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The idea of an operating system integrating with services like that still bothers me even though it is done in Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

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I could not agree more. I run Fedora on my desktop, and iOS and OS X on my iPhone and MacBook respectively. When I read posts like this, I can't help but think "How long will it be until I'm unable to do any compute without being tied to an online account?". Most people (including myself) have no idea what is going on in their smartphone, tablet or desktop PC. I can trust Fedora somewhat more, but as an exercise, leave tcpdump running on your OS X device and the amount of non-local network chatter is unbelievable.

Furthmore, why is it when you delete a photo from your iPhone it can persist on iCloud for up to 30 days?

Likewise, why is it when I restore my iPhone and set it up from scratch it starts to download 100MB + of data over WiFi? [1]

[1]. When I setup my iPhone from scratch (Apple ID, iCloud disabled), it hammered my WiFi at the full RX rate of my DSL line for approx. 10 minutes. That's 4Mbps * 60 * 10 = 2400Mbits = 300MB. I made sure that my iPhone was the only device connected to my WiFi. What could be in that 300MB of data? I should proxy all traffic from my WiFi to my DSL modem via another PC and do tcpdump on that!

I use a local account on Windows 8 (which is pretty much configured to run like Windows 7) but that completely keeps me from being able to use the Windows Store and therefore any of those universal apps.

I'm sure if I choose the same option in Windows 10 a large part of the OS will be completely closed off.

Not that you're missing out, not being able to access the universal apps. Hell, Skype even pulled a 180, got rid of their universal app and went back to regular, ol' desktop apps.

Uh, no they didn't. The Universal app is still there and was updated a month ago. They've always had both Universal and Desktop apps available, especially since there are people on Win7 and below that wouldn't be able to run the Universal app.

Edit: Apparently they deprecated it inside the app itself, not in the store. I've kept the message above.

All of my installations told me "we're discontinuing this app, here, download the desktop app."

Maybe that was the update? Granted, I haven't used the Universal app in a long time because it's not nearly comparable in featureset to the desktop one. It'd be nice if there were update logs more than "General fixes" but oh well.

I hate Skype so much, but I don't know of anything better. Google Hangouts has been extremely unreliable for me.

You should be able to log in directly into the Store without associating that account to your local account. That should be the default in 8/8.1, I don't know if it applies in 10 but it's exactly how you can get universal apps while on a domain account.

I wouldn't hold my breath over MSFT software market place. They are notorious at dropping support for this as soon as they feel it doesn't enable them to capture more market share.

and iOS and Android...

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