It’s quite common to login as admin on windows though (in home setups), you’ll still have to authenticate for administrative tasks (the UAC popups).
The issue here is mostly that the user has probably upgraded and windows changed their account, resulting in the files being owned by their old account.
In linux, that’s fixable with ‘sudo chmod -R’
In Windows, there’s no built-in way, you need the take ownership script.
Yes, but on Linux, if I am root, I am God. I do whatever the fuck I want with my machine, for good, evil or stupidity. That’s the poster’s point. It seems like Windows doesn’t allow you to do this, or at least not easily. So I guess people who want to have absolute control over their computer shouldn’t be using Windows, I guess.
I think windows is a pretty good middle ground. Yes it’s annoying that you might need to install a 3rd party tool to give you a right click menu option to take ownership of any file/folder, but at least you can do that and it’s easy. And for normies that don’t have Linux-fu they’ll get into a lot less trouble than if you give them Linux.
MacOS on the other hand, if there’s something Apple decided users are too dumb to be allowed to do (which it turns out, is a lot of stuff), then you just can’t do it, period.
As far as I remember the secret is to log in as admin and change the ownership of the files to yourself, then change permissions and then do whatever the f you want with the files.
There’s an OS you might like. It has no UAC, no file permissions, no sudo nor chmod, as it has no multi-user support, no antivirus and no firewall, no protection rings, not even spectre/meltdown mitigations, and most of all - no guard-rails whatsoever: You can patch the kernel directly at runtime and it won’t even give you a warn. And yet, it is perfectly safe to run. It’s called TempleOS and it achieves such a flawless security by having no networking support whatsoever and barely any support for removable media. If you want a piece a software - you just code it in, manually. You don’t have to check the code for backdoors if it’s entirely written by you… only for CIA at your actual back door…
A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It’s much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor’s memory through DMA.
I think they just mean they should have control over the modem. They are all locked down and proprietary with known backdoors throughout history, effectively bypassing any OS level security.
The short version is that only the users granted permission to a given set of files can access those files. With NTFS permissions it’s… Complicated. You can have explicit permission to a file, or implied permission via a group that you’re a part of, or some combination of those things. You can also have read, but no write. You can have append but not create, you can have delete, but not list. It’s a lot of very granular, very crazy permissions.
There’s also deny permissions which overrule everything.
What has likely happened is that the posters user account doesn’t have implied or explicit permission to the file, but if you sign in as an administrator, even if the administrator doesn’t have permission to read/write/append/delete the file, the administrator has permission to take ownership of a file, and as owner, change the permissions of a file. Being owner doesn’t mean you can open/read/write/append/delete anything, you can just change permissions and give yourself (or anyone else) permissions to the file.
Changing ownership is a right which, as far as I’m aware, cannot be revoked from admin level users. They can always change ownership. Owners of files cannot be denied the right to change the permissions of a file as far as I know. This will always result in some method by which administrative level accounts can recover access to files and folders.
In my experience, exceptions exist but are extremely rare (usually to do with kernel level stuff, and/or lockouts by security/AV software).
The poster might legally and physically own the device and all the data contained therein, and may have an administrative level account on that device, but the fact is, their NTFS permissions are not set to allow them access to the data. The post they’re replying to is trying to let them know how to fix it by using an administrative level account and they’re not tech-savvy enough to follow along.
I don’t blame them. File permissions issues are challenging even for me, and I fully understand the problem.
Yep, there’s actually quite a few more than what I mentioned, if you get into the advanced dialogs.
IMO, it’s unnecessarily complicated, but given that NTFS is used for network file sharing in large companies, I get why it’s so crazy. They probably demand those kinds of granular permissions.
I know Linux is a lot simpler. Just read/write/execute, and a single group, single owner, and a setting for “everyone else” kind of thing, which is generally sufficient for 90% of use cases.
I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.
I don’t work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.
It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.
Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting “run as administrator”, so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.
On that last part, theres a difference between elevating a file to admin, and being an admin in Windows.
In a lot of cases the ui is GREATLY simplified when not an admin, to the point where you might only have like 20% of all available options.
For the standard user?
Great!
Not when you’re messing around with permissions.
It’s why you ALWAYS log in as Admin when setting up a windows server.
Iirc you can’t even install tiles without actually being an admin, even if you have all logins.
From my experience with windows, your current guess is correct btw :D
I feel like he has a machine that someone set up for him, and he can’t escalate permissions, because he’s on a basic user account.
The normal way this works on a single user machine is:
You try to do something that is restricted to admin
Windows puts up a modal dialogue box asking if you want to do it as admin
You click yes
You do it as admin
But in that case he can’t have locked himself out of a file, he can only be locked out of things Microsoft think you shouldn’t muck with unless you know what you’re doing
A while back I was tinkering with some website and installed some npm packages.
