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Not to belittle how shitty MS is... but you can use 11 with offline accounts. You have to jump through bullshit to do so but you can still do it.

The average person shouldn't have to know how to do it though.

I'm using Windows 11 that I installed yesterday that has offline accounts. Enabled by jumping through bullshit.

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Anyone doing that should be warned that it is not unusual for a new laptop to have the harddrive/SSD encrypted with bitlocker without any notification to the user.

If you don't create a Microsoft account and then later the laptop won't boot or the TPM gets erased then you loose access to all the files on it if you didn't make a copy of the bitlocker key. You can't take the hdd/ssd out and read it using another computer.

You can also be screwed if you don't have access to the email address used for the Microsoft account.

Yes, people should have backups but they often don't.

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