Every stupid mistake by Microsoft is yet another great day for linux.
The requirements doesn't list internet... and I was pretty sure my friend pressed some button or something that asked him for online login, when he tried to install Ubuntu for raspberry (because I'm not hardcore linux guy and I use Ubuntu and I will be able to assist him better in that OS), but after some googling around, it really turns out to be true - cant install without SSO login.
The solution for that guy? He just installed a different OS.
Also Canonical/Ubuntu seems just have a particular bad track record of stuff like this. Most Linux distorts are better.
The open source world actually needs to implement this + a decent offline alternative to Alexa or be left behind.
I will never want to use a Microsoft/whatever account either but other people will.
They can start doing their job without signing in with any accounts, one step fewer.
just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
I wouldn't say this is a problem in the bad sense. That's Ok. Almost nobody (except low-level system engineers) really knew how the file system works ever. I always believed it's unreasonable to ask people to learn about file system internals.
What I really consider a problem which should never have happened and should be fixed ASAP is Windows hiding file name extensions by default.
And people having an idea of how a DOC file and a TXT file are different, what do TXT and HTML files have in common and why zipping MP4 videos doesn't save space feel a blessing for me to meet among non-devs.
> just log in to your ms account on a new laptop and wait a few hours while everything syncs up via onedrive and its like every computer is your home computer
And this is a convenience we have to reproduce. It almost is there - you can add a Microsoft account in Ubuntu but it still requires an extra step of setting a local user up and signing in with it first.
I was recently spurred to action by two things.
1. The forced news widget in my taskbar. 2. Being forced to sign into a Microsoft Account to setup my father's laptop. The onscreen prompts promised me that I could disable the account later if I wished.
We all see what's coming here. We're experiencing different levels of it all over the place.
My work machine (as in, the device I use to make my living with and the only device I can't actively "play with") is now running Arch.
I'm out. You guys can do what you want, but there is zero chance this nonsense doesn't continue and get worse.