Then I tried to delete the nodes modules folder… NOTHING worked… Safe mode, permissions change, command line deletion,… I spend like an hour googling and raging, it’s my fucking computer I put the fucking file there, let me delete it!!!
I was ready to give up and finally stumbled on the answer on stack overflow. The npm folder that was created (I forget exactly what it was) had the ~ symbol in path name and that basically made the folder invincible.
Luckily the poster also posted the command line to nuke the fucker and I was finally able to delete it.
So yea, I kinda get it. Seeing that stupid you don’t have permission to delete this file pop-up is rage inducing.
His problem is he went to answers.microsoft.com That place is a cesspool of fuck you, but here’s a copy paste of something from 2006 so I can get some karma
Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”
Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”
Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.
Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.
…where people will definitely give helpful answers and not just dunk on them for not using Linux before diving into an extended argument about distros, sudo and run0
You’re completely right, but there’s a good reason why this happens. Why are people so insistent on trying to find fixes and workarounds for a broken system?
It’s absolutely the same mindset as boomers complaining about technology these days because they don’t want to learn how to download a mobile app. These people grew up with Windows and are too stubborn or insecure to learn something new, even if it’s consistently better in multiple different ways. Yes, there are a few exceptions to that argument, but for the most part the arguments against switching to Linux are flimsy excuses, or outdated, or both.
Retraining people to use new tools on a corporate scale is an immense endeavour, probably a huge cost given the dip in productivity, and that’s assuming there is an equivalent Linux tool in the first place.
For some people, learning new stuff isn’t as easy, and they just don’t have the investment to do so when all they want is to go about their day. The expectation that people shouldn’t be so reluctant to learn something new ignores the inflexibility that long-established habits bring in some demographics.
Conversely, while that demographic is locked into using Windows by virtue of the cost-benefit function to learning something new just too… not be using Windows anymore? is just unfavourable, others will have to cater to them.
Technology is advancing way faster these days, and it’s unfair to demand that everyone keep up with it. Hence, while recommending Linux is a good thing, being an elitist about it (as the people my previous commend alluded to tend to be) is unproductive.
Corporate adoption is Linux is absolutely a completely different discussion. Users of corporate devices are not the owners of their device, they have no expectation of control or freedom, and the tasks completed on these devices are typically simple and restricted. So yes, very little of my initial comment applies to that.
As for your other arguments, I would agree that the general everyday public with very little knowledge of Linux or the differences from Windows should have little expectation of switching over unless they decide to investigate for themselves. The main target my complaints are those people who come in to threads like these who do have the technical understanding to complain about Windows and understand that Linux is different, but constantly whine that they could never switch because this reason or that reason and oh won’t those Linux nerds please just accept that Windows is better even though we’re talking in the eighteenth thread full of people who hate it.
I think we’ll see more office drones happy with Libre Office (perhaps even on Linux) to avoid the monthly fee for MS 365, not in the office, because few care about what the boss provides (except for the crap screens) but at home
This is absolutely the attitude he was just talking about, you can’t agree, then add a “but”
Linux is not the fix for all that ails you, and it’s especially not the fix for non tech-savvy people, which as a reminder, is most people. Lemmy is not a good baseline for this because we’re all savvy enough to get onto the fediverse in the first place, which in itself is very confusing if you’re non tech savvy or coming from a place like reddit, where things are so fundamentally different.( Which i know for a fact most of you have experienced at some point)
Linux is especially good for normal boring people. It’s only bad for tech-adventurist idiots. It does email, web, documents just like windows. There’s no learning curve (though it isn’t great for users unwilling to log in, as their keyring won’t be unlocked by auto (or biometric) log-in, so they need to add their login password before they can get email or have their browser log into Reddit for them
Bet, go ahead and grab your parents or the nearest old fart you know who isn’t tech savvy and try to get them to install linux, libre Office, and thunderbird and attempt to use it.
$100 says they won’t make it through using rufus without help
I wouldn’t do that. I installed the software for them and set up their email and showed them how to do things. Linux was harder to set up back when I did that. Printers were a headache especially
But once set up a Linux box is no harder to use than a windows or apple one
It’s absolutely the same mindset as boomers complaining about technology these days because they don’t want to learn how to download a mobile app.
I’m really not too sure about that.
Used to work in customer service for a major right wing (Daily Mail) newspaper, and that included tech support for their rewards club website, their newspaper reading Android/iOS/Kindle Fire app, and their bookshop website.
Pensioners struggle with technology and I really don’t think it’s just stubbornness and ignorance. I genuinely think that your ability to learn and remember things diminishes greatly as you grow older.
