I remember playing the backup & restore game when rebuilding my PC, which I just happened to do last night as I received a new SSD. I didn't have to worry about documents and thanks to a separate volume, redownloading my Steam library, either. That was a massive time save. And it didn't have to be OneDrive, it could have been any cloud sync service -- but OneDrive works just fine.
The user just fucked up and had a conniption fit on Tiktok.
Was it user error? Maybe, maybe not, but that's irrelevant. If it's so easy to make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake, it's a tool that's too dangerous to use on the daily.
Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them. In tech you are surrounded by footguns and bear traps. MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice but the logic that "dangerous things should be prohibited" is a perfectly good way to end up living in an environment where someone else curates what you can and cannot do. For your protection of course.
A tool isn't dangerous because you can make an unrecoverable and catastrophic mistake (you can make one with a kitchen knife and we still use them every day). It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations like OneDrive did.
The article is accompanied by a TikTok video I can't scrub through so I can't tell why it's not possible to go to OneDrive's recycle bin and recover the lost data.
You say delete my "onedrive" storage content, why on earth someone sane should expect that Microsoft will also delete the data one your computer, that you never asked to be sent to OneDrive in the first place.
But this wasn't a mistake, or at least not an unprovoked one. The user did nothing wrong. They operated under reasonable assumptions established by decades of computer tools. This was a user who didn't get cut by the knife's blade but by its handle. The tool was configured to operate against the user's interests, wishes, and reasonable expectations. This isn't "a dangerous tool" this is a developer who weaponized a tool. The danger is the practice of misleading the user. MS took a pipe and made it a pipe bomb, the solution isn't to declare pipes to dangerous to use.
> why on earth someone sane should expect that Microsoft will also delete the data one your computer, that you never asked to be sent to OneDrive in the first place
From a reasonable user perspective of course it makes no sense. If you investigate from a technical perspective, knowing how the tool works, it "works as intended". OD Backup is not backup, it's storage. That's the first trick MS pulls. OD didn't back up your data, it moved it to the cloud and didn't tell you. This is the second trick MS pulls. Disabling the "backup" means disabling the storage of your single copy of the data. This isn't a trick, it's just the level of competence at MS.
Now I think that I understand your mistake. You think that onedrive moves the data to the cloud, and so obviously losing the cloud version makes you lose the file.
But it is not what is happening from my understanding, and here is the very dark pattern:
- The file is and stays in your computer. (Actually OneDrive doesn't know how to store more than what you have in local copy... totally miserable).
- So it is just a "copy" that is sent to the cloud.
- When you delete your files in their cloud (in the sense of getting ride of your storage there, and not only files), only then "OneDrive" actively goes to delete your files in your local disk!
I never asserted that. I asserted that if a tool is that dangerous, it shouldn't be used on a daily basis. I stand by that. Use it if it solves a problem for you, but intentionally every time, not as a matter of habit or in the background with automation.
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
OneDrive meets those criteria.
Agree to disagree. I will repeat, we are surrounded by dangerous tools that we use on a daily basis. Clearly the "danger" part is not the criteria that defines if or how often you should use the tool.
> OneDrive meets those criteria.
Correct. But those are my criteria, and I believe they are the ones that carry my argument. Your criteria was "is dangerous" which is not enough to carry the weight of your conclusion.
Correct, I'm just saying that I think your criteria supports my opinion. As you say, we disagree about this. Fair enough. I'm not telling anyone not to use OneDrive. We all make that sort of decision for ourselves.
All I'm saying is that OneDrive hosed me in a terrible way, so I'm no longer willing to risk using it. Particularly since it doesn't really address any need I have and if I did have such a need, there are better tools (for me) available.
The other dangerous tools you've mentioned haven't ever burned me.
For example, if a user does not actively change the save location, at least for office apps, the default behavior is to save to onedrive.
Strangely poetic!
It's worse, because it runs without the users explicit knowledge or consent, and it lacks the implicit guardrails `rm -rf` has (in that most people who use Linux and the terminal are at least literate).
> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.
Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?
> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.
Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.
I think too many people got the impression that I'm defending OD and can't get out of that trench. My point is that a generic tool being able to do dangerous things isn't a high enough bar to say don't use it (often). A tool being able to do dangerous things in the manner I described above is a completely different devil. The "how" you end up doing a dangerous thing is what should be punished.
I want to be able to do whatever I want with my computer and my data and not have someone define what's "too dangerous" for me to use. But what happened here wasn't what the users wanted, or could reasonably expect to happen. That's the key.
