14 ms·

People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

764 points by breve 7mo ago

ano-ther 7mo ago
That would improve things. Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine. When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug. Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.
- no_shadowban_3 7mo ago
  [dead]
- SirFatty 7mo ago
  That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.
  - tzs 7mo ago
    It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions. It has been this way for 3 years.
    - BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
      Default = Effectively Force for most users, I would think.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  > saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only This is why local backups should always have the highest priority. Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.
  - ihsw 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - ano-ther 7mo ago
    Fully agree. The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive. Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.
    - pomian 7mo ago
      Don't feel bad. Even if you noticed, It is likely that during the next "security" update, one drive would be re-enabled, as the default - and possibly everything moved there.
  - gooob 7mo ago
    lol wtf
- stronglikedan 7mo ago
  > OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only Holy shit that's nuts!
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    Makes it easier for them to mine your files for personal data they can use to push ads I guess.
    - pllbnk 7mo ago
      All they (all big tech companies) have been doing for the past decades has been mining data for ads. Yet, they still are pretty much stuck on the same level: - I search for and buy something, they keep showing me ads for the thing I don't need anymore. - I check out some random product, they all think if they just show me one more ad with that product, I will surely buy it. While I am not immune to ads and they help with brand recognition, it can sometimes serve opposite purpose than intended.
      - themafia 7mo ago
        - You started watching videos about farm equipment and how repairable it isn't. Now you get ads for farm supplies. You haven't been on a farm in 25 years.
    - throwaway5465 7mo ago
      I view it as a change in philosophy that does allow more ads indeed and goes deeper into how microsoft view themselves and by extension their customers: You have an account that exists on Microsoft - on being somewhere, multiple places at once, even in location and function, in a ocean of Microsoft but whose existence and ownership of existence is finely permissioned. vs. You own your device(s).
  - userbinator 7mo ago
    One drive. On a server in one of Microsoft's datacenters.
  - 7mo ago
- rurp 7mo ago
  This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this. Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
- BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
  So now 'cloud' is a reason to need local backups. Full circle!
- ratmeadow 7mo ago
  Since forever, I've been pretty stubborn with managing my tech/digital stuff myself, even if it's kind of a pain, and this kind of shit reinforces that belief. Other entities, especially big companies, cannot be trusted with your tech. The best place for my hardware is in my house; software, in my own git repo; data, in plain files on my hard drives. The fewer hands that touch it, the better. Just let me have it my own way, please.
- noisy_boy 7mo ago
  On Linux, I have my backup script that syncs the data to two local disks + Cloudflare R2. I run it when I want to even though I can schedule it to run automatically. I also use Syncthing which syncs the important files between my main computer and phone. So I have 4 copies of the data and I'm paying only for R2 (which I deliberately opted for). The setup works exactly as per my wishes and my needs. I am so grateful that Linux has given me that freedom.
ooterness 7mo ago
Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.
- pipes 7mo ago
  I've done this several times over the last 18 years or so. The most recent was a few months a go. And my steamdeck persuaded me. Unfortunately I ran into the same WiFi networking issue I've never managed to resolve. Even on different hardware. Pings to my default gateway are ridiculously slow compared to windows. I spent countless hours trying to resolve. I gave up and have gone with windows 11 ltsc.
  - graemep 7mo ago
    What is the constant? You have something that is unusual and that has not changed for 18 years. Is it specific to your home network? I have not had any issues I can remember with Linux wifi for as long as I have used wifi.
  - ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
    Like what sort of response times for each?
  - k4rli 7mo ago
    This is the type of thing that AI is actually good at diagnosing in my experience. Haven't had anything similar happen but seems more of a router issue upstream. Maybe worth checking what Steam Deck's connection has configured differently given it's on the same network?
    - exographicskip 7mo ago
      100% With ssh access to the underlying arch/fedora fork, it'd be an easy fix with AI
      - pipes 7mo ago
xeromal 7mo ago
Windows LTSC gang.
- xiaolong543 7mo ago
  I made sure to have Windows 10 LTSC installed on every PC that I had in the past five years. Will never look back.
  - pomian 7mo ago
    Yes and now win 11 ltsc! It's like the difference between browsing the internet with and without unblock origin.
lousken 7mo ago
And they have not yelled when they were implementing it years ago? That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.
- keeda 7mo ago
  Alternatively, they yelled back then and were dismissed but now have some political ammo to push their case. I mean, if it was actually backfiring enough, they would not have to "fight" for it now, Windows PMs themselves would be scrambling to do it.
throwa356262 7mo ago
Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 7mo ago
  How do you mean?
  - Supermancho 7mo ago
    people remember creating an Apple Account login and using it on their laptop, but don't understand that it's connected in fundamentally different ways. The answer is: Because the Apple Login is not calling out for every service, including login.
    - kstrauser 7mo ago
      I also think that's what they meant. Alternatively, the person could've been asking why Apple hasn't made the same boneheaded mistake as MS. I wasn't sure how to interpret their question to know how to answer it.
- Jare 7mo ago
  I don't recall macos forcing it. They definitely over-suggest it and the ecosystem (especially for dev) is very full of it and I consider that a problem, but it's limited in scope. If you don't want the Apple ecosystem, as far as I know you never need an AppleID.
  - nananana9 7mo ago
    I had to make one to download Xcode from the store. I couldn' figure out a way around it, but admittedly I have about 4 hours of macos experience.
kstrauser 7mo ago
Microsoft has, by far, the absolute worst sign-on experience of any enterprise vendor I've ever used in any industry for any reason. Try to log in to AWS and you'll either get authed or a clear denial reason. Google Workspace? You're in or you're out. Enterprisey MS service like Outlook or Azure? Well, if you've logged in from that computer before, you might get to log in, but you may also have to hunt around for your organization login. I recently tried to log in to an org but it ended up creating a personal account with an email address at the org's domain, and then I couldn't sign in to the org because that account was already taken, and it took something like a week for the anti-fraud cooldown to let me delete the account and eventually re-register it inside the org. For giggles, I just logged into my charity's Outlook account. I tried to log out, but it's showing me a "Your privacy matters" popup explaining why my privacy doesn't matter, and the "sign out" menu item stopped working, presumably until I agree to let them hoover my data. (Aside: the "To adjust your optional connected experience, go to Privacy settings." link doesn't take me to my privacy settings. It takes me to a page telling me how to get to my privacy settings.) You cannot convince me that anyone at MS actually uses their public-facing auth system for anything ever. MS gets love for backward compatibility, but I see it as laziness. Instead of making one system that "just works", like Google and Apple and AWS and every other large vendor on the planet has managed, they half-ass support all 537 different auth systems they've ever deployed, driven by what I imagine must look like a giant nested switch/case behind the scenes. "OK, the user didn't have an "@" in their username, so call `legacy_pw_auth_23(form.password)`. It did have an "@", and also a "@minecraft." in it, so call `minecraft_v1_real_pw_authorizerer(form.password)`, unless it also contains `foo@minecraft.`, in which case call `minecraft_migration_2014_null(form.password)`, except in February, which has 28 days most of the time, where we call..." Heaven help you if it guesses wrong and sends you down the wrong twisty passage. I'm far from a Google fanboy. I use their stuff for work, and it's alright, but it does not spark joy in my day. Still, I bet if the Microsoft Account login worked anywhere near as clearly, reliably, and rationally as Google sign-on, then Windows wouldn't get 1/10th the pushback we're seeing. If I couldn't authenticate to my own desktop any more reliably than I could auth to Outlook, I'd want nothing to do with it, either.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
jmclnx 7mo ago
>Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State. In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.
- wvenable 7mo ago
  Age verification just requires that one be able to provide an age when setting up an account. Like, for example, when you setup an account for your child on the device. This doesn't seem to require any sort of online account requirement as far as I understand it.
  - senfiaj 7mo ago
    Yes, the law itself doesn't, but I guess online accounts will make it somewhat easier for MS to verify users.
grujicd 7mo ago
This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services. It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money. I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.
- riversflow 7mo ago
  > I use all the shortcuts subconsciously. I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.
  - TimTheTinker 7mo ago
