Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

pcworld.com

205 pointsrobtherobber259 comments

I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks Windows should stay frozen forever as Windows XP, I appreciate we're finally getting 15-20 year old features like search filtering in the task manager.

But whoever's bonus metric is tricking people to sign in with MS accounts is really making it a gross experience. I managed to finally get my new machines install on a local account using "OOBE\BYPASSNRO" although none of the instructions I found online worked for some reason, eventually found the script find myself. Then when trying to eventually register Windows it tricked me into converting to a MS account because the license troubleshooter forces you to login to do anything.

Next time I boot my machine its asking for my MS password instead of my local password... So that's taught me to never enter my MS account into anything on the desktop because there is a risk it will silently do that.

You have a "Home" and a "Pro" version, really just wish for a world where they do this silly scammy behavior in the Home version and let the Pro version just be an actual tool to use hardware. I'm not using Windows because it's a great operating system I'm only using it because it's the only OS in the Venn diagram of "Supports Nvidia GPUs" and "Runs Adobe CC", can't they just be happy I use it at all.

>and let the Pro version just be an actual tool to use hardware.

Pro has Group Policy, among which is an option to block Microsoft account logins at the OS level. It kind of breaks Microsoft 365 subscriptions if you need Office 365, but that's obvious.

Other Group Policies include ones to turn off Windows Autoupdates, block OneDrive, block Copilot, and more.

Any good resources on flipping these switches?

Yes: Open Group Policy Editor and play around.

There are so many policies you can configure to your heart's content that it's better to learn by doing than hearing.

There's an official spreadsheet of Group Policies that's typically updated alongside major feature releases: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=105...

Search for Microsoft account or local account and you'll find several relevant policies.

I was a user of several microsoft services that worked relatively well. On computer I used to have onenote and onedrive. On phone I also had the outlook app to manage all emails.

For exactly the very same reason you stated, I have stopped using them. Whilst I can still use them on my android phone, there is no point if they dont sync to my computer, and they don't sync to my computer because I am afraid of putting my microsoft password in anything that is not firefox.

Hence, I already moved out from onenote to Joplin (still synced via onedrive), (I am not happy with the move) and I stopped syncing with Onedrive, and will have to move soon to something else. On my phone I stopped having outlook, and I am back to use each app for each email.

As you, I am also trap on windows (tried fedora, it simply didn't work).

Sad times for people who want just a computer that works.

It's not for everyone, but I have been having great success with Thunderbird for a mail client. Maybe give it a try and see if you like it.

Thunderbird is great until you receive Teams invites. It removes/hides the links in the calendar entry so you need to keep the email in order to be able to click on the meeting link.

Weird, I join teams meetings every wednesday from Thunderbird. I can either use the Today/Events Pane (f11 to toggle), the calendar tab (Alt+3), or find the email. To find the link in calendar view or from the events pane, all you have to do is double click on the event. The link, Meedting ID, passcode are all in the description box.

Maybe it was a previous issue that they fixed, but, for me, it's been working for months without a hitch.

Pirate it next time!

It comes with free root kits as well

Yes, but. We're talking about Microsoft here, we've known about their embedded rootkits since the NSAKEY[1] days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Will pirating it actually solve the issue? MS is not after one-time cash payment (heck, they even offered the upgrade for free), what they want is long-term user milking in various ways, some of them looking pretty grey to me.

Depends on which 'distro' you pirate, ghostsceptre removes a lot of the asshole-ness.

Never thought that I will see the return of third-party repackagings ala "Joe Shmo's Super Hyper Windows" in any somewhat popular capacity.

I expected it even less in a recomendation for an actual problem.

Time is a flat circle.

Although I agree with the sentiment of voting with your wallet, but building the foundation of my GPU workstation that could cost me a lot in electricity if a bad actor took control of it on pirated software is ill advised.

You can download official ISOs of all of the Windows versions for free directly from Microsoft's servers. Then you just need to activate it and there are plenty of methods to do that without risk of malware. Microsoft seems to care about this so little that one of the most starred repositories in github(MAS) has provided easy one click activation solution for years at this point.

[*] https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

According to the Windows 11 system requirements[1],

Windows 11 Home edition requires internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account to complete device setup on first use.

So can't you just tell Windows 11 Pro you don't have an Internet connection, given that it's officially optional?

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-syste...

How do you get "optional" from "requires"?

jasomill's question/assumption is about PRO version.

Internet connection and Microsoft account are explicitly required for HOME version.

There's no mention of such requirements for PRO version. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that they are optional in PRO version.

> You have a "Home" and a "Pro" version, really just wish for a world where they do this silly scammy behavior in the Home version and let the Pro version just be an actual tool to use hardware.

This "it's fine if they scam other people as long as they leave me alone" attitude is really bizarre to me. If they keep showing you that they can't be trusted… maybe believe them?

I think OPs sentiment translates to "I'm fine with them charging more money for a version that works without a Microsoft account, so long as it exists."

This is a pretty good step by step:

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...

Why not the opposite? Track the Pro users all you want since these are people willing to spend more money on MS features and possibly also using their devices as a work device where the company pays for it. Leave the Home users (kids, parents, grandparents, etc.) alone and not get them into forcing signups, misclicking random shit, etc.

I recently had to install windows on 2 computers after some years without doing it.

Had to spend an entire day debloating the thing. Had to use a handful of tools and powershell scripts to do it.

I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one.

The only thing holding me from Linux is ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop

> The only thing holding me from Linux

I've spent the last 25 years using linux and seeing this statement.

There's always something.

And to give a more Linux-positive spin

"there is always something that holds you... which is actually not that vital in the end once you lose it"

It really has come a long way. Obviously this is one users needs, and other folks will find other things that are missing or not 100%. But the fact that in this case the conversation as moved from gaming more generally, to vendor specific overclocking is quite a sign of the times.

It might be different people saying that, and with time, some blockers are removed, some people migrate, and a new set of would be linux users get bumped up in the queue where they are now at their last obstacle to using linux.

A lot of these "blockers" are, to put it bluntly, merely excuses.

Like ggp here didn't mention why he thinks ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner are a must for him but but I doubt that they are truly irreplacable. More likely they provide some non-essential utility which would make this more about tradeoffs, or about just taking the plunge to feel the grass on the other side of the fence with your own feet.

Let's be honest here, the something is 99% drivers. It was printers, then it was wifi, now it's gpus. DNNs and LLMs at least made the compute part of the gpu driver Linux-native (from the vendors' perspective), one would hope the graphics part of the graphics processor would come next, but alas making big iron do work is done from macos and windows laptops.

Weird I haven't had a graphics issue since like the 8000 series of cards for like, the normal driving graphics right off the card use case. Optimus is definitely a little fucky with multiple GPUs and sometimes new CUDA versions break libs if you're keeping it bleeding edge updated, but most ML workflows use environment management to get around the clusterfuck that is the python ML ANN ecosystem anyway. Nvidia does a lot of work to make it hard to work with their cards but since GPGPU started taking off in the 2010s this sounds like a blast from the past, as a lot of the need for getting good performance out of cards on compute servers - which inevitably run linux because it has any kind of reasonable headless userspace and is easier to write reliable software for - has driven better driver support in general

In discussions between people who don't use linux, their notions of what the pain points even are seem to lag by sometimes over a decade

I find myself equally ill-informed on the pitfalls of windows ecosystems of late, except the ones that make the news for how insane they sound, but in my defense I also don't go around claiming I intermittently try to use it but just can't make the jump

As microsoft continues to tighten the screws, I just hope all these reluctant users can get out before it's too late

The GPU market forces are:

- gaming: Windows with a sprinkle of Steam Deck (yay!)

- compute: Linux

- video decode: Windows (DRM on Linux... yeah)

- video encode: mixed (Windows for consumers and smbs, Linux for cloud transcode)

Of these, the Steam Deck is the closest to a laptop that we got to. This is actually great, but it didn't result in a noticeable shift in anything, because LLMs took it all.

I am not sure what point you're trying to make with this collection of non-sequiturs and false statements

-The vast overwhelming majority of games are now effectively cross-platform. Work done mostly by valve benefits the entire ecosystem of linux-based OSes, and the sliver of incompatible games that still exist take vast resources to prevent from being made compatible, and thus can only be pulled off by well-resourced studios, most of whom Microsoft either has a deep relationship with or has bought.

