Literally. I open up my terminal and try to cd Desktop only to be told that no such file exists. I thought for sure everyone this was happening to was just not reading something correctly and were foolish. Nope! It literally began deleting my files.
Edit 2: Even once it's done and you have them locally and not "on demand", the Desktop is in
~/OneDrive/Desktopinstead of~/Desktop. See this helpful comment.
It looks like there might be a way to sort of disable Files on Demand but it looks like it won't let me do it until it's done uploading? I'll post updates.
Not to be dramatic, but I'm really going through it. My mouse logitech mouse is suddenly chattering really bad and double clicking everything. Also while Steam refuses to let me disable auto updates for all games in any sort of easy way. And DDG seems intent on only showing me results related to launching games without updating (as opposed to merely disabling auto updates until I launch). The chatter fixer I found for my mouse does not work and the other requires some logitech program to even try to use. (The repo doesn't mention the name.) This is awful. When it rains it pours, I guess. Literally can't even high light this text to wrap it in a spoiler. This is fucking stupid.
Context: My parents have a family plan for Microsoft 365 they added me too and it has 1 TB of storage I can use. I wouldn't have turned it on otherwise.
Edit: My desktop background has literally vanished and turned solid black.
DO NOT ENABLE ONE DRIVE.
Big thanks to Microsoft for their efforts to advertise Linux.
There was this mini golden era around 2019 or so where it really seemed like Windows was getting their shit together. I think a lot of places use Macs for development now and Windows was trying to get that market share back. Stuff like the new console and WSL were amazing.
Yeah I swear from when Nadella took over until like 2 years ago, Microsoft really seemed to be on the right route. They were becoming the "good guys" of big tech companies.
WSL, actually being really good stewards of GitHub, Chredge actually (at first) being way better for users than Chrome, the amazing revitalisation of some of their oldest and most loved game franchises like Age of Empires and Flight Simulator.
But then recently we've had Microsoft adding shitty AI to everything, from Edge to Windows. We've had that AoE revitalisation tarnshined by showing off a really shitty official mobile game with all the makings of a typical pay 2 win time sink. The Age of Mythology remake has obvious AI art featured in it despite them insisting no AI was used (though thankfully the actual gameplay is as good as hoped for, at least). We've got large layoffs and other shitty corporate bullshit towards workers.
It was earlier, when they released Windows 7 and it was the first (and only) release, management gave development a largely free hand and they could bring down some technical debt.
But apparently that didn't work out for Microsoft and now we get one dystopian news after another.
WSL sounds really cool, but I was already gone by then. How well does it work/compare to bash?
It works well - for a Windows subsystem. It is well-integrated but also separate which can be annoying sometimes.
For example, you might code in Python in VSC against a WSL folder but make a script to eventually run in Windows. You need to install and update Python twice then - a Linux and a Windows version (obvious, but can be annoying).
WSL is also really slow, especially for filesystem heavy stuff. You know how on Linux programs sometimes run faster via Wine/Proton than on Windows itself? Yeah, this is the other way around.
It isn't bash, it's Linux that's well-embedded with the rest of Windows. You can get most Linux stuff working reasonably well, and you can even get a working GUI of some distros.
Just saying 'bash' was ineloquent of me; could I easily open a terminal that feels like a Linux/UNIX shell?
Though from your comment, I expect the answer is "Yes."
Yes, even Cygwin and Git for Windows feel like a Linux shell despite being less like Linux than WSL.
Honestly the type of stuff I do works good enough with MSYS through Git for Windows (which is a basic bash environment). There are three ways to get bash on windows,
I preferred the simplicity of Git for Windows and Cygwin. Now, if I still had Windows on a work computer I probably would've deep dove into WSL and figured it out more.
Most useful things i found in wsl that made it not feel like a vm is knowing the wslpath command, and the fact that it can execute any exe such as explorer.exe (which works for even wsl directories). those two things let you use sed/grep/awk on files in windows and execute any exe on stuff in linux.
We tried to onboard two devs into our project earlier this year with it and it was not good.
We spent 4 days trying to get it to work, and had all kinds of problems from VPN not working, DNS not working and compile times being 20x slower (as I later learned, you're not supposed to use your Windows NTFS partition inside of it). Partially, this has to do with our corporate environment being annoying, but it simply being different from a normal Linux in this regard is still annoying.
On the fifth day, we set up a Linux VM with them and they were ready to work in an hour.
Once I get some extra money to fuck around with my computers, everything is becoming foss. Fuck Microsoft.