    > the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer. Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax&filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax%2Fbe https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...
- drewda 7mo ago
  FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...
spandrew 7mo ago
I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in). Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch. If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks. Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.
- bushbaba 7mo ago
  The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector
  - TheRoque 7mo ago
    13 inch screen though.. it's really small And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say
    - longislandguido 7mo ago
      I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....
      - bobbob1921 7mo ago
        I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.
        longislandguido 7mo ago
        I forgot about magical Mac memory. Just keep it under one browser tab, bro.
ChocolateGod 7mo ago
I wonder how much pressure is coming from OEMs given the MacBook Neo is coming straight for them in the budget laptop range.
freediddy 7mo ago
I have Windows and Mac PCs/laptops. I've used Windows since Windows 3.0, for 30+ years now. In the early 90s I invested in Windows NT 3.5 as a college student and learned how to use that over Windows 3.1 or OS/2. I attended the Windows 95 celebration in person. I almost went into becoming a Microsoft MCSE because it would have doubled my pay but went the programming route instead because I loved it more. I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better". If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.
- wvenable 7mo ago
  With a few small tweaks, Windows 11 is just as good if not better than Windows 10. Now maybe you shouldn't have to do those tweaks but it's certainly not a major hardship.
dahdum 7mo ago
You’ve always been able to install and use without an account (oobe\bypassnro). As long as power users and businesses can avoid it, they have no real incentive to change.
- hackyhacky 7mo ago
  Note on Current Status (2025/2026): Microsoft is actively removing this command in newer Windows 11 updates, especially in 24H2/25H2 and Insider builds. If oobe\bypassnro fails, the command is not recognized, or simply reboots without enabling the option, you must use alternative methods.
  - whyoh 7mo ago
    The command (oobe\bypassnro) still works in 25H2. There was some talk that they're going to remove it, but so far it hasn't happened.
nubinetwork 7mo ago
The only benefit I've seen to having a Microsoft account is that I don't have to remember a cd key anymore if I have to reinstall... other than that, what was it actually used for?
- dahdum 7mo ago
  They use machine id, shouldn’t need the key to reactivate on reinstall.
  - wvenable 7mo ago
    But you can move your key across devices -- just de-register the old machine and register on the new one. I bought a Windows Pro license a decade ago (maybe for Win7) and I'm still using the same license for Windows 11 on a new PC.
smithcoin 7mo ago
I posted something similar the other day, but at this point it is too little too late. Using windows feels like actively submitting to a hostile user experience. I look back fondly to the time I had using my Dell XPS when WSL first came out, they had me hooked. I've been using MacBook Pro for about a decade now and I can't even fathom going back to windows. Every time I open the start menu I feel personally attacked. I used to obsess over reading xda developer forums and playing around with my android phone. I would laugh at the "sheeple" using apple products for not being customizable and giving away their freedom. At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.
- baal80spam 7mo ago
  > At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision. I am the same. I used to fiddle and obsess on customising every last thing possible. Now I just want the damn thing to work, and MacOS does exactly that.
- exographicskip 7mo ago
  I remember the OG XPS 13 had what Dell called "project sputnik". To my knowledge, it was the first time a Dell laptop shipped with Ubuntu, if not Linux. Really wanted one, but was a poor recent college grad at the time.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Great - so even Microsoft is not convinced to force everyone into having a Microslop Account. We need to change Microsoft - its current culture is too evil.
tonymet 7mo ago
I’m a Windows fan, and I could see this being a pain for OEMs and installers / IT guys – but I don’t see why people are making a huge deal . Windows quality is a much bigger issue: latency, reliability issues, inconsistencies in the UI, etc. Windows account login provides decent value: Bitlocker recovery, device management, Onedrive sync (even the free version), simpler RDP & remote RPC authentication. You won’t even defeat telemetry with a local account. Windows TOS grants telemetry consent. Why do you guys care so much about this? It feels like a bikeshed – something easy to complain about with little nuance. What will be won if MS concedes?
- kstrauser 7mo ago
  With it, can you use your laptop offline?
  - spogbiper 7mo ago
    yes, as long as you signed in once while online. windows caches the creds locally and afaik they do not expire
    - kstrauser 7mo ago
      What happens if you disable the account online, then, or change its password? I haven't worked through this before and I'm curious about it.
      - tonymet 7mo ago
        password changes or deleting the account will lock out the local credential .
        kstrauser 7mo ago
        How, if the computer's offline?
        7mo ago
wildpeaks 7mo ago
The lack of local account makes it so difficult to setup a PC for someone else, I wish they just used the same strategy as macOS.
TheGRS 7mo ago
I've always understood why they do this. Its data collection, its a really weak lock-in to their ecosystem, it gets users embedded into Windows more. Its just not very compelling, just another hoop to jump through. Also I don't really see Microsoft accounts as a major SSO offering on many sites, its usually Google/Apple/Facebook and maybe some other related sites. Seems logical to call this one done and just focus on making a more enjoyable experience in Windows.
beart 7mo ago
This entire article is based on a one sentence tweet with zero details provided. "Ya I hate that. Working on it." - Could mean anything, which I would argue in this case, is equivalent to being meaningless. Does this mean Hanselman has a team with tickets lined up for the next sprint to allow offline accounts as a first-class workflow? Or does it mean he sent an email to the relevant stakeholders asking, "Hey guys, what can we do about this"? I am not encouraged that we will see a change in momentum from Microsoft on this issue.
sidkshatriya 7mo ago
> People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.
benterix 7mo ago
But remote account is just one of the many evils they cane up in the last decade or so. Honestly, not sure if the net benefit for humanity is negative if Windows gradually disappears.
everdrive 7mo ago
I hope they succeed, and this is from someone who loves Linux and hate Windows. I want as many positive general purpose computing platforms as possible. No, this won't make Windows perfect, but every step in the right direction is crucial. Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback. I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.
- exographicskip 7mo ago
  > I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term Mostly agree until this line. MS enshittifying their ecosystem is the resting state and if you believe in the free market (I don't btw), customers voting with their money or data (since they're the product) should be applauded. TBF Apple does this too on macOS and arguably iOS. I think a lot of their longstanding pushes to merge the two OSes is hostile to their user base who want stronger separations of concerns; a desktop OS has different requirements and capabilities than a phone or a tablet. Would love to have a Neo with Sequoia which in itself is a step back from Sonoma, but I haven't truly loved any of their OSes since Mountain Lion.
windex 7mo ago
A lot of people are finding the Mac Neo very interesting given how unfriendly the whole Win11 experience has become. Either MS learns or the market teaches them the same lessons IBM learnt.
herf 7mo ago
Apple makes a nice distinction between their "app layer" (iCloud drive and Messages, etc.) and the OS login. This would work fine for Windows power users, and for the most part Windows has already had this (your "store" login). But to require the cloud to replace your login, the cloud has to be essential to the functioning of Windows and you have to explain the security implications clearly, and it's not clear that any of these things happened. For instance, almost none of the useful settings from win32 apps sync - migrating to a new PC is painful, your apps don't move, your settings are all missing. It takes weeks, you don't just login to it. So this idea that it makes all your settings sync is maybe 10% true. The argument for this online account (vs just a container for apps) is that you think a few Windows appearance settings must be synced always, or that you want to save things like your BitLocker keys in the cloud (which probably makes them visible to FBI or whoever else). And the security implications need to be spelled out in plain language. And in the end, it's a pretty bad argument - Grandma doesn't need BitLocker, but the people who do want a clear explanation. A lot of the rest could live in a "Microsoft apps" credential layer: Edge, OneDrive, Office, etc. I want to feel like I can login to a recovery console and fix a bad partition. I want to keep using the same username across Linux and Windows. I want to recover a router with the old laptop that has actual ethernet, and who knows if it has cached credentials? My Microsoft account is my least used one, and who knows if it is secure? One last thing: logging in with biometrics is amazing, but why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password? Please fix it all.
- tremon 7mo ago
  why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password? FAFAIK, all characters that are allowed in a user password are also allowed in device PIN codes. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure there's domain policies to alter/restrict this. And the idea behind it is sound: that PIN is tied only to a single device, meaning that even if someone watches you enter your device passcode (or uses a keylogger), they can't go to a different machine or online portal and re-use the captured credentials there.
  - lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
    Because nobody would use the same pin for different devices. This is a farcical argument.
pugchat 7mo ago
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jeremie_strand 7mo ago
[flagged]
gpvos 7mo ago
[dead]
semiinfinitely 7mo ago
microslop
PeterStuer 7mo ago
I have used Microsoft operating systens for 30 years. I started moving servers onto Linux 5 years ago. The desktops on laptops stayed on Windows (10). I have started converting those ss well. Windows had a good thing going (if you ignored some bad releases), but them pushing it too far with 11 and the Linux desktop making great strides, sort of put the nail in that coffin for me. Not sure what they can do to make me reconsider. It's a trust issue now.
- hacker_homie 7mo ago
  replace Satya Nadella?
  - dbdjdjdkeke 7mo ago
    he will just be replaced by Sandeep Dicksheet
cute_boi 7mo ago
microslop can do anything, but I am not going to use their stupid OS anymore. Even enterprise window is full of bloatware.
TheDong 7mo ago
Are people inside apple fighting to drop the mandatory apple account for iOS and various core apple features? I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account. I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software. Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  I use both, almost on a daily basis, but spend most of my time in Linux (Arch btw). Both of them deserve equal amount of shame because they're both trying to do the same, force you to have an online account associated with a local user profile, either directly or indirectly. Not sure why it has to be a contest who "we should shame the most" or whatever, how about saying both of them suck when it comes to this?
- zadikian 7mo ago
  Does iOS truly require it? I thought that was only if you wanted to use the store.
  - TheDong 7mo ago
    Being unable to install an alternate app store or sideload my own apps means I need an apple ID to use the computer I purchased. Again, android phones with GrapheneOS or windows machines with linux let me use my hardware fully without creating any advertising-ridden-evil-corporate-company's account, including building and running my own apps. I can't even build my own code for iOS, let alone run it, without an apple account (and paying apple money).
    - antiframe 7mo ago
DeathArrow 7mo ago
Maybe Apple will follow suit and won't require an Apple account anymore to be able to use a MacBook.
- antiframe 7mo ago
  They do? News to me, and I probably shouldn't update then. I haven't booted my MacBook for a long while but it doesn't have an Apple ID logged into it. I last used my Apple ID when I had an iPhone back in 2016 or so.
observationist 7mo ago
No, they should leave it. Make it as onerous and tedious and annoying as possible to set up a new computer. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.
- exographicskip 7mo ago
  Chaos agent hahaha
zhengyi13 7mo ago
I'm reminded of people inside Google arguing with Vic Gundotra to drop the Real ID requirement for Plus :(
tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago
The enshittifiers don't seem to understand inertia. By the time the enshittification becomes bad enough to do something about it, it's too late. For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing. Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.
- devnotes77 7mo ago
  [dead]
- Atlas26 7mo ago
  Nothing about intertia means it’s ever “too late”, just that there’s a lag between a change (positive or negative) and its effect. People said the exact same thing about Linux ever taking off on the desktop, but slowly but surely it’s increasing. The effect always comes, eventually.
zadikian 7mo ago
I only deal with Windows during a little IT volunteering. The org's PC has an MS account, which is ok per se, but the nagging doesn't stop there. Like it randomly started asking for SMS verification at login, which looks like a real auth challenge, but you can actually skip it. So that's in their handbook now.
imzadi 7mo ago
My company is still on windows, but it's only because most of our users are over 60 and would stroke out if they had to learn something new. I predict within the next 10 years we will move to something else. The hoops I have to jump through to setup new devices without a Microsoft account are ridiculous. Every time we have a workaround they disable it and we have to do a deeper dive on it. The process right now requires using the command line to create an account with administrator permissions and no password and then create a password after logging in. Then we can create a non-admin local account.
Animats 7mo ago
I dropped Windows when Microsoft first added ads. My last Windows 7 machine was turned off last year. It's just better without Microsoft.
layer8 7mo ago
For what it’s worth, `start ms-cxh: localonly` after Shift+F10 during installation still works. Another way is to prepare a custom installation image. Of course, such workarounds shouldn’t be needed, so this is nevertheless a good fight.
- lloydatkinson 7mo ago
  I use Rufus boot to change downloaded ISOs to allow local accounts and bypass other nonsense. Like TPM and other crap. This allows me to use 11 on my PC I built in 2015.
fredgrott 7mo ago
hmm MS killing off MS Windows by employing the Google AI and surveillance in everything push....who would have guessed that MS ran out of product ideas!
drillsteps5 7mo ago
They might drop it for end consumers but I doubt it. It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise. However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it. Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth. Enterprise is where the money is.
hexage1814 7mo ago
Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users
OliveMate 7mo ago
I think the decreasing fondness of Windows can mostly be blamed on Microsoft forcing their internet services on users; with the need for Microsoft accounts being the most recent & damning of the bunch. You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS. It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.
- judah 7mo ago
  FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store. Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.
  - trinsic2 7mo ago
    Microsoft store try's to dark pattern you to think you need to log in though. Or at least it did.
    - aprilnya 7mo ago
      It no longer does.
  - hacker_homie 7mo ago
    Yeah but it really looks like you need to, are they still showing the login modal dialog that you have to close before it installs?
  - anonyggs 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - nkrisc 7mo ago
    How? When? Every time I tried to use it I was prompted to log in to a Microsoft account. If it is in fact possible then you’ve done an excellent job hiding it.
deflator 7mo ago
Ironic that the website that has this article also features similar bloat and ads that the article complains about.
savageaudit 7mo ago
feels like microsoft keeps optimizing for ecosystem lock-in while users just want less friction requiring an account for basic stuff might make sense internally but from user side it just adds unnecessary steps
dbvn 7mo ago
PLLLLLLEEEAAAASSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE It just doesn't make any sense. Starts off the user experience with a kick in the nuts and a slap across the face. "You don't own this machine"
gregates 7mo ago
I was a MS-DOS 2.0 user as a child. I have always preferred windows to OSX. I used WSL for years at companies where every other engineer had a MacBook. Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition. Too late, Microsoft.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
  I’m still on the Linux Mint part of the transition from Windows and I just for no reason see going back. I’m dealing with sub-par Office on my work machines. But as MS moves/forces Office into online modes and I’m hoping that it’ll just be an electron app I can pull up.
- lugu 7mo ago
  Deleting the partition is a good strategy to commit yourself. It might take some effort to get back to you productivity (and autonomy) levels, but then you will exceed them.
driverdan 7mo ago
Too little too late. I've been a Windows user since 2.1. It hasn't always been my primary OS but I've always had it running somewhere. Win 10 LTSC is the last Windows I'll use. I still have it on my desktop but will be moving completely off to Linux. My dad has also been primarily a Windows user since it existed. A few weeks ago he switched over to Linux, his first time running it. MS is killing themselves with this mess.
maltyxxx 7mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 7mo ago
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pedalpete 7mo ago
Of all the things wrong with windows, I don't feel that having a Microsoft account is the worst of them, or the one that needs the most attention. Is the reasoning that if you don't have a Microsoft account, they'll do less of the ads nonsense which is baked into the OS? Maybe I don't get what the issue is. I've tried linux, but haven't converted (though I'm tempted), but my mac has a mac account and nobody seems to complain about that, my android has a google account, why is a Microsoft account so much worse. The things I feel it is more important for Microsoft to get rid of 1) the push for OneDrive everywhere - Mac is as bad if you don't have iCloud 2) updates requiring "set-up" and trying to trick you into adding services in the process 3) Windows Hello moving the "sign in" button down 10px once it recognizes you....WTF!! 4) ads, ads, ads (though if you don't use start button much or Edge, I think this is mostly avoided 5) letting apps add shortcuts to your desktop on an update. What am I not understanding?
- sdwr 7mo ago
  "Requiring an account" means leaning in the Apple/Disney direction - upselling, walled gardens and milking captive customers. Dropping the account requirement is a symbolic (and practical!) step in the other direction, towards using the product as a tool.
  - pedalpete 7mo ago
    That's fair, so is the outrage focused on Microsoft because they are a "more" open system without the app store being the default method of installing apps? I guess I'm wondering why Apple and Google don't get the same pushback?
- dana321 7mo ago
  You don't need and apple account to use macos
BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
The fact there has to be a 'fight' about this tells you all you need to know about the direction the company's leadership wants to take. Get out before their terms allow them to sue your company and hold your data to ransom if you think about migrating away.