It was one of the worst jobs I worked in, not just because trying to explain how to do basic things like open a web browser, type in a URL or force stop and clear the cache on an Android app to a 90+ year old is like pulling teeth, but because we were paid like crap, treated like children by management, treated like shit by a lot of customers, and because we used to get a lot of editorial calls from people thinking we could put them through to a journalist so they could spout their often bigoted views. So glad I work in accountancy now. The worst customer support jobs are the ones where callers frequently go full Karen on you.
Good grief, that might be the worst customer service job I’ve ever heard of. I’ve worked Sainsbury’s ‘head office’ - which was just the outsourced customer service centre for people who phone store chains to complain about cucumbers - and that was bad enough, but at least I got some good stories out of it (“My watermelon has exploded and I’m afraid of the second one. Can a man come round and take it away?” First ever call).
You were getting Mail readers who are already a self-selecting group of thick cunts and you were getting the worst of them. Jesus Christ, that must have been rough. So, so happy for you that you’re out of that, I can’t imagine what that would do to someone’s mental health!
For the record, this was for a customer service outsourcer I used to work for. I wasn’t directly employed by Associated Newspapers and I’d say a good deal of the internal managerial and pay issues I had were down to my employer, not the client. Only thing I miss about that place were my colleagues. I had made some life-long friends in that place and there were a lot of great people who came and went.
As for management, one or two team leaders aside, they were a clique of nepotistic assholes.
I was fired from that job nearly three years into my employment (long after we lost the AN contract and I moved to a different campaign) for ‘capability’ reasons, after they dragged me through a month-long PIP and disciplinary process for failing to hit targets. Our whole email team was failing to hit performance targets and I was effectively scapegoated and bullied out of the company by a team leader who didn’t like me. In retrospect it was the best thing to ever happen to me, because had I not been sacked, I’d probably still be there on min wage and not working in commercial finance today.
Can’t say much about iPhones because the last time I used iOS was about a decade ago, but I’m not a fan of Apple for how often they ask you to sign in to your Apple ID just to do anything on the App Store.
As for Android, learning how to open an app’s settings menu to force stop it and clear its cache is a godsend. It solves about 99% of technical issues I may face.
I don’t run as root because I’ve always been told I shouldn’t. I don’t know enough about anything to be contradicting stuff like this. It has always seemed weird to me that we don’t run as root and then just sudo everything, though.
A big part of it comes from the security model and Linux historically being a multi-user environment. root owns the root directly / which is where all of the system files live. A normal user just has access to their own home directory /home/username and read-only access to things the normal user needs like the /bin where programs are stored (hence /bin/bash in lots of bash scripts, it tells the script what program to run the script from)
Because of this model, a normal user can only mess up their own files, while root can mess up everyone’s files and of course make the system non-bootablem. But also you can have user Bob signed in and doing stuff but unable to access user Alice’s files, and user Alice can be doing stuff and even running the same programs that user Bob is running (since it’s read only there’s no conflict) and then the administrator can log in as root to install something because they got a ticket to install suchandsuch for soandso.
Back to your point with sudo, sudo is Super User Do, so you are running a single command as root. By running it as root you can potentially be messing up with Alice and Bob might be doing, and most importantly whatever you are running with sudo can potentially affect any file on the computer. So if you run the classic rm -rf / it will delete every file that the user has write access to, so if bob runs it it’ll delete all of /home/bob/ but Alice will be unaffected, and the admin can still log in as root to do stuff. But if you run it as root you’ll quickly find the server unable to boot and both Alice and Bob will be very upset that they can’t access the server or their files
If you host a website you’ll generally take advantage of this by giving the www folder read-only access so that web users can only see webpages and can’t start reading random system files, or for server software you can create a dedicated user to run that server software as, so if someone were to somehow exploit a vulnerability and gain access to that server user they can only mess up the software and no system files
We are human and make mistakes. Not running as root means the computer will ask us to confirm when we are about to do something major (like a software update, or formatting a partition). This reduces the chance of making big mistakes. (But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)
(But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)
You don’t run VLC as root because you don’t especially trust that build of VLC
We don’t run random stuff as root because it’s a stupid risk. We try to only take necessary risks. Risks that make things easier. Running random programs as root gains you nothing and causes annoyance in that you need to fix permissions on its configuration files if you want to run out as a user
There is nothing stopping you though if you want to set up a Linux machine where you log in as root, run a desktop environment as root, run apps as root. You’re unlikely to be taking an unreasonable risk as a home user.
But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.
For the reasons you described, I won’t run VLC as root, and I don’t think 99% of users would need to. But if someone wanted to do it, the software shouldn’t stop them from doing it (beyond giving a warning and asking them to confirm).
You’re not supposed to “sudo everything” though. It’s mostly for changing the system configuration (editing config files in /etc/, running your system package manager etc.). It shouldn’t be a “oh, I got a permission error, better sudo the same command again olol”
The fact that Andrew might have to run this at all means Windows (or possibly the manufacturer of his camera) has fucked up. He should not need to learn about this to use his files. Obviously he shouldn’t have permissions to system files but that’s clearly not what he actually wants.