-I'm glad we at least agree that computers running linux can be used for doing computation, as is true of any computer I would hope

-Most video decoding is effectively done on browsers, which are, with the exception of the garbage ones OS vendors keep trying to lock users into despite this being deeply unpopular, run on every platform. DRM is supported by most browsers with some opt-out consent options, and remaining incompatibility with streaming platforms is largely driven by those platforms being able to detect what operating system you're on and specifically trying to prevent playback on that basis. There is no popular codec I am aware of that isn't supported by FFMPEG, let alone by any free software whatsoever

-At this point are you just talking about platform adoption? People can encode stuff on whatever system they want. The only market forces are increasingly futile efforts to enforce platform control on the part of content aggregating corporations

-Is the thing about laptops referring to the fact that laptops are, through corporate deals, mostly sold with windows as a default operating system on them? There are now several whole OEMs that don't, but the last time I encountered a laptop for which a routine and standard linux install process ran into any issue whatsoever was like 2012, and it felt like a weird edge case then. Maybe I would have if I used fingerprint scanners or some other creepy spyware nonsense? I'm not even looking up laptops before I buy them. One time I had a boss who just bought the most expensive thing he could find at best buy on short notice. I heard it was kinda hard to get new Apple silicon models up and running for a while? For the most part, computers are just computers. It's weird that so much marketing pretends otherwise. The market for GPUs in laptops by and large does not care what operating system they are running, because people are buying the hardware for any of a number of general purposes for which one might use a general purpose computer. If you've done any statistical analysis to support these claims of "market forces", are you sure you're not claiming every laptop sold with windows installed by default in your models, despite that everyone running linux on a laptop also has to buy the laptop, but will probably only boot up windows if it forces them to by trying to prevent people from booting into a BIOS menu, and then only to do that?

This kind of fuckery will also affect statistics for things like counting browser agents, because every time Netflix does some fuckery to try to gate high-quality streams by OS, someone will write a script or a plugin to spoof the agent of another OS to get around it

I find it pretty futile to try to understand "market forces" in any sort of factual sense, because the metrics are nebulous, easy to manipulate, and everyone involved has lots of incentives to lie about all of them. But I still don't have any clue what this has to do with whether drivers work, since most people on every operating system just use the same stupid blob of drivers nvidia dutifully provides every platform for every GPU they make, as they have for the last 10 of the roughly 15 years I've had any reason to care about GPU drivers

> The vast overwhelming majority of games are now effectively cross-platform

That's true (and Proton often works better than a native Linux build), but then there's the few games only run on Windows, often due to anti-cheat (see https://areweanticheatyet.com/). Unfortunately, a lot of developers aren't very interested in making it compatible even when it's definitely possible and not something they're opposed to, e.g. that list shows SMITE as compatible, but Paladins from the same company with the same anti-cheat as incompatible. Almost no games are Linux-only, many are Windows-only.

VR can also be a big headache, although I made it worse by getting WMR. Monado is getting there though.

In my experience most of the point of VR seems to be giving the user a big headache

I've used it for hours with no ill effects outside of a big red mark on my face. The tech has come a long way.

They told me that the last four times I tried it, years apart each time. At this point this is feeling like the full self-driving car all over again. But honestly, as I've thought about it over the years, even if it works for most people it's probably not going to be something I'm gonna want. I'm big on gargoyle shit, believe you me, but AR > VR every time. I love my bone conduction headsets. It really sucks they keep putting cameras attached to big shitty spy corps on all the glasses form factor portable monitors because honestly I'd like some sunglasses with a transparent terminal and a nice intuitive gaze-tracking interface a lot better than the head strap that puts me in some kinda low budget unreal engine bullshit world, even if they didn't consistently, without fail give me a full-on migraine after an hour. VR is a non-starter for me, and that's probably not gonna change. I don't want to be in the matrix or the metaverse or one of what seems like an endless series of "what if your life was an MMORPG" anime that are apparently serving a gigantic market of people with whom I will likely never relate. I need convincing to use a GUI for something that doesn't absolutely need it. Good books often make mediocre movies. Movies basically always make shitty video games. I personally think video games will always make shitty immersive experiences, no matter how much Zuck and other like-minded techbros keep trying to make fetch happen

Yea I got wrecked by that update trying to play the new Doom single player... It worked great until they rolled out anti cheat. But they also said Forza Horizon 4 would never work on Linux because it's a MS title and it's tied to the real DirectX but eventually that started working too.

I play another game that has EAC anti cheat and twice it stopped working after an update simply due to the URL for the new Linux client was wrong. Thankfully Devs fixed it after 1week.

In the year 2024 of our lord, Linux do not works fine with the ultra-common Realtek ALC892 chip for sound, having constant audio skips. Found in a myriad of motherboards from the last decade.

This is just my issue, I am pretty sure, there are other loads of drivers issues elsewhere.

You check for compatibility before buying a part and if there’s going to be an issue you buy something else.

MacOS doesn’t work on most machines either, but drivers aren’t an issue for Mac users.

This conversation is perpetually marred by this sort of flippant response. No one expects MacOS to work on anything but Apple hardware, but they do expect a random chip on the motherboard they've been using for a several years to work. Proposing they google every chip on their motherboard to see if they can run linux is a failure of linux.

I would hope that you consider that dismissive replies like this do little to encourage anyone to adopt linux, and instead make the community seem elitist and off putting.

> random chip on the motherboard they've been using for a several years to work.

You can easily check if the motherboard has issues, but this idea you should install on random hardware is a mistake.

Linux is not MacOS, but the best time to swap is when you get new hardware. Run into issues and the old Desktop/Laptop still works and there is no need to stress.

>this idea you should install on random hardware is a mistake.

Why, it works on windows? And it's not 'random hardware' its the hardware they have and use. You should realize this is a failure of linux, not of the user.

> it works on windows

So? Linux is not Windows.

It’s the advice that’s a problem not the user or Linux.

Then when you say, that Linux is not yet prepared for desktop, they will mention that they have been using linux for years and it is ready.

Chromebooks have worked for the general public for years.

Which suggests the question is isn’t if it’s ready but if you’re going to be happy with it.

I completely agree with bishbosh.

However, can I know what is that easy way to check if every single chip of a motherboard will be compatible with linux?

I am honestly asking, because I have not found anything to check hardware.

the same way, if I want to make a computer formed with parts from a store, (not a prebuilt) how can I check all pieces to make sure that it will be compatible?

Thank you.

I haven’t used it in a while but:

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=search

I went there, and put the motherboard that has problems with that chipset. It is an intel dq77mk. I tried with Fedora and had issues. I have check on the webpage and it says that it works. Everything on green.

Whilst it is true that I did not check compatibility of my system. If I had, and would have bought that motherboard based on the website, I would still have the same problem.

Linux is not yet ready. the attitude of the community to say, it is the user problem, does not help to get it ready either.

Intel dq77mk is the chipset not a specific motherboard. Some motherboards with that chipset do work, but you need more information to validate what works and what doesn’t

Seriously just buy a Chromebook.

No, it is a motherboard made by Intel, at least the one I got:

https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/612/intel%20corporation_d...

And by the way, I just realised that my motherboard is certified to run on Windows 7, Redhat linux and Suse (Page 2 of the manual). And I did have problems with the audio on Fedora 39 using that motherboard.

The point is not that the user needs to keep purchasing hardware (a chromebook) until something it works, the point is that linux is doing a terrible job at working on hardware that people have, and that it is Linux certified!

Ahh ok, Q77 Express Chipset. Page I looked a listed it as a chipset.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Intel_DQ77MK

Your sound issues might not be caused by driver compatibility.

I asked in the Fedora forums, and I got not any help at all, just blaming me that I was giving them useless information (I did what I could, as I don't know which command to run to give the information).

They never got that far to diagnostic my issue, I did myself, and eventually decided that I don't want to deal which such a community every time I got a problem. I would rather see the Microsoft ads after each update. (Main reason to change)

I might sound quite snarky when talking about linux, but I keep reading all folks saying is ready, no problems, and they get very hostile when you tell them that not it isn't. I wish it was, I love KDE, I wish I could run KDE on top of windows.

but it isn't ready, and with any problem that happens you are on your own.

The last thing I would need to test is to pay for a supported linux, and lets them deal with all the issues I got. But I also have the feeling that it will be as useless as any support from any other company that I had contacted. (Fine for simple stuff, useless for more complex issues).

By the way, if you have any ideas where to look for my sound issues, I will take notes on my Joplin for the future. :)

25 years and I haven't had drivers blocking my usage

On the other hand I'm sat next to someone really struggling with getting a windows machine to talk to a network at the moment, half an hour of "General failure"s, then eventually they got it working but the system clock was months out

So much more complex than linux it's crazy. Windows will never be ready for prime time until you can literally plug in and load a webpage like you can with a linux box.

15 years ago, that was Photoshop that kept me back. I switched to macOS a couple of years later. Now, I switched to Linux, ditching Photoshop. So far so good. I can stand the life without Photoshop, but tolerating macOS or Windows is above me.

