I was a poor young man, I refused to pay $100 to put windows on a hard drive I had installed into a hand-me-down desktop.
I found linux and made it work, through thick and thin. As a lazy jackass i somehow got skyrim to work through wine via copied and pasted terminal commands. wintetricks and all, i found it wildly difficult. Playing was almost as thrilling as seeing it work.
I have only ever attempted to make a linux ISO bootable drive through windows that one time, more than ten years ago. My wife was given a laptop with windows 11 installed and I wanted to install firefox.
what, the actual fuck, is “S” mode?
ctrl-alt-t “install that shit”!
A computer should not come with a subscription baked in. That’s trash. The issues i get through linux come from my failure to understand it and/or the walled gardens it hasn’t found its way into yet. The issues I experienced this evening on windows were there by design.
Thank you to all of the homies that make the weird and sometimes uncomfortable linux/ open-source community work. You guys are the shit.
I’d argue that’s true of any user’s experience with any OS, including what you just experienced with Windows.
Getting out of S mode is actually very trivial, certainly moreso than many of the changes one might be expected to make in Linux. There’s a certain type of user that “S Mode” is intended for. You’re not that user, and Linux is likely to be a negative experience for that user.
Never heard of that mode, what is it?
Imagine turning Windows into an even shittier version of itself, and you’ve got S mode.
Can’t install shit unless it’s from the MS Store. Can’t use a browser unless it’s Edge. Not sure what other stupid shit it enforces. It’s supposed to harden the system, but I find that hard to believe.
S is operationally analogous to using a Chromebook.
There are people who will never need more than that.
We are not these people…
Nobody should be those people. Those people are constantly giving the industry a reason to water everything down and make things as overpriced and limited as possible.
Ah, like a “stable” mode? Honestly it makes sense from a user support perspective. More locked down, more predictable, easier to secure. In the same way that you can’t hack a brick, and similarly useful.
I was thinking a “shit” mode but “stable” does sound nicer lol.
Heh, I’m probably in the minority, but I like the idea of different windows “modes”. I’ve long wanted msft to make versions of windows for different users rather than a one-size-fits-all product. I just wanted it because I’m a power user who wanted something more stripped down and configurable, not a boomer who wants something that won’t act as a conduit between my ignorance and scammers.
But it’s cool, they can do whatever they want with windows now, they’ve made it clear they don’t want me as a user.
I hadn’t either until last night. From what I gathered it disables the installation of any softwares that don’t come from the microsoft store i.e. .EXE files for programs that were downloaded from the browser. Getting out of S mode is as easy as creating a microsoft account. I had no interest in that for a variety of reasons.
You can disable it and run windows like normal.
Except they use a bunch of dark patterns to discourge any user from doing it by calling it ‘Developer mode’ and throwing a bunch of scary sounding warning screens at you when all you’re doing is disabling the forced use of the Microsoft store.
It’s a super scummy move that will be very effective. Many people will just use the Microsoft store and Microsoft will, once again, have used their monopoly to manipulate the market by forcing their own product to be used (like they got in trouble for in the IE vs Netscape Navigator case)
This is exactly what Google did on Android.
Did they? Installing APKs doesn’t require an account afaik, just a settings toggle (not even in developer mode, just the regular settings).
Okay, so it’s just similar to what Google did on Android.
I guess I just didn’t have the patience enough to even get that far with it haha All I could think of was the Netscape thing. It was sooo obvious when i opened edge and got halfway into typing “google chrome” when a giant banner pops up and says “you don’t have to install another browser! please bro! Don’t do it!”
Oh yeah, Microsoft has really leaned into the dark patterns.
You don’t ever need to launch edge, you can just use winget now:
or
well man, I was scrambling looking for a terminal to actually do something and It was disabled in S mode O.o I will keep that in mind though should I ever be called to mess with another windows machine.
Oh yeah, you gotta get rid of S mode before you can do essentially anything.
I’ve only dealt with one laptop that came with that ‘feature’ so I just ignored all of the warnings that they’ve posted around the official way of disabling it (I mean “Enabling Developer Mode”, i.e. regular Windows)
I remember being stressed when I deactivated the S mode on my Surface Go 1 as if I was about to make a big mistake😅
That was way before (re)discovering Linux and installing Fedora on it.
Limits app installations to those on the Microsoft Store and also disables Terminal / Powershell.
Makes for a super simple tamper-proof system that is similar to a Chromebook but a little more versatile. It’s a good solution for users who are all-in on the Microsoft ecosystem - think those who live their lives in Edge, Word, Excel. The restrictions keep them out of hot water.
Those restrictions are obviously annoying to those who want to install regular x86_64 apps from an .exe / .msi file or use Powershell / Terminal / CMD.
Switching out of S mode is very easy: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of-s-mode-in-windows-4f56d9be-99ec-6983-119f-031bfb28a307
“There’s no charge to switch out of S mode.”
How generous of you, Microsoft!