Windows defaults to giving a user access to common folders like a desktop, pictures, etc. Most never need anymore access to internal folders.
The fact that Andrew has the permissions settings open enough to discover “owner” but doesnt understand what any of it is means and instead launched a “don’t tread on me” screed about his “dominion of all things mine” implies that he fucked up, not Microsoft.
How did his user account lose permissions to a folder of pictures?
He didn’t “discover owner” by opening any permission settings. He is simply asserting that he is the owner of the pictures he took, in a non-technical sense.
He doesnt talk about pictures at all. That was someone elses supposition.
It’s not clear from the snippet of text what the issue is, but it sure looks like he opened up the folder ACLs and found that his account wasn’t “Owner” for some folder/files, and now hes mad that he is being made to elevate his own account for that folder, because “He is the OWNER!” of the files in a property rights context.
Ah, ACLs, had the pleasure of working with these again last weeks.
It gets really curious when even the Arch wiki doesn’t really know what’s going on (talking about mask and effective permissions):
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason: The original note about the --mask option (which was taken from setfacl(1)) was determined as inaccurate, but the new note does not seem correct either. See the talk page for details.
From trying, I can confirm that the info presented further down is wrong.
Once you read what it actually does and why it’s the way it is, it makes more sense - not that I remember it now - but at least there was a coherent design decision behind it
I think I had this guy’s exact issue and maybe even stumbled upon his comment in that Microsoft support forum thread. It looks very familiar, but I could have just seen the meme before.
My problem was that I needed to do this for 100+ files, so using the UI individually for each file was out of the question. The eventual solution I found was in this tutorial for adding a context menu entry that changes folder/file ownership recursively. It’s been very useful!
Pebkac. Gui equivalent of chown perfectly working on windows and supports recursing into directories. If the questioner doesn’t know how to login as an admin they miss some absolute basic computer usage knowledge, and a general help forum thread wont help them.
Not to mention there is no admin anymore, it’s essentially a sudo style with it popping up asking are you sure.
This though really reeks of their son dragged and dropped their old files onto a new computer and didn’t set the NTFS permissions, and purposely set them up as a non admin so they wouldn’t bother them with “I got a new virus”. When I have an elderly relative ask for me to set up their computer I don’t give them admin rights
If you read the thread they got an answer to their question, then OP posts this rant here like its a classic “windows is stupid” thing, while simply a user tries to do something which is too complex for them, and blames their lack of knowledge on the os.
Andrew complains, Microsoft makes a root mode so Andrew can have his way. Andrew breaks his computer the next second by deleting a system file and proceeds to call Microsoft support. :)
Most of the annoying stuff that Linux users hate about Windows are because Windows has to cater to even the least technologically knowledgeable users.
It is why Windows updates are forced, why so many files are locked behind SYSTEM user and can’t easily be circumvented, why some settings are registry or Group Policy only, why some settings are opt out, …
Without those, their support center would blow up.
So if Linux wants to become mainstream, it will have to cater to those users as well. And Linux will slowly turn into Windows.
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My man just reinvented free software.
Eh? On Linux you also aren’t supposed to log in as root, and you also have to individually set file permissions.
This issue is unrelated to windows, it’s a safety feature that all modern desktop OSes have
It’s quite common to login as admin on windows though (in home setups), you’ll still have to authenticate for administrative tasks (the UAC popups).
The issue here is mostly that the user has probably upgraded and windows changed their account, resulting in the files being owned by their old account.
In linux, that’s fixable with ‘sudo chmod -R’
In Windows, there’s no built-in way, you need the take ownership script.
I am the installer and only user of my pc, but Windows neeeds other users. Note: Phil is USERS not ADMIN! Not even Authenticated Users.
i mean, chown is just a binary. takeown is probably pretty similar, right?
Pretty much, yeah
I assume the equivalent would just be ‘takeown /r <folder>’
As far as I can tell it always uses the currently logged in user as target though
Yes, but on Linux, if I am root, I am God. I do whatever the fuck I want with my machine, for good, evil or stupidity. That’s the poster’s point. It seems like Windows doesn’t allow you to do this, or at least not easily. So I guess people who want to have absolute control over their computer shouldn’t be using Windows, I guess.
I think windows is a pretty good middle ground. Yes it’s annoying that you might need to install a 3rd party tool to give you a right click menu option to take ownership of any file/folder, but at least you can do that and it’s easy. And for normies that don’t have Linux-fu they’ll get into a lot less trouble than if you give them Linux.
MacOS on the other hand, if there’s something Apple decided users are too dumb to be allowed to do (which it turns out, is a lot of stuff), then you just can’t do it, period.