worik 7mo ago
Why Windows?
kogasa240p 7mo ago
Good to see there's some people fighting the good fight in the depths of Redmond.
nmstoker 7mo ago
My "favourite" with this is the new Windows app (terrible new name for the remote desktop app). You now have to sign in to use the app but then as soon as you connect to any corporate resources (ie remote PCs/Cloud PCs), you have to sign in again! It seems like the perfect opportunity to SAVE the user some hassle but instead it's adding it.
- vardump 7mo ago
  That new Windows app didn’t even work for me at all. Could not connect a Windows 10 box for example.
darkhorn 7mo ago
Why Microsoft is obsessed with accounts? Azure's managed identity for this for that drives me crazy. An integration that could be done in few hours takes more than a week. No proper documentation, buggy libraries, made up, non-standard behaviors, uhhhh...
jwpapi 7mo ago
Another chill day on Linux..
trollbridge 7mo ago
I was shocked to install Windows 11 in a VM today for some throwaway purpose I needed (specifically, proving that some piece of software that's 3 years old will absolutely not work on up-to-date Windows 11), and was not required to use a Microsoft account. Just prompted to make a local account and that was it.
- 2b3a51 7mo ago
  Which Windows 11 sku did you use for that test?
  - trollbridge 7mo ago
    I selected Pro. Downloaded the ISO from Microsoft yesterday.
chka 7mo ago
The irony of needing to fight internally for something users have been asking for since day one. Local accounts should be the default, not a hidden workaround
khuedoan 7mo ago
Even if the good people fighting for this win, Microsoft will eventually enshittify it again. It’s just what Microslop does. There's no future for Windows. I think most people should move to Linux, or to macOS if they still need proprietary software for work.
TuringNYC 7mo ago
Ss it just me or did Microsoft never actually fix/figure out their account merge? I found that anyone who had a legacy skype/hotmail account basically got locked out once Skype/Hotmail/Outlook.com all merged. Multiple frustrated message threads online complained about this and from my personal experience it never got fixed. Basically two out of three accounts became inaccessable. That was when I completely left that ecosystem, Office 365, everything. It was literally impossible to log in. Not surprisingly, the Office 365 bills continued to charge even though accounts were inaccessible. To this day, i'm far too scared to even attempt to use Azure on a personal account for this reason.
- culopatin 7mo ago
  For a long time I used my Gmail account as my Microsoft account somehow. So my login ended in Gmail.com. At some point like 2015 I realized it had been merged with outlook or something and now I had an outlook mailbox that had a Gmail domain, along with my actual Gmail mailbox. I got locked out once and it took me days to figure it out. Got so confused about it I decided to close that MS account and get an outlook one. I don’t even know if it’s active or what it was for anymore.
  - TuringNYC 7mo ago
    Well you are lucky if you were able to dump the account. For me, I had Skype credit, monthly billings, and tons of contacts -- all gone in a botched post-merger integration. Definitely makes me never go back to that ecosystem ever again.
gorfian_robot 7mo ago
my win11 disk shit the bed and I had the local PC guys put in a new one (wiping all my data). they gave me the the machine back with a local 'user1' admin account. so that's me now. user1. hi.
kevinbaiv 7mo ago
[flagged]
smetj 7mo ago
I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.
hacker_homie 7mo ago
Satya Nadella's obsession with Azure and online services has basically removed all say for local development, if it doesn't use azure he doesn't care. I think he needs to be replaced before his obsession kills the golden goose that is windows.
leonidasv 7mo ago
Using Windows these days feels like "you're the product" in a way that's really annoying. Like, I know that "I am the product" when I open Instagram or Facebook, but the overall experience makes me not think about it; using Windows I get constantly remembered that I am the product: ads, forced Copilot, telemetry making things slow/showing up in the Task Manager, more ads, mandatory account (more telemetry, yay!), Edge begging me to use it... I'm just trying to do my work and the OS gets in front of it! This is (technically) a paid operating system. Ubuntu is free and doesn't do 1/100th of that (and Ubuntu isn't even the best distro in that regard). I tolerated Windows 7, tolerated 10 a little bit less, but Win 11 is impossible to use. And I haven't even touched the performance issues...
saltyoldman 7mo ago
Macs are cheap now.
Zenul_Abidin 7mo ago
I had to set up a Windows laptop for work... and you guessed it, it badgered me for a Microsoft account. No bypasses working since it was in S Mode. Ended up just logging in on my personal account and then scrubbing it after. I also got rid of S Mode.
anonyggs 7mo ago
[dead]
dogcomplex 7mo ago
lol. lmao actually. Windows has an absolute onslaught of competition about to stream its way, and they're gonna be paying for every little enshittified user experience they've embedded into their OS. Hope they enjoy ripping that out just to slow their user numbers deathspiral The people inside Microsoft fighting to keep mandatory accounts out are the equivalent of a crew throwing furniture off a sinking ship, hoping to buy more time. They're smart enough to have an innate sense of where things are going, and it might even help a little, but man... good luck.
speedylight 7mo ago
At this point windows should be classified as a public utility and regulated as such. Microsoft has turned the most popular operating system on earth into an ad riddled and dysfunctional joke. Satya Nadella destroyed what would’ve been a stellar legacy as CEO of Microsoft by allowing all this crap to go on, chief among them is the war on local accounts.
red_admiral 7mo ago
If you can't set up without an account, this should work, no? 1. Create an admin user "setup" with a throwaway Microsoft account on first boot. 2. From there, create a local user "admin". 3. Reboot into "admin" with internet off, delete "setup", and run a bunch of deshittification scripts to get rid of AppX(Provisioned)Packages.
- zamadatix 7mo ago
  Assuming you have internet during setup (can be a pain loading drivers via USB) and are fine with creating the throwaway to just not use it, sure - but that's precisely the kind of thing people don't like about the setup requiring an account. Getting rid of the preinstalled packages is a bit of a game of russian roulette for the install as you never know when the next incremental update breaks something because the machine doesn't match baseline or something else was built with the assumption certain crap would be there. If you're going to go through all of this there are easier ways to just work around the install and crap limitations. They are also still annoying, but at least easier.
- lloydatkinson 7mo ago
  Why go through all that instead of updating the ISO to bypass all that?
monster_truck 7mo ago
One of the most common things people still reach out to me for help with is when they are travelling with a windows laptop, go to a country they have been to and worked from before, and Microsoft helpfully locks the account. I then have to make a judgement call wrt them being competent enough for me to walk them through the process of booting into recovery mode and prying this shit out. The official support channels, if they respond at all, often take weeks to handle it. And FWIW, I still see this happen to people with Apple products more.
delphic-frog 7mo ago
The OneDrive thing drives me crazy too. I set up a fresh Windows install last month and spent the first hour just undoing defaults and disabling prompts. It's weird how Microsoft keeps doubling down on this when the backlash is so consistant. At some point they have to realise they're pushing more technical users toward Linux.
Peaches4Rent 7mo ago
I moved from windows to Linux a few years back. As of now the only thing I've not been able to do is update my Chinese gaming mouse's firmware. I'm afraid to brick it if I upgrade using wine. Honestly, for anyone who's on this site, switching to Linux isn't hard or problematic. Go for something like fedora silverblue and you get a similar experience where you don't have to control the operating system yourself. The only thing would be if your company wants you to be on windows.
- bjackman 7mo ago
  The other side of the coin is also funny: I've used Linux for 15 years. There's always been a little voice in the back of my head that says "ah, but one day you'll be forced to admit that these hobby OSs just can't compete with the reliability and product investment offered by a commercial backer like MS". And then every few years I have some reason to boot Windows and I go "ah, here it goes, I bet this is gonna be slick as hell". But you already know how the story ends - every single time it's a confusing, hostile, slow and ugly experience. Also, it used to be that you could say "actually, if you really take care to set it up, Linux is usable for nontechnical people". But nowadays Linux is actually the obvious choice for non-Apple hardware. There's really no reason to leave your family on Windows. Specialised applications are the _only_ remaining reason to use Windows, and most people don't need them.
shlewis 7mo ago
I have minor inconveniences and hiccups with Linux. I have a gut-level disdain for and distrust of Windows.
albert_e 7mo ago
Is this a reaction in part to the threat posed by the launch of very affordable Macbook Neo; and partly the rise of AI Agents like Cowork that will drive massive demand and scale of sanboxes and virtual machines and Windows OS is not a great fit for that today.
legacynl 7mo ago
The start menu is a react app? What the hell.
culopatin 7mo ago
My 30000+ person Windows centric company has discovered that Macs are not only cheaper to order (than the 2.5k HP laptops they’ve been fed) but people don’t complain about the fans as much, batteries last longer, speakers are better and screens are brighter, so there has been a massive wave of Windows to Mac transition. It went from web devs and designers to now HR, admins, anyone. I don’t think we’ll swap Active Directory just yet but I would’ve never thought we’d do this. We’re an old school slow red tape wrapped industry. Cloud too, Azure could not secure our business even though we’ve been Microsoft everything. We’re in AWS.

