This makes little sense without saying what an "expert mode" is. What is "geek settings turned on?". You can already configure ~everything and more via the windows registry or gpedit.msc. There are thousands of "expert settings" apps and special iso-s for anyone wanting more user friendly tweaking. Any OS that is enterprise-ready does not need any "I'm geek" checkbox.
YMMV - The reverse for me. I hate it when I don't see the extension. And you'd think that a file named File.xls.scr with the icon of the Excel would be seen by a user, but it doesn't.
I think the argument is rather to make Windows simpler (because it’s supposedly too complicated for many non-geeky users), but to retain an “expert mode” for the more “advanced” functions, or a slider as described.
Microsoft partially does that since at least Windows 10 by dumbing down and enshittening the Home Edition, while providing "expert settings" like the Group Policy Editor or better Windows Update settings in the Pro Edition and above. The strategy hasn't really proven popular so far
E.g you can't remove these annoying "remind later" things (without disabling integrity protection and patching OS files), and they are everywhere. Enshittification of windows is going strong, there are more and more things you can't configure anymore
An optional console view of the kernel boot log and driver configuration stages Etc. all the stuff that you have to find out after the fact by retrieving a log through one of the alternate boot methods like the recovery console. Assuming you can even get to one of those.
Why can't this just be something you can tab over to instead of that stupid blank startup screen with occasional disingenuous, ambiguous feel-good messages on it? Why do Windows crash dump and recovery screens have to be still largely stuck in the cryptic and unhelpfully threadbare state they were in 20 years ago when there is so much more memory available to store say, a scrollable stack trace or even a large text table of meaningful errors or exception states so you don't need to go Googling around for these or checking your notes at 4:08 am on a Monday?
The bane of anyone who's ever had to get a production system back up and running from a non-bootable state and you're sitting there staring at spinning circles and featureless colorblock screens sometimes for minutes on end, wondering just what the hell is going on.
Brings back old memory on a AD lab, where our professor was presented with "contact your local administrator" dialog upon closing some simple configuration dialog.
He had set-up the AD himself and had no idea where it came from
Yeah, I appreciate it in both ways I've said it: Both "I'm the sysadmin, I'm in charge here, shut up and do what I said", and also "yeah, I'm the sysadmin and I have no idea what you're trying to tell me". In both cases I'm a bit put out with the machine, but somewhat different tones.
I guess there's also the "oh, right - sudo make me a sandwich", but that's less notable in my experience.
It's called the registry. A very long linked list data structure designed to scare experts into using another OS. This process takes time as despair finally wins against hope.
This is what I find the most annoying thing about Windows. Without the expert mode when you have a problem there is no easy way to figure out what is wrong. You google for the symptoms of the problem and all kinds of suggestions and "recipes" turn up. You quickly realize that nobody known anything either. Instead of getting to the root of the problem and applying a precise fix, you have to resort to trying all those "recipes" one by one hoping that you stumble across the one that fixes your problem.
So, by not having an "expert" mode in Windows, Microsoft made Windows neither newbie-friendly nor expert-friendly.
TBH I wouldn't overly mind a version of Windows that really was just a terminal on top of the kernel, with the option to use the Windows shell or whatever other shell I want or build one if that's what I desired. Much like that most proselytized of Linux distros. It would still be Windows, but I would feel in control of it to some degree.
But it would have to be something other than PowerShell, and I think that's a nonstarter for Microsoft.
TBH I wouldn't overly mind a version of Windows that really was just a terminal on top of the kernel, with the option to use the Windows shell or whatever other shell I want or build one if that's what I desired.
WinPE is literally that. A highly stripped-down version of Windows that boots to cmd.exe as a shell.
Why would I want to use a shitty command line some developer who likes GUIs made when I could use the terminal which can be set up to my liking and my entire environment can be consistent?
That's the whole problem with GUIs in general. You're relying on the developer to expose every little thing to you as buttons and widgets. How many times have you been sitting there stuck because there just wasn't a button for the thing you wanted to do?
Also, you can't chain programs together with a GUI like you can with CLI. And your suggestion of using program-specific command lines ruins this as well.
