3 ms·

I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters. My Microsoft

I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters. My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta". I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence. I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory. I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?

bavell 5mo ago
> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. 5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows. Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back. I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
steve1977 5mo ago
My account email is info@<domain-name>.com. I feel you. And what I do is create a local account and then add the Microsoft account to it after creation.
irishcoffee 5mo ago
Yes, just a username. “ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ” This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.

bavell 5mo ago

> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. 5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows. Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back. I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

steve1977 5mo ago

My account email is info@<domain-name>.com. I feel you. And what I do is create a local account and then add the Microsoft account to it after creation.

irishcoffee 5mo ago

Yes, just a username. “ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ” This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.