I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data.

I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.

Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?

Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.

Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work

Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs

There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows. Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff.

No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene.

When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it... I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...

There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows.

An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family...

Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.

I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.

There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio.

But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise.

[1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article.

Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.

I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.

They won't change it unless you give them a reason.

Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.

I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective.

With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished.

Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle.

For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.

The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice.

[0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better.

Whoever you are, I hate you.

I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things.

But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.

BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?

This is absolutely TRASH behavior. One of my siblings not only experienced this but after setting Bitlocker off it turned on ONCE AGAIN automatically after some time.

I urged him to print those fucking codes on paper just in case after we carefully recovered them. This is one of the worst things that can happen to a non technical user.

This is not Linux/Window flame. I am trying to say, local account is possible and is working.

I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.

All you need is your password.

And a well-designed disk encryption tool.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IOT is great tbh.. Install it without internet and you dont need a MS account at all.

The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.

Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app.

Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.

i’m happy on mac even with its ux regressions, and my ubuntu workstation.

Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !

Now it's going to succeed on the desktop for the same reason

Bye bye windows

It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom".

I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.

I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.

I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.

ive been a dual boot linux user for years, but still booting into windows for games and work.

no more, i just couldn’t take the:

- constant nagging

- ads for all of microsoft’s other shit that i absolutely did not want to use. copilot, onedrive, xbox, and on and on.

- the nonstop “sign in to your microsoft account” etc…

- settings i very deliberately changed reverting back on update.

- how stupidly long updates would take.

i just finally went to linux for everything. i was concerned about work stuff, and i ahve to admit, its absolutely definitely not perfect, but it still … feels? … better. i’m not sure this is the right phrase, but it just feels more fun. i feel good when i diagnose a linux bug, like productive or something. that feels more like fun to me compared to the dark patterns of windows which feels frustrating. if that makes sense.

i’d rather spend 20 minutes fixing a weird quirk on linux than the deal with the assault microsoft is constantly throwing at me when using windows. and id absolutely rather put up with a feature that isnt fully complete yet on linux than deal with dark patterns on windows.

and gaming? at this point, if a game doesn’t work on linux, i just play something else that does. there are just way too many choices of rad games that run good on linux. it does help that the games i’ve been playing lately (like cyberpunk) run a bit better on linux anyway.

the only holdout for me at this point is video and photo editing, i have to break out my macbook for lightroom and premiere still. but from what i understand linux is moving very very fast in that area so i’ll just use my mb until those are caught up. the day i can ditch my adobe subscription will be the type of “let’s go to the bar and toast with shots” kind of day. and from what other people say, it’s very close.

the cherry on top for me is, weve moved our parents machines to linux mint. my gf and i jokingly wonder if they would have even noticed if we hadn’t told them, firefox just works for their facebook and amazon lol. huge bonus that i can update their machines with a quick ssh apt update which takes literally seconds vs windows which sometimes takes half hour plus.

if so much of your life is centralized through a few accounts, then these companies shouldn't have a legal right to ban you from using it

Case in point, moving to a new computer is absolutely painless now with a Microsoft Account because of OneDrive and Winget.

Make sure that Onedrive is setup to backup all folder (desktop, documents, pictures. you can do this by clicking the gear icon and selecting Manage Backups)

Next have this simple batch file run whenever the user logs in. It basically uses winget to update all packages to the latest version and export a list of all those packages and save it onedrive

winget update --all --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements --silent winget export -o "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt"

Now if you move computers, you just log in with your Microsoft account so that you will have your desktop and everything because onedrive will come over.

Now just do an import with Winget and you will have 95% of your programs installed. Yes I know there might be some programs that aren't available for installation through Winget, but almost ALL popular programs are available.

winget import -i "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt"

It's that simple. Something that use to take days now takes minutes and 3 commands. Plus the fact that everything is backed up to the cloud, you just can't beat it.

Yes I get the same stuff can be done with Google Drive, Dropbox replacing Onedrive. Chocolatey, ninite as a package manager instead of winget. Using Onedrive and winget are native and available on ANY Windows 11 machine and they WORK.