> We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.
"enhancing security and user experience" -- what a ridiculous, bold-faced lie. Bravo Microsoft.
Well, it's bald-faced lie but I wouldn't disagree that it's bold.
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 with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point.
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).
And to be fair, I would say the success for Linux in this case is increasingly approximating what we have come to understand as an optimal desktop experience without screwing anything up rather than outcompeting by necessarily achieving a noticeably higher standard.
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.
My gaming PC has four NVME slots. Currently it hosts Windows 10 and Fedora, but since a new update was released it's also about to host SteamOS. When W 10 support ends later this year, I'll use Windows 11 ARM in a VM on my MacBook and that'll be that.
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.
If all you need is the terminal than windows is definitely getting in your way, WSL is a worse experience. Plus you still have to put up with candy crush in your start menu, Cortana annoying the hell out of you, and the taskbar giving you unwanted updates on the latest news from the Kardashians.
I don't have any of that in Windows. I'm not using the home version but the preinstalled apps can be removed in a minute, I think cortana has been deprecated for a while now, and the only unwanted thing I've seen on the taskbar has been the weather that I've hidden with two clicks.
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 remove them in a minute, but they'll come back. ChatGPT will pop in there when Microsoft adds it. You will get a full-screen blue "get windows ready" wizard every few days to "remind" you to log in. OneDrive will reappear on your desktop.
You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.
OK, I'm coming from Linux, but I have to say my experience has been the opposite.
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.
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
1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it.
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.
>1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it.
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.
Could you point me to some more information about "visual hashing"? I'm a bit tired of "try this tool because it worked for my set of 100 pictures", but if I could read an explanation why given tool/library does what I want, that would be fantastic. The biggest issue of my use case is the sheer number of files.
Right, you're looking for things that work at the scale of 100k separate files or so. Moreover you seem pretty used to getting bad recommendations, and I know the feeling. Important caveat is that all I know about these are what I've chatgpt'd about them.
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.
dHash sounds like a good starting point if I ever get to the situation where VisiPics doesn't work anymore for some reason. It's horribly difficult to replace software that is "just good enough", and all of its problems have known mitigations.
I do all my development work on linux. I have a self-hosted linux server. I used ubuntu as my main desktop computer OS for a full year, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, games that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on linux, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on windows. Saying that you can game on linux is like saying you can host a web server on windows. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.
I have to do all my corporate work on Windows. I have a self-hosted Windows server. I used Windows as my main work computer OS for three years, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, applications that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on Windows, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on Linux. Saying that you can work on Windows is like saying you can play games on Linux. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.
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.
As someone who grew up with DOS, and later Windows 3.1 through 98, I can confidently say that Windows continues to become an ever-worse shitshow.
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.
I think I'm lampooning the hyperbole. Both, Linux and Windows, have their own issues, and some shared issues, but none are making one or the other unusable or even hard to use. I, for one, am more comfortable with the issues Linux throws up than with those Windows throws up, which I often find vexing, but I guess that's habituation. It's important to realize your own biases, isn't it?
Yeah, I agree that bias is an important factor here for general day-to-day usage issues. But even beyond subjective bias, there are things that are _literally impossible_ to do on an OS without manually porting some tool from its original OS to the new one. And generally, if a tool is only designed for one OS, it's windows for gaming-related tools and linux for coding-related tools.
What you're describing sounds like the Linux gaming experience of 4-5 years ago. Steam and Proton have been complete game changers though, bringing the normal gaming experience with thousands (tens of thousands?) of games to Linux. It's not like it used to be.
There are a lot of games that work well on linux. Maybe even most games! But there are also many games that do not work on linux. It's not fun to tell my friends "hey I'll be sitting this one out, let me know when we move on to another game"
Again I have to stress how behind the times this take is. I recommend you check out the Steam Deck and the Proton project. It's something like 20,000 compatible games at this point.
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.