He's wrong. We do need an expert mode, at least to remove UAC in a simple way and allow us to mess around at will.
Let's see, UAC is nice for your grandmother who might click on something that it shouldn't, yet, we, advanced users are constantly annoyed by those cof,cof "security" features who get in the way when doing something.
Yet, your grandmother will eventually get ransomware or malware despite the UAC and other features, so, what's the point!??!
At the moment I just remember UAC, but there are plenty of features that we want to turn off with a simple button and we can't, unless we play around with the registry or 3rd party apps.
And this is why power users love Linux, we can do whatever we want, if we break it, it's fine and we can learn with it. At this rate, your computer will no longer be "your" computer, Microsoft will own it and you will like it.
> Let's see, UAC is nice for your grandmother who might click on something that it shouldn't, yet, we, advanced users are constantly annoyed by those cof,cof "security" features who get in the way when doing something.
Even for us power users, we might hit some drive-by exploit, a friend might send us something that got wormed or whatever. And now, unless that malware comes with a UAC bypass/privilege escalation exploit which is worth millions of dollars, we get an unexpected UAC prompt and have a chance to stop a minute and actually notice that something is Not Right.
It's worth noting that UAC is not a security boundary[1]. Sure, a safeguard mechanism, but not a security feature against stealth rootkits trying to escalate from non-privileged environment.
Unfortunately as more and more software is installed only for the user (in AppData), the malware can just infect a binary from there (Chrome, Discord, VS Code, ....)
Yeah - I’ve had this rant more times than I can count. Modern PC security is stupid because it protects users from other users (what other users?) but it doesn’t protect users from bad software they run on their own account. When the computer only has 1 user anyway, there isn’t much practical difference between the root user and my user account. But the elephant in the room is software supply chain attacks and malware. The fact any program I run can do anything it wants with all my files is ridiculous and appalling.
Phones get it right. The Facebook app on my phone can’t read Gmail’s data. And Gmail can’t access my photos without permission. On desktop any program can read or write to any of my files. And my files - photos, work, code - matter a lot more to me than anything my OS works hard to protect.
There’s no good technical reason, either. It’s a problem of pure inertia.
Apple kind of does this with the MacOS now. It will continuously ask you for each app to give it permissions to specific folders (downloads, home directory) plus can the app use the camera, the microphone etc.. I feel like most people blindly just tap yes to get it out of the way and use the app they just installed.
People like to hate on the permission dialog boxes on MacOS - but each app only needs to ask you once for permission. I don't think I've seen one of these dialog boxes for months. And they add a remarkably large amount of security to the overall system given how little they inconvenience users in the steady state of system execution.
But they're a very coarse brush. Once an application has permission to access some folder, it can do anything it wants there. And only certain folders and permissions are protected. (I think any app can read / write any data in ~/Library).
I think the desktop security environment would work extremely differently if it were designed today. I'd love to see more people experimenting with ideas.
Not really, you use sudo when needed, at your will, not when Linux thinks you need it. I can just setuid some executable, how do you do it with Windows?
You can login as Administrator if you enable the user account. You can also just turn admin approval mode to "never ask" in the Control Panel.
While you can't login as SYSTEM (since it's not really a user account), you can trivially open a shell under it's account (and you can do everything you need as an administrator anyway, so there's really no point).
I used to use a PowerShell snippet for adding SeBackupPrivilege and SeRestorePrivilege to an app or explorer window. That will let you read/write anywhere on disk.
I asked for basically the opposite of this for MS Office products. I use Excel for specific purposes, and it would really make it more usable if I could easily hide a bunch of features (especially alternate click context menus that I accidentally engage during the middle of a huge select or copy-paste sequence, requiring me to start over). While still having those unused features available via some drop-down menu.
I completely agree that there are different types of expertise, but I'd expect experts to know their own expertise and not touch parts of a hypothetical "expert mode" outside their particular expertise.
If Windows could’ve been dialed back to be as not manipulative as it was at the time of the post’s writing (ie 2k & XP), I would be glad to hold the temptation to self-claim as an expert.