As far as I remember the secret is to log in as admin and change the ownership of the files to yourself, then change permissions and then do whatever the f you want with the files.
I want to say “Haha, Idiot trusting Microsoft”.
But honestly I want the same stuff he wants. Including modems in mobile phones. Including EVERYTHING I own.
There’s an OS you might like. It has no UAC, no file permissions, no sudo nor chmod, as it has no multi-user support, no antivirus and no firewall, no protection rings, not even spectre/meltdown mitigations, and most of all - no guard-rails whatsoever: You can patch the kernel directly at runtime and it won’t even give you a warn. And yet, it is perfectly safe to run. It’s called TempleOS and it achieves such a flawless security by having no networking support whatsoever and barely any support for removable media. If you want a piece a software - you just code it in, manually. You don’t have to check the code for backdoors if it’s entirely written by you… only for CIA at your actual back door…
Huh, didn’t realise Windows is on a level to be compared to TempleOS. And losing. Thanks for that.
What does ‘modems in mobile phones’ mean? Isn’t the whole thing a modem strapped onto a screen? What am I missing?
I just saw discussions like this
So no, there are more parts to your phone. You forgot the whole part you, the user, solely interact with.
A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It’s much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor’s memory through DMA.
I think they just mean they should have control over the modem. They are all locked down and proprietary with known backdoors throughout history, effectively bypassing any OS level security.
Is this real? Are people having to request permission changes on files by petitioning microsoft to change their permissions?
I’m a sysadmin and I work with Windows a lot.
The short version is that only the users granted permission to a given set of files can access those files. With NTFS permissions it’s… Complicated. You can have explicit permission to a file, or implied permission via a group that you’re a part of, or some combination of those things. You can also have read, but no write. You can have append but not create, you can have delete, but not list. It’s a lot of very granular, very crazy permissions.
There’s also deny permissions which overrule everything.
What has likely happened is that the posters user account doesn’t have implied or explicit permission to the file, but if you sign in as an administrator, even if the administrator doesn’t have permission to read/write/append/delete the file, the administrator has permission to take ownership of a file, and as owner, change the permissions of a file. Being owner doesn’t mean you can open/read/write/append/delete anything, you can just change permissions and give yourself (or anyone else) permissions to the file.
Changing ownership is a right which, as far as I’m aware, cannot be revoked from admin level users. They can always change ownership. Owners of files cannot be denied the right to change the permissions of a file as far as I know. This will always result in some method by which administrative level accounts can recover access to files and folders.
In my experience, exceptions exist but are extremely rare (usually to do with kernel level stuff, and/or lockouts by security/AV software).
The poster might legally and physically own the device and all the data contained therein, and may have an administrative level account on that device, but the fact is, their NTFS permissions are not set to allow them access to the data. The post they’re replying to is trying to let them know how to fix it by using an administrative level account and they’re not tech-savvy enough to follow along.
I don’t blame them. File permissions issues are challenging even for me, and I fully understand the problem.
Huh, having separate append permission is interesting. i didn’t realize that was an option.
Yep, there’s actually quite a few more than what I mentioned, if you get into the advanced dialogs.
IMO, it’s unnecessarily complicated, but given that NTFS is used for network file sharing in large companies, I get why it’s so crazy. They probably demand those kinds of granular permissions.
I know Linux is a lot simpler. Just read/write/execute, and a single group, single owner, and a setting for “everyone else” kind of thing, which is generally sufficient for 90% of use cases.
I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.
I don’t work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.
It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.
Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting “run as administrator”, so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.
On that last part, theres a difference between elevating a file to admin, and being an admin in Windows.
In a lot of cases the ui is GREATLY simplified when not an admin, to the point where you might only have like 20% of all available options.
For the standard user? Great! Not when you’re messing around with permissions.
It’s why you ALWAYS log in as Admin when setting up a windows server. Iirc you can’t even install tiles without actually being an admin, even if you have all logins.
From my experience with windows, your current guess is correct btw :D
So this guy is just bitching because he sudo installed something?
It’s not MS having to manage your folder permissions remotely?
I feel like he has a machine that someone set up for him, and he can’t escalate permissions, because he’s on a basic user account.
The normal way this works on a single user machine is:
But in that case he can’t have locked himself out of a file, he can only be locked out of things Microsoft think you shouldn’t muck with unless you know what you’re doing
Andrew is going to get malware on his PC, guaranteed.
Man, I kind of feel for the poster.
A while back I was tinkering with some website and installed some npm packages.
Then I tried to delete the nodes modules folder… NOTHING worked… Safe mode, permissions change, command line deletion,… I spend like an hour googling and raging, it’s my fucking computer I put the fucking file there, let me delete it!!!