> Shift+Del asks for confirmation
I'm sure OD also asked for some confirmation. By that time it's too late, you're confirming what you think will happen, not what will actually happen. When you confirm shift+del you know what you are confirming. When you confirm OD's dialog you're confirming under misleading assumptions.
Use `rm -r` and just press Delete if you want to have protection.
This is where OD failed by MS's design, it didn't operate intuitively and consistently with almost any other computer tool, and didn't document the behavior properly in a way that the user can take advantage of the knowledge.
The user fucked up. Sadly HN even gobbles this shit up with no thought.
How about no. I dropped some important documents on a few flash drives that I have lying around.
Why would anybody ever want their pictures to disappear from their phone if they delete them on the web? It doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense to me. I rely on that feature. My monitor is big and it's much easier to use the big screen to sort vacation photos and delete the 90% which are garbage and not worth preserving. When I delete the garbage ones, of course I want to delete them everywhere. (And if I accidentally deleted the wrong photo, I can undelete within 30 days.)
I put the effort in to move off gmail, was worth it. Now gmail is just my spam inbox
It was in my history? Check
Recent documents? Check
Visible in the file explorer? Check
Desktop? No dice
Try to open from the file dialog... error. The message? Can't get it from some URL.
My wife wakes up and starts crying. She's spent hours. What the fuck? I understand computers, and files don't just disappear.
"Were you editing it with Tritium?" (blames my product!)
Wait, a URL? I bet it's some OneDrive dark pattern.
Fix it by de-selecting "backup" multiple times and then clicking "submit". Files magically re-appear after I make sure to tell Microsoft to "keep my local copy".
Because Microsoft treated users as if they were idiots.
So basically tons of Windows related websites teach this infallible little trick as solution when a user gets a Windows BSOD (Blue Screen of Death): Reboot!
Invariably, the reboot causes the Windows OS to start working again, till the recurrence of whatever circumstances (typically, hardware and/or software conflicts) caused the BSOD in the first place. It is left to the user to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent the issue from recurring again, as the BSOD messages are typically cryptic for the average user to decipher (maybe not so difficult in the modern era of AI assistants invocable from a handheld smartphone).
In fact, I would say the whole IT industry grew tremendously over the last few decades, because Microsoft's products were powerful, user friendly (to an extent, and until they worked), but quite complex to maintain (the dreaded Windows updates nightmares) and troubleshoot in case of issues. That's because every company using M$ products needed dedicated IT Support teams solely for such maintenance, help and fixes for M$ products. Even other vendors like Oracle grew as competition to Microsoft's corporate dominance.
The wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of antimalware software may not even have existed were it not for Microsoft products.
What happened is exactly what it suggests. OneDrive migration doesn't just copy your files to a server. While the migration is occurring, the operating system is optimistically re-mapping them all to a cloud URL and/or deleting them entirely.
Halting the migration and disabling "backup" returned the mapping back to the local disk, and I was able to open the file as normal.
I know, it's as crazy as it sounds and your bet was my bet at first as well.
But consider the alternative... :(
FTR, I've used it and usually configure to explicitly only sync a single directory.
It's insane to me that there isn't a simple, GUI-based app that provides this utility in a clean, straightforward way. Basically just "dropbox, but let me set the destination to another drive on my PC/network/VPN (or a 'repo', for 'advanced' users)".
Just a plain interface that shows me my files and allows me to say "I want this folder to be backed up to here, here, and here". I can do that manually for every folder I want backed up, but other users may opt to backup a whole drive or whatever, depending on need.
Seems like a slam dunk. Frustrating that I don't know enough about the footguns with backups (duplications, cpu limiting, etc) to just write the app myself, but I have been looking at what the eframe and rustic libraries can do together. Feels imminently do-able by someone who has a lot of experience with backups. But maybe it's even passable do-able by someone who just knows what he wants.
Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.
I can understand why people might want to backup entire drives, or to backup OS content minimally, but my use-case is to just pick a few folders and only have those backed up. Not to an external drive, but to internal ones and network ones.
That's the tool I'm looking for. While Time Machine can exclude everything but the folders to backup, it doesn't seem to be able to back them up with different cadences or rules about content limits or whatever else. It's all or nothing. I'm just not sure it provides what I'm looking for.
The UI is a little cumbersome for me, personally, but it does seem at least straightforward enough for me to understand what the intentions are.
