Rufus and Massgravel still function as a pressure release valve to prevent too much outrage from building up, but Microsoft is working hard to direct more and more of the flow into the channels that get them the most revenue. If HN readers want to set up a machine without any of the bloatware, with all the "developer-mode" switches turned on, without a Microsoft account, there are still ways to get it done.

I actually just set up a new laptop this morning with Windows 11 LTSC 24H2. I'm an engineer, I can edit config files and burn bootable USB drives and install Intel storage drivers in the setup environment and validate sketchy batch files and compare ISO hashes. Now that I'm done, it's got a pair of fully-offline user accounts, it stays out of the way, it boots in seconds, the Windows-only software I have to use for work is no longer nagging me about being out of support, I'm quite happy with it.

But it was not trivial. Had I not known what I was doing, there were a dozen ways it could have gone wrong. I suppose it's nice that I'm not vulnerable to Mossad surreptitiously installing a MITM-patched OS while I sleep, but secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick. And I have a good sense for which links are the tools I actually want to download and run, and which links are scams.

But it's nowhere near smooth enough for me to point a non-technical peer at it and say "Oh yeah, if you don't want your OS to do that, just install LTSC."