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.
The real answer?
“We once gave you commoners this power and you used it to fuck your computer up and then blamed us for it, so we learned you can’t be trusted with this power. We hid it behind a kind of skill test, and you’re failing that test.”
Good luck with opening the subdirectories of
C:\WindowsApps\. I ran Explorer as admin, gave myself R/W permissions, even recursively changed ownership of everything, followed all the online guides… Still denied access.If you make a bootable linux usb drive you can do whatever you want with all windows stupid files without even having to install linux.
Those’re probably containerised.
Sandboxed rather than containerised I think.
what was the difference for those of us who dont know, like andrew over here 😂
U can use proccess hacker to lauch for example total commander with SYSTEM privileges it’s highest possible privilege in windows.
it’s highest
its*
hightesthighestHighest*
Reminds me of the “chmod 777” crowd at work. Goddamn it.
Why can’t I delete System32? It’s taking up space.
Where are the other 31 systems??
I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying “sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility.”
Microsoft gives no warranty and assumes no responsibility as it is.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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)
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 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.
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 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.
Andrew is going to get malware on his PC, guaranteed.
In defense of Andrew, until windows 10 never had I ever installed a program that made it’s own files untouchable unless you did some real fuckery with permissions.
As soon as they introduced that little warning screen in program files it was clear shit was going downhill for power users.
I discovered basic versions of windows are even more restrictive when I was unable to install my favorite lightweight pdf reader in a friend’s laptop because Windows home just said that for my safety I wasn’t allowed. With no option to bypass this limitation being hinted at.
Ended up installing it anyways but had to run the installer from an admin terminal (luckily it was windows 7 so it was a local account with admin rights instead of a bullshit Microsoft one)
basic windows… does that entail windows N by any chance?
drop the pdf reader. libreoffice makes the pdfs look horrific and apache doesnt work
that made it’s own files untouchable
that made its* own files untouchable
I make that same mistake enough that at this point I figure I’m just contributing to the paradigm shift of modern english grammar.
Making the oxford comma mandatory is my next big target.
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.
Andrew is not very smart. Windows isn’t very good, but he is very clueless. There are legitimate things to complain about, but Andrew just complains.
Andrew doesn’t know how file system permissions work. He complains that computers demand he keeps up, but these ACLs have been a thing since Windows XP (for consumers, much longer for older NT versions) so clearly the 14 years he had to catch up weren’t enough.
I’m not sure why he brought up moving to 64 bit (guess he came from XP, perhaps?), I don’t think thats relevant to anything here.
He doesn’t seem to know what an administrator account is (so his normal account probably is an administrator account) and rants something about “owners” as if that means anything to a computer.
He also concludes that this needs to be done for every file (it doesn’t) and then gets mad about that.
Fixing ACLs sucks, it takes forever and the UI isn’t very good for novices, but this guy’s anger seems to be misdirected towards his own misunderstandings about how Windows works and has worked for over a decade at the point he came to the forums.
None of this is because of “changes”, if anything his problem is exacerbated by the fact Windows still has the Win2000 permissions dialog on ACLs to this day.
Windows permissions can be tricky… I’ll give them that. A lot of the tools Microsoft provides are not very straightforward.
However, PowerShell and tools from Sysinternals suite, or open source tools as well, make it a lot easier.
Managing permissions on Linux, especially if doing the ACL thing, can be complicated too. I’ve really never ran into many permission issues myself. psexec has been helpful too when needing to access things as the SYSTEM user and not get those stupid prompts asking me to change permissions for protected folders.
Having used secured SELinux enterprise code, I’ve learned that Linux permissions can be even more complicated than Windows’ when multiple permission models suddenly overlap. There’s an endless supply of special bit flags, security contexts, and sandboxing features that all overlap.
I’ve run into very complicated Linux permission issues when combining SELinux (properly configured, not just neutered and standby) and system services in some specific configuration. Once you start applying the permission systems that Windows comes with by default in Linux, you get the same problems (or worse ones, as Linux has a multitude of permission systems stacked on top of each other).
