Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account
theverge.com
theverge.com
"enhancing security and user experience" -- what a ridiculous, bold-faced lie. Bravo Microsoft.
The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Microsoft account is merely for that purpose is preposterous on its face.
Not that I was ever a regular on windows, but I think I've at least found there to be a necessity to be on windows for certain desirable games or for PC apps. So I've always kind of recognized a necessity, but I do think I can't imagine myself ever intentionally signing up for this. The Linux-based gaming experience is now so advanced, and there's nothing I truly need on Windows. I know it's a cliche indulge in a kind of performative version of a goodbye cruel world post so I don't want to go that far, because I think I would considered the contract to have been broken a while ago, but I don't think I have ever considered myself forever away from Windows, perhaps until just now.
I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).
I personally would say Linux does desktops objectively better both in the higher standard but also in the not screwing up sense but I am willing to accept that it might be a little bit opinionated about that and for some people it amounts to too much customization.
The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities.
Sayonara, Windows.
Dev experience is usually at worst the same as Linux when you use wsl as you don't really need more than the terminal
For wsl, it's just a normal VM that's integrated with Windows. Maybe it'd get in the way of I did development that needed to work closer with the hardware, but I don't at the time
You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.
I have a semi-complex app I've decided to port to Windows (it's so far on Linux and MacOS and configures/debugs/tests servo motors on serial and CAN busses), and after a couple of days I've been unable to make any sane workflow work without installing three seperate half-assed copies of Linux userspace (Git for Windows w/ its bash install, cygwin and wsl2) and choco on top to install more Linux/Unix-originated stuff. It's a lot like MacOS and needing to fiddle with homebrew, except worse and you need four of them.
Let me give you an example: I have a serial device connected to an SBC mini computer that I want to interface with from my dev PC, so I want to proxy that serial port over tcp to Windows and make it available as a COM port. On Linux this is trivial to do using socat, or ser2net+socat.
On Windows, plenty of similar tools exist. Usually you need two of them, one to make a virtual pair of COM ports, and another one to pipe a TCP socket connection into one end of the pair. So far, so good.
Except all of the utilities, drivers, etc. I've tried have just plain not worked, and I've tried a good half dozen. Often their last version is from somewhere in the 2007-2012 time frame, and something no longer works on Windows 11. I think a lot of devs of tools like this just nope'd out when Microsoft started enforcing signing and pushed the Store model harder, and moved to Linux or Mac.
In the end I had to write my own thing for the COM pair and run socat in cygwin.
And I've jumped through a few hoops like this.
I'm sure if all you do is need a place to run npm from and the rest of your stuff is all in the browser, the OS barely matters. But for native dev, Windows feels dead and barren, and fully reliant on the Linux ecosystem to be productive at this point. It's where all the reliable and well-maintained stuff comes from, whereas Windows-native tools are a ghost town of abandoned, frequently closed-source binaries.
The many years Windows couldn't make their minds up between the managed code .NET stack and native C/C++ APIs, and one was incomplete while the other bitrotted away, have really taken their toll, I think.
Unix-likes are far more productive environments for what I do.
From what I remember only the c/++ toolchains were a problem on windows but the couple of times I needed them they were either managed by some other build process and ran fine or I could just compile and run in wsl
2. Once a month I have a task of checking 100k images for duplicates. Strangely, the only app that actually works is VisiPics from 2013. It does something smarter than just binary comparison, it works very fast. I guess I'll be running a Windows VM forever just for this one app, unless someone explains to me the algorithm it uses, so that I could write a more modern replacement.
Office 365 is web-based and Linux accesses the web. If you're deep enough in the weeds that your survival hinges on desktop only features that can only be accessed from Windows then you're in a use case that can be resolved by getting a laptop for that purpose or being furnished one by your work.
And while your use case is fascinatingly specific, my understanding is that the paradigm there is what might be called visual hashing or perceptual hashing, which is more than mere file size comparison, but kind of hashing a more generalized notion of image similarity.
