Scott Hanselman says he's working on Windows local accounts
twitter.com
twitter.com
If I want to update my controller firmware, for example, I have to use the Xbox Accessories app, and it will try to open one or two Microsoft login windows on basically every click. They seem to take about 10 seconds to appear and load, during which time the app seems stuck. It actually works fine with a local account, but you're going to see about a dozen, slow-to-load login prompts, accompanying every step of getting your controller firmware updated. It's an insane experience. I can't imagine it's intentional, I assume the app is just desperately trying to connect to some Xbox overlay which presumes a Microsoft account and was never tested without one.
It just seems like it's part and parcel of Windows' generally abysmal software quality.
Not a knock on the guy, but it seems that fixing windows is way out of his wheelhouse and so the tweet has no value to me as a marker of any kind of tangible progress
Mark Russinovich would be a different story, but he seems to be mostly concerned with Azure nowadays.
Scott is well connected in the dev and azure divisions. He has headlined dev conferences etc. But as an evangelist he only carries information. This change will not happen because of him but maybe with him. But I do not believe so. To much money at risk.
Even though it's been said many times that MS doesn't give a fuck about personal users, their money comes almost 100% from companies using Windows. Gaming computers etc. are a rounding error.
For such users nothing will change and they'll be still exposed to all darkpatterns and shenanigans. This "kind" move is just for power-users.
Assuming of course this will actually happens and Hanselman won't be told "no".
WinJS.Application.restart("ms-cxh://LOCALONLY")
I use both, but prefer linux to stay behind the scenes on my servers. Windows has been a solved problem for me for the past couple of decades. Here's a random 100 day uptime screenshot that I found from 2017, https://imgur.com/a/PRp9L50. These days I usually shutdown more often to not waste power, and my NVMe makes bootups instant anyway.
First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
Second, there was no way to have the row and column of the current cell highlighted. This made it difficult to find where I was - very important not to screw that up on a PCBA BOM.
I've not found any objective UI problem with LibreOffice Calc. It's not perfect, but it is intuitive and feels like the people who wrote it, use it.
> First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
That is no more a problem than the fact that there is no mnemonic to remind you what "chaos" means in English. Shortcuts are there to be convenient to use, not convenient to describe.
Just like LibreOffice keyboard shortcuts, many languages do in fact base their words on similar sounding words.
Does this actually work? I'm just thinking of the people who refuse to learn from an in-person demonstration, much less a written description. But maybe enough of that level of incompetence is filtered out by the time you're doing interesting things with spreadsheets...
(Not that I'm opposed to people mass-abandoning Microsoft, just trying to be realistic about my hopes.)
Billions of installed seats, a huge corporate offering, a mature full-spectrum developer ecosystem, instant familiarity for billions, and working drivers for everything (which every vendor builds with their OS in mind).
no stupid "you're using the wrong distro" recommendations to fix issues either...
There are no enthusiastic Windows users constantly telling you how much superior it is, and how easy it is to write your own drivers in 2026.
For everyone its a different App. For me, Visual Studio 2022 and its world class visual debugger that inspects my complex vectors. Sadly, nothing similar (Xcode slow, QtCreator slow, etc).
I do enjoy Haiku the most, but cannot be as effecient when developing embedded libraries. I professionally develop cross platform libs, developed on Win11 but deployed on Linux embedded. Irony.
If we did that automatically, would the resulting links all be readable?
Probably at some point we'll relent.
then they follow it up with a media blitz “oh, look at how amazing we are, we’re going to work on local accounts”
do awful shit then expect praise when they undo 30% of it.
the guys on a podcast i listen to said it best, (these guys have typically always recommended windows so it held some weight when they discussed this):
> “when i’m on windows it feels like im constantly under attack. whether it’s constant nags for edge, onedrive, online accounts, settings i’ve previously changed turning themselves back on again, recall, copilot, settings buried in registry, etc… only for microsoft to undo them on the next update. i’m constantly on defensive. but with linux i just don’t feel like that.”
they followed up with:
> “linux isn’t perfect, but we can’t ignore that windows just keeps getting worse while linux keeps getting better.
from my perspective it’s just too late, microsoft has done this too many times, i’ve already ordered my parents 2 macbook neos, will be removing my windows partition this weekend from my main desktop to linux. and moving all work and media stuff to my macbook. i’m just done, so tired of feeling exactly how the podcast hosts described, so sick of feeling like i’m constantly on the defensive with windows.
so from my perspective, no microsoft, i will not give you applause for “look at us! we’re working on local only accounts.” you yanked them away, you made them nearly impossible. you actively patched the methods we were using, now you want applause?
but even if i had, like i said it is definitely not just the local account issue. it’s so many things just piled up on top of each other. it’s become aggressive. from the nonstop pestering to use onedrive to edge, to microsoft reverting settings i’ve changed after os updates, to ads on my computer to copilot ridiculousness to recall awfulness and on and on and on. and yes, ms actively removing local accounts.
mspaint now tries to push for a login… yep that’s right, mspaint…
[0] when i setup my MacBook pro last month i didn’t have to sign in to appleid at all. it asked but there was a “setup later” or something and i just skipped right past that. no dark patterns or anything for me.
I suppose this just hints at the possibility someone may be advocating for it to be made again a clear choice during install but it's a vague response.
What the hell is going on at Microsoft?