10 ms·

Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

570 points by josephcsible 4mo ago

anorphirith 4mo ago
they also force you to give a recovery account. i’m thinking microsoft’s hands are tied in this matter, it might be the government forcing a kyc strategy
- xg15 4mo ago
  "KYC" simply for operating your own PC?
  - lenerdenator 4mo ago
    Of course. How else are they to know that you posted criticism of the President on the internet?
    - DaSHacka 4mo ago
      So far there haven't been any instances of that, from what I'm aware of. A particular foreign nation, on the other hand...
      - lenerdenator 4mo ago
        That's the goal, though. The current batch of elite have come up in a place where they have no real incentive to act in any way except that of their choosing. They're also exceedingly thin-skinned. If they think they can get away with ruining people who criticize them online, they'll do so.
- Telemakhos 4mo ago
  Apple doesn't force you to create an AppleID unless you want to use Music and the App Store. You can still run macOS as a standalone local user. So, it's not government-forced KYC.
  - opan 4mo ago
    I believe on my Mac (non-primary machine, FWIW) I ended up signing into an Apple account, and I doubt I did that for no reason. I don't rely on iCloud or spend money on apps. Is it required to get Xcode, which is required for some things from homebrew to work? You did mention the App Store, which maybe applies here. Is the App Store the only way to get Xcode?
    - mjevans 4mo ago
      Yes, it's that. Xcode is the only reason I've ever touched an Apple account.
- notavalleyman 4mo ago
  Which government? And what's your evidence
  - tupac_speedrap 4mo ago
    It's an open secret that Windows is backdoored for the NSA to be fair and that isn't even including the truly dodgy stuff like Intel Management Engine being a backdoor on a BIOS level with remote access
    - DaSHacka 4mo ago
      Do you have a source for literally any of those allegations? I'm as big of a Windows and ME hater as they come, but I'm not aware of any proven backdoors in either. Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point. The only 'backdoor' discovered was the undocumented killswitch command that disables it after initialization.
      - fsflover 4mo ago
        Not the parent, but have you heard of Snowden leaks? Also this from the old times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
        0x1d7 4mo ago
        Snowden says nothing about backdoor'ed Windows. And _NSAKEY... There is no evidence that it