You may already know this, but from checking with chatgpt, there's something called DupeGuru which appears to be cross-platform. And also, it looks like there's some powerful Python and Perl libraries. Again, I'm sure your use case has some specific wrinkles to it, and you may very well know all of that already, so those might not help. But I suppose the interesting thing here is that the more idiosyncratic a use case is, the more closely it approximates things solved by programming languages which puts you back in the paradigm where Linux is not merely usable but I would argue the friendliest option.
There's the aforementioned DupeGuru program which is cross platform and wields a handful of algorithms. Then there's aHash (average hash), dHash (difference hash) , and pHash (perceptual hash). They each make assumptions about which subset of image data is important, pull it out, compare it, and are meant to do it quickly and at large scales. They are all accessible from within Pythons' imagehash library and require getting your hands dirty with python. My understanding is that Dupeguru uses its own custom perceptual hashing methods.
And although it seems like you need something more specific, the very very lazy choice is md5 sum comparison which is super fast but is only testing whether files are identical copies.
2. Does it work in linear time, or square?
Granted, I'm using Linux for 25 years now, so I may be biased. Things that are easy on Linux are often incredibly hard on Windows, if they are possible at all. Things that used to be hard on Linux, e.g. installing, gaming, are now easy. Things that used to be easy on Windows, e.g. typing into the start menu search box, installing, are now hard.
I'm so glad that I made Linux my daily-driver OS decades ago and (these days) only boot into Windows when I want to play games that have good HDR support. Valve has done so much good, effective work towards getting games (both major and minor) to work well on Linux. I hope whoever replaces Gabe N. and the other core management is at least as ethical, driven, and farsighted as the current folks running the show are.
If you're really missing something, then great, get a console to go with your Linux desktop or laptop setup. Still no need for Windows.
Hypothetically if I were to switch back to linux as my main OS, I'd rather just dual boot windows than buy a console with an OS that is, in my opinion, even worse than windows.
>Is it behind the times to prefer an OS where literally every single game I've played in the last year has booted with no issues?
You're copying the manner of my phrasing while turning it into a rhetorical question about a different topic, you're not being responsive to my point about it being behind the times to claim that Linux does not offer a thoroughly modern gaming experience.
I'm pretty sure that type of non sequitur response is exactly what the Onion was making fun of in its headline: "Hippie wants to tell you what the real crime is." The joke is the familiar feeling of hearing someone go off who clearly didn't pay attention to a word you said.
Are these nVidia drivers? If so, there's your problem. nVidia on Linux has always been a shitshow of varying degrees (and based on my investigation over the years, I've found that the majority of the problems people say they have with xorg are problems that go away when you use AMD or Intel hardware).
Anyway, Steam works great for me on Linux, and I don't use the various cheating tools that are popular in online FPS games, so E_NO_REPRO, WORKSFORME.
If you're talking about in-tree drivers (which will be the overwhelming majority of drivers running on the system [0]), well, pull the other one, kid.
[0] Unless you've done the thing some folks coming from Windows get confused and do, which is go searching for and installing drivers that you don't need, because they don't know that the good ones are already packed in.
That sounds about right.
> In my experience, there were no linux drivers that work as well as the first-party drivers on windows
I said:
> So out of the fifty-to-a-hundred-or-so drivers loaded on your system one gave you problems... and that one was the Nvidia driver...
and you agreed.
Online is more about convenience than security. Though with Windows, it looks more like convenience for M$ and not for its users.
Recall when Microsoft lost control of a Microsoft Account OpenID token signing key a year and a half ago?[4] I can't find a reference to confirm if attackers could have obtained BitLocker recovery keys by logging into any Microsoft Accounts with an OpenID token signed with the compromised key, but a reasonable assumption would surely lean towards "almost certainly". After this attack, Microsoft still had not conclusively determined 10 months later how the key was compromised, and no further news appears to be published since then.[5]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Key_escrow
[3] https://nickvsnetworking.com/transport-keys-a4-k4-keys-in-ep...
[4] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec...
[5] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sti...
In an ideal world, that would be a triple decker antitrust problem!
They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.
I hate this practice.
So if they just removed that 2-line bat file, it's not a big problem. You still can add that entry to the registry, just with more complicated command.