764 points by breve 7mo ago

That would improve things. Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine. When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug. Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.

no_shadowban_3 7mo ago
[dead]
SirFatty 7mo ago
That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.
- tzs 7mo ago
  It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions. It has been this way for 3 years.
  - BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
    Default = Effectively Force for most users, I would think.
shevy-java 7mo ago
> saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only This is why local backups should always have the highest priority. Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.
- ihsw 7mo ago
  [dead]
- ano-ther 7mo ago
  Fully agree. The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive. Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.
  - pomian 7mo ago
    Don't feel bad. Even if you noticed, It is likely that during the next "security" update, one drive would be re-enabled, as the default - and possibly everything moved there.
- gooob 7mo ago
  lol wtf
stronglikedan 7mo ago
> OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only Holy shit that's nuts!
- autoexec 7mo ago
  Makes it easier for them to mine your files for personal data they can use to push ads I guess.
  - pllbnk 7mo ago
    All they (all big tech companies) have been doing for the past decades has been mining data for ads. Yet, they still are pretty much stuck on the same level: - I search for and buy something, they keep showing me ads for the thing I don't need anymore. - I check out some random product, they all think if they just show me one more ad with that product, I will surely buy it. While I am not immune to ads and they help with brand recognition, it can sometimes serve opposite purpose than intended.
    - themafia 7mo ago
      - You started watching videos about farm equipment and how repairable it isn't. Now you get ads for farm supplies. You haven't been on a farm in 25 years.
  - throwaway5465 7mo ago
    I view it as a change in philosophy that does allow more ads indeed and goes deeper into how microsoft view themselves and by extension their customers: You have an account that exists on Microsoft - on being somewhere, multiple places at once, even in location and function, in a ocean of Microsoft but whose existence and ownership of existence is finely permissioned. vs. You own your device(s).
- userbinator 7mo ago
  One drive. On a server in one of Microsoft's datacenters.
- 7mo ago
rurp 7mo ago
This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this. Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
So now 'cloud' is a reason to need local backups. Full circle!
ratmeadow 7mo ago
Since forever, I've been pretty stubborn with managing my tech/digital stuff myself, even if it's kind of a pain, and this kind of shit reinforces that belief. Other entities, especially big companies, cannot be trusted with your tech. The best place for my hardware is in my house; software, in my own git repo; data, in plain files on my hard drives. The fewer hands that touch it, the better. Just let me have it my own way, please.
noisy_boy 7mo ago
On Linux, I have my backup script that syncs the data to two local disks + Cloudflare R2. I run it when I want to even though I can schedule it to run automatically. I also use Syncthing which syncs the important files between my main computer and phone. So I have 4 copies of the data and I'm paying only for R2 (which I deliberately opted for). The setup works exactly as per my wishes and my needs. I am so grateful that Linux has given me that freedom.

ooterness 7mo ago

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.

pipes 7mo ago
I've done this several times over the last 18 years or so. The most recent was a few months a go. And my steamdeck persuaded me. Unfortunately I ran into the same WiFi networking issue I've never managed to resolve. Even on different hardware. Pings to my default gateway are ridiculously slow compared to windows. I spent countless hours trying to resolve. I gave up and have gone with windows 11 ltsc.
- graemep 7mo ago
  What is the constant? You have something that is unusual and that has not changed for 18 years. Is it specific to your home network? I have not had any issues I can remember with Linux wifi for as long as I have used wifi.
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
  Like what sort of response times for each?
- k4rli 7mo ago
  This is the type of thing that AI is actually good at diagnosing in my experience. Haven't had anything similar happen but seems more of a router issue upstream. Maybe worth checking what Steam Deck's connection has configured differently given it's on the same network?
  - exographicskip 7mo ago
    100% With ssh access to the underlying arch/fedora fork, it'd be an easy fix with AI
    - pipes 7mo ago

xeromal 7mo ago

Windows LTSC gang.

xiaolong543 7mo ago
I made sure to have Windows 10 LTSC installed on every PC that I had in the past five years. Will never look back.
- pomian 7mo ago
  Yes and now win 11 ltsc! It's like the difference between browsing the internet with and without unblock origin.

lousken 7mo ago

And they have not yelled when they were implementing it years ago? That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.

keeda 7mo ago
Alternatively, they yelled back then and were dismissed but now have some political ammo to push their case. I mean, if it was actually backfiring enough, they would not have to "fight" for it now, Windows PMs themselves would be scrambling to do it.

throwa356262 7mo ago

Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 7mo ago
How do you mean?
- Supermancho 7mo ago
  people remember creating an Apple Account login and using it on their laptop, but don't understand that it's connected in fundamentally different ways. The answer is: Because the Apple Login is not calling out for every service, including login.
  - kstrauser 7mo ago
    I also think that's what they meant. Alternatively, the person could've been asking why Apple hasn't made the same boneheaded mistake as MS. I wasn't sure how to interpret their question to know how to answer it.
Jare 7mo ago
I don't recall macos forcing it. They definitely over-suggest it and the ecosystem (especially for dev) is very full of it and I consider that a problem, but it's limited in scope. If you don't want the Apple ecosystem, as far as I know you never need an AppleID.
- nananana9 7mo ago
  I had to make one to download Xcode from the store. I couldn' figure out a way around it, but admittedly I have about 4 hours of macos experience.

kstrauser 7mo ago

Microsoft has, by far, the absolute worst sign-on experience of any enterprise vendor I've ever used in any industry for any reason. Try to log in to AWS and you'll either get authed or a clear denial reason. Google Workspace? You're in or you're out. Enterprisey MS service like Outlook or Azure? Well, if you've logged in from that computer before, you might get to log in, but you may also have to hunt around for your organization login. I recently tried to log in to an org but it ended up creating a personal account with an email address at the org's domain, and then I couldn't sign in to the org because that account was already taken, and it took something like a week for the anti-fraud cooldown to let me delete the account and eventually re-register it inside the org. For giggles, I just logged into my charity's Outlook account. I tried to log out, but it's showing me a "Your privacy matters" popup explaining why my privacy doesn't matter, and the "sign out" menu item stopped working, presumably until I agree to let them hoover my data. (Aside: the "To adjust your optional connected experience, go to Privacy settings." link doesn't take me to my privacy settings. It takes me to a page telling me how to get to my privacy settings.) You cannot convince me that anyone at MS actually uses their public-facing auth system for anything ever. MS gets love for backward compatibility, but I see it as laziness. Instead of making one system that "just works", like Google and Apple and AWS and every other large vendor on the planet has managed, they half-ass support all 537 different auth systems they've ever deployed, driven by what I imagine must look like a giant nested switch/case behind the scenes. "OK, the user didn't have an "@" in their username, so call `legacy_pw_auth_23(form.password)`. It did have an "@", and also a "@minecraft." in it, so call `minecraft_v1_real_pw_authorizerer(form.password)`, unless it also contains `foo@minecraft.`, in which case call `minecraft_migration_2014_null(form.password)`, except in February, which has 28 days most of the time, where we call..." Heaven help you if it guesses wrong and sends you down the wrong twisty passage. I'm far from a Google fanboy. I use their stuff for work, and it's alright, but it does not spark joy in my day. Still, I bet if the Microsoft Account login worked anywhere near as clearly, reliably, and rationally as Google sign-on, then Windows wouldn't get 1/10th the pushback we're seeing. If I couldn't authenticate to my own desktop any more reliably than I could auth to Outlook, I'd want nothing to do with it, either.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

jmclnx 7mo ago

>Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State. In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.

wvenable 7mo ago
Age verification just requires that one be able to provide an age when setting up an account. Like, for example, when you setup an account for your child on the device. This doesn't seem to require any sort of online account requirement as far as I understand it.
- senfiaj 7mo ago
  Yes, the law itself doesn't, but I guess online accounts will make it somewhat easier for MS to verify users.

grujicd 7mo ago

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services. It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money. I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

riversflow 7mo ago
> I use all the shortcuts subconsciously. I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.
- TimTheTinker 7mo ago
  > the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer. Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax&filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax%2Fbe https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...
drewda 7mo ago
FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...

spandrew 7mo ago

I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in). Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch. If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks. Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

bushbaba 7mo ago
The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector
- TheRoque 7mo ago
  13 inch screen though.. it's really small And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say
  - longislandguido 7mo ago
    I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....
    - bobbob1921 7mo ago
      I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.
      - longislandguido 7mo ago
        I forgot about magical Mac memory. Just keep it under one browser tab, bro.