For me, the something is the DAW i use (Cubase). I know it intimately, I make a living with it, and despite trying other alternatives, there isn't a DAW which runs on Linux which would cut it for me, in terms of overall features.

If Cubase ran on linux (and all my current plugins could work), then I'd drop it in a heartbeat. I've been running Linux in various guises and roles since (I think) 1998, but it's never made it to the 'daily use, I can do everything in it' stage, despite quite a few attempts on my part to make it happen.

I’m curious, how did you settle on PC vs Mac? I’m a PC user (Cubase), but there are certain unique advantages to Mac as a platform of course when it comes to music. I’m not wedded to brand personally but use PC as I find it more versatile in non-music tasks (and in music I am more a hobbyist these days).

I suspect

> and all my current plugins could work

holds the key, there are an immense amount of plugins that are PC-only, as I'm sure you're aware. The list of mac-only plugins is pretty tiny.

I actually use both, but my main DAW is on Windows because of cost of storage and processor at the time I built it. It's now due for replacement, and I'm still pretty confident I can build a more performant Windows system for less money than buying anything macOS based - even if I buy a mac Studio I'd need to go for 64GB RAM, and that would be £2500 for just the system unit with 512GB of storage. I can build a faster windows-based i9 system for that, complete with 64GB of RAM and probably 4TB of storage (if not more).

I've got an M1 max macbook Pro as I've used macbooks for a few years now and despite trying Windows-based laptops out, I've not found any where the keyboard, trackpad, build quality and screen match up to a mac, and I (for the most part) like macOS more than Windows.

As for some other replies about plug-ins and instruments, I used to find that Windows was far more popular and available, but now nearly everything I've bought is available cross platform, so it's nowhere near the issue it used to be.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

Bother. You do seem to be stuck for now.

Yeah... I had some hope back in the day, but I didn't get SX3 working in a meaningful manner. And Cubase is now on version 13, so I think it's just a non-starter, alas.

I've been using Linux for a similar time. To be fair to those people, there were massive roadblocks for ages. 802.11b (then G, A, N, etc) support, Flash while it ruled the roost, DRM-video playback, GPU-acceleration, Bluetooth device support, proper sleep, functional multihead, application support, etc, etc, etc.

It's not fair to say "there's always something" in a sarcastic tone, when there legitimately has always been something holding people back. Especially on laptops.

Is it easier than ever to use? Definitely. Does it support a significant chunk of hardware these days? Yup. Are there actual proprietary/commercial pieces of software on it? Yeah. Does it game now? Sure does. Are there still reasons people might not be able to use it? Definitely.

How long does it take in linux for the context menu to open? In fact, is there a context menu at all?

Not sure if the question was asked with sarcasm or not, but, me being me, I actually tested it here as soon as I read it: It's instant. OnMouseDown event, if you will.

Using KDE Plasma 6.

I don't even know what a "context menu" is in this context. Are we just talking about a general right-click menu? If so, it's instant in both Windows 11 and KDE6 for me (desktop, toolbars, etc).

Or do we specifically mean a context-filled context menu, such as the ones used in the file managers? If so, Dolphin definitely performs better than Windows Explorer, but that's a pretty useless micro-benchmark. The thumbnail and live preview processes are far more processor intensive/laggy in Dolphin/KDE, does that mean KDE is overall worse? No.

It's funny because it's the latest version of Windows that requires two clicks to get a non-broken context menu. It's either that or registry hacks that Microsoft hasn't disabled yet.

https://superuser.com/questions/1674122/how-can-i-revert-to-...

It does have the advantage of context menus that contain all of the context, rather than a button to revert to an older version of the context menu that has what you actually want!

On the steam deck that statement is gone!

privacy.sexy is pretty good

>I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second

They did make everything slower than it used to be when it comes to new UI elements, but the context menu can also be slowed down by third parties.

On my machine, the primary cause was the shortcut to AMD radeon settings. You can remove it with this powershell command :

Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers

It was a major pain to find how to disable this thing. In fact, if you google "AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM" (with the quotes, to get a verbatim search) you won't find more than a handful of results talking about its existence.

It doesn't uninstall the settings panel itself, just the shortcut. Yes, the context menu shortcut is a standalone app package of its own. It's crazy.

After uninstalling this AMD crap the context menu went from taking a second to being almost instantaneous.

On other people's machines I've also remarked certain antivirus like Kaspersky causing major issues with 11's context menu performance.

I thought the new context menu was all about fixing the mistakes of the previous ones when it came to the nasty things people can do in extending explorer.exe but seeing the behavior of those new third party additions to the menu, I guess not.

It’s for these weird edge cases that I love macOS’ new Startup Items menu. It includes a list of everything that starts at boot, and everything running in the background that’s not the OS or Apple. I had been waiting for a feature like that all my life. Sure, put a weird little service hidden somewhere as a login item, but tell me so.

I can now turn off Microsoft’s license validator !

The thing on the later macOS that opens so slowly is System Preferences. So annoying, and also how it always starts at Appearance (as if that's the most important) when I usually want the last thing I had opened before.

Look, the new Settings app is far from perfect, but one can like a new feature it has with reservations about its rewrite.

Imagine having to use command-line tools to configure your OS, how will such a system ever catch on for the desktop...

This may not fulfill your needs in the way that MSI Afterburner and ThrottleStop do, however I would recommend checking out MangoHUD and cpufrequtils respectively for similar (but perhaps not identical) behaviour.

You don’t really need ThrottleStop if you go into your bios, turn off Turboboost and/or powerlimit your CPU.

If your laptop bios doesn’t allow that, look for a “quiet” setting in the bios. This changes the PL1/PL2 to 35w/65w down from 85w/60w.

With the NVK driver steadily improving, it feels like it is only a matter of time before something similar to Corectrl is written for Nvidia. I realize GreenWithEnvy exists, but it’s never worked well for me.

> can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one.

And the system sounds now take a few seconds to chime - often after I already dismissed the corresponding dialogue

> MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop

If you want some unsolicited software recommendation: CoreCtrl offers similar controls to MSI Afterburner, at least on my AMD GPU

Use Chris Tutus' Debloat utility https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

> I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second.

It’s probably One Drive and Dropbox. The cloud storage providers have to run a check on every context menu execution.

It’s slow because MS closed the loophole that was previously used to implement that and provided an official API that does the same thing but worse and slower

So just use Windows for gaming only. That's what I do which means I'm in Linux 99.9% of the time.

There is nothing inherently special about ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, these are merely (proprietary) Windows-specific utilities for changing the behavior of your hardware.

Running these programs on Linux would not make sense because their only purpose is to twist knobs in the Windows OS. Linux has different knobs so their functions do not apply.

Thus your restriction is self-imposed more than anything, you are effectively saying "the only thing stopping me from switching to Linux is that it's not Windows."

Between your BIOS settings and programs like cpufrequtils and CoreCtrl there are equivalents to those programs, but interacting with hardware is platform-specific. You may have to learn different programs because Linux abstracts access to your hardware differently, thus your preferred Windows-specific utilities will not have any use :D

This is in contrast to productivity applications like Adobe which could reasonably work the exact same way across platforms... if only they were cross-platform at all :(

Next time install using English/World as locale. Then add your favorite language/region/keyboard after. Don’t know why, but it comes almost bloat free.

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts?

This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account. Apple also REALLY want you to have an Apple ID, but you don't have to.

I still fail to see why Microsoft doesn't go all in on privacy, do they really need the extra profit from advertising?

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about the desktop anymore and at this point they're also stopping to care about the business customers, unless they can move them to subscription based services in the cloud.

The reasoning is Microsoft is now in the services (as well as advertising) business, with traditionally-licensed desktop software revenue becoming less and less important. Which you kinda stated in the last sentence.

The reasoning for not going all in on privacy is because they want to maximise services and advertising revenue, and they also sell to government and enterprise who actually like the ability to spy on their employees. There's not much financial incentive or government regulation to make them focus on consumer/end-user privacy.

> but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account.

Microsoft has ties with many governments. I wouldn't be much surprised if the reason they amass user data had nothing to do with selling that data to companies.

The big players would be fools to sell data, as such. Their whole thing is that they are so big they can target ads effectively. You'd be a fool to sell that data. They sell ad targeting and ad placement, not the data to do those things.

>It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account.

To play Devil's Advocate, I can see some:

* Backups. Let's face it, most people do not and will not take backups and yet they all cry when they inevitably suffer data loss. OneDrive syncing everything at gunpoint is a holy grail in the face of this problem.

* Sync. Clearly, most people like all their computers looking, having, and acting more or less interchangable with all their others. Together with backups above, OneDrive and a Microsoft account bring this to fruition.

* Licenses. Most people aren't going to keep the Windows box with the key around, or neatly store the documentation (which contains licensing information) they get with their new laptop or big box desktop. Chances are they're all in the trash the next day. Tying license activations to Microsoft accounts addresses a lot of headaches around lost licenses.

I, as a tech nerd, hate it. But if I hang up my nerdism at the front door and see things as a normal man with too much shit to do and too little time to deal with 'pooters, why yes, a lot of this actually makes fucking common sense.

Wrt licences, these days laptops have their Windows licence burnt in their BIOS (and this has been the case for some time now). Backups and sync are great, except if someone doesn't want to upload all their data to the cloud. There could be many reasons for this, I'm sure you can list some of them too.

I understand that some cloud providers (now) scan stuff you put into cloud storage. This could be a problem if you're dumping terabytes of stuff. Maybe a million monkeys on a million keyboards might never trigger a false positive on modern sophisticated scanners; but now make it a billion or a trillion.

The also seem to have an odd relationship to the US government, to the point where they sometimes come over as a half-public entity. (See the domain seizure and other anti-cybercrime operations where the FBI and DHS were very openly cooperating with MS, even though MS had no direct involvement in the cases)

Maybe they just think of them selves as part of the government already and believe they are too big to fail...

Piracy

Two reasons I can think of to force the creation of a MS account is to

a) make it easier to get started using MS products (e.g. Office), since you don't need to go through the hassle of creating an account; it just works and

b) once (almost) everyone has a MS account, using MS oauth may become the default login mechanism for many third party services (although Google is already starting to take up this space).

c) report to (their real) customers and shareholders the number of people that are using their OS and measure the reach of start menu ads.

Money is money, and companies want more. Of course if they notice they can both sell you the product and have you be the product, they'll ask themselves "Why not both?"

The login thing is also probably partly because it does genuinely make the user experience better - log into a computer, To Do has your tasks, OneDrive and OneNote start fetching your notes and files, Edge seamlessly syncs your browser history, and so on. Things Just Work™. MS has a cloud-based clipboard and Edge has a OneDrive-backed AirDrop clone. All of that needs accounts to function properly.

Some exec at microsoft probably has their promotion depend on user growth and is able to push the Windows team to implement this crap. Things megacorporations do don't really have to make long-term sense for the organization as a whole - they only need to provide a short-term advantage to someone in the hierarchy.

Right. You can retroactively think of all sorts of reasons, and people internally will talk about it and make presentations and plan meetings over it, but it's just a gigantic corporation and it doesn't think, it's a number that can be chased.

They can charge a recurring and increasing subscription fee for on-line accounts and services. And of course data.

Before they can do that, they first have to get everyone dependant on the on-line account and services, because most would not voluntarily knowingly agree to be charged a subscription just to use their own computer, not intentionally using any external services.

So step 1 is do not charge for the basic account combined with force everyone to use it.

Most will go along with this because it's free this exact minute and most people follow strictly the path of least immediate resistance. You can make most people do anything you want by just making anything else 0.0001% more difficult. This is not cynical, this is studied.

In the olde dayes, if you wanted to sell a subscription service, you created a service and then convinced people to become paying customers.

MS is tricking everyone into becoming customers first, and then when the deed is done, inform them they are now paying customers.

And of course also data.

> Most will go along with this because it's free this exact minute and most people follow strictly the path of least immediate resistance. You can make most people do anything you want by just making anything else 0.0001% more difficult. This is not cynical, this is studied.

This is terrifyingly accurate.

What I like about the apple way of doing it is you can toggle on and off every single feature of having an account. So every app and every featyre has been designed to exist in both states, working locally and working with icloud. Remindered for example, are local or on your account. Toggle for every feature. I have photos and password sync turned off on my mac, I never use them.

More user hostility. Less user choice.

I remember a few years ago on here everyone crowing about the new Microsoft and how it wasn't like the old one. It's notably worse a this point.

Honestly I think both things are true: the consumer apps division of MS is more open and is being allowed to follow the money, even to other OSs. The Windows division is doubling down on all of the worse practices that the law allows them to try to extract some more value from their users.

Thankfully the EU has forced them to curb some of these practices, even if the process is still intentioanlly obtuse. For example, you can't upgrade to an EU version of Windows if you didn't start with one - you have to reinstall Windows from scratch, without preserving any other user settings, and choose an EU country as your locale at this step. Only then do you get to uninstall Edge and no longer need to manually opt-out of all their tracking crap. I'm sure they've still kept a lot of illegal tracking around for now too, though I'm hopeful that in time they'll be forced to remove even that.

I would rather hope the vendor has the right policy, not that a multi-national union forces it to have the right policy.

Unfortunately many people, in particular the leaders of industry in the USA, believe essentially the opposite: that any company almost has a duty to extract as much profit as legally possible, or even beyond, assuming profit > fines.

I’m very uncomfortable with the degree to which I’ve become dependent on VSCode, GitHub, and Typescript. Microsoft has the same incentives to exploit their users now that they always have.

I've purposely avoided all three of those for that very reason. I've spent 30 years working with Microsoft stacks. It paid the mortgage off but it's been hell from a churn and lock in perspective. So much ROI was wasted on rewrites because of their policies and schizophrenic direction changes.

I'm in a different space now and I am blessed that my editor is vim, my language is either Go or Julia and my VCS is Fossil.

> Go

Funny. Great choice! Almost makes one believe the company behind it is not the biggest driver of AdTech in the world, whose business model is built entirely on selling user data, and that company also has propensity to kill much beloved and heavily used projects no matter how ridiculous the move is.

Fortunately I think we're good here given how MS org chart[0] looks like.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/XLuaF0h.png

> VSCode, GitHub, and Typescript

So true. Majority of my time on the computer is dominated by these, and I'm not comfortable they're all owned by Microsoft.

I don't see how they could ruin a programming language, but a code editor and centralized code repository.. Especially the latter, I'm surprised how long it's been since the acquisition and so far it's been mostly unaffected by the inevitable enshittification.

The only thing that will incentivize Microsoft from ruining these admittedly great products is the existence of viable alternatives. Same with Windows, minus the great part.

I wonder when Europe starts to stop this and also forces Microsoft to stop users from the hard requirement for an online account. It's about time.

I mean, they could make a ton of money by charging users for Windows without tracking/online accounts/bloatware.

I'm guessing that selling OS:es to consumers isn't making a ton of money. Most would come as OEM for a small Windows tax on a new computer. The money is in AppStores, OneDrive subscriptions, Office 356 subs and so on.

And letting people run some sort of no-frills windows where you login as a local account and run your old spreadsheet for 10 years is completely at odds with any kind of strategy that will make money from home users.

I don't like it - but I'm also not disagreeing with the beancounters at ms if this is the conclusion they reached. I have a feeling it's the right call.

I'm not saying that MS shouldn't sell M365 or similar. The thibgs you mentioned are not exclusive to my issue.

I would be willing to pay for an OS that has no Candy Crush, LinkedIn and whatever installed and that would allow to use local accounts. I also don't want forced reboots because of updates.

Yet, I still would use OneDrive, M365, ...

It's currently possible to to run your Office 2010 on Win 10/11, there's nothing holding you back.

> I would be willing to pay for an OS that has no Candy Crush, LinkedIn and whatever installed and that would allow to use local accounts.

Me too. But I do agree with the beancounters at MS that putting such an OS on the market might reduce sales of store apps or O365 subscriptions or make it less convenient for people to use OneDrive backup etc - in a way that costs them more than they would make from selling this great version of Windows to very few enthusiasts.

Btw I think there are lots of differences between getting a good LTSC install now, vs if you have an OEM Home version of Win 11. A lot of my complaints only apply to the "bad" SKU's of Windows and not generally. The problem is of course that you can't buy this "good windows 11". It's reserved for volume license customers.

the problem is things like forced updates are low-key good security policy.

users already have the power to defer updates for up to 35 days. What do people do with it? defer it as long as humanly possible and then whine when the timer runs out and they have to run the install.

again: the cure for forced updates has always been simple: run your updates occasionally. the people like GP who are forced into it? those are the people who should not be allowed to defer updates indefinitely, because they obviously can't handle the ability to defer updates which they are already allowed.

selling those users a version of windows intended for enterprise environments with a formalized lifecycle, managed by dedicated users, which is allowed to break the normal rules around updates etc, is like giving a no-limit amex to someone who has repeatedly overdrafted their secured credit card. They literally already have self-identified as not being able to handle even a little bit of a responsibility, they are the last users in the world you want to be able to defer indefinitely

Occasionally, a little user-hostility can be a good thing, in the big picture. Like, laws are fundamentally "citizen-hostile", but we still have to have them, because without fences a significant amount of people will choose not to be good neighbors.

The only thing I can praise is the .NET Core ecosystem. C#, ASP.NET and EF is very comfy for web dev compared to my experiences with Java and its thousand moving parts.

That said, I still fear what may come. The decrees from on high concocted by the unscrupulous bugmen that are breathing absolute contempt for their users. Who can ponder their designs while maintaining his conscience?

.NET Core would be great if it weren't tainted by the New Microsoft policy of turning all tools into spyware. Now you have to remember to set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 everywhere and meticulously ensure that it doesn't get stripped from the environment when launching subprocesses, changing users, etc.

I remember the discussion about that which boiled down to: it’s good for you - shut up.

That was the thing that kicked me over the fence. Open source doesn’t matter if the stewards do not have your best interests at heart.

The list of what is gathered: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr...

As you can see, it is system data and basic crash reporting, something that helps with the health of .NET ecosystem and has no monetary value.

They used to gather all command line arguments until they later decided that (oops!) it's "not acceptable per our privacy policies"[0] and they really shouldn't have been doing that. They have also had issues with anonymization not being implemented properly, the opt-out mechanism not working in some edge cases, forgetting to even tell users about the need to opt out, and who knows what else. The risk of accidentally exfiltrating your data one way or another seems pretty high.

Also, monetary value is not the only reason you might want to keep information private.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145#issuecomment-22010...

The issue dates back to the release candidate of the second version of .NET Core, 8 years ago. Surely we can do better than "it used to be bad at x point in time and this can never be rectified".

I like my privacy more than the next guy, but you are not arguing in good faith (which is all too common, because people like to use much inferior technologies and make .NET a scapegoat, instead of learning better and ceasing idiotic self-sabotage)

Edit: Heh, in HN jail. In response to the comment - you should apply this logic to the languages steered by Google, Oracle and Apple. .NET is completely unrelated to Recall and whatever happens to it, it could have been as well a separate company.

Microsoft does not make it easy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

See, for example, the Recall debacle. https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ev...

Microsoft is famously a handful of very different and very large companies who don't seem to speak. The DevDiv part is a lot different now than 20 years (or even 10) ago.

The other sides of Microsoft are mostly the same as they always were.

Microsofts OS division have bet everything on the strategy that "enthusiasts" aren't going to run Windows anyway. It's a segment they never cared about, and nothing indicates they ever will. I don't agree with the strategy (because it's these enthusiasts who recommend things to everyone around them and of course fix their parents machines every Christmas since the 90s), but I'm going to guess that more clever people than me have run the numbers and reached the conclusion that it's better to alienate our 10% of the Windows user base while catering only to enterprises and the non-tech-savvy users who are actually likely to buy the subscription recommended on the start menu. We weren't going to do that anyway now were we?

I don’t agree with this. You can run macOS without this crap so why can’t you run windows without it? macOS is arguably less enthusiast oriented than windows.

Microsoft is one facade regardless of who is underneath it and they are aligned in user hostility at the moment. Even devdiv is a mess.

> You can run macOS without this crap so why can’t you run windows without it?

MacOS is a service tied to selling an expensive piece of hardware. They don't need to make money by selling MacOS, they make money selling the Mac.

Microsoft makes money selling Enterprise Windows licenses, Office subscriptions, OneDrive subscriptions, AppStore cuts etc. But they let Acer put an OEM copy of Win11 Home edition with very little markup because it's likely that these customers will a) ensure thir employers keep running windows because everyone knows it and b) they are likely to buy a OneDrive/Office365/whatever subscription.

> Even devdiv is a mess.

How so?

This is a very good point. A lot of purchases in tech are recommended from a friend or family member.

From 95 - Windows 7, I could talk grandma through her problems without even being near a computer. Now the start menu can't even search properly.

> I remember a few years ago on here everyone crowing about the new Microsoft and how it wasn't like the old one.

People here still do this, despite all evidence to the contrary!

I have concluded that a large percentage of hn users simply work at Microsoft or one of its subsidiaries (eg GitHub).

I have a theory, which I have no way of backing up or testing at all, that the entire slump in the laptop segment is driven by the fact that Windows is just utterly user-hostile garbage, and there aren’t any alternatives really, other than MacOS, which is too tied to Apple.

Like any reasonable tech savvy person I use Linux of course, but I’d have trouble suggesting it… lots of people just don’t want to use the terminal at all.

But do they know they don't have to use a terminal? You can use Linux Mint perfectly fine without ever opening a terminal, like MacOS. Seems like more of a reputation issue.

Only if all you ever do is web browsing and do some light office work. As soon as you have to troubleshoot something or install some less popular software, you can't avoid it.

I would hazard a guess that this (+ gaming) is how most people use their personal computers. Most users live in their browsers.

It's an issue of supply-chains and gap in the market. I can't buy a generally competitive Linux Mint (or anything similar) device in a shop anywhere in my country as far as I know. Whereas existing vocal demand are generally tinkerer types who often want the opposite of what we actually need. So I can see why it's a difficult market to bootstrap. Meanwhile, incumbent hardware vendors have competence and interest elsewhere and are probably getting decent incentives from Microsoft...

Valve's been bringing eberyone forward. I wish System76 et al to keep on their optimistic trajectory, for what that's worth. And Framework would be in a great position to spin out a dist or just offer a community install (fingers crossed Manjaro don't get them loljk).

I don’t know. I prefer to use the terminal wherever possible, so any “you can use Linux without the terminal” advice I’d give would just be me passing along stuff I heard on the internet. I’m not going to proactively offer that up.

>lots of people just don’t want to use the terminal at all

That's unfortunate, since the article notes: "Another method of bypassing the account lockdown still exists. You simply have to enter OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup process, which allows you to skip the connection to the Internet and thus also the link to a Microsoft account."

Using the terminal for day to day things is different than having to use it one time during the setup process.

Chromebook, if you're okay with Google having your data.

Sigh. This is the state of personal computing in the early 21st century. Most people are running operating systems and computers made by corporations that are actively user hostile, hungry for private data (except maybe Apple), and experts at dark patterns. Scammy behavior has become normalized throughout the industry.

Kinda makes me think, tech literate people have a moral responsibility to push back somehow and contribute towards a more healthy relationship between technology and humanity.

The sad reality is that Linux that e.g. my mom and dad could use day in and day out without any tech support always feels like it's a few years away, and has felt that way for decades now. Linux won the server space, but outside of that, it's a hard sell to suggest anyone not tech savvy should use it. I'm sure there's loads of people who do use it despite the pains anyway, but for the wider audience I don't really see it as a realistic alternative.

Sure, you can use a browser on any distro and pretend it's fine, but the buck stops the moment something as innocent looking as printing or transferring a file to your phone comes up.

I think we crossed the point where Linux is less shitty than Windows. KDE and XFCE can compete.

That could very well be, but less shitty is the wrong metric. Can get shit done is the right metric, regular users don't care about corporate telemetry and adware so long as it doesn't get in the way of getting their stuff done. A good example of what I mean is a work event I attended a year or two ago. We had a bunch of guys up on the stage and between the lot they probably had over a century of combined Linux experience. Still, it took them a good 10-15 minutes to get the projector working. Now imagine a regular user in that situation.

How? I thought this was a solved problem. I've been using arandr for a decade.

Hard to guess, if someone doesn’t use many different setups they might just not be familiar with arandr.

> it took them a good 10-15 minutes to get the projector working.

I installed my old projector ages ago, on a 1st version PPC Mac Mini running Debian and the Freevo media player (if memory serves, Kodi didn't even exist as XBMC back then). No problems whatsoever setting up the whole thing, aside the atrociously loud BONNNG! the Mac Mini played when turned on, but that's another story. I think setting up hardware is a hit and miss, and sometimes crap happens also under Windows where drivers are packaged according to brand, not chipset, and often bring all sort of junk with them.

For some time I had a Linux NUC, so no monitor. When I had to give a presentation I’d set it up to boot straight into the slides. I thought that was pretty slick. I’d bring a keyboard for emergencies but didn’t need to plug it in, just a slide advancer. But it required preparing beforehand. Linux is the Batman of OSes. You can do anything, but it requires prep time.

How disingenous, this comedic scenario is literally a mainstay at any tech conference

Who says the windows or mac users would be any quicker, per-se? Some days the windows folks get lucky, sometimes the mac folks get lucky, and some days the Linux person might actually get done faster than everyone else (it has happened!).

If you need to use local hardware you haven't used before; it's always a good idea to arrive well in advance to get yourself set up. You never know what you might run in to.

You're exactly right. Many normal users are "single issue voters" when it comes to OS choice. Linux could be the best operating system in the world, and Windows could be flaming trash that will drain your bank account and shoot your puppy, but if the user has an application that's important to them that runs on Windows but not Linux, they will always choose the "shoot my puppy" choice because at the end of the day they just want to ruin that application.

I agree. I've been a Linux user since 2017, and in the last year transitioned to an M1 MBP for the battery life (cheaper than buying an inverter+batteries in South Africa with loadshedding).

Tried to upgrade to a new machine last month. New-ish (and not name brand) hardware made Linux unusable on it (keyboard & BT wouldn't work), while Windows was passable. After some work I decided to try working on Windows again. Honestly the worst OS experience I've had in years, because at every step there's some default setting that basically equates to "Microsoft will do whatever they want on your machine" and it's hard to turn off permanently.

Then I tried to go back to Manjaro where I had a stable work experience from 2020-2022, and compared to macOS, it was just a pain getting the same dev environment back up. Ubuntu wouldn't have been much different.

I dislike Apple for a lot of things, and really don't like the absurd Apple Tax on having a usable amount of RAM, but it is still the best (and most stable) dev machine I've had in years.

Same situation here. Apple is not the best option, but it's the least shit.

To be fair, it is quite typical for cutting edge hardware not working in Linux for the first few months. Kernel devs have to catch up, and depending on your distro this might take a while. Best is to wait until support matures, or go with last year's option.

(Not that it really makes much difference in Intel-world anyway, the difference these days is not very noticeable - I am typing this on a Thinkpad X1 Gen 5, which was released... in 2017. Can't justify buying a new laptop, each year I have a look and wonder, what the benefit would be.)

iGPUs are getting better at a good clip, I think. Maybe we can have GPiGPU worth caring about soon.

You went to the one OS that’s practically universally shunned because of how unstable it makes arch systems n.n

I don’t think I could use a MacBook, I enjoy tinkering with my computer too much.

I loathe cellphones, though, so I have an iPhone. It is fine. It belongs to Apple really. Someday maybe it will be easy enough to put together something like a Raspberry Pi cellphone. But, for now, I’ll just rent one from Apple and let them handle everything.

They make fine devices for people who don’t like that type of device. No wonder they are doing so well, people who hate tech is a huge market, and we’re doing our best to expand it every day.

i mean, macos is just unix, and you will do a lot of tinkering given how many bad defaults it's got, and how many weird foibles etc. I have a script which fixes all my file assignments after a brew upgrade because macos grabs them back when the old application is uninstalled, for example, plus about five third-party apps living in my toolbar (plus bartender to manage them all etc).

idk why people think macos is super locked down, it's not at all like the phones. the reason the AI revolution is happening on Apple second is because there's actually an enormous amount of technical people using macos these days. if they couldn't run a python script how would pytorch have ever happened etc?

> the reason the AI revolution is happening on Apple second

...is because Apple goes out of their way to arbitrarily disable your ability to run Nvidia drivers?

So much for "not locked down" I guess. But at least they still lets you install apps for free, it's nothing like the phones. How generous.

> the entire slump in the laptop segment is driven by the fact that Windows is just utterly user-hostile garbage

Partially true, but I wouldn't rule out the marketing driven belief that cellphones are just like smaller laptops, which is utter BS.

Regarding Linux, I've installed Manjaro on some laptops and desktops for non techies, even seniors, and all of them (but one due to incompatibility with a proprietary Windows app) kept using it without any issues. I'm more a Debian user, also liking Alpine a lot on small systems and servers, but found Manjaro to be quite good for laptops and desktops that need to just work without fiddling too much with the command line.

I fully agree. There is no choice. People need to be on a certain income bracket to own macs. On a certain tech literacy level to own Linux laptops. So They've all been born and grew up on Windows. Recently I setup a recently purchased windows laptop.

Cleared all the crap, did not have the energy to work around online accounts, so setup one. All working. Great! 6 months later, Genuine Windows warning shows up on desktop, windows keeps asking to add product key. We never received one.

All the guides to retrieve it fail. I gave up, wiped the machine, installed Linux but had to give the person another windows laptop bc they had no idea how ot use Linux desktop.

Currently, my brother wants my help setting up some apps on his windows (he's an architect, so you know the heavy CAD stuff). I'm running away from him like the plague...managed to avoid him for 2 months, wonder how long I can last til he corners me.

With open core legacy patcher, there are quite a few of us enjoying 2012 and newer MacBooks that cost as little as $150.

Since there are smartphones, they are the most convenient everyday computing devices. They are a great and useful package of functionality, a real swiss army knife of digital capabilities, and their portability is on another level, compared to a laptop. So what actually happened is that people don't buy laptops, because they already have smartphones, and the smartphone can basically do everything they need to do.

With suggesting Linux, I too have trouble, but honestly, that's mainly because people don't need it. I believe it to be superior to Windows, morally and technologically, but the fact is that people prefer convenience, and Windows is more convenient. Windows also has a lot of moat built by business machinations, so now the de-facto PC platform is Windows, and the de-facto office formats are MS Office formats, and while Linux has some compatibility, this is not something that people want to fiddle with, when they just need it "work".

What actually works is when manufacturers build an entire OOTB experience on top of Linux - like how the Steam Deck is.

I just recently had to reinstall it a second time because my first image didn't let me past the account registration. It specifically stated that an internet connection is required and there was no way around it. On a notebook where neither ethernet nor wlan worked out of the box btw, I had to install them manually. That wouldn't have been possible with the old install.

While I had an adapter to enable networking just fine, I opted to reinstall with a cleaned image.

This is really bad work, Microsoft... maybe think about why your users are looking for workarounds here.

And no, I do not want secure boot either, thank you very much.

As far as I’m aware you can still manually disable the internet connection and get a local install: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...

Yes it’s a real pain and it should be way simpler to do. Microsoft makes it pretty hard to like windows…

That's how I installed Windows on one those mini PCs you can get from Amazon for $150. The trick, which required no fake account, came in the computer instructions.

Additionally have in mind you can create a random account for free for each computer you buy. That's what I do for my TVs when using YouTube.

Whats the issue with Secure Boot? That's an actually good idea security wise.

No it isn't. It is allowing microsoft the only authority to allow you to run software of your choice on your own hardware.

Nah. While ensuring the integrity of your boot partition can be a security benefit, it isn't really the most attractive target for malware anymore.

And instead most use cases are levelled against you. For example some computer games now require Windows 11 and secure boot to be enabled for remote attestation. If the mechanism becomes more pervasive, we will see more of that. That is very likely the main motivation of Microsoft here as well.

And while there are enough methods for device identification and fingerprinting, I don't want my device to be cooperative here. I do not have evil maids either and the whole trusted computing stuff is badly designed, intransparent and mostly security fluff.

I do understand the security benefit for enterprises and disk encryption, but I use alternatives for security. Also Microsoft defacto has control about allowed and allegedly secure distributions. Yes, you can add your own key, but that will probably be as viable as running your own CA at some point.

Overall it just makes open computing more complicated and the security gain is negligible.

edit: No idea why you were downvoted. Many believe trusted computing to "just" increase security. But the intentions and mechanisms behind that aren't as neutral as some would like you to believe.

There are also other fights like AMD Pluton, which really lowers the desirability of AMD hardware for me. I though they could have been an alternative for Intel, which is fairly needed. But their developments aren't attractive if they invest in such technologies.

I also forgot that a TPM has an endorsement key that is used as a hardware ID. It cannot be changed by the user. The whole setup is a scam and scams are a security threat.

Secure boot and trusted computing should die, there are better ways to secure system integrity.

If you can tell me how to put your own public key in there, without spending hours on google; I will agree that it is a good idea security wise.

There’s a way around it. It’s specifically made by MS. You invoke cmd with special shortcut and execute bat-file bundled in installer which adds one key to registry and restarts an installer.

I don’t know if it’s an officially supported way, but given the fact that MS put all the necessary scripts and implemented it, it can’t be a coincidence.

Little bit off topic, sorry.

Windows 10 support ending in 2025 is really scary. Literally billions of computers are not eligible to install Windows 11 because of artificial limitations, all of these are supposed to be trashed? That would be an enormous amount of e-waste.

Realistically one or a combination of the following will happen:

  - Microsoft extends the deadline
  - There will be a paid long term support update channel, and hopefully a registry edit will enable this (happened a couple of times before)
  - Most people will continue to use it without security updates (most likely)

I guess Microsoft will agressively tell you that your OS is not safe, etc, so hopefully a single tool will exist that hides all of these messages and switches to the long term support updates.

Well… KDE is green! https://eco.kde.org/

We've been here before with Windows XP. It'll be fine.

May be and just may be, those users will then try some linux distros and realize that it's not so bad and stick with it.

Hope that will drive linux adoption a little more.

2025 will surely be the year of desktop Linux.

My husband is a normal layperson who treats his computer like an appliance. It's just there to do word processing and web browsing. He's been asking me to buy him a new laptop and specifically wants Windows on it.

I've been struggling for weeks trying to explain to him why Windows is bad and why I don't want to setup and manage his spyware machine.

I've convinced him to at least try a few Linux distros to see what he's comfortable with, but he either doesn't understand why Windows is bad or just doesn't care.

For now I'm avoiding purchasing the new machine, and he's begrudgingly using my manjaro laptop. I really don't know what to do about it. The most solid argument I've got so far is that I can't help him with any of the inevitable windows 11 issues because I just don't use windows anymore.

He's his own person. You want to help him avoid future headaches and protect his privacy but ultimately, he is his own person who should be able to make his own choices. Understandably this is difficult for you since you are being asked to buy the new laptop and have valid reasons for not wanting to purchase one with Windows but none of that changes the fact that he is his own person with his own thoughts. You may feel complicit in any trouble his choice brings him since you're involved in the purchasing process but that's on him, not you, if it ends poorly.

I set up a separate VLAN on my home network to isolate all Windows machines from the rest of the LAN and strictly lock down their access to the outside world, too. Maybe that is an option for OP's home network?

Windows machines can safely coexist on your network, but you need to treat them as attackers in your threat model.

That's a tough situation.

Marriage is one of those relationships where hard-line stances (on either side) can be really damaging.

So, to resolve this tough situation: get rid of what you can't control. He will find help with Windows elsewhere..

ChromeOS might be a good option.

If I understand correctly, you still can get Windows 10, which can be activated with local user: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

It is also more customizable in terms of disabling some (most?) spyware features using 3rd party tools. It's an effort, but I think your marriage is worth it.

Why not a Macbook? I get why people might hate Apple as much as MS, but it's certainly more privacy friendly than Windows and more user friendly than Linux.

And yes I know Linux has come a long way - I use it daily - but there is still significant friction for non-technical users.

can't force someone to do a certain thing, especially if they have little to gain from their perspective.

having made my parents switch to ubuntu (please hold your pitchforks, this was a decade ago), they always fell back to windows when things got tough.

Windows should be broken up.

"Windows 11 Platform" for applications, drivers, security updates, and gaming. No (forced) Microsoft account. Only security updates.

"Windows 11 Plus" is a subscription model for enhanced features.

What their system requirements tell consumers:

> Windows 11 Pro for personal use and Windows 11 Home require internet connectivity and a Microsoft account during initial device setup. [1]

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

I've recently bought a windows laptop for my grandparents and it had W11... It looked bloated af... Had to change some bios settings to install some older version of windows 10 so that the system would look similar to what they know, but I'm thinking next time I'll just install Ubuntu + maybe some skin + rustdesk to help them if needed and deal with it

Now that I've started getting Windows 10 EOL Notifications (on aging 2017 hardware), I'll be needing to upgrade to a new Desktop + OS soon.

No idea what my next Desktop OS is going to be but definitely don't want ads/spyware in a progressively user hostile OS so it will be the first time where I wont be using Windows as my primary OS. I've been using macOS on my macbooks and deploy exclusively to Linux servers so either OS will be a viable alternative.

It will come down to whether Apple can ship compelling M4 H/W at this years WWDC, if they don't I'll be switching to a Linux Desktop OS where it will finally be the year of the Linux Desktop!

I've been getting harassment to update to 11 (on a machine where secure boot is disabled) for a very long time.

Plus harassment to stop using a local account, of course.

IIRC, there is a pretty simple registry edit that can force Windows to remain on the Windows 20 22H2 update channel, i.e. not prompting to install windows 11.

It really seems Microsoft is trying hard to push users to Linux (or other alternatives)

It's amazing how they keep digging their own grave.

Don't forget that we all are in an echo chamber. Most people are not pushed anywhere, they don't care. They don't even know that Microsoft is hostile.

Yeah. Only MS knows the actual impact of their decisions.

The fact that they are removing a workaround says that it doesn't impact them much i.e. their actual users don't care.

Despite all these shenanigans, their regular users will be oblivious to the harm and power users will still grudgingly use it.

I guess(!), MS makes most of their profit from Windows licenses with enterprise licenses, where all users are managed through ActiveDirectory.

If that assumption is correct, then I guess the financial losses of private users not migrating to Windows 11 might be negligible.

How many actual retail licenses they sell? Either retail or individual OEM. As with pre-builds for consumer market license is already there. And lot of home builders just go for grey market which have fraction of retail price. Even Home is not exactly cheapest product if bought retail from regular reseller.

They care. They don't know what to do about it.

lol most users will swallow anything microsoft gives them

Not like users are paying for Windows unless they buy a computer with it on already, they don't care about the 0.1% who build their own computer, when they can get 2% of people to use OneDrive and then pay monthly for a service

They go exactly according to the plan. Now you officially don't own your own personal computer.

I look forward to see people getting banned from their own computers.

Well, I'll personally weather this storm on my Windows 10 LTSC 21H2. I'm sure people will figure out something until 2027-01-12, when its security supports end, or Microsoft will release the Win 11 LTSC-equivalent.

How do you get a license for the LTSC?

I fake one with vlmcsd.

Ultimately, the only reason we need to look at is late stage capitalism (and I say this as someone who believes in the market economy). Windows was the historic money maker at Microsoft, they held all the keys, all the power. The regime is changing however. OSes are more and more commoditised and the money has moved to Cloud and now AI. But there is one rule of the market: you have to post gains every quarter. So what is the Windows team to do? There is no growth to be had anywhere else, so they become increasingly less scrupulous in an effort to squeeze more $$$ out of the product.

This is obviously a race to the bottom. They know, we know it, the market knows it. However, as long as the numbers keep going up, the market will reward this self destructive behaviour and the team will indulge it.

They aren't stupid, they know that these features are annoying, but they'll keep pushing them to find the optimal point between the users being pissed off and profit going up.

The risk is of course that they launch a positive feedback loop of exodus and end up destroying the product in the long term, but in the long term we are all dead and the PMs profiting from these user hostile policies will be long retired...

I just miss Windows 7 :(

I also suspect one of the driving reasons is to inflate reports. Sony is doing a similar thing by requiring PSN accounts on PC games - its to show their share holders that MAU number go up.

Absolutely. It's just maximizing some sort of metric that ultimately translates into P&L for the PMs. Everything else is largely irrelevant. If the users bitch and moan, but the PM is getting paid more, they'll be incentivised to keep doing what they are doing. The product may end up dead in 10 years time as the userbase is driven away, but by then everyone responsible is long gone.

We can all pontificate about acting differently in their shoes, but I'm honest enough to admit that I wouldn't :D

Basically you're saying the incentives are misaligned with what's best for the user. This -however- may yet be a fixable problem wrt corporate governance.

(And here some people thought misaligned GAI was the biggest threat to human society. But more mundane misalignment problems can crop up anywhere I guess)

Yeah. I guess you could say that the focus shifted from Windows the OS being the product to the user also becoming the product. Of course, the users never signed up for this.

I'm not sure how to prevent these kind of shenanigans, but it simply comes back to sweet adtech dollars I think. The industry is so huge and pervasive now, that regulating it back into submission is going to be very difficult. 10 years ago, regulation could've been passed that simply prevented adtech from ever becoming as normalized and intrusive as it is these days. Doing it now will cause a massive hit to the valuation of the industry, and these kind of moves tend to be unpopular. Who is going to pull off a campaign that erases hundreds of billions of dollars from the US stock market (and thus people's pensions)?

Still condider windows 2000 to be 'peak windows usability' ... and usable with tiny amounts of ram ;)

Somehow I managed getting through the setup of a 2nd hand laptop that came with Win 11 preinstalled. At one point they wanted me to enter a Microsoft account but through back and forth I somehow was able to skip it although I couldn't reproduce it. Probably I accidentally did the same as described in the article.

Anyway, requiring a Microsoft account sucks and I wonder if it's even legal in the EU (better to ask for forgiveness than permission, I guess, right MS?). Conclusion is, Microsoft sucks as much as ever, even with all the open source and Microsoft loves Linux.

I'm so happy my brand new computer a few years ago was deemed not powerful enough for Windows 11 so I stayed on 10. Windows for home users is clearly in a death spiral.

Unfortunately (as I really like(d) Windows OS), I agree with you. Once my LTSC is end of life, I'm finally swapping to anything but Windows.

Windows 11 LTSC just came out last week and no online account needed

> It seems that Microsoft is aiming to make the use of Windows 11 dependent on a Microsoft account. In combination with the increased calls for Windows users to finally switch to Windows 11, this appears to be a controversial combination.

I want to see if they really manage to force several millions of users out of the blue to make a MS account, against the explicit will of those users.

As consumer-hostile as Microsoft's practices are, and that these things needs to be optional, I find linking your Windows to a Microsoft's account still pretty useful. With it you can sync your Windows settings across different devices. You can use Find My Device. You can save your BitLocker's encryption key to the cloud. It helps when you forgot your login password. Copilot AI stuffs,... Turning off telemetry and deinstalling some bloatware requires clicking through a few menus, but it's still a mostly just-work experience compared to the amount of time I need to set up a Linux box.

On Linux, configuring the fingerprint to work everywhere requires reading through different online threads and edit a config file. Enabling TPM auto disk decryption involves 10 steps command line. Enabling proprietary video codecs necessitates adding a third party repository. And many other small issues that I have to troubleshoot (shutdown freezing, sddm crashing after wake-up from sleep, PackageKit unable to update package, having to turn on a kernel flag for touchpad to work...). I really want Linux to work for me but still have to decide to use Windows on my personal laptop, coming from someone who has to work with Linux everyday at work.

Windows 11 LTSC just came out last week and no online account needed (also no crapware, no TPM, no Secure Boot etc.)

I assume a new machine with an OEM Windows license doesn't have the possibility to switch it to LTSC?

Not but MS doesn't care about home user piracy either.

I'd buy it, but it seems you can only get a volume license or so? How tricky is that to get?

If you are a home end user just pirate it, iso is available everywhere and you can activate it with MAS

https://archive.org/details/Windows11LTSC

Any downsides? In particular, will games work? Visual Studio?

There really isn’t any downsides. No feature updates? So if something fancy comes out LTSC doesn't get that just much later (and even then almost everything is removed).

The only thing I can imagine if there is some bleeding edge hardware feature that needs the newest Windows version because of drivers, API etc. and that won't work.

Windows 10 LTSC only got four feature updates, most of the time years apart so most likely that will be the case with 11 LTSC too https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/ltsc/ove...

Okay then, I'll just switch my gaming rig to Ubuntu and fiddle with Wine or whatever to get my Quake Champions running. Might take a small performance hit but I'm not going to use Windows with a Microsoft account. Not ever. Not going to happen.

Up to 10% performance hit isn't small. Controversial opinion, but linux isn't good for gaming even in 2024.

People who are making such things possible are doing great piece of work, but I would say it's more about gaming industry isn't ready for this. Developers still don't case about linux, performance hit is too big, anti-cheat systems have issues and Linux desktop is too fragmented.

OOBE\BYPASSNRO still works at least

I think it depends what games you play. Steam actually allows you to return a game if it doesn't run on your system (in fact they have a very generous return policy indeed). GOG is a bit more strict, and a bit more hit-and-miss, but also Mostly Works (tm).

The unifying factor is steam and/or heroic games launcher (and one or two others besides), which set up your system to run a particular game.

Most of the games I've bought in the past year or so Just Work (tm). Obviously YMMV.

When it comes to GOG, hilariously, sometimes installing the windows version _on linux_ is the easier option, what with wine/proton forming the universal compatibility layer.

I'm sort of wondering if we might evolve to a point where there's proton-for-windows, and then everyone can just target proton exclusively.

It's worth noting ChromeOS doesn't let you do that either, while MacOS doesn't require an iCloud account. iOS doesn't either, but is pushy about having an iCloud account. Don't know about Android.

I have a Samsung phone and while I'm allowed not to have a Samsung account, it's pretty pushy(pun intended) about it. There's an eternal notification active that tells me to add one. If I dismiss it, it reappears, either instantly or within a couple minutes. It can be snoozed, but the option to mute it indefinitely is greyed out in the notification manager. The app responsible can't be disabled or uninstalled. I can kill it, but then it's promptly restarted. Currently it has used 2% of the battery since the last charge.

I don't even know what a Samsung account is for, but I don't care. Clearly I don't need one because the phone is fine otherwise.

They have their own ecosystem of apps and services a la MS, Goog, Apple.

Macs are way worse about pushing services on you than they used to it, back in the glory days it was maybe one CTA in the OOBE. Now once every 2 months or so I open Apple Music and get blocked from my local music until I dismiss an Apple Music subscription offer.

In general you can tell there is no one at the top in a position to veto this who has the taste to know they should and it's slowly eroding the brand just to hope they get a few more Apple One, Apple Play, Apple News, Apple Fitness+ whatever subs

So that means they fixed SMB folder shares with Microsoft accounts, right?

Very good move, seems like Microsoft really embraces Linux nowadays :)

Sometimes I read the latest news from my adoptive industry and truly ponder the probability that we have been reincarnated in another world's hell.

So what would be a good laptop for Linux these days?

You may look into Framework laptops.

Checkout framework laptop

A used Thinkpad. (or any other used non-consumer grade laptop)

Most companies either rent their laptops or somehow sell them after a couple of years. They are usually in good condition and often the reseller gives you 1-2 years of warranty. I've bought a used X250 for <300€ a couple of years ago and I could not be much happier. Of course, the specs could be a bit better, but for most of my tasks (HW + embedded Linux dev) it's sufficient. For everything else i can spin up some beefy server somewhere in a couple of minutes. And since the hardware is on the market for quite some time, driver issues are mostly resolved.

Bonus: used Docking stations and spare power supplies are cheap and the battery can be hot-swapped.

Bonus2: since it's already slightly beaten down, making another scratch doesn't hurt as much as if it would've been a shiny new macbook.

edit: I think the official term is "refurbished". I can't see myself ever buying a new device again.

System76 is by far the best that I have found. No litany of kludges to make your Windows laptop mostly functional (e.g. no need to have kernel parameters to work around buggy hardware) No need to look compatibility tables and install guides.

It ships with Linux preinstalled and with great support. So if you want Linux that Just Works, this is my recommendation. (Also if you want to DIY it with e.g. Arch, since the hardware supports Linux already.)

I’ve had good experiences with business-grade Dell laptops like the Latitude line. Framework and Thinkpads are generally solid, too.

As for distro, Fedora is a great beginner distro.

It's mostly up to you and your requirements. Most laptops should be fine, that doesn't really matter that much whenever do you use windows or Linux. I think thinkpads are way too over hyped. I would just grab something with good build quality, and specs you need. If you want something really fancy like fingerprint, smartcard reader make sure it's compatible with Linux, that's all.

I wouldn't recommend fedora as it uses RPM and SElinux which can be tricky, especially for beginners.

I am mid-advanced Linux user, I would went with Linux Mint, no matter is it for me or for somebody totally new.

that depends entirely on what you do with it. bare 24.04 sits at about 0% CPU / 1 GiB RAM usage.

a browser+IDE combo will perfectly fine even on a budget laptop with 4 cores / 8 GB RAM / generic SSD.

8GB isn't really sufficient anymore, unless you're obsessive about pruning browser tabs and closing one program before open another.

On my just-retired 8GB T410, trying to use a filter in Gimp without closing Firefox would start thrashing and result in the infamous Linux lock-up until power-cycled. Ubuntu 22.

well, idk. just four years ago, I had a PC with 8 GB RAM and it was enough for firefox, CLion and a Windows 7 VM in virtualbox.

I have several VMs with xubuntu 24.04, and they're doing fine with 2 cores and 3 GB RAM. but yes, I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open.

framework 13 amd cpu. It's great!

I wonder how much work it is to check if Windows was installed with an account and terminate the program in that case.

They just fixed bug I guess...

Unless "OOBE\BYPASSNRO" still works I don't have any problem with that

We've been moving our fleet to OSX, I am so tired of dealing with Windows and Microsoft in particular.

Just don't do large numbers of Apple "servers". Xserves were horrible and Mac Pro/Mini/Studios aren't really servers, they're still desktops. They're great as stand-alone desktops. For large numbers of Apple devices, MDM is essential.

They are trying so hard to de-evolve Windows into iOS and android.

i have also noticed dark patterns with making you login if you have a local account. really annoying and at least there should be some respite for pro users.

It really is disgusting that they'll block workarounds like this. Do they REALLY need to force this on the less than 1% of users who might use such workarounds?

You can use a program called Rufus to create a bootable flash drive from a Windows ISO which lets you bypass the Microsoft login.

This is how Microsoft is fighting piracy: "So you want to use our software and not pay for it, huh? Fine, but in return we need your personal data and behaviour, and we will show you unwanted ads in the Start menu and other places. Deal?"

No deal. I paid quite a lot for my windows license.

And you don't really get an ad-free experience without both finagling a more expensive Enterprise license AND magic GPO/registry incantations to cut the crap. Conclusion: Microsoft is an airline without planes out to monetize misery.

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