I was ready to give up and finally stumbled on the answer on stack overflow. The npm folder that was created (I forget exactly what it was) had the ~ symbol in path name and that basically made the folder invincible.
Luckily the poster also posted the command line to nuke the fucker and I was finally able to delete it.
So yea, I kinda get it. Seeing that stupid you don’t have permission to delete this file pop-up is rage inducing.
Always know your escape characters! Usually \ works
(I wonder how many clients show that as double backslash)
His problem is he went to answers.microsoft.com That place is a cesspool of fuck you, but here’s a copy paste of something from 2006 so I can get some karma
He could alternatively go to…
Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be “use the search bar you imbecile, locked.”
Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like “my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren’t improving. How can I make him better at math?”
Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.
Or Reddit, where you can’t even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.
I think any Q&A site is absolute dog water now.
They could come to lemmy!
…where people will definitely give helpful answers and not just dunk on them for not using Linux before diving into an extended argument about distros, sudo and run0
You’re completely right, but there’s a good reason why this happens. Why are people so insistent on trying to find fixes and workarounds for a broken system?
It’s absolutely the same mindset as boomers complaining about technology these days because they don’t want to learn how to download a mobile app. These people grew up with Windows and are too stubborn or insecure to learn something new, even if it’s consistently better in multiple different ways. Yes, there are a few exceptions to that argument, but for the most part the arguments against switching to Linux are flimsy excuses, or outdated, or both.
Retraining people to use new tools on a corporate scale is an immense endeavour, probably a huge cost given the dip in productivity, and that’s assuming there is an equivalent Linux tool in the first place.
For some people, learning new stuff isn’t as easy, and they just don’t have the investment to do so when all they want is to go about their day. The expectation that people shouldn’t be so reluctant to learn something new ignores the inflexibility that long-established habits bring in some demographics.
Conversely, while that demographic is locked into using Windows by virtue of the cost-benefit function to learning something new just too… not be using Windows anymore? is just unfavourable, others will have to cater to them.
Technology is advancing way faster these days, and it’s unfair to demand that everyone keep up with it. Hence, while recommending Linux is a good thing, being an elitist about it (as the people my previous commend alluded to tend to be) is unproductive.
Corporate adoption is Linux is absolutely a completely different discussion. Users of corporate devices are not the owners of their device, they have no expectation of control or freedom, and the tasks completed on these devices are typically simple and restricted. So yes, very little of my initial comment applies to that.
As for your other arguments, I would agree that the general everyday public with very little knowledge of Linux or the differences from Windows should have little expectation of switching over unless they decide to investigate for themselves. The main target my complaints are those people who come in to threads like these who do have the technical understanding to complain about Windows and understand that Linux is different, but constantly whine that they could never switch because this reason or that reason and oh won’t those Linux nerds please just accept that Windows is better even though we’re talking in the eighteenth thread full of people who hate it.
I think we’ll see more office drones happy with Libre Office (perhaps even on Linux) to avoid the monthly fee for MS 365, not in the office, because few care about what the boss provides (except for the crap screens) but at home
This is absolutely the attitude he was just talking about, you can’t agree, then add a “but”
Linux is not the fix for all that ails you, and it’s especially not the fix for non tech-savvy people, which as a reminder, is most people. Lemmy is not a good baseline for this because we’re all savvy enough to get onto the fediverse in the first place, which in itself is very confusing if you’re non tech savvy or coming from a place like reddit, where things are so fundamentally different.( Which i know for a fact most of you have experienced at some point)
Linux is especially good for normal boring people. It’s only bad for tech-adventurist idiots. It does email, web, documents just like windows. There’s no learning curve (though it isn’t great for users unwilling to log in, as their keyring won’t be unlocked by auto (or biometric) log-in, so they need to add their login password before they can get email or have their browser log into Reddit for them
Bet, go ahead and grab your parents or the nearest old fart you know who isn’t tech savvy and try to get them to install linux, libre Office, and thunderbird and attempt to use it.
$100 says they won’t make it through using rufus without help
I wouldn’t do that. I installed the software for them and set up their email and showed them how to do things. Linux was harder to set up back when I did that. Printers were a headache especially
But once set up a Linux box is no harder to use than a windows or apple one
I’m really not too sure about that.
Used to work in customer service for a major right wing (Daily Mail) newspaper, and that included tech support for their rewards club website, their newspaper reading Android/iOS/Kindle Fire app, and their bookshop website.
Pensioners struggle with technology and I really don’t think it’s just stubbornness and ignorance. I genuinely think that your ability to learn and remember things diminishes greatly as you grow older.
It was one of the worst jobs I worked in, not just because trying to explain how to do basic things like open a web browser, type in a URL or force stop and clear the cache on an Android app to a 90+ year old is like pulling teeth, but because we were paid like crap, treated like children by management, treated like shit by a lot of customers, and because we used to get a lot of editorial calls from people thinking we could put them through to a journalist so they could spout their often bigoted views. So glad I work in accountancy now. The worst customer support jobs are the ones where callers frequently go full Karen on you.
