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Comment by aorth | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic! How do we get access to this "European" version of Windows 11? Asking for Europeans who don't live in Europe, and for non-Europeans everywhere who want less Bing, Edge, and upselling in their OS.

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I know that this is hard. But the end solution is not installing European Windows versions, but fixing government, especially curtailing lobbying, campaign funding, etc. And break the narrative 'market is everything, government is the enemy' that is so common in the US. Some regulation is good, it makes the market fairer to everyone.

Hard, impractical, incredibly slow and high chance of failure. Sounds like maybe installing an EU version is reasonable in comparison.

All your adjectives apply to installing an EU version in the long term.

This. They don't want to get off the gravy train. So as long as it's not regulated, they'll try to infer your locale and enable features based on that. And since this is the OS, they can use WiFi AP MAC addresses, nearby Bluetooth devices' addresses, etc. to infer your location. After all, this world brought you

https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/countryd.8.html

You can still have a debloated Windows 11 setup without the bloat by just selecting "English (World)" in the localisation option during installation. Add to that the "no@thankyou.com" trick while signing in to Microsoft account and you'll have an option of a fresh, clean locally-administered install.

Didn't they fix the English (World) trick at some point?

Regardless of that, supposedly for this you just need to set your region to somewhere in the EU during initial installation; Though that can't be changed post-install.

I installed Windows 11 just this month, the trick is still working.

What's the deal with no thankyou? Are you just giving access to your machine to the owner of thankyou.com?

A clever person got that account banned. When you try logging in with that email and a random password, it will fail, and Windows will allow you create a local account. (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37179504, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049235).

The European version is Linux, made in Finland!

(Ok, it's a joke and I know GNU is American too).

Same here, I look forward to the workarounds that will come.

When I still used Windows I remember there used to be a Windows "N" version. Some AIO ISOs will let you choose

Is the license the same between N and non-N versions?

No, they require different keys.

Thought so.

Irrelevant! See vlmcsd on github.

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