Here's its code:
@echo off
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
shutdown /r /t 0I got mad and installed Fedora Kinoite, which somehow just worked out of the box. My games all worked too.
I've been mulling over installing a Windows partition for the inevitable game with anti-cheat I'd like to play (Battlefield) but insanely hostile shit like this has made me reconsider.
At nearly the same time, I re-flashed my phone with LineageOS, but without Google apps. I finally completed my transition away from Google that started with Snowden's leaks, only coincidentally did the same to Microsoft at the same time.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
I check ProtonDB support prior to purchasing games, and I very rarely have to ignore a game.
Edit: just checked and, wow, Linux support has been explicitly disabled.
If I got to a point where I couldn't use it without a Microsoft account I would just drop it entirely.
Absolutely insane for an OS, I don't know how people put up with it as a daily driver.
I have no idea why we accept ads in a paid product in the first place.
Also I doubt it's just me but every other day when Windows forces an update "restart and update/shutdown and update", upon restarting I am again prompted by Microsofts dark patterns for all the telemetry, defaulted to ON (location, biometrics, etc).
Literally every second update windows wants to re ask me and I have to either select "skip for 3 days" (comical) or walk through each step and toggle each one off...
Unfortunately Microsoft no longer innovates and can only continue to try to data mine but they are fighting a losing battle.
At this point revenge may be best to just use a cracked windows install on a VM using a dummy email. You want telemetry, have at it ;)
No account needed, no extra BS installed.
And the installer asks "Enter your name", so I enter "Firstname Lastname".
Now my $HOME directory is `C:\Users\Firstname Lastname` with a space character in it!
Ironically, the whole point of the Windows machine was to install ESRI's ArcGIS Pro, which literally cannot handle spaces in filepaths in the year 2025, so I can't reference data or projects from my user's home directory.
Some fun ones: windows defaults to storing the hardware clock time as a time-zone local offset, so whenever it syncs time with network servers, it messes up your time in other OSes (in multi-boot setups). You have to set the RealTimeIsUniversal registry key to make Windows behave.
What made me figure this out? Another pair of issues: the XBox/gaming app/overlay would give nonspecific errors, or at best not let my party hear me, when I’d try to join my brother’s party when playing games. Eventually connected the dots: I would reboot into Windows after working in Linux, the time would be messed up, and the Windows gaming overlay’s party stuff would be broken, suggesting the local time is used in some way for the chat/voice protocol, but of course they don’t tell you that. I initially scoured pages, and pages of Google search results, leading to countless MS forums and Reddit posts, none of which pointed out the importance of the system time. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Windows would more regularly sync the system time, or at least do so upon booting, but of course there isn’t a first-party way to do that, either — the best I could do without installing crap was go into the time settings and unset then set the option for syncing time automatically, coercing it into updating the time right then and there — at least, until I sorted out why the time was all messed up when rebooting after running Linux.
Now with the ads and forced online account creation, it’s only becoming more of a dumpster fire than it already was.
/s obviously
I’m really surprised how humiliatingly their top managers act. Surely someone who lies like this has no concern for self respect or pride.
Of course, those most successful are just numb due to specific psychological deviations from the academic norm.
Another question, once you've activated it with an online account, is it possile to then create another local user and simply use that?
>> is it possile to then create another local user and simply use that?
Yes, that is absolutely an option. Just remember that by default your hard drive is encrypted with bitlocker and Windows sends the encryption key to microsoft to that account you signed in with without asking you first.
Downloading and installing applications by dragging them from the installer to the Applications folder works fine.
Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows, which somehow after 20 years still hasn’t been fixed.
And I say this as someone who’s been using it personally and professionally for 20 years. The year of the Linux desktop will come when people are met where they are, not where you want them to be. If the simplest standard things require sifting through forum posts from 2006 for hours on end, you’ve already lost.
First time I tried Linux was around late 90s. The included driver for my ati on board gpu did create some artifacts and it was suggested to use the default svga one.
The second time was in the early 2000s. There I was playing around with wine until it crashed one day and wiped my whole hard drive (sadly this was before I had a cd writing device, so lots of data gone :().
The third time, I can't really remember, but I wasn't really amazed (must be late 2000s).
