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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

At least, unlike microslop, they ARE fixing things based on user feedback.

So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc.

Classic case of the reality distortion field here.

Oh? So I can now disable "AI" and "onedrive" and "microsoft accounts" in windows? COOL! where do i enable that?

You always could disable OneDrive (it's uninstallable), and you could always use a local account on Pro editions of Windows, that's nothing new.

Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.

https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accou...

https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-lo...

Hmm, funny, because I literally just set up a Win11 PRO machine yesterday, I could still create a local account, no bypass script needed.

Your links only apply to Home editions.

How did you do it? I had to set up a Windows 11 Pro install 2 months ago and there was no way to get past the Microsoft Account requirement, I had to create an account, I tried everything (setting up with no network device attached, etc)

Choose "Other options" then click "Domain join instead" you don't actually have to join a domain here, it just has to create a local account. That option won't be present on Home edition though just a heads up.

You can also use an autoattend.xml file on the install ISO to set up a local account (https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) amongst other things like removing all the windows store apps, etc.

I personally would never have thought to go the Domain route, so I suppose you technically -can- have a local user but they don’t seem to surface the option.

We shouldn’t give them praise for gatekeeping it behind a paywall.

Wait - what is the dev edition of windows?

Edition is probably a bit generous (although that's the verbiage they used at the BUILD conference), but its a set of winget configs (works like Ansible) to disable a bunch of stuff, install WSL, starship, coreutils, node, python, whatever other SDKs you want, etc. with one command. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig

I believe they used the word edition because they plan on offering W365 cloud VMs with this config pre applied.

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