Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?

> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.

And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.

They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.

Microsoft is really shooting themselves in your foot.

It might be time to look at other options.

There are two technologies propped up by having to earn a living: windows and the iPhone.

No matter the android phone, trying to get your MFA experience working with the umpteen stupid MFA apps is painful because all the dev work went into the iPhone versions. I hate it but yep I ended up buying an iPhone although I never buy them new.

Windows is the other one and again it’s security related. More and more places simply rely on Active Directory/Entra and try telling the bank you’re working for that you have to have a Linux notebook. You’ll get laughed right out of a job.

I’d agree for a home computer Linux or macOS are the only sane choices now. But whatever is installed on my work provided computer is what I’m using and that’s windows.

I cannot see myself installing Windows 11, it's sad, I've been primarily a windows guy for my home computer since W95 and I'll miss it. Windows 10 (LTSC) has been the best operating system experience of my life, once I disabled updates and all the nag screens it's been rock solid for me for many years. It's so important to be able to trust that your computer works the same way tomorrow as it does today.

I hope that there's enough people like me that the combined community will keep it alive for a few years longer, but I know eventually something will force me to upgrade to Linux.

Author implies he was using a local account at the time of the error. Which answers an important question. I'd heard of people with Microsoft accounts getting locked out of their own computers, but that's a first I've heard of basic apps failing with a local account.

> I couldn't open Notepad ... an error (0x803f8001) with Microsoft Store's licensing service stopped me

I wonder if it works at all when no online connection to that store.

Switch to linux, don't look back

I only use my windows machine because I can swap out parts stuff and is more hackable but macos is so much more beautifully designed.

Sometimes I prefer one machine over the other I rarely wish for anything other than sometimes being unable to transfer data between the two systems.

I work in academia and I've gotten most of my people to switch to Macs and no, Linux is not an option here.

I have about eight Windows PCs against about sixty MacBook Airs and guess which platform causes me the most work? 1:20 issue ratio. Even simple things like SMB in Windows 11 are hopelessly broken.

Imagine if Fedora locked you out of vi because your Red Hat account had an issue.

The unsettling part of stories like this isn’t “Microsoft bad,” it’s the growing assumption that local tools should be downstream of remote identity systems. A text editor is about as offline and fundamental as software gets, yet it’s now possible for account state, sync bugs, or policy enforcement to make it inaccessible on your own machine.

This is where non-macOS UNIX and Linux systems draw the line - if it’s installed locally and you have permission, it runs. Cloud services can enhance that experience (backups, sync, collaboration) but they don’t get veto power over whether vi opens.

When that boundary erodes, we start to see our systems as thin clients, instead of full local OSes, as the author mentions.

> I couldn't open Notepad ... an error (0x803f8001) with Microsoft Store's licensing service stopped me

I wonder if it works at all with no online connection to that store.

With Macbooks Air M4 starting at $1k/€1.1k, and apparently soon some even cheaper Macbooks coming up, it's really difficult to justify buying a Windows laptop those days and having to deal with all Microsoft bs, unless you have specific needs and being locked in.

The difference of "value for money" in terms of build quality, battery life, screen, touchpad, OS stability, OS upgrades experience, and overall polish and level of user (non-)hostility is immense.

A Windows guy for two decades, got an MBP for work, and while I miss some Windows software and I don't like some Mac things (e.g. no real write-to-disk hibernation; pricey upgrades from base models etc.), but there's no way I'm going back.

Most of all, first-party apps from Microsoft have been ruined by them. Use alternatives when possible.

The subscription to his own machine had bugs that prevented him from using a basic windowed text editor and that isn't the last straw?

>I don't want people to switch away from Windows; I want Microsoft to treat its premier operating system like it used to.[...] and Windows 12 is ultimately an agentic AI OS, I wouldn't be surprised if more people stick with a debloated Windows 11, just as others did with Windows 10

Is there any justification for the first part other than that the authors job at windowscentral.com depends on it? Because I'm not seeing it in the article which amounts to the digital version of Stockholm syndrome. If even the author is predicting that this is what the next windows will look like, why aren't you running for the hills

To be clear, this is the horrible "new" Notepad "app" that I absolutely hated and instantly removed when it was forced upon everyone. I doubt the old "edit field in a wrapper" one which has been nearly the same since Win95 has this problem.

(My newest machine is now running Linux.)

I believe this is related to known issues with KB5074109

It hit Both Win11 24H2 and 25H2.

The renaming of “my computer” to “this PC” was quite telling.

Every horrible windows story is yet another glorious day for linux.

Fyi, in Mint if you search application for "notepad", "Text Editor" is the first result. That is curated search done right. Search for notepad on windows and you probably get an ad for a travel website.

If I had such a problem with my OS, I would have changed the distribution.

How can Microsoft legally do that? Notepad++ is GPL-licensed open source. It's on Github.[1]

[1] https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus