Have you tried installing Windows 11 without signing in to a Microsoft account? It's very difficult to do and the instructions online keep having to change as Microsoft makes it more and more difficult. What I'm finding now [0] involves using a hotkey to open command prompt at a certain part of the installation process and running a command to disable the internet before you proceed.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
You're not wrong, but your initial comment made it sound like it was just a matter of not stepping in a single pile of dog poo. What Microsoft presents users with instead is an entire sewer with a great big EXIT sign pointing straight through the sewage. If you're in the know you can mutter a secret incantation and a ladder will drop down, allowing you to climb up onto a rickety catwalk with lots of warning signs telling you that you're going the wrong way. If you're brave enough to ignore the warning signs then eventually you'll get to the other side without touching the crap.
Needless to say, most people follow the path that Microsoft designed for them and end up interacting with at least some of the crap.
Notice that linux is not safe from that trend as well: you have to learn tech stuff to operate it in any capacity.
So there's no free lunch in this world, that much is obvious. I don't see where 'typical person' can reasonably survive intact in this tech climate so I also see no reason to bring them up.
Don't connect to the internet, press 1 hotkey and enter 1 line of text ("OOBE\bypassnro").
While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all, it's not "very difficult".
If we want to be really pedantic, maybe I should have said "intentionally extremely obscure"—would that phrasing be satisfactory?
I've been a Linux user for decades through some dark days and some "hard" distros, and I would call that "very difficult". Part of the difficulty is knowing what you don't know, and that absolutely qualifies.
For a tech forum, I'm surprised at these responses. I have to Google shit all the time, including "can I do X in Y". I guess I'm the one out of touch, sorry.
I don't think anyone here is saying that they personally would have had difficulty installing Windows without a Microsoft account. I've done so myself.
What we're doing is empathizing with people who don't typically post on tech forums—people like my dad who install Windows on their own but don't regularly dig deep into the system internals. When I went through the process of installing Windows without setting up a Microsoft account I was appalled by how hard Microsoft is working to make sure that most people don't figure it out, and that was back in the days when all you had to do was not connect to Wi-Fi.
It's great that you'd be able to figure it out, but that's in spite of Microsoft's best efforts to hide the path.
I'm generally either at work or just done work when I'm on HN so I'm in "work mode". The next time I'm called on for family tech support on a Sunday, I'll think back to this thread and be in a better position to empathize with a non-techie view.
I don't need to disconnect from my network either. It just "work".
>While it's absolutely stupid that it needs to be done at all