Good grief, that might be the worst customer service job I’ve ever heard of. I’ve worked Sainsbury’s ‘head office’ - which was just the outsourced customer service centre for people who phone store chains to complain about cucumbers - and that was bad enough, but at least I got some good stories out of it (“My watermelon has exploded and I’m afraid of the second one. Can a man come round and take it away?” First ever call).
You were getting Mail readers who are already a self-selecting group of thick cunts and you were getting the worst of them. Jesus Christ, that must have been rough. So, so happy for you that you’re out of that, I can’t imagine what that would do to someone’s mental health!
For the record, this was for a customer service outsourcer I used to work for. I wasn’t directly employed by Associated Newspapers and I’d say a good deal of the internal managerial and pay issues I had were down to my employer, not the client. Only thing I miss about that place were my colleagues. I had made some life-long friends in that place and there were a lot of great people who came and went.
As for management, one or two team leaders aside, they were a clique of nepotistic assholes.
I was fired from that job nearly three years into my employment (long after we lost the AN contract and I moved to a different campaign) for ‘capability’ reasons, after they dragged me through a month-long PIP and disciplinary process for failing to hit targets. Our whole email team was failing to hit performance targets and I was effectively scapegoated and bullied out of the company by a team leader who didn’t like me. In retrospect it was the best thing to ever happen to me, because had I not been sacked, I’d probably still be there on min wage and not working in commercial finance today.
My condolences on having had to work for the Mail!
My mum really wants to use her smartphone but we’ve been struggling to teach her.
Do you have any tips?
Can’t say much about iPhones because the last time I used iOS was about a decade ago, but I’m not a fan of Apple for how often they ask you to sign in to your Apple ID just to do anything on the App Store.
As for Android, learning how to open an app’s settings menu to force stop it and clear its cache is a godsend. It solves about 99% of technical issues I may face.
Me trying to modify games from the Xbox store.
Open the files in any non-windows system and do what ever the hell you want.
My brain read that in John Oliver’s mocking voice. xD
French or standard?
“I shouldn’t have to use permissions or sudo, just all root all the time”
“Real Men Run As Root”
https://www.garyshood.com/root/
I don’t run as root because I’ve always been told I shouldn’t. I don’t know enough about anything to be contradicting stuff like this. It has always seemed weird to me that we don’t run as root and then just sudo everything, though.
What is the reason we don’t run as root?
A big part of it comes from the security model and Linux historically being a multi-user environment.
rootowns the root directly/which is where all of the system files live. A normal user just has access to their own home directory/home/usernameand read-only access to things the normal user needs like the/binwhere programs are stored (hence/bin/bashin lots of bash scripts, it tells the script what program to run the script from)Because of this model, a normal user can only mess up their own files, while root can mess up everyone’s files and of course make the system non-bootablem. But also you can have user Bob signed in and doing stuff but unable to access user Alice’s files, and user Alice can be doing stuff and even running the same programs that user Bob is running (since it’s read only there’s no conflict) and then the administrator can log in as
rootto install something because they got a ticket to install suchandsuch for soandso.Back to your point with
sudo,sudois Super User Do, so you are running a single command asroot. By running it as root you can potentially be messing up with Alice and Bob might be doing, and most importantly whatever you are running withsudocan potentially affect any file on the computer. So if you run the classicrm -rf /it will delete every file that the user has write access to, so if bob runs it it’ll delete all of/home/bob/but Alice will be unaffected, and the admin can still log in asrootto do stuff. But if you run it asrootyou’ll quickly find the server unable to boot and both Alice and Bob will be very upset that they can’t access the server or their filesIf you host a website you’ll generally take advantage of this by giving the
wwwfolder read-only access so that web users can only see webpages and can’t start reading random system files, or for server software you can create a dedicated user to run that server software as, so if someone were to somehow exploit a vulnerability and gain access to that server user they can only mess up the software and no system filesBecause you might accidentally do something which breaks the system, or you might run a program which does something malicious without your knowledge.
By gating dangerous (or protected for any other reason) commands behind sudo, you create a barrier which is difficult to accidentally cross
We are human and make mistakes. Not running as root means the computer will ask us to confirm when we are about to do something major (like a software update, or formatting a partition). This reduces the chance of making big mistakes. (But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)
You don’t run VLC as root because you don’t especially trust that build of VLC
We don’t run random stuff as root because it’s a stupid risk. We try to only take necessary risks. Risks that make things easier. Running random programs as root gains you nothing and causes annoyance in that you need to fix permissions on its configuration files if you want to run out as a user
There is nothing stopping you though if you want to set up a Linux machine where you log in as root, run a desktop environment as root, run apps as root. You’re unlikely to be taking an unreasonable risk as a home user.
