Paid for MS Excel out of the goodness of my heart so now I get this popup every 2 hours...

Paying Microsoft is like paying a ransomware scammer
No amount will ever be enough to satiate their depraved lust for money
- Microsoft threatened me with $140 to reactivate windows because I changed my motherboard, and since this is my 2nd time doing so without reinstalling windows, I can no longer do so for free. I just typed 2 lines into powershell and then it became activated.
  
  At risk of sounding like an insufferable individual, I've completely had my fill of Microsoft. I'll have to still use it at work, but I'm transitioning everything into Linux.
  What finally made me make this decision is when I read about Microsoft's vision to make the Windows OS completely cloud-based.
  I've also had to fight with Windows 10 so much just not to be redirected into Edge, show me unwanted promotions, or, worst of all, restart my machine without my deliberate consent and in spite of making registry edits (If I leave my computer on overnight, there's a reason, I don't care if it's "inactive hours" or whatever they want to call it.)
  Whatever I miss out on by using Linux just isn't worth the hassle anymore.
- It’s it’s a feature not a bug.
- I juuuuust pyr8ed the latest MSO, it went mega smoothly (and had a rad 90s style warez crack tool with music and scrolling graphics)
  Works perfectly and no data pop ups like this.
  
  Best way to obtain Microsoft's products imo
  I'm so fed up with their BS
- command prompt activation FTW

Shit like this is why I switched to OpenOffice and then LibreOffice all those years ago. LibreOffice is just as good for my personal purposes and I'm never going back to MS Office. Unless your work specifically requires something only Microsoft's product can do, I highly recommend LibreOffice, I use it every single day.
- I switched to OpenOffice, and hated it. But it was free, so i used it. Then tried Libre, it was better... But it will was not Microsoft office. Then years later i had to use Microsoft office for work (it was Alli was allowed to install on the work computers) and realized how much i enjoyed using Libre over Microsoft.
- and if the work required it, THEY should pay for it

are you able to get your work done on other suites like LibreOffice / OnlyOffice, or does it require MS specific functionality?
- I can't speak for everyone but I rely heavily on VBA scripts, dozens of macros, PowerQuery for ETL, connection to azure SQL data, etc. If you work with big data excel is basically a must.
  
  That's fair enough
- Given that OP posted a Mac screenshot, Pages and Numbers would likely work just as well for the files themselves.
  
  Hadn't noticed! Keen eye!
  Design convergence across platforms has me fooled 😅
  
  screenshot, Pages and Numbers would likely work
  Terrible app names to be honest

Unfortunately thats what you paid for. These are 2023 legal scams.

I literally just cancelled my McAfee subscription because of annoying constant pop-ups like this. At least this one from Microsoft is a legal notice. McAfee constantly spams you to turn on unnecessary features, and even changes settings periodically to turn things on like "browser monitoring". Literally worse than old school pop-up viruses.
More importantly, it also never caught a single thing. Windows Defender does fine. My buddy in cyber security suggested them for safety despite how bad they are, but I can honestly recommend you should never, ever, get it. Just keep backups and be prepared to nuke your system if needed, and save yourself a pop-up every other day.
- It’s wild to me that anyone uses Norton or McAfee anymore.
  
  Only if ~~that person was~~ the persons pc's OEM was paid big bucks.
- Does your buddy in cybersecurity solve most of his problems by reinstalling Adobe Acrobat and restarting, and if that doesn't work, muttering about hackers and walking away? Because John McAfee himself didn't recommend using what the software bearing his name became and was more likely to put a bullet through his PC than install that shit.
  
  Okay, but isn't he also more likely to put a bullet through another human being than anything?
- Who the heck still uses McAfee! Wow.
  
  The US intelligence community, or a subset thereof, apparently.
  I have no idea his personal skill level or knowledge, but without putting him on blast I know his company has been involved in big stuff. He could theoretically focus more on a different aspect of security and have got this part wrong, I don't know the details of his job very much by design.
  
