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.

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."

Why can't I delete System32? It's taking up space.

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.

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.

Yeah like, complain about the one thing MS is finally improving in recent years, clamping down on non-admin users and non-admin permissions.

"Real Men Run As Root"

https://www.garyshood.com/root/

Most of the annoying stuff that Linux users hate about Windows are because Windows has to cater to even the least technologically knowledgeable users.

It is why Windows updates are forced, why so many files are locked behind SYSTEM user and can't easily be circumvented, why some settings are registry or Group Policy only, why some settings are opt out, ...

Without those, their support center would blow up.

So if Linux wants to become mainstream, it will have to cater to those users as well. And Linux will slowly turn into Windows.

chown won't alter the ACLs set by setfacl (which is much closer to the permission model Windows follows).

On Windows, you can use takeown /f "path" /r to 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.

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.

"sudo is not recognized an an internal or external command"

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...