ChocolateGod 7mo ago

I wonder how much pressure is coming from OEMs given the MacBook Neo is coming straight for them in the budget laptop range.

freediddy 7mo ago

I have Windows and Mac PCs/laptops. I've used Windows since Windows 3.0, for 30+ years now. In the early 90s I invested in Windows NT 3.5 as a college student and learned how to use that over Windows 3.1 or OS/2. I attended the Windows 95 celebration in person. I almost went into becoming a Microsoft MCSE because it would have doubled my pay but went the programming route instead because I loved it more. I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better". If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.

wvenable 7mo ago
With a few small tweaks, Windows 11 is just as good if not better than Windows 10. Now maybe you shouldn't have to do those tweaks but it's certainly not a major hardship.

dahdum 7mo ago

You’ve always been able to install and use without an account (oobe\bypassnro). As long as power users and businesses can avoid it, they have no real incentive to change.

hackyhacky 7mo ago
Note on Current Status (2025/2026): Microsoft is actively removing this command in newer Windows 11 updates, especially in 24H2/25H2 and Insider builds. If oobe\bypassnro fails, the command is not recognized, or simply reboots without enabling the option, you must use alternative methods.
- whyoh 7mo ago
  The command (oobe\bypassnro) still works in 25H2. There was some talk that they're going to remove it, but so far it hasn't happened.

nubinetwork 7mo ago

The only benefit I've seen to having a Microsoft account is that I don't have to remember a cd key anymore if I have to reinstall... other than that, what was it actually used for?

dahdum 7mo ago
They use machine id, shouldn’t need the key to reactivate on reinstall.
- wvenable 7mo ago
  But you can move your key across devices -- just de-register the old machine and register on the new one. I bought a Windows Pro license a decade ago (maybe for Win7) and I'm still using the same license for Windows 11 on a new PC.

smithcoin 7mo ago

I posted something similar the other day, but at this point it is too little too late. Using windows feels like actively submitting to a hostile user experience. I look back fondly to the time I had using my Dell XPS when WSL first came out, they had me hooked. I've been using MacBook Pro for about a decade now and I can't even fathom going back to windows. Every time I open the start menu I feel personally attacked. I used to obsess over reading xda developer forums and playing around with my android phone. I would laugh at the "sheeple" using apple products for not being customizable and giving away their freedom. At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.

baal80spam 7mo ago
> At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision. I am the same. I used to fiddle and obsess on customising every last thing possible. Now I just want the damn thing to work, and MacOS does exactly that.
exographicskip 7mo ago
I remember the OG XPS 13 had what Dell called "project sputnik". To my knowledge, it was the first time a Dell laptop shipped with Ubuntu, if not Linux. Really wanted one, but was a poor recent college grad at the time.

shevy-java 7mo ago

Great - so even Microsoft is not convinced to force everyone into having a Microslop Account. We need to change Microsoft - its current culture is too evil.

tonymet 7mo ago

I’m a Windows fan, and I could see this being a pain for OEMs and installers / IT guys – but I don’t see why people are making a huge deal . Windows quality is a much bigger issue: latency, reliability issues, inconsistencies in the UI, etc. Windows account login provides decent value: Bitlocker recovery, device management, Onedrive sync (even the free version), simpler RDP & remote RPC authentication. You won’t even defeat telemetry with a local account. Windows TOS grants telemetry consent. Why do you guys care so much about this? It feels like a bikeshed – something easy to complain about with little nuance. What will be won if MS concedes?

kstrauser 7mo ago
With it, can you use your laptop offline?
- spogbiper 7mo ago
  yes, as long as you signed in once while online. windows caches the creds locally and afaik they do not expire
  - kstrauser 7mo ago
    What happens if you disable the account online, then, or change its password? I haven't worked through this before and I'm curious about it.
    - tonymet 7mo ago
      password changes or deleting the account will lock out the local credential .
      - kstrauser 7mo ago
        How, if the computer's offline?
        7mo ago

wildpeaks 7mo ago

The lack of local account makes it so difficult to setup a PC for someone else, I wish they just used the same strategy as macOS.

TheGRS 7mo ago

I've always understood why they do this. Its data collection, its a really weak lock-in to their ecosystem, it gets users embedded into Windows more. Its just not very compelling, just another hoop to jump through. Also I don't really see Microsoft accounts as a major SSO offering on many sites, its usually Google/Apple/Facebook and maybe some other related sites. Seems logical to call this one done and just focus on making a more enjoyable experience in Windows.

beart 7mo ago

This entire article is based on a one sentence tweet with zero details provided. "Ya I hate that. Working on it." - Could mean anything, which I would argue in this case, is equivalent to being meaningless. Does this mean Hanselman has a team with tickets lined up for the next sprint to allow offline accounts as a first-class workflow? Or does it mean he sent an email to the relevant stakeholders asking, "Hey guys, what can we do about this"? I am not encouraged that we will see a change in momentum from Microsoft on this issue.

sidkshatriya 7mo ago

> People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.

benterix 7mo ago

But remote account is just one of the many evils they cane up in the last decade or so. Honestly, not sure if the net benefit for humanity is negative if Windows gradually disappears.

everdrive 7mo ago

I hope they succeed, and this is from someone who loves Linux and hate Windows. I want as many positive general purpose computing platforms as possible. No, this won't make Windows perfect, but every step in the right direction is crucial. Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback. I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.

exographicskip 7mo ago
> I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term Mostly agree until this line. MS enshittifying their ecosystem is the resting state and if you believe in the free market (I don't btw), customers voting with their money or data (since they're the product) should be applauded. TBF Apple does this too on macOS and arguably iOS. I think a lot of their longstanding pushes to merge the two OSes is hostile to their user base who want stronger separations of concerns; a desktop OS has different requirements and capabilities than a phone or a tablet. Would love to have a Neo with Sequoia which in itself is a step back from Sonoma, but I haven't truly loved any of their OSes since Mountain Lion.

windex 7mo ago

A lot of people are finding the Mac Neo very interesting given how unfriendly the whole Win11 experience has become. Either MS learns or the market teaches them the same lessons IBM learnt.

herf 7mo ago

Apple makes a nice distinction between their "app layer" (iCloud drive and Messages, etc.) and the OS login. This would work fine for Windows power users, and for the most part Windows has already had this (your "store" login). But to require the cloud to replace your login, the cloud has to be essential to the functioning of Windows and you have to explain the security implications clearly, and it's not clear that any of these things happened. For instance, almost none of the useful settings from win32 apps sync - migrating to a new PC is painful, your apps don't move, your settings are all missing. It takes weeks, you don't just login to it. So this idea that it makes all your settings sync is maybe 10% true. The argument for this online account (vs just a container for apps) is that you think a few Windows appearance settings must be synced always, or that you want to save things like your BitLocker keys in the cloud (which probably makes them visible to FBI or whoever else). And the security implications need to be spelled out in plain language. And in the end, it's a pretty bad argument - Grandma doesn't need BitLocker, but the people who do want a clear explanation. A lot of the rest could live in a "Microsoft apps" credential layer: Edge, OneDrive, Office, etc. I want to feel like I can login to a recovery console and fix a bad partition. I want to keep using the same username across Linux and Windows. I want to recover a router with the old laptop that has actual ethernet, and who knows if it has cached credentials? My Microsoft account is my least used one, and who knows if it is secure? One last thing: logging in with biometrics is amazing, but why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password? Please fix it all.

tremon 7mo ago
why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password? FAFAIK, all characters that are allowed in a user password are also allowed in device PIN codes. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure there's domain policies to alter/restrict this. And the idea behind it is sound: that PIN is tied only to a single device, meaning that even if someone watches you enter your device passcode (or uses a keylogger), they can't go to a different machine or online portal and re-use the captured credentials there.
- lowbloodsugar 7mo ago
  Because nobody would use the same pin for different devices. This is a farcical argument.

pugchat 7mo ago

[dead]

jeremie_strand 7mo ago

[flagged]

gpvos 7mo ago

[dead]

semiinfinitely 7mo ago

microslop

PeterStuer 7mo ago

I have used Microsoft operating systens for 30 years. I started moving servers onto Linux 5 years ago. The desktops on laptops stayed on Windows (10). I have started converting those ss well. Windows had a good thing going (if you ignored some bad releases), but them pushing it too far with 11 and the Linux desktop making great strides, sort of put the nail in that coffin for me. Not sure what they can do to make me reconsider. It's a trust issue now.

hacker_homie 7mo ago
replace Satya Nadella?
- dbdjdjdkeke 7mo ago
  he will just be replaced by Sandeep Dicksheet

cute_boi 7mo ago

microslop can do anything, but I am not going to use their stupid OS anymore. Even enterprise window is full of bloatware.