ETA: Welp, that didn't last long. A service running in the background that exposes an "insecure" url for a browser to then open as the only means for GUI interaction with the app is not a great recommendation for everyday users. It looks like it has all the features, but I'm looking for a user experience. CLIs provide the features. I'd like an app, not a service running a webserver. Shudder the thought of just shoving the front end in an electron app, but even that would be better than this for casual users.
It's basically just holding your computer for ransom because guess what the 20 gigabyte they give you for free doesn't cut it lmao. Don't call it a backup my SSD is 2 terrabyte and I ain't paying you anything.
No doubt this has gotten more "seamless" in recent years than it was at first.
The exact definition of "deceptive trade practices".
does everyone hate it?
Thanks to dark patterns, users sometimes think it's asking them to rate their previous experience, or the podcast they're listening to, but those wind up tallied as app star ratings.
I don’t rate the apps I use unless other than to give it 1 star for doing something I hate. My banking app’s transaction search doesn’t work at all, so it gets 1 star. But 1.9M ratings resulted in a 5 star average — who are the freaks giving their banking app 5 stars and why?
looks like millions for my banking app (Chase) rating 5 stars
do you really not understand why people might do things different from you?
hundreds of thousands and millions of fake reviews. it’s all manipulation!
The UI in Windows is intentionally designed to confuse the issue so people unintentionally end up using One Drive, which is free until it isn't and then they can jam you with a subscription. Many of my students barely have an understanding of what a file system is and how it works now due to this horrible user-hostile UI.
MacOS is headed this direction as well. Congrats linux: you just need to continue to get worse at the relatively slow rate that you always have and you will be the best desktop/laptop OS within a few years.
Win the game by doing nothing while the competition drives themselves into the ground via enshittification.
After 40 years of computing this is the best we can do? No wonder we can't have nice things.
Maybe the Windows users should be called "victims" at this point.
This is cartel to remove the data ownership possibility from people. Recently Polish youtuber got his video blocked because he showed how to play locally stored mp3 files (accused of breaking yt policy on allegedly showing people how to download illegal files)
If we allow companies to put an equals mark between not storing your own data in cloud and piracy, this will finish the cartel's objective very fast.
But it isn't the students' fault, I guess they are still learning how to use computers.
This is purely an IT Administration fiasco. The IT admin should simply exclude the repository folders/paths from OneDrive. Or make everyone to save non-code documents to a separate shared network path, which is a storage drive that gets automatically backed up daily.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/how-to-remove-a-folder-from-o...
Arguably it's already the best desktop/laptop OS. Hopefully within a few years it can be the most popular desktop OS.
Then again... maybe this year is the year of the linux desktop...
I'd really love if some vendors would license Pop from System76 for more, broader hardware support. I think it's just about the best out of the box experience in Linux for most users.
Now if you proceed with he same horrible lawnmower and cut off your other foot, then that might be on you.
While the analogy is being stretched, same applies here - if Microsoft makes terrible footguns, then that's on Microsoft even if the users should have stopped using Microsoft by now.
Not necessarily. I don't use Microsoft on my personal machines, but my employer forces me to use it at work.
Also - lots of people are used to it and habits die hard, regardless of technical merit etc.
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.
It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
Either way, only serves to further the point that Linux is in a pretty good place and the experience should only be better on more stable options.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
Didn't even need to download steam.
Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.
To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
My guess is that most DRM'ed games won't work right, but they often don't work right under Windows either.
> but they often don't work right under Windows either.
This is certainly untrue. Them working often is the entire reason why Windows is the "gaming OS".
Might need a little update to bring it up to date.
Disclosure: I fear technology and my daddy is not rich.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
Funny enough - I have less problems with audio on Pop/Bazzite than my Mac (where my headset mic can be muted by flipping up - but is unable to unmute without power cycling the headset) or Windows (which cannot ever remember which device I want to use for which app).
I held off on switching to desktop Linux because of horror stories on places like HN. But it’s seriously not been my lived experience. I can only think that maybe these were problems 5+ years ago - or it’s folks that went with super customized Arch installs or something.
I mostly just use my webcam's mic, despite my headphones being better so I can leave my headset on bluetooth/stereo.
To properly support Pro Audio you have to completely switch the audio stack to JACK - which I also used in MacOS a few years ago because Apple's audio stack wasn't up to the task as well.
Coworkers with wired headphones (also on Ubuntu, but I don't know if they switched to pipewire) tend to have problems regularly.
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.
Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming
Most issues on Linux come from fighting the community, which historically Nvidia has done a lot of.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
I always find this so hard to believe, mainly because the majority of players are on Windows, which means that the market for cheats is there and statistically most likely to happen there.
I just don’t play games by devs that snub Linux. There are many to choose from.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
While Gimp and Krita are very useful and even usable for a lot of people... that doesn't mean it's a suitable replacement for the Adobe products. Some will get Affinity running with Wine... frankly it would be nice if there was an "easy gutton" to doing a lot of this. I'm not sure about the legalities of copying actual MS dll's from Windows for use with Wine even... even if yoou have a license, as I'm not a lawyer, which can impact the ability to make it easier to do/use.
It would be nice if more software at least got tested to run on Wine/Proton with closer to first party support. Bridging the gap between a full Linux version, and something that can at least run in Linux.
They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.
Not that its perfect when 100% automated but it takes a fraction the time to adjust things towards perfection, no one misses doing it by hand.
Rapidraw does try to compete some having ML based masking but I gotta agree most the open source solutions have been lagging behind bigtime.
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
yup...at first i thought, "at work i have to manage rpm-ostree servers, so why not use the same tech at home?", well, because the tech is freaking buggy, annoying and deprecated already (imagemode/bootc).
Bazzite also had strange issues with the XBOX controllers i use, those issues went away with CachyOS. in the end it doesn't matter that much, on both i use(d) KDE Plasma. GF also uses the PC with her own useraccount to play her games. overall very satisfied, can't complain.
don't lynch me, decided to go for the pretty standard instead of Sway or Hyprland, as i feared that this would bring more issues with gaming. maybe that's an irrational fear, who knows.I'm trying to understand the "deprecated already" in your first paragraph. (All I know about rpm-ostree is from using and adminning a distro that relies on rpm-ostree. I.e., I don't know much.)
Here is my guess as to what you mean: Bazzite could continue to use imagemode and bootc while replacing rpm-ostree with something better, and maybe you'll give Bazzite another look after that happens.
they're different technologies with bootc being the new kid. bootc means "bootable containers". rpm-ostree has not much to do with containers and is more like managing your OS with git-logic.
forget about "imagemode", that's the marketing-term RedHat uses for bootc.
i imagine bazzite will migrate to bootc sooner or later, but of course that requires a new way to build and ship it.
The first paragraph of the home page of https://universal-blue.org/ ends with "We produce a diverse set of continuously delivered operating system images using bootc."
Another author explains: "Bazzite utilizes bootc to manage the base image for your system, pin specific versions, and perform rollbacks when needed. For systems with customized software via layered packages, rpm-ostree becomes essential for installing, upgrading, and managing those additions."
"Why do this? Each tool is chosen for its strengths: bootc offers robust control over base images, ensuring that your core system remains unchanged unless you explicitly update it, while rpm-ostree provides flexibility for managing additional software without compromising the integrity of the atomic base. This separation helps maintain stability and security. Bazzite uses bootc for managing system images and rpm-ostree for adding layered packages."
Source: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/how-to-manage-bazzite...
Of course, nothing I wrote contradicts your assertion that rpm-ostree "is freaking buggy, annoying", but it does cast doubt in my mind on your belief that bootc can by itself completely replace rpm-ostree.
Thanks for your reply.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
Otherwise, spot-on to my MO
Amiga users have been here before.
I will say that the Microsoft Office OneDrive save experience is completely subpar. It behaves completely separate & unlike Windows Explorer and is just unpleasant to work with.
On the other hand, UX for doing that sharing is clunky.
And I believe it's pretty well documented that the reason for the File-Save experience being so awful is that Microsoft is actively trying to deter us from using our own local storage, and coercing us to use their (subscription) cloud products.
I’m pretty sure it had worked just fine for the users in the article too, until it didn’t.
IMO they should clearly encourage users to keep backups elsewhere in case something happens, but they’re currently doing the exact opposite: encouraging users to back up (and on Windows even store) files exclusively on OneDrive.
Using OneDrive is often fine. Having it imposed on you is a breaking change.
This happens as part of the PRISM program, whose existence was leaked by Edward Snowden last decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
as part of that program, online communications and storage of all users of large US tech companies, including Microsoft, is made accessible to the NSA.
I just noticed yesterday that Copilot or OneDrive is pressuring me to set it up and my options are: Yes, Remind me in 1 week, or Remind me in 1 month. Like, what the fuck is that?
It is a testament to the power of tech policy momentum that a company can crank out absolute shit for decades and the corporate world just keeps on using their software because "that's what we've always used".
