Hey y’all, today I experienced another push for Linux from our friend Microsoft. 5 minutes ago, I wanted to use the timer app on Windows, so I could manage my work/break schedule, and this fucker showed up. Yes, that’s a prompt to sign in with a Microsoft account to use the clock. If you close it, it pops up 30s later. Clicking “Don’t sign in” or closing the process responsible for displaying it is useless, and guess what… IT PAUSES THE TIMER WHEN IT SHOWS UP.
I guess this is another thing added to the super long list of things which will eventually make me switch my main workstation to Linux once win10 is discontinued.
/endrant
Hope y’all are having a great day :3
Why wait. Start switching now.
I have moved my laptop over to kubuntu for a while now, but I have too many workflows that rely on windows ) :
What are they?
I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.
I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.
I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have
As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.
8 years or so for me. I miss Ableton and Sibelius. I have Bitwig and Musescore but I still miss them. Musescore is getting better and better (I am planning on moving to lilypond anyway) but Bitwig is too alien for me. It is almost the same bu not really. If it was completely different, it might have been easier to get used to. Also I wish there was a viable open source alternative to Bitwig.
This is actually surreal ☠️
the clock app has a built in spotify integration and player.
the calculator sends diagnostic data.
I’m glad that you want to switch to Linux, but I think there’d be open source solutions for Windows too. I daily drive Linux, and I would begin with looking for open source timers if I ever need timers. Why not do the same in Windows too?
Here are a few: https://alternativeto.net/software/free-countdown-timer/?platform=windows&license=opensource
If you close it, it pops up 30s later.
This is by far the most annoying development in software and website design to ever occur. You can’t say no to stuff anymore. If you say no, they nag you again very very soon, and they will continue nagging you until you accidentally click yes. After you’ve clicked yes, they make it damned near impossible to change that selection. Dark patterns were outlawed years ago, yet somehow nagware is legal? Fuck the person who thought this up with a spiked baseball bat.
Minor correction: You can’t say no because they intentionally almost never give you “no” as an option. It generally is “Ask again later” instead, when you clearly never want them to ask again, just like you didn’t want to be asked the first time.
Oh boy are you going to love-to-hate this then. It’s best viewed on a proper computer, but you’ll get the gist on mobile too.
Ha! Thanks for sharing that. I got a real laugh out of it. It starts off pretty tame and just gets worse and worse until it’s completely unusable. As a former blogger, I’m very familiar with some of the shit that money driven bloggers pulled. I always avoided anything other than non-intrusive ads and still made a living off of it, which really goes to show that usually the webmaster is just an asshole.
I know I’m getting wildly off-topic just three comments deep in this thread, but comedy that warps into existential horror is a genre that I’ve recently discovered I love but probably never would have expected to be my kind of thing. This video is one of my favorites.
There is a carrier app on my phone that cannot be uninstalled without root. I guess all phones have that, even if you don’t have a contract, which I don’t. I disabled roaming, went to another country, and it started to randomly show pop-ups asking me to turn on roaming and activate the international plan. There is an ok and cancel button, and it can pop up right under my fingers while I am typing something. That is pure evil.
I haven’t experienced this with a Pixel nor an iPhone. I buy straight from Google and Apple though, because I don’t want the bloatware that carriers install. Did you buy from the carrier? Is it a Samsung? They do all kinds of crappy things with their TouchUI.
Apparently the app is actually called Sim toolkit and it is built into the Android OS. I didn’t even give it permission to send notifications.
I did not buy from the carrier. It’s a OnePlus 9 Pro.
In all my phones so far, a carrier app like this is automatically installed after I boot the phone for the first time with a sim card. Going all the way back to my first android phone.
lol, that’s so stupid. why does it pause the timer? did they do that intentionally?
I’d imagine it’s to force me to sign in to use the timer. Shittify the version that can’t track as much, and force the users to use it logged in
Does the timer “jump” to the correct time after you dismiss the window ? It’s also possible that they didn’t bother testing the app when logged out, and that the popup blocks the UI thread while it’s displayed. In short it could be bad coding and QA instead of intentional enshittification.
No it pauses the timer. Once I dismiss the popup I can see that the pause button icon has been replaced with the continue/play icon. Clicking it unpauses the timer until the popup pops up again.
Of course they did. They’re going to make it as intrusive and annoying as possible so that people give up and sign in.
People can just use a different timer, use a batch script or task scheduler. I once even made a multiplatform timer for my tea myself in Java that can go to the systray.
My point is: By making it annoying, they just drive them away to the many alternatives and gain nothing. It seems like some mistake idk.