For the reasons you described, I won’t run VLC as root, and I don’t think 99% of users would need to. But if someone wanted to do it, the software shouldn’t stop them from doing it (beyond giving a warning and asking them to confirm).
You’re not supposed to “sudo everything” though. It’s mostly for changing the system configuration (editing config files in /etc/, running your system package manager etc.). It shouldn’t be a “oh, I got a permission error, better sudo the same command again olol”
Real superuser allow every programs and services run as root
bro has never heard of a computer owned by more than one person
The long reply on how to change file ownership when it could just be
chown -R andrew /picturesdeleted by creator
The fact that Andrew might have to run this at all means Windows (or possibly the manufacturer of his camera) has fucked up. He should not need to learn about this to use his files. Obviously he shouldn’t have permissions to system files but that’s clearly not what he actually wants.
Windows defaults to giving a user access to common folders like a desktop, pictures, etc. Most never need anymore access to internal folders.
The fact that Andrew has the permissions settings open enough to discover “owner” but doesnt understand what any of it is means and instead launched a “don’t tread on me” screed about his “dominion of all things mine” implies that he fucked up, not Microsoft.
How did his user account lose permissions to a folder of pictures?
He didn’t “discover owner” by opening any permission settings. He is simply asserting that he is the owner of the pictures he took, in a non-technical sense.
He doesnt talk about pictures at all. That was someone elses supposition.
It’s not clear from the snippet of text what the issue is, but it sure looks like he opened up the folder ACLs and found that his account wasn’t “Owner” for some folder/files, and now hes mad that he is being made to elevate his own account for that folder, because “He is the OWNER!” of the files in a property rights context.
Ah, ACLs, had the pleasure of working with these again last weeks.
It gets really curious when even the Arch wiki doesn’t really know what’s going on (talking about mask and effective permissions):
From trying, I can confirm that the info presented further down is wrong.
Once you read what it actually does and why it’s the way it is, it makes more sense - not that I remember it now - but at least there was a coherent design decision behind it
In which case you could also go right-click -> properties -> security -> advanced -> click change where it lists the owner.
It’s not as quick but hey, mouse-driven UI exists.
I think I had this guy’s exact issue and maybe even stumbled upon his comment in that Microsoft support forum thread. It looks very familiar, but I could have just seen the meme before.
My problem was that I needed to do this for 100+ files, so using the UI individually for each file was out of the question. The eventual solution I found was in this tutorial for adding a context menu entry that changes folder/file ownership recursively. It’s been very useful!
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Pebkac. Gui equivalent of chown perfectly working on windows and supports recursing into directories. If the questioner doesn’t know how to login as an admin they miss some absolute basic computer usage knowledge, and a general help forum thread wont help them.
Not to mention there is no admin anymore, it’s essentially a sudo style with it popping up asking are you sure.
This though really reeks of their son dragged and dropped their old files onto a new computer and didn’t set the NTFS permissions, and purposely set them up as a non admin so they wouldn’t bother them with “I got a new virus”. When I have an elderly relative ask for me to set up their computer I don’t give them admin rights
Strong Disagree, the GUI equivalent of chown is a bizarrely long series of clicks that less knowledgeable users will easily get confused doing.
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I never said it’s good ux, but it’s working
You described it as pebkac - it isn’t - it’s an OS design issue.
If you read the thread they got an answer to their question, then OP posts this rant here like its a classic “windows is stupid” thing, while simply a user tries to do something which is too complex for them, and blames their lack of knowledge on the os.
Oh! I know! Andrew wants Windows 95. But then he won’t be able to post questions on the Internet any more 😔 .
There are versions of OS/2 or BeOS that might fit his style. Although they’re called something else nowadays.
Andrew complains, Microsoft makes a root mode so Andrew can have his way. Andrew breaks his computer the next second by deleting a system file and proceeds to call Microsoft support. :)
Most of the annoying stuff that Linux users hate about Windows are because Windows has to cater to even the least technologically knowledgeable users.
It is why Windows updates are forced, why so many files are locked behind SYSTEM user and can’t easily be circumvented, why some settings are registry or Group Policy only, why some settings are opt out, …
Without those, their support center would blow up.
So if Linux wants to become mainstream, it will have to cater to those users as well. And Linux will slowly turn into Windows.
Some distros maybe, but I’d say that instead we’d quickly have another golden era of malware.
Isn’t that the whole idea of GNOME? Always considering users as stupid and lowering the bar?
I won’t stand any gnome slander, get out
Why Windows doesn’t have an ‘expert mode’ (2003)
HE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO LOG IN AS ROOT. IT’S HIS COMPUTER!!!