MudMan

He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.

The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:

The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.

Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.

Agreed 100%. I think it’s understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.

But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy’s job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn’t make this alright.

Because it was a 500 dollar transaction and the card they purchased was an apple-branded product in a major retailer.

It was a 500 dollar transaction because this guy is a pro developer in Apple’s ecosystem and apparently uses a 6TB plan for both personal and professional storage.

The Trigger: The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked.
    An Apple Support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue: indicating that something was likely untoward about this card.
    The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale), so if I cannot rely on the provenance of that, and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, indicating the card’s serial number and purchase location to Apple.

Much as I do think mixing pro and personal accounts is a mistake, as a person who has to pay several major corpos for subscription plans for professional software that include cloud storage, I admit I get it. Receiving spam about how full your free personal Google Drive is kinda sucks extra if you are already paying a bunch for an enterprise account with a bunch of storage on the side.

Not an “apple fan”, an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.

Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple’s ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.

That’s not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.

Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so… I mean, it’s a thing.

Not saying you should, and it’s definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.

I’m currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just… remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can’t be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can’t get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the “can’t hook it up to a keyboard and mouse” in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.

Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren’t functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don’t need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.

I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.

You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.

That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.

I mean… my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.

I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn’t care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but… maybe not the best use of power.

I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That’s feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.

No.

I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I’m not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.

This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren’t trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than… you know, whether it’s good or not, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. In fact, half the “Windows sucks” angles these days are down to “Windows 11 doesn’t support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware”. Which, you know, is the exact problem I’m having here.

Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn’t contradict my previous statements.

I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.

Look, like I said, it’s not you and it’s not about whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me.

I think at this point I’m just disappointed at the concept of social/user generated media as a whole. Straws and and camels and all that.

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

I am so furious with this at this point.

And the problem is, I also get what’s going on. You all feel cool and proud and self-actualized with the whole thing where you moved to Linux and whatnot. And you really, really, really want to tell somebody about it. I get it. It’s social media.

It’s fine the first few times, but it piles up after a while, you know? You can only have somebody veer sharply to the left towards “I use Linux, by the way” so many times.

Nobody asked if it was a dealbreaker for you. That didn’t happen. And even if someone did it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. We know.

Look, again, it’s not you. It’s just that hanging out around this place and trying to engage with the issues can get to be really weird after a while.

I’m confused. What is “not accepting” a MS account to set up Windows? I mean, if you don’t have to use Windows and that is a dealbreaker for you, then great.

But if you need to use Windows and you want to… you know… work… around… having to be logged in, he’s suggesting a way to do that. That’s what we call in the business “a workaround”.

As I said elsewhere, I get that people want this to be a dealbreaker, or the suggestion to be a pointless defense because this is a Linux community and there is a cultural pressure to pretend that the account problem is a massive dealbreaker (as opposed to most normies just going with it, just like they do on their phones, which is what actually happens), but OSs aren’t football teams. You can both criticise MS for having an online activation requirement, rightfully so, and acknowledge a potentially useful mitigation for anybody who needs or wants to use the OS without being constantly logged in.

Hah. “Kid”, right.

First off, don’t be disrespectful to young people, some of them can make decent points sometimes.

But also, man, I wish. I was using DOS before this guy was working on it.

Man, I don’t really care what you think, but the way you can only parse this as taking sides or being personally attacked is… kinda not healthy?

Just maybe come back to it in a couple of days and give it some thought.

No, I have an issue with both him misrepresenting Mac OS and with you misrepresenting his point.

Because for the fifteenth time, what matters is what’s true. I’m not taking sides with you and assuming every fallacious argument you make is fine and every fallacious argument this guy makes is not, or viceversa. Your fallacies don’t justify his, and importantly, his don’t justify yours.

Look, at this point you’re being obtuse because egos and the Internet and whatever, so whatever, you do you. This conversation is deep into “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” territory.

Yes. People have been correcting him on the Mac OS thing. Which you said was irrelevant several times.

I, remember, said it is not. Because again, this is not about what you like, it’s about what is true. Given what I’ve seen so far I’m assuming that a) his workaround is valid, and b) his statement that MacOS works the same way is not. I’m open to changing my mind on both of those because, one more time, it’s about what is true.

On that note, the breakdown of what is sent, how and when is absolutely dependent on your account login. If it was not then there would be nothing to complain about. That doesn’t mean they don’t send anything without an account (unless you’re not online at all, obviously), but the payload of information will be different and in some cases some calls may be dependent on you having an ID in the first place. Plus there’s the question of whether unsigned users leave any connection to the account that activated the Windows install. Which I don’t know about and you clearly don’t care about.

Oh, and… yeah, I would love to help Linux get more mainstream. If only egotistically, it’d be super nice if the parts of it that don’t work right for me due to missing drivers got more first party support, but having the underpinning of home computing software revolve around open source software? Yeah, I wanna help with that. I do agree with you that “I installed Linux for my grandma” is not “helping”, either, but I didn’t say I do that, either.

Nnno? To any of that?

I mean, he’s biased, you’re biased, whatever. The question is whether his information is accurate. Which I’m assuming it is. I haven’t tested it, but nobody seems to be disputing it. I’d personally like to know how much an activated Windows using an offline account phones home, if at all, and what data it shares and stores, but I’ve noticed nobody seems to care about the specifics of that in this fanboy flamewar, which is frustrating.

In any case, accurate information from biased sources is still accurate, and not sharing the same biases you have isn’t deception.

Also, nobody presents these workarounds as permanent anything, he hasn’t made that statement or even implied it. Most people sharing the previous workarounds actively warned that they seemed like an oversight and MS may patch them out at any point. Which they ended up doing.

Again, this seems like you equating caveats with dealbreakers for the sake of pushing an agenda. And as someone who uses both Windows and Linux on the daily I’m just gonna say you’re not helping. Misinformation makes people who notice it less likely to side with you and everybody here can notice it because we’re all tech savvy enough. I guess being the hardcore guy acting all uncompromising makes you feel cool or whatever, but it’s not doing much of use.

…

I mean he used to work there, so yeah?

You saying the accuracy of the account requirement in MacOS is irrelevant makes me wonder if it is incorrect, because… well, no, it’s not irrelevant. I’d like to know. I mean, I will continue to use Windows because I need Windows things, but if I was in a position where I’m mad about this to the point of making me look for a clean break that would be a fairly relevant thing to know.

What I’m hearing here is that people are mad about what he’s saying, not because he’s wrong or because it’s not useful, but because this is a Linux community and people want this problem to be as big as possible to wield it as a dealbreaker to specifically promote the OS they like. Which is, I’m guessing, why you don’t sound stoked about MacOS not having the same issue?

Weird as it is to root for specific pieces of software, I also don’t find that particularly useful because, frankly, people using Windows already know how good or bad Windows is. Trying to overplay it is not particularly constructive to promote alternatives. You can acknowledge the ways in which people can work around annoying Windows stuff and still point out you don’t need any workarounds on Linux, if that’s what you want to do.