On Windows, I recall one particularly messed up drive from another computer that not even NT_AURHORITY\SYSTEM was allowed to alter the ownership of. Luckily Linux happily stripped out all the permissions for me because Linux can plainly ignores ACL if you’re root and provide the right flags. Probably a terrible way to break ACLs in a managed environment, but this time it was a feature!
Omg, it’s an inside-joke at our company now.
Anytime something happens on a server that’s been running great for years, like a hard drive going bad or the time one literally caught on fire…
98% of the time it is selinux that is the reason it is doing weird things after the main fix because selinux changed a setting on the reboot.
“Have you checked selinux?” is the go to question whenever anything breaks now, even if it’s not a computer.
We tend to forget about it these days, but the Unix permissions model was criticized for decades for being overly simplistic. One user having absolute authority, with limited ways to delegate specific authority to other users, is not a good model for multi-user operating systems. At least not in environments with more than a few users.
A well-configured sudo or SELinux can overcome this, which is one reason we don’t bring it up much anymore. We also changed the whole model, where most people have individual PCs, and developers are often in their own little VM environment on a larger server.
I agree with the critics, the Unix permission model is too basic. I’ve run into this myself doing the very difficult operation of “reusing an ext4 USB drive on another computer” because all the files were suddenly owned by a user that didn’t even exist on my laptop.
NTFS fixed this issue by having the OS generate user IDs across systems rather than reusing the same IDs and making the administrators match everything up. I don’t think selinux can fix that, though.
I welcome the extensions bringing Linux’ permission model to the 21st century, but the way they’ve all been implemented independently does cause some weird edge cases that clearly nobody has tested.
I think Andrew might be a lawyer.
My roommate for a couple years in college was pre-law, and did some internships after graduation but before gaining his own law degree. He mentioned at one point how absolutely and hilariously pervasive it was at the firm he was working for attorneys to just run screaming to IT every single time literally anything was even the slightest bit inconvenient or obtuse (to their understanding). Part of it was the logic of “I bill clients at $800/hr, I am not spending my time to resolve whatever this hiccup is”, but part of it was absolutely also some bullshit power dynamics.
Worked in IT for over a decade, lawyers are the fucking. worst.
I see your lawyers and I raise you doctors…
I was working with a doc on an IT problem a few months ago… It was a mildy terrifying experience, I would never want someone so ignorant as my doctor.
I don’t know, I don’t think I want the best IT person in the world performing an appendectomy.
Just because you’re an expert in one field doesn’t mean you’re an expert in every field.
I don’t think I want the best IT person in the world performing an appendectomy.
“Okay so let’s start with the simplest thing by performing a power cycle and seeing if that fixes it…CLEAR!”
I was married to a lawyer for years. They have to bill somewhere from 1700-2200 hours a year to stay on partner track. And they can’t bill every hour that they’re working (although they can double up sometimes by using the minimum 2/10ths of an hour). My sympathy is with the lawyer. It’s not a power dynamic, it’s how the firm makes money and what you’re there to do.
Yeah, because being a raging asshole to your coworkers is justified as long as it helps you “stay on partner track.”
Abusive people always find justifications for it.
“Look guys, their industry makes their boss abusive to them which makes them abusive to their staff, so it’s just how it is because money…”
This is like "Well my drunk granddad had anger issues after the war so he beat my dad who beat me something fierce and I turned out fine " of the professional world.
Some people think enough money or status is worth disrespecting other human beings who are just trying to do their already shitty enough job, and that’s concerning.
I.T has to hit their “ticket targets” to stay on the “lights come on when they flip the switch at home” track, it’s how they make their money and what they’re paid to do.
Playing coddling psychologist for grown adults who could pass a bar exam but can’t handle basic respect doesn’t make things any easier lol.
To any of those types reading this:
Stressed or not, it’s amazing how fast things move when you work with IT as teammates instead of underlings, using your level brain instead of your emotionally unstable mouth.
Because their continued employment depends on them hitting their targets so they need support staff to do their jobs.
Yup, there’s the justification right on time. They had to abandon basic civility and professionalism to “hit their targets.”
Thats why they can be abusive, ignore the company process for tickets, threaten their coworkers, whatever they want. They need to “stay on parnet track” and “hit their targets.” No one else has any stressors or requirements at their workplace, just the lawyers.
