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Comment by andrewl-hn | Hacker News Reader

Every single interaction with post-Windows 7 configuration / settings leaves me very frustrated. Some settings have new UIs, some don’t, often there are several generations of UIs for the same group of settings. Add to that minor revisions of the UI that happen as part of software updates. Finally, hardware vendors often have their own apps, various “Ninja Dragon Sci-fi Anime Nuclear Power Plant Control Centers” from graphic card vendors and some random sys-tray crap for your webcam and touchpad.

I have no idea why things turned out this way, and I remember how with every other major OS release Microsoft promises a brand new rewrite, and yet if you dig deep enough you probably can find some UI from Win3.1 era.

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My most frustrated moment was discovering that windows 11 requires a network connection to set it up. It blocks on the user creation screen until you decide to add a microsoft account or create a new one. There's no other OS I know of that does the same thing.

Is this really true? You can no longer skip/bypass linking a cloud account?

Last windows install I did (couple of years ago) I had to prevent it from being connected to the wifi during the install to be able to skip this step.

If I recall correctly, you have to press a secret keyboard shortcut (to open command prompt) and run a command to unlock the "no Internet and thus no Microsoft account" version of the Windows 11 setup.

Sadly this „Server Install“ has been disabled by MS. But it was only a couple days ago.

Does this include Win 11 Enterprise?

seriously? so i have to register with microsoft to reboot windows to install linux now?

No, you can shift + f10 for cmd and run shutdown.exe /r /t 0

Just get a flash drive with a linux iso from elsewhere and boot directly into it.

Last time I tried it was unskippable via UI.

You could press Shift+F10 to get a command prompt, then use `oobe\bypassnro` to bypass the online login, but I heard they're removing that too.

I guess you could make a temp account, and once you're logged in you can create a new local account and remove the online MS account.

They removed that now too. You can choose domain join on pro version to create a local account

Is there any bypass possible on the Home version?

Also, do the bypass methods that tools Rufus and Ventoy use still work?

The bypass via Rufus is working as of 3 weeks ago; Did two installs with local-only accounts from the get go.

unattend.xml file can be used to skip this screen, knowing ms, probably in pro edition only

Unattend.xml can be used in both editions, as there is no more separate install image for home edition since windows 8

Pro does not, and that is the version you should be on. Clean install w ISO.

"Services" and "Disk Management" UI's are great examples of ollllld (possibly MFC?) Windows UI's and are still the standard way to manage those settings from what I can tell.

I’m sure some UX idiot at Microsoft will be along to “fix” them any time now.

What's funny is I remember when those Microsoft Management Console snap-in tools were brand new, and what came before them was a lot less nice to use.

(They might be MFC. Windows 2000 is about the right time for Microsoft to be C++ happy enough to push developers to use it over just using the bare Win32 C APIs. MMC was a pretty big deal when it first came out.)

You can use Spy++ to look at the properties of open windows on your system. If the window class name starts with "afx:" then the application uses MFC. As far as I can recall I've never seen a Microsoft product built on either MFC or Visual Basic. They apparently don't like their own dog food.

They tried doing stuff in .Net for Vista but had to revert all that; perhaps they've now come back to using it for real, but I know the new settings panel is done in C/C++.

Start -> Run -> compmgmt.msc

Microsoft has a similar surface design trend as Apple, both want to constantly streamline and dumb down the main parts of the OS so that no one could possibly be confused since there’s so little you can even do.

But interestingly while Apple keeps some of the complexity hidden deep in ridiculous new squirrel holes in the settings UI (things like ( i ) circles), Microsoft just accommodates those who would miss the greater detail by also shipping the previous version’s entire settings screens wholesale under an “advanced” or “more” button from the new UI.

I am much more confused on where to find things in 10/11 than I was in Windows XP. But maybe I’m a minority because all the normies back then needed geeks like me to set up their XP PCs so maybe this is easier for them?

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