TheDong 7mo ago

Are people inside apple fighting to drop the mandatory apple account for iOS and various core apple features? I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account. I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software. Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
I use both, almost on a daily basis, but spend most of my time in Linux (Arch btw). Both of them deserve equal amount of shame because they're both trying to do the same, force you to have an online account associated with a local user profile, either directly or indirectly. Not sure why it has to be a contest who "we should shame the most" or whatever, how about saying both of them suck when it comes to this?
zadikian 7mo ago
Does iOS truly require it? I thought that was only if you wanted to use the store.
- TheDong 7mo ago
  Being unable to install an alternate app store or sideload my own apps means I need an apple ID to use the computer I purchased. Again, android phones with GrapheneOS or windows machines with linux let me use my hardware fully without creating any advertising-ridden-evil-corporate-company's account, including building and running my own apps. I can't even build my own code for iOS, let alone run it, without an apple account (and paying apple money).
  - antiframe 7mo ago

DeathArrow 7mo ago

Maybe Apple will follow suit and won't require an Apple account anymore to be able to use a MacBook.

antiframe 7mo ago
They do? News to me, and I probably shouldn't update then. I haven't booted my MacBook for a long while but it doesn't have an Apple ID logged into it. I last used my Apple ID when I had an iPhone back in 2016 or so.

observationist 7mo ago

No, they should leave it. Make it as onerous and tedious and annoying as possible to set up a new computer. 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.

exographicskip 7mo ago
Chaos agent hahaha

zhengyi13 7mo ago

I'm reminded of people inside Google arguing with Vic Gundotra to drop the Real ID requirement for Plus :(

tgsovlerkhgsel 7mo ago

The enshittifiers don't seem to understand inertia. By the time the enshittification becomes bad enough to do something about it, it's too late. For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing. Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.

devnotes77 7mo ago
[dead]
Atlas26 7mo ago
Nothing about intertia means it’s ever “too late”, just that there’s a lag between a change (positive or negative) and its effect. People said the exact same thing about Linux ever taking off on the desktop, but slowly but surely it’s increasing. The effect always comes, eventually.

zadikian 7mo ago

I only deal with Windows during a little IT volunteering. The org's PC has an MS account, which is ok per se, but the nagging doesn't stop there. Like it randomly started asking for SMS verification at login, which looks like a real auth challenge, but you can actually skip it. So that's in their handbook now.

imzadi 7mo ago

My company is still on windows, but it's only because most of our users are over 60 and would stroke out if they had to learn something new. I predict within the next 10 years we will move to something else. The hoops I have to jump through to setup new devices without a Microsoft account are ridiculous. Every time we have a workaround they disable it and we have to do a deeper dive on it. The process right now requires using the command line to create an account with administrator permissions and no password and then create a password after logging in. Then we can create a non-admin local account.

Animats 7mo ago

I dropped Windows when Microsoft first added ads. My last Windows 7 machine was turned off last year. It's just better without Microsoft.

layer8 7mo ago

For what it’s worth, `start ms-cxh: localonly` after Shift+F10 during installation still works. Another way is to prepare a custom installation image. Of course, such workarounds shouldn’t be needed, so this is nevertheless a good fight.

lloydatkinson 7mo ago
I use Rufus boot to change downloaded ISOs to allow local accounts and bypass other nonsense. Like TPM and other crap. This allows me to use 11 on my PC I built in 2015.

fredgrott 7mo ago

hmm MS killing off MS Windows by employing the Google AI and surveillance in everything push....who would have guessed that MS ran out of product ideas!

drillsteps5 7mo ago

They might drop it for end consumers but I doubt it. It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise. However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it. Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth. Enterprise is where the money is.

hexage1814 7mo ago

Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users

OliveMate 7mo ago

I think the decreasing fondness of Windows can mostly be blamed on Microsoft forcing their internet services on users; with the need for Microsoft accounts being the most recent & damning of the bunch. You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS. It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.

judah 7mo ago
FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store. Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.
- trinsic2 7mo ago
  Microsoft store try's to dark pattern you to think you need to log in though. Or at least it did.
  - aprilnya 7mo ago
    It no longer does.
- hacker_homie 7mo ago
  Yeah but it really looks like you need to, are they still showing the login modal dialog that you have to close before it installs?
- anonyggs 7mo ago
  [dead]
- nkrisc 7mo ago
  How? When? Every time I tried to use it I was prompted to log in to a Microsoft account. If it is in fact possible then you’ve done an excellent job hiding it.

deflator 7mo ago

Ironic that the website that has this article also features similar bloat and ads that the article complains about.

savageaudit 7mo ago

feels like microsoft keeps optimizing for ecosystem lock-in while users just want less friction requiring an account for basic stuff might make sense internally but from user side it just adds unnecessary steps

dbvn 7mo ago

PLLLLLLEEEAAAASSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE It just doesn't make any sense. Starts off the user experience with a kick in the nuts and a slap across the face. "You don't own this machine"

gregates 7mo ago

I was a MS-DOS 2.0 user as a child. I have always preferred windows to OSX. I used WSL for years at companies where every other engineer had a MacBook. Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition. Too late, Microsoft.

SV_BubbleTime 7mo ago
I’m still on the Linux Mint part of the transition from Windows and I just for no reason see going back. I’m dealing with sub-par Office on my work machines. But as MS moves/forces Office into online modes and I’m hoping that it’ll just be an electron app I can pull up.
lugu 7mo ago
Deleting the partition is a good strategy to commit yourself. It might take some effort to get back to you productivity (and autonomy) levels, but then you will exceed them.

driverdan 7mo ago

Too little too late. I've been a Windows user since 2.1. It hasn't always been my primary OS but I've always had it running somewhere. Win 10 LTSC is the last Windows I'll use. I still have it on my desktop but will be moving completely off to Linux. My dad has also been primarily a Windows user since it existed. A few weeks ago he switched over to Linux, his first time running it. MS is killing themselves with this mess.

maltyxxx 7mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

pedalpete 7mo ago

Of all the things wrong with windows, I don't feel that having a Microsoft account is the worst of them, or the one that needs the most attention. Is the reasoning that if you don't have a Microsoft account, they'll do less of the ads nonsense which is baked into the OS? Maybe I don't get what the issue is. I've tried linux, but haven't converted (though I'm tempted), but my mac has a mac account and nobody seems to complain about that, my android has a google account, why is a Microsoft account so much worse. The things I feel it is more important for Microsoft to get rid of 1) the push for OneDrive everywhere - Mac is as bad if you don't have iCloud 2) updates requiring "set-up" and trying to trick you into adding services in the process 3) Windows Hello moving the "sign in" button down 10px once it recognizes you....WTF!! 4) ads, ads, ads (though if you don't use start button much or Edge, I think this is mostly avoided 5) letting apps add shortcuts to your desktop on an update. What am I not understanding?

sdwr 7mo ago
"Requiring an account" means leaning in the Apple/Disney direction - upselling, walled gardens and milking captive customers. Dropping the account requirement is a symbolic (and practical!) step in the other direction, towards using the product as a tool.
- pedalpete 7mo ago
  That's fair, so is the outrage focused on Microsoft because they are a "more" open system without the app store being the default method of installing apps? I guess I'm wondering why Apple and Google don't get the same pushback?
dana321 7mo ago
You don't need and apple account to use macos

BLKNSLVR 7mo ago

The fact there has to be a 'fight' about this tells you all you need to know about the direction the company's leadership wants to take. Get out before their terms allow them to sue your company and hold your data to ransom if you think about migrating away.

worik 7mo ago

Why Windows?

kogasa240p 7mo ago

Good to see there's some people fighting the good fight in the depths of Redmond.

nmstoker 7mo ago

My "favourite" with this is the new Windows app (terrible new name for the remote desktop app). You now have to sign in to use the app but then as soon as you connect to any corporate resources (ie remote PCs/Cloud PCs), you have to sign in again! It seems like the perfect opportunity to SAVE the user some hassle but instead it's adding it.

vardump 7mo ago
That new Windows app didn’t even work for me at all. Could not connect a Windows 10 box for example.

darkhorn 7mo ago

Why Microsoft is obsessed with accounts? Azure's managed identity for this for that drives me crazy. An integration that could be done in few hours takes more than a week. No proper documentation, buggy libraries, made up, non-standard behaviors, uhhhh...

jwpapi 7mo ago

Another chill day on Linux..

trollbridge 7mo ago

I was shocked to install Windows 11 in a VM today for some throwaway purpose I needed (specifically, proving that some piece of software that's 3 years old will absolutely not work on up-to-date Windows 11), and was not required to use a Microsoft account. Just prompted to make a local account and that was it.

