Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands.
This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.
There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows.
An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.
Just like how Linus from LTT (just trust me bro on the source) said one day he needed a tool (hammer?) so he walked into the hardware store, found what looked like a hammer, and bought it. End of journey. And then he finally realized how a regular person buys tech. Most people do not care, do not know they should care, and do not care enough to know if they should care enough.
(This is like my niece buying a $5000 Alienware to play Roblox because she thinks she “needs a gaming PC”)
"You moved my Chrome. I liked my Chrome. Put it back. I can't get to the Facebook. I want to talk on the Facebook and I can't because you moved my Chrome."
2. These users wouldn't be the people referred to by the article though, right?
And from the article: "Technician's know how to get around this, but not everyone using a computer is a technician."
To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time. Backing up data, burning USB sticks, installing, setup new backup solution, resyncing bookmarks, creating shortcuts to their email, replacements for the apps they use... all the details takes a lot of time, and it is ongoing work. Someone has to become 'the technician' and provide support. Otherwise, people have no option except to keep bumbling along with the default or somehow become 'the technician' themselves without any guide but web forums and ChatGPT.
Implementing a strict "no fiddly shit on my game machine" policy was one of the best choices for my mental health that I've made: It's a dedicated machine for gaming, with nothing really sensitive on it aside from gaming related accounts, and its only purpose is to play games with the least amount of immediate hassle. In other words, if the choice is installing something ugly or fiddling, that launcher, kernel level anticheat or whatever it is gets installed.
Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.
Windows can be just as bad, I'm quite happy to restrict my games choice a bit to run them on a console that someone else makes work.
Not everyone does everything from a web browser.
The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.
Does the encryption keep the user's data safe if the device is lost or stolen? Yes? Then it fulfills its main purpose.
Nobody deserves to be abused.
I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.