  I promised in this thread I'd update, then forgot to do so. But thankfully someone reminded me: https://lemmy.world/comment/4948293
- Lol, I would like to have words with your friend in cybersecurity
  
  Just one
  no
  
  He's in the IC (and so is the other guy who recommended it), so less "sysadmin best practices" and more "stopping state actors" practices, so maybe that has something to do with it. I'll tell him the Internet thinks he's wrong and see what he says. He definitely wasn't saying it was great at the time, just that it was needed in addition to Defender and was way safer than Kaspersky which is basically spyware.
  
  Total fail on timely response, but here: https://lemmy.world/comment/4948293
- Your buddy must be very bad at his job
  
  Could be. I had the same objections, and brought up how I thought Norton and McAfee were supposed to be garbage. His take was that McAfee had cleaned their act up and was best in class in addition to Windows Defender. I mentioned elsewhere but he's in the Intelligence Community so he may have reasons he can't tell me, or just looking at different attack vectors than your average sysadmin. I'll ask him.
  
  Sounds like some people I’ve encountered who really don’t know shit, and have just survived on the ignorance and impressionability of others they con into paying/employing them. Then they just Google every problem they’re tasked with fixing.
- I recently made the mistake of installing Avast, and it does the same annoying garbage. The actual settings are buried under a metric shit ton of "Did you know that...?" pop-ups that appear every single time no matter how often you select "do not show me this again", and it constantly urges you to buy the "premium" version for extra features that are literally useless to me.
  And it was a pain to uninstall as well. Some files survived the official Avast uninstall AND separate uninstall from the Task Manager, and messed with the Windows Defender, which was unable to recieve updates for a while until I found and nuked the hidden residue of Avast.
  
  Avast, avg, McAfee, Norton is all just garbage to try get you to pay.

Payed to get your data leached.

If that's reoccurring it's because your activation went pear-shaped. Sign out of your O365 account and back in

I'll never forgive Microsoft for LOCKING me out of my own computer, during a recent update. I was FURIOUS. Something to do with Bitlocker or some bullshit.
- it happened to me, the computer had a firmware (BIOS) update and it reset the TPM holding the decryption key was wiped.
  But anyway you had a backup of the decryption key, right? Right?
  (The reason microsoft insists so much on having everyone login with microsoft accounts is that bitlocker encryption keys are uploaded in the cloud so you if you follow the link on the boot error message, you can unlock your drive)
  (a "side effect" of this automatic encryption key upload on the cloud is that your drive is not encrypted for law enforcement)
  
  Is there a way to sign in with Microsoft account and not upload your key to the cloud?
  This also makes me wonder if Android does the same thing with its device encryption, since you must login with a Google account.
- That's what bitlocker is supposed to do. It's kind of the whole point of bitlocker.
  
  Bitlocker is supposed to lock out people that should not have access to the data on that PC not lock the owner out.
  
  Huh. I do not have a bitlocker account.
  Also, the whole point of the TPM (when I looked it up) was to not tell anyone, including Microsoft your decryption key. It's so the user has ten chances to enter a short PIN or password and then it unlocks the device. That way not even Microsoft or the police can unlock the device without a tunnelling electron microscope with which to crack the TPM.
  That way, you see, getting into a device is expensive and something law enforcement would not be tempted to do without an ironclad warrant and maybe a national security reason.
  That Microsoft can ask TPMs to break their T makes them not T-worthy enough to be called a TPM. More like a Microsoft Obedience Chip.

Debian + KDE + LibreOffice = chef kiss

The main issue here might not be the application including its own updater, but the operating system not including a common updater so each application needs to provide one for itself

Bill Gates thanks you for your donation to his meaningful mission to enrich himself and his shareholders 🙏
- Bill Gates? I don't think he is really involved much with Microsoft anymore. He stepped down from the board of directors in 2020.
  
  He stepped down as CEO and all involvement in active development in 2008 even. This has nothing left of Bill Gates, not even strategy-wise.
  
  He's still one of the largest individual shareholder, though.

You deserved that tho. Thinking you are "doing the right thing" by paying Microsoft, you have to be really stupid