2b3a51 7mo ago
Which Windows 11 sku did you use for that test?
- trollbridge 7mo ago
  I selected Pro. Downloaded the ISO from Microsoft yesterday.

chka 7mo ago

The irony of needing to fight internally for something users have been asking for since day one. Local accounts should be the default, not a hidden workaround

khuedoan 7mo ago

Even if the good people fighting for this win, Microsoft will eventually enshittify it again. It’s just what Microslop does. There's no future for Windows. I think most people should move to Linux, or to macOS if they still need proprietary software for work.

TuringNYC 7mo ago

Ss it just me or did Microsoft never actually fix/figure out their account merge? I found that anyone who had a legacy skype/hotmail account basically got locked out once Skype/Hotmail/Outlook.com all merged. Multiple frustrated message threads online complained about this and from my personal experience it never got fixed. Basically two out of three accounts became inaccessable. That was when I completely left that ecosystem, Office 365, everything. It was literally impossible to log in. Not surprisingly, the Office 365 bills continued to charge even though accounts were inaccessible. To this day, i'm far too scared to even attempt to use Azure on a personal account for this reason.

culopatin 7mo ago
For a long time I used my Gmail account as my Microsoft account somehow. So my login ended in Gmail.com. At some point like 2015 I realized it had been merged with outlook or something and now I had an outlook mailbox that had a Gmail domain, along with my actual Gmail mailbox. I got locked out once and it took me days to figure it out. Got so confused about it I decided to close that MS account and get an outlook one. I don’t even know if it’s active or what it was for anymore.
- TuringNYC 7mo ago
  Well you are lucky if you were able to dump the account. For me, I had Skype credit, monthly billings, and tons of contacts -- all gone in a botched post-merger integration. Definitely makes me never go back to that ecosystem ever again.

gorfian_robot 7mo ago

my win11 disk shit the bed and I had the local PC guys put in a new one (wiping all my data). they gave me the the machine back with a local 'user1' admin account. so that's me now. user1. hi.

kevinbaiv 7mo ago

[flagged]

smetj 7mo ago

I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.

hacker_homie 7mo ago

Satya Nadella's obsession with Azure and online services has basically removed all say for local development, if it doesn't use azure he doesn't care. I think he needs to be replaced before his obsession kills the golden goose that is windows.

leonidasv 7mo ago

Using Windows these days feels like "you're the product" in a way that's really annoying. Like, I know that "I am the product" when I open Instagram or Facebook, but the overall experience makes me not think about it; using Windows I get constantly remembered that I am the product: ads, forced Copilot, telemetry making things slow/showing up in the Task Manager, more ads, mandatory account (more telemetry, yay!), Edge begging me to use it... I'm just trying to do my work and the OS gets in front of it! This is (technically) a paid operating system. Ubuntu is free and doesn't do 1/100th of that (and Ubuntu isn't even the best distro in that regard). I tolerated Windows 7, tolerated 10 a little bit less, but Win 11 is impossible to use. And I haven't even touched the performance issues...

saltyoldman 7mo ago

Macs are cheap now.

Zenul_Abidin 7mo ago

I had to set up a Windows laptop for work... and you guessed it, it badgered me for a Microsoft account. No bypasses working since it was in S Mode. Ended up just logging in on my personal account and then scrubbing it after. I also got rid of S Mode.

anonyggs 7mo ago

[dead]

dogcomplex 7mo ago

lol. lmao actually. Windows has an absolute onslaught of competition about to stream its way, and they're gonna be paying for every little enshittified user experience they've embedded into their OS. Hope they enjoy ripping that out just to slow their user numbers deathspiral The people inside Microsoft fighting to keep mandatory accounts out are the equivalent of a crew throwing furniture off a sinking ship, hoping to buy more time. They're smart enough to have an innate sense of where things are going, and it might even help a little, but man... good luck.

speedylight 7mo ago

At this point windows should be classified as a public utility and regulated as such. Microsoft has turned the most popular operating system on earth into an ad riddled and dysfunctional joke. Satya Nadella destroyed what would’ve been a stellar legacy as CEO of Microsoft by allowing all this crap to go on, chief among them is the war on local accounts.

red_admiral 7mo ago

If you can't set up without an account, this should work, no? 1. Create an admin user "setup" with a throwaway Microsoft account on first boot. 2. From there, create a local user "admin". 3. Reboot into "admin" with internet off, delete "setup", and run a bunch of deshittification scripts to get rid of AppX(Provisioned)Packages.

zamadatix 7mo ago
Assuming you have internet during setup (can be a pain loading drivers via USB) and are fine with creating the throwaway to just not use it, sure - but that's precisely the kind of thing people don't like about the setup requiring an account. Getting rid of the preinstalled packages is a bit of a game of russian roulette for the install as you never know when the next incremental update breaks something because the machine doesn't match baseline or something else was built with the assumption certain crap would be there. If you're going to go through all of this there are easier ways to just work around the install and crap limitations. They are also still annoying, but at least easier.
lloydatkinson 7mo ago
Why go through all that instead of updating the ISO to bypass all that?

monster_truck 7mo ago

One of the most common things people still reach out to me for help with is when they are travelling with a windows laptop, go to a country they have been to and worked from before, and Microsoft helpfully locks the account. I then have to make a judgement call wrt them being competent enough for me to walk them through the process of booting into recovery mode and prying this shit out. The official support channels, if they respond at all, often take weeks to handle it. And FWIW, I still see this happen to people with Apple products more.

delphic-frog 7mo ago

The OneDrive thing drives me crazy too. I set up a fresh Windows install last month and spent the first hour just undoing defaults and disabling prompts. It's weird how Microsoft keeps doubling down on this when the backlash is so consistant. At some point they have to realise they're pushing more technical users toward Linux.

Peaches4Rent 7mo ago

I moved from windows to Linux a few years back. As of now the only thing I've not been able to do is update my Chinese gaming mouse's firmware. I'm afraid to brick it if I upgrade using wine. Honestly, for anyone who's on this site, switching to Linux isn't hard or problematic. Go for something like fedora silverblue and you get a similar experience where you don't have to control the operating system yourself. The only thing would be if your company wants you to be on windows.

bjackman 7mo ago
The other side of the coin is also funny: I've used Linux for 15 years. There's always been a little voice in the back of my head that says "ah, but one day you'll be forced to admit that these hobby OSs just can't compete with the reliability and product investment offered by a commercial backer like MS". And then every few years I have some reason to boot Windows and I go "ah, here it goes, I bet this is gonna be slick as hell". But you already know how the story ends - every single time it's a confusing, hostile, slow and ugly experience. Also, it used to be that you could say "actually, if you really take care to set it up, Linux is usable for nontechnical people". But nowadays Linux is actually the obvious choice for non-Apple hardware. There's really no reason to leave your family on Windows. Specialised applications are the _only_ remaining reason to use Windows, and most people don't need them.

shlewis 7mo ago

I have minor inconveniences and hiccups with Linux. I have a gut-level disdain for and distrust of Windows.

albert_e 7mo ago

Is this a reaction in part to the threat posed by the launch of very affordable Macbook Neo; and partly the rise of AI Agents like Cowork that will drive massive demand and scale of sanboxes and virtual machines and Windows OS is not a great fit for that today.

legacynl 7mo ago

The start menu is a react app? What the hell.

culopatin 7mo ago

My 30000+ person Windows centric company has discovered that Macs are not only cheaper to order (than the 2.5k HP laptops they’ve been fed) but people don’t complain about the fans as much, batteries last longer, speakers are better and screens are brighter, so there has been a massive wave of Windows to Mac transition. It went from web devs and designers to now HR, admins, anyone. I don’t think we’ll swap Active Directory just yet but I would’ve never thought we’d do this. We’re an old school slow red tape wrapped industry. Cloud too, Azure could not secure our business even though we’ve been Microsoft everything. We’re in AWS.