The fourth time (must be around 2010-ish, I dunno), I finally made it for a few years after getting a 64 bit computer with more then 4 GB of RAM. Was using Windows XP (32 bit) and decided that instead of using Windows 7, I might try Ubuntu. Worked well, until it didn't. For some reason, Linux was having problems with the chipset on my mainboard (a nvidia one) and the dvd drive wasn't working. There were regular patches for the kernel (which didn't get included in the kernel for some reason, so I had to compile my own kernel). When that stopped working, I put my dvd drive into a Windows machine and it started working again (even on the linux machine) until it stopped working again.
That was when I switched to Windows 7 (64 bit) and I am now on Windows 10, sadly with a HTC Vive Pro 2 headset which seems to be unsupported on Linux. :(
I've been using Linux for over 20 years. Can't remember when I had to do anything other than choose my keyboard layout, region and enter the WiFi password. 20 mins later, all installed and working.
Dual boot I agree can be awful, because for me, Windows has hosed the other operating system more than once on some update. Can't put them on the same disk together safely, but seems OK so far on separate disks.
If you go on distowatch, look at the download pages for the top ten distros. Some are better than others, but most present a dizzying array of options and terminology that assume the person reading is already familiar with Linux and those options.
It would be trivial to add in some “If you don’t know what you’re doing pick this one” to a given flavour to at least give somewhere to begin. Ubuntu at least got that part right at one point in time, but the community largely still has the soft-gatekeeping stance of “if you don’t know what you’re doing this isn’t for you”.
When I first started playing with Linux I tried quite a lot out for fun, but settled on Ubuntu (or derivatives like PopOS).
Never encountered gatekeeping by anyone, although I guess I don't really need much help.
I’ve only used it for ~15 years but long ago came to the conclusion that I really don’t care about broader adoption. Why should I? It is good if people find their way to Linux. But it isn’t a product, they can come to it and accept it as it is, or fix it for themselves. But there’s no real benefit to increasing marketshare for its own sake.
This is fixed now with most desktop systems using UEFI. The bootloader will always show a "UEFI setup" option, and that in turn lets you pick alternate boot choices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42698137
I'll make another prediction: their ultimate goal is to start charging a subscription service for Windows.
1. More effectively target you for ads
2. Upsell cloud service subscriptions
3. Cross-promote other Microsoft services, your windows account means you already have an xbox/skype/minecraft/whatever account.
4. Provide extra features, like syncing your tabs between devices and backing up your passkeys to the cloud.
5. More closely emulate Android and iOS, major and successful rivals of Windows.
6. Keep track of software licenses and suchlike. Ideally through an app store where they get a 30% cut of every purchase.
7. Avoid having their cash-cow products like MS Office out-competed by collaborative, cloud-based new entrants.
I hope you're not that naive.
Alas, smart people have been shining a light on Microsoft's path for over a decade.
I don't think it's virtuous be be the fool.
I'm not saying it's good, but I'd be curious how many non-corp users are using a Mac without an Apple account.
My current Windows box, Windows 11 Pro (forgot the version names). I setup an account registered with MS to get it installed. Then set up a separate user account, not registered with MS. I use that 2nd account for everything. I haven't logged into the first account in years.
I'm not sure what you mean by pretty dang unsupported. Everything I use the MacBook for as a software developer works great, no Apple account needed.
It then asks you if you want to enable siri, you press no and you never see it again.
>If I recall correctly you can't install anything from the app store on an Mac/iPhone without an Apple account.
You can download Xcode using their site instead of the App store, but you still have to login to download the file. I guess there isn't anything preventing you from running the installer downloaded from another user's computer. Still as a developer you can install the command line tools through the terminal and then code in non apple languages without the app store.
I'd argue most users install standard applications (since this is a computer and not an idevice) which provides you a clear path to using the computer without ever having to make an account.
That does not answer your question, but i'd push back and say that Apple accounts dont really intrude on the user like Microsoft accounts do. You dont need to use it to login, you don't ever see it other than the app store or the setting menu, you can disable icloud and not even use that. Most importantly though like I mentioned there is still a path to avoiding it completely.