Go look at https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=mostBorked. In the first 50 games, there are 5 that I play that appear to be completely unplayable on linux at the moment. 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?
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.
It's hilarious that the excuse for needing Windows is to pretend that in this context that you would be using the game console as your primary operating system. That's what Linux is for. If the problem with Linux is that 20,000 modern games being supported isn't enough because you still need to play Fall Guys, which is a hilariously boutique thing to hang the whole legitimacy of Windows on, then your problem is better solved with a console than with adding Windows. The operating system was already accounted for. Amazingly, your preferred solution is to have the worse operating system and fewer games.
>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 out-of-tree drivers (which are generally ones that you download and install separately... the Nvidia closed-source driver is one such example), then I can believe that.
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.
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, whose closed-source version is known to generally be just absolutely godawful in every aspect other than "provides maximum performance, when you're able to get it installed and working", and whose opensource version is known to be an enormous crapshoot (on account of it being reverse-engineered with zero help from Nvidia).
Sorry, I'm very confused here. What's your point? Yes, at least one gave me problems, but specifically more than one gave me problems. Both graphics driver options did, and other unrelated drivers did as well.
Yeah, not only are they lying about their intentions, but they are also absurdly wrong from a technical standpoint too. How in the world can an online account provide more security than a local one? Online has way, way much more attack surface. It's not even close.
Online is more about convenience than security. Though with Windows, it looks more like convenience for M$ and not for its users.
Windows 11 24H2 enabled BitLocker full disk encryption by default for all new installations (including OEM) after a user has logged in with a Microsoft Account.[1] By default the BitLocker "recovery key" (everything one needs to decrypt a BitLocker device) is surrendered to Microsoft (uploaded automatically for storage with the associated Microsoft Account). This situation is similar to the Clipper chip[2] or Ki key programmed into mobile phone SIM cards during manufacture[3] where a user does not control the key for its full lifetime and has little to no assurance of who else may have a copy of the key.
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]
It's not. But not all unacceptable things are illegal. And just as immoral people will do legal-but immoral things, immoral corporations will do the same.
What they're doing might actually be illegal under antitrust law, since it's effectively 'tying' a market-dominant desktop OS to provision of online services. If they are genuinely determined to get rid of the existing workarounds, there might be grounds for a formal complaint on that basis.
So there's three revenue streams, all of which are incompatible with offline usage: locking and upsell on cloud services, exfiltrating and selling your data, and showing you ads.
In an ideal world, that would be a triple decker antitrust problem!
Fair enough, but I really meant that it's not illegal (far as I know) to lie about their motivation for doing this. It may well be illegal to do it in the first place.
It's dumb on every angle. How many people are going to these lengths to avoid an MS account? Even if they suck it up and stick with Windows, will this really convert them into MS Store app buys or whatever? I doubt it.
They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.
Because it's how the entire society functions. There's an entire class of lies that are not only accepted, but actually expected. Case in point: imagine saying "Hi, how are you?" and someone replying "I hate living like this".
It is standard practice to stretch the truth to a breaking point. In this case, Microsoft could argue that a connected account leads to a better experience. It also (more tenuously) argue that it leads to better security, in terms of protection against ransomware via OneDrive backups.
This script just added single key to the registry and rebooted the machine (restarting the installer). The underlying functionality which allowed to use local user, if registry key was present, was coded into the installer itself.
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.
I have a recent (2024) Gigabyte AMD motherboard and Windows 11 refuses to recognize the Ethernet NIC or onboard wifi. I can't load the drivers during setup either because they're .exe installers and it wants .inf files or something.
I 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.
I had been mulling it for a while, but with (the last version of[0]) Windows 10 support ending, and Windows 11 looking like a dumpster fire, I bit the bullet and went Linux on my main desktop, reformatting over the last Windows install in my house. It's been a remarkably smooth transition for me.
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.
Battlefield 1 (I think) worked roughly two years ago, which is when I last played it. I think it was Lutris is that got it rolling for me. Not to mention the usual SDL_VIDEODRIVER=windows,x11 that us required for most anticheats. Give it a try IMO.