As far as I'm concerned, I'm fine with these tech CTOs replacing their software engineering workforce with LLMs because the bar is already on the fucking floor when it comes to use experience.
The engineers can’t be completely to blame here, Microsoft is too consistently bad for that. It is a high-level strategy issue. Replace the Product Managers with LLMs maybe… a bunch of random matvecs couldn’t possibly be wrong so consistently, right?
Aside: WTF isn't the Teams wiki using markdown files you can edit and sync locally? I mean if this has changed since I last tried, cool... but that's the single biggest thing I wanted from this. Now, I just put a _docs directory into my projects and have markdown files in there sync'd to the git repo... I've given up on files in teams for the most part.
Also with teams, splitting up chats and meating chats is a pain... the "activity" indicator doesn't tell you WTF subtab for chat something is in now. I used to at least halfway like teams if you avoided (over)using features, now it's just a craptastic mess.
Some computers are shared by six family members, each with their own MS account and 1TB of storage. OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive but still give everyone ready access to their files by not storing them all on the hard drive.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder I create outside Onedrive. I've never had any problems.
The comments by people who hate make me wonder why my experience is so different than theirs.
The problem comes when people who don't want to use it are tricked,.manipulated, fooled and dark patterned into using it against their understanding.
If I don't want something synced to Onedrive then I usually save it in my downloads folder or another separate folder
My complaint is that MS has intentionally made it SO DIFFICULT to do that. There's a significant amount of extra clicking and thinking necessary to go through the steps to do it.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-sav...
> OneDrive makes it so the computers can have a 1TB hard drive
No, it's a 1TB storage account accessible via the Internet, and wholly dependent on a good Internet connection, especially if you actually use most of that 1TB. Non-tech people will take misrepresentations like this at face value, which further makes tech a disempowering force.
I understand the point, that everything is a bit convoluted and badly explained and may even lead to bad stuff happening. When you disable OneDrive Backup (good feature) and OneDrive deleting all your files locally with a little shortcut to OneDrive in the Cloud with all your files? Yeah... that is bad practice, but an easy fix for MS. Besides that hickup I currently don't undestand what the fuss is about.
That sounds horrible.
> Could be good, or bad
It sounds bad either way. If the app exists on both computers there's good chance of conflicting overwrites of whatever is saved there. If the app is not used on a device then it's just a waste of downloading and syncing useless data.
They should just make the computers and have subfolders in a shared documents folder AND prompt you about so this before starting so you can turn off this or that folder before anything gets uploaded or downloaded. It's user-hostile design currently
This is how Roaming Windows User Profiles work at most companies. I don't understand why you think it sounds horrible.
I know my Documents/Pictures directory isn't sync'd, I don't want it to be... to me my workspace is far different than what I want backed up to the cloud... I also have a local nas that is also setup for cloud sync for my service accounts. I emphatically do NOT want system default workspace directories sync'd.
What’s mainly wrong with OneDrive is that it doesn’t work how most people expect, it’s on by default, and it deletes files from your local PC without asking. No matter how nice it is if you understand what’s going on, those details are enough to make it hate-worthy IMO.
I wouldn't have minded Onedrive, in fact I would have used it a lot more, if it just showed up as an external mounted drive in Explorer where I could just paste files and folders I want shared or backed up. But nope, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom just have to sync up my entire home directory by default and have Office/365 only save docs and sheets to cloud by default. No thank you.
1) Microsoft aggressively attempting to convince you to use OneDrive, no matter how many times you turn it off.
I've had a Dropbox subscription since before OneDrive became a common name, and it works for me, so I have no real use case for OneDrive. That doesn't stop Microsoft forcibly "helpfully" re-enabling the OneDrive app and embedded link in the quick access bar regularly...which leads to
2) Microsoft attempting to sync your user profile in OneDrive, and bugs that arise from how it implements that.
I've never enabled this, so I haven't dug into how it works, but the first time I ever encountered OneDrive discussion in tech or adjacent circles was people complaining about OneDrive syncing of user profile folders breaking some games.
I assume it's something like the comedy of errors that could come out of folder redirection and software not expecting multiple people touching it at once, or the comedy of conflict resolution on a filesystem layer that isn't expecting that for semantics, but I have heard more complaints about OneDrive in this context than I've heard anything else about it.
So I suspect that it works fine, if you use it as a Dropbox-alike.
Using it as a Folder Redirection/Roaming Profiles replacement, or trying to say "no" to Microsoft, is where the problems ensue.