This is night and day difference from Windows where this entire thread is full of all the tricks Microsoft plays and really, people here are justifying registry hacks as if thats normal. Its not.
Mac is slowly probably following Microsoft, not the other way around. If Mac sinks into the nonsense that is Windows I'll have to go back to Linux (and eternally hate my life forever maybe after ~30 years of my life revolving around computing, I will rather give up computing than go back to Linux).
That was the status quo on Windows Home. But there's a big difference between "pretty darn unsupported, expect random breakage in things like the M$ Store" and "we'll stop allowing you to do it at all".
The "MicroWin" tab allows users to create their own Windows Install disk image version from the official releases .. giving you the reusable install disk of your choosing .. w/out microsoft accounts, telemetry, etc.
Does using a yubikey instead of a password works in that heap of shitpile? Or we need to wait for that another 10+ years?
Windows market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
With this change, I have decided to accept the insecurity of not updating and stick with 10. The only thing I do on Windows is ensure my FOSS is cross-platform.
I must say it's quite refreshing to not have to deal with Microsoft's user-hostile nonsense. No shenanigans with required accounts, no ads, no preinstalled bloatware. My OS is made to serve me and my needs, not to eke out extra profits. Ironic that the free option is better at serving me than the paid option, these days.
The sad part is, I like Windows. Or at least I used to. I've never been a "Windoze sucks, I hate M$" guy. Time was that it was genuinely a well made operating system that did its job well and got out of the way. But those days are long since gone. I hope that someday Microsoft gets their act together and starts caring about making a quality product again.
I refused to "upgrade" past Windows 7.
When Windows 7 went EOL, I installed Linux. I've never looked back.
I just use Windows to build and test my FOSS on it.
The only beneficiaries of this are corps who want to ensure that new devices must check-in for AutoPilot enrolment on first boot out-of-box.
In fact, Macs with Apple silicon will require an internet connection on setup, but only after that machine has been online at least once before and has seen that it’s registered to business (handled by a firmware flag).
I'd like to switch to using Linux but I haven't been able to overcome some packaging and performance issues yet.
This is killing my (and maaaany others) productivity since in some jobs you constantly need to switch between multiple windows.
Yea, extrnal programs exist, but they can br buggy, cost extra money on top... and good luck installing them on a coporate computer.
Ive seen like 20-30 people with the same problem: taskbar being useless. Windows 11 is bad at switching windows.
The taskbar cant even highlight the active window since everything is "graphically flat" too
Also that stuff worked correctly in windows 10 (and 7 and XP...) and was just removed.
Why? To cut costs? It kills corporate productivity...
You can create a Microsoft account with an alias/temp email and fake data? Or phone verification is required?
And later remove the Microsoft account from the system and switch to a local account?
Just fuck off.
- Select Organization
- Select Sign In Options
- Choose Domain Join
- Create a username and leave the password blank.
- You'll be logged into Windows without a Microsoft account!
I completely agree with this. By making Windows insufferable you're enhancing security and user experience by making users switch to Linux, which is superior in that regard. Well done, Microsoft.
There.
I do, however, miss the early F# on WinXpPro64, having bought the Pro install version a million years ago for a clean install, using it for quite a few years on an early q6600, I'd love to be able to fire up one of my boot disk images into a no-network VM subnet from those years, maybe even creating network drives to connect and disconnect to in order to migrate files to and from. It was fully registered and current, with up-to-date service packs and everything, and quite a bit of nice MS dev software as well, and nicely stripped down by cannonballing down into the registry morass and tweaking as many sections as possible over the years.
Any clues on which modern 64bit linux or BSD would allow it to boot and run and as a functioning MS instance to run old-school commandline F# fsi.exe, including the recompiled one I made a tiny prompt change to? [That was some high-nerd-reward spelunking that I never really took advantage of.]
Maybe QEMU?
I loved the commandline interactivity; I had built up quite a suite of code to do some slick processing using F#'s mind-blowing pipe operator.
Anyway, AtDhVaAnNkCsE, and Happy Friday, all.
I don’t know how people use it for, like, work stuff or whatever.