Nevermind that the “support staff” make sure lots of people, processes and services work, and may individually be more important to “hitting targets” for the company as a whole than any individual lawyer.
How about the lawyers “do their job” by interacting with their coworkers professionally? By submitting tickets correctly and in a timely manner?
Abusing your coworkers is never justified.
edit: nix this.
they never justified anything.
they explained.
explained why they were raging assholes or whatever.
but didn’t justify.
But being rude and abusive to support staff doesn’t help, encourage, or even compel the support staff do their jobs any better or faster. In fact, I’d wager it’s rather the opposite.
I work in IT (not IT support, though) and I’m fortunate enough that none of my business partners are outright abusive. Even so, I still have some that I deprioritize compared to others because working with them is a pain (things like asking for project proposals to solve X problem and never having money to fund them). If someone was actively rude to me when I had fucked up, much less when I was doing a great job, I can guarantee I wouldn’t work any better or faster when it was for them.
Yeah like, complain about the one thing MS is finally improving in recent years, clamping down on non-admin users and non-admin permissions.
Is this real? Are people having to request permission changes on files by petitioning microsoft to change their permissions?
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.
So this guy is just bitching because he sudo installed something?
It’s not MS having to manage your folder permissions remotely?
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’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.
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
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.
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 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
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.
People talking shit about Andrew but I’ve had seriously weird issues with Windows throwing out odd permissions errors on seemingly basic shit on files that are 0kb after restarting and doing all sorts of basic troubleshooting including CMD Prompt and Powershell guides only for none of them to work.
It reeked of virus but never was. Just weird stupid shit that wasn’t easily explained, should’ve worked but didn’t, or various other things that the allmighty Lemmings here think is just beyond a google apparently.
FWIW I’m pretty sure it was straight up related to corrupted files in weird shared folder spots.
You have to pretend they don’t exist and never think about them again after hiding them then hopefully never remember or just reinstall because it’s been a couple years and probably good to do anyway.
Yeah, that guy’s issue isnt a matter of “Microsoft has control over my PC!!!”; more like “I’ve been using a computer for years and never actually looked at how things work under the surface”.
Simple permissions error, happens in Linux all the time as well.
Right?
This reeks of inexperience.
We lock things down because a malicious program can easily be “owned” by the user through stupid choices. And now you got viruses.
This is a way to stupid proof things. And the workaround isnt difficult, but it’s to stop people like Andrew. And so far, success.
Why are you assuming so much about Andrew?
What are these workarounds? And why are they workarounds and not standard procedures?
“I shouldn’t have to use permissions or sudo, just all root all the time”
“Real Men Run As 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?
What is the reason we don’t run as root?
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.)
The long reply on how to change file ownership when it could just be
chown -R andrew /pictureschownwon’t alter the ACLs set bysetfacl(which is much closer to the permission model Windows follows).On Windows, you can use
takeown /f "path" /rto recursively set the owner on a directory. Powershell can do more fine-grained control if necessary.The problem with this and your proposed Linux solution is that most normal users don’t know any command line tools and just want a button to access their files. Windows does have this, but it doesn’t always work reliably. On Linux it depends on the file manager, but I don’t think any of them support setfacl-style permissions.
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.
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.
sudo apt install linux
problem fucking solved
Package “linux” is already the newest version.
“sudo is not recognized an an internal or external command”
I literally saw that kind of message very recently on a nixos based machine and I literally had to stand up and do a lap. What in God’s green earth do you mean there’s no ‘sudo’??
Linux: Keeps the same quirks in shells alive for half a century BeCaUsE bAcKwArDs CoMpAtIbIlItY.
Also Linux:
If you follow the Arch installation guide it’ll get you to a working system, but you’ll need to install sudo yourself. It’s not strictly required so it’s not installed with the essential packages (or even the packages recommended for most users in the guide).
apt remove sudosudo is not installed on several distributions by default, so hardly surprising it’s not there or that you can remove it.
run0 for you my guy
Nixos scares me
i mean there are other superuser commands, BSD doesn’t use sudo for example, it uses “doas”