Try adding Teams, Sharepoint and 9000 more people in the mix.
Oh and MS Office that will try to force it on you.
I enjoy my car, but I would dislike if someone took it without my consent and signed me up for uber instead.
When more people Google "How to disable xyz" than "How to enable xyz," that would be a strong hint to most of us, but it doesn't mean anything to Microsoft's developers. ("Hey, at least they're engaging with the product," they tell each other.)
OneDrive is an easy and well integrated cloud drive. The principle of having a cloud drive is not new anymore, and I believe people should get over the fact that, indeed, the files on the cloud drive is... In the cloud; colour me surprised!
To point out how shambloic it was it was originally called SkyDrive but they were forced to rename it thanks to a trademark lawsuit. I mean, they launch a product that is so important to them that they are willing to make us all miserable shoving it down our throats and they can't be bothered to spend a few $100 or $1000 on a trademark search.
I was working with Word and found that it defaulted to OneDrive which I could have lived with if it worked. Except it didn't work and when I tried to save documents I could not save.
Needless to say that was the last time I used OneDrive. Microsoft doesn't get it
Force somebody to use it -> It fails -> Somebody never uses it again
I have OneDrive completely disabled on my personal PC. I still found I couldn't find files that I had created with Word in the filesystem. Turns out even if you don't have the OneDrive service running on your PC, Office will store files in OneDrive directly through the API -- it's not hard to turn off (thanks Copilot!) but it's one more thing to be resentful about.
OneDrive just deleted all of my files
Microsoft gets their tendrils everywhere.
Oh, you want to download all photos so that you can free the cloud space? Too bad, you can only download them one by one. Or use Google Takeout and leave half of them undownloaded.
Works out really well. They all work perfectly for their intended uses.
Are you implying each one's intended uses are different? What are the differences?
My company uses Dropbox which is windows and mac.
For some reason Microsoft gave me 40Gb of free storage on skydrive in their early days, and it was always a little off to use, mostly due to search. So it ended up being used to store misc files like software installers which I can always find elsewhere if OneDrive misbehaves.
Whatever you do, don't try to sync a git repo folder with OneDrive.
I think they're related. Software Engineering is about enumerating these edge cases and dealing with them. That requires skill.
Vibe-coding, or even prompting for larger chunks of code doesn't force you to enumerate these edge-cases.
And I firmly believe that reviewing the code for those edge-cases is harder than writing it yourself, as by nature you have to work backwards. You've arrived at a place, and you need to find out which routes were taken, and whether those routes are correct. Guardrails, snow-chain warnings, slope % warnings etc.
When you've arrived at the place it's easy to say: eh, whatever. We got here. Ship it. Especially with the push from above these days to go faster.
The shenanigans that happen when you 'link' to files, or not, from Teams to Outlook to Sharepoint is beyond me.
They also constantly sneak it into Word. If you don't pay close attention they suddenly save your local file to some Cloud Desktop folder.
Back in October I had issues with the Linux dlang Onedrive client deleting all the files shared with me. Unlike Microsoft, the developer actually acknowledged there could be a problem and we figured out the cause was new unintended behavior caused by an old config option, really long issue thread for it here: https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive/issues/3475 (TL:DR it was a very niche situation unlikely to have affected anyone else, I have more concise thoughts on it in the Gentoo bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/964370 )
So that was really bad, but we were able to restore all the deleted files from her OneDrive web using its recycle bin. That leaves me with the issue I'm facing now. Some of the files which I created and put in the share she shares with me have my ownership but OneDrive doesn't recognize I created it and she can't change the permissions to share back to me. So now I have to figure out how many files are affected here and I guess copy them on her side so the new files get her ownership and share back properly to me.
I do want to say as well, those files just don't show up at all on my side in OneDrive but they DO show up in my Office apps recent list. It just refuses to let me open them. She sees them though with my ownership and both the web and windows onedrive clients throw errors if she tries to change the permissions. Absolutely maddening.
So what’s gone wrong?
I wish the ergonomics would be more standard so switching costs aren’t so high.
[0]. A huge shoutout to the folks behind the amazingly solid https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive
no major issues here. sure its got the occasional bug, and is missing some features i think it should have... but all in all its very usable.
Forgeties79•1d ago
gruez•1d ago
don't you mean adblock?
edoceo•1d ago
Forgeties79•1d ago
yakkomajuri•1d ago
specproc•1d ago
frm88•12h ago