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.
Fairly recently they rolled out "proper" anticheat to BF 1 and V. Sucks that they don't support linux anymore but the games were also pretty unplayable with the overrun of hackers previously.
I've mostly dropped it, I have a couple of windows machines for dev stuff but I really don't enjoy using the OS, each time I log in there is a new annoyance.
If I got to a point where I couldn't use it without a Microsoft account I would just drop it entirely.
You can use ALVR to stream SteamVR games to your Quest 2. Some people use another app called Envision. There's a bunch of information here https://lvra.gitlab.io/
Windows set up is actually insane, I did it in a VM recently to test my app on Windows. I would say not only does it require a Microsoft account but you also have to agree to (at least) 3 EULAs about sharing/selling your data that are unskippable. Pretty sure it also makes you set your ad preferences.
Absolutely insane for an OS, I don't know how people put up with it as a daily driver.
It absolutely sets your ad preferences. It does so by asking something along the lines of "do you agree to personalized ads, of you opt out, you won't get fewer ads they'll just be less relevant to you".
I have no idea why we accept ads in a paid product in the first place.
Luckily I use my phone for most tasks and can avoid my two remaining windows machines unless necessary.
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 ;)
The grass isn't greener. With the amount of advertising, tracking, and upselling on iOS and Android, our smartphones are significantly worse than Windows 11.
If you're setting up Windows in a VM for test purposes, I'd recommend Windows Server. There is an eval version you can get from Microsoft that can be used for 180 days without activation.
Why do this? It was already a loophole that most users would never know of or care about using, but it is essential for a small core user base that cares about how they set up their systems. This cannot be a good business decision.
Addressed in another comment: close all loopholes, then make using your computer a subscription service. It's a great business decision. It's a horrendous decision in all other respects.
I had to install Windows 11 on a laptop last year, for the first time since win2k. I managed to dodge the online Microsoft account and create a local account, and was proud of myself...
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.
I have a personal “Windows install / configuration playbook” so I don’t fall into these types of pitfalls for the Nth time (including the very example you give).
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.
What are you supposed to do if you have no Internet connectivity? You basically have a brick on your hands until you can connect it to the Internet? That's ridiculous.
Well you see, contrary to the rampant speculation you get on sites like HN, when we deployed a telemetry update to report on how many of our users have no internet connectivity, the data showed 100% of respondents had internet connectivity.
I mean, Xbox has been like this for a long time and clearly it's not dettering sales at all - and even with Windows the functionality to skip it has been well hidden and required bringing up windows console and typing in a command that rebooted the installer - hardly something that your average person would do I guess. So yeah, it's ridiculous, but Microsoft knows it will make zero difference to sales.
I own an xbox (which I received as a gift) and absolutely hate having to log into it any time I want to use it. MY 15 year old PS3 still delivers a far more pleasant user experience.
Microsoft is really degrading themselves over the 0.1% of users that opted out (and however much money they didn’t manipulate out of them because of that).
I’m really surprised how humiliatingly their top managers act. Surely someone who lies like this has no concern for self respect or pride.
The sad thing is that they're being respected for that in their circles. There is no need for shame. They're proud of themselves. They don't talk to people who feel the cringe, and I guess them subconsciously knowing is a reason why they don't talk to people further below them.
Of course, those most successful are just numb due to specific psychological deviations from the academic norm.
Last time I activated a Windows 11 system, I had already entered my Wifi credentials, and then couldn't find any way out of the online account trap. Eventually backed out far enough, deleted my wifi credentials again, forward again and created a local account. Have they closed that loophole too, i.e you can't activate it at all without cloud connectivity?
Another question, once you've activated it with an online account, is it possile to then create another local user and simply use that?
That's been closed for a while now. Now(and even before this most recent update) even if you don't have any network devices present on your machine at all it still doesn't show any option to create an offline account - you just can't do it until you find a way to connect to the internet.
>> 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.
Oh, another M$ account creation trick. When they discontinued Skype they said you could just log into Teams with your Skype credentials. Not so! That just forces you to enter an email address (that's not already associated with a M$ account) and guess what.. now you have ANOTHER M$ account. After this the Skype credentials are invalidated.
Heh, except they weren't (they said they would be). I can now log into M$ with both my old Skype userid and with the email address it made me enter. Not quite clear on whether this is two accounts or just aliases for one.
The best marketing campaign for Windows is finally deciding on a distro only to be presented with a bunch of bullshit options (gnome, cinnamon, xfe, kde, mate, etc) the average person is expected to somehow understand the difference between or care about if they did. And no, someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is not going to feel comfortable picking at random.
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.
Well my Linux journey was even more adventurous then this.
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'm amazed at your experience, not sure what distros you've been using.
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.
It’s not so much my experience, but an understanding of why people unlike us face hurdles to even trying out Linux to make the switch.
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”.
Surely after 20 years you’ve given up on the year of Linux on the desktop.
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.
> Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows
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.
This isn't really true from my experience. Windows 10 will update the BIOS of the computer without your consent. This can result in the BIOS getting reconfigured in such a way that the system no longer boots unless you happen to know how to reconfigure it
How can you set up / use Windows without an Internet connection? Surely that's not an unsupported use case anymore, is it? There's gotta be plenty of places where Internet connectivity is not available or is restricted.
You joke, I get pretty frequent requests from customers to validate that a product is compatible with Microsoft Windows Server 2003. That's basically the server version of XP
last i tried was only months ago, there is still a fallthrough, if you go back and forth enough times about not connecting or creating an account it just lets you through, perhaps had you unplug ethernet as well
It has been "unsupported" in the sense of "Microsoft doesn't approve of that behavior and won't help you accomplish that goal" since before Windows 11. It is not yet "unsupported" in the sense of "Microsoft has made it entirely impossible"; every year or two they make it incrementally harder, but they have yet to close off all of the workarounds, and even this change may still leave a workaround.
What is MS's motivation to push so strongly to have everyone on a Microsoft account? I really hope it's not primarily so that they can more effectively target your computer for ads. Or upsell some service subscriptions.
In other words some upper management cunt has a PowerBI KPI card that shows the % of windows installs where a MS account is being used, and since it’s not at 100% they’re putting pressure on everyone under them in the org to force everyone into the fold.
Bad leadership/ direction of product. These decisions are bad in the long term as people find alternatives. Windows will just be used by large non-tech orgs that need excel and are locked in that ecosystem. Then there is the gaming crowd and I think Steam is in a unique position to do something here. Everything points to Windows 11 being the last Windows, but not for the reasons MS intended.
The quality of mercy is not strained, etc. They may not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but it is still virtuous to give it to them. If anything, them not deserving it makes it all the more virtuous to give the benefit of the doubt.
Aren't they just following Apple? Technically you can use an iPhone and Mac without an Apple (iCloud) account but it's pretty dang unsupported except for corp devices. If I recall correctly you can't install anything from the app store on an Mac/iPhone without an Apple account. On Mac you can run other stuff without an account. You can't on iPhone. You'd need XCode, XCode you can only get from the App Store or possibly from the developer site, Both the App store and the developer site require an account.
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've used my MacBook without an Apple ID for years and it works fine. When you install a fresh copy of MacOS, they don't force you into bullshit hoops like having to disconnect your WiFi or running some bat script just to get the option for a local account back. No, it just asks for a login and provides a button to skip it. You knows the exact same thing Windows used to do, but doesn't anymore.
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.
Agree. The only thing you need one for is the Mac App Store, but most software is either not on there to begin with or is also available directly from the developer's website (other than Safari extensions, which are mostly Mac App Store only). But not only does Apple not force you to sign in with an Apple ID, if you do it doesn't take over your account (i.e. Windows makes your email address your username and you sign in to Windows with your Microsoft account password). Allowing password reset with your Apple ID and uploading your FileVault key to iCloud are both optional (and they ask you instead of it being opt-out). And you can also choose to sign into just Apple Media Services (App Store, iTunes, etc), leaving iCloud signed out (or you can use different accounts for each).
When you set up a new mac or install a fresh copy it asks you to sign in/create an account once, you click no and it never asks you again.
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).
> Technically you can use an iPhone and Mac without an Apple (iCloud) account but it's pretty dang unsupported
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".
If you don't use the app store, you can still install the xcode command line tools with the xcode-select command. I didn't bother signing in with an Apple account on my personal Mac.
This is made worse by Windows 11 retail images being years behind on Wi-Fi drivers. We recommend to customers to use Rufus to create Windows USB installers to bypass the network requirements because Windows 11 doesn’t come with functioning drivers for any of the last few generations of Wi-Fi cards we use.
Chris Titus and many volunteers have created an open script powershell application that allows modification of most aspects of windows complete with popup help, references, forums, etc.
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.
So is this Microsoft account requirement a 'home' version thing? I can't imagine they would force this on pro installations. Unattended installs, kiosks, ATMs, display walls, etc. would be a nightmare to deal with this.
Another stupid move by M$. No wonder the market share of Win11 is still below Win10. IMHO WinXP, 7 and 10 were the best ones. A billion dollar behemoth like M$ should know better ;-)
I actively avoid using a MS account on my local Windows machines. Until last week when I logged into Teams and Windows activated that account as the Windows account on the next boot. The problem is: I was using my wife's laptop. I dunno how to remove the account without creating more problems.
This is one of the most insidious parts of the Microsoft Account. Windows and other apps (from Microsoft) are littered with booby traps where if you sign in on one of them, it’s irrevocable and automatically attaches the account to all the other apps and Windows. You can’t feel safe anymore because there are land mines all over the place.
They better give me a way to select my local username then. I always create my user account without an MS account first because the times when I created my Windows account from my MS account it named my user directory as my first name with the final letter missing. It's not even a long name!
So I have Windows 10, and I was not looking forward to the "upgrade" to 11 at 10's EOL because of the TPM requirement.
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.
That's where I'm at. Even before this, I refused to install Windows 11. I daily drive Linux, and I only boot into Windows on occasion when there are games that I can't get to work with Proton. When Windows 10 goes EOL, I will just run it unpatched for those occasional uses. When Steam stops supporting it, I will stop using Windows altogether.
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.
Have you tried using a VM? That's what I do when I want to test cross platform. The benefit being you can just re-create it whenever it starts to harass you about license keys or whatever.
I really did need a kick in the ass to get Linux on the last machine in my house not running it. I know people say this all the time, I have my own excuses for why I still have 1 windows machine, but it truly just isn't worth it anymore.
The last 3 times I installed Windows 11 _and_ used an account were a nightmare as for some reason, Microsoft would disable my account for logging in during an install... I avoid Windows like the plague but it's the only place where I can use my audio virtual instruments (No audio production in VMs and I don't own Apple hardware and it'd be ironic for the Windows setup to push me to get an Apple device...)
Well, better keep a hold of those older Win11 ISOs then.
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).
Unfortunately, the people who made the decision almost certainly won't read this. At best, it'll be seen by some developers who were opposed to this, fought against it, and got overruled by management. I have no doubt that the tech guys at Microsoft hate this stuff just as much as the users do.
So how will the air-gapped customers use their Windows 11 computers? Has Microsoft decided to abandon their OS sales to governments and security researchers?
> We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience
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.
I've been skipping dealing with a MS id every day for coming up on seven years now :-) and I had been (ab)using OpenBSD for a few years before that, so it's been a nice long hiatus.
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.
"enhancing security and user experience" -- what a ridiculous, bold-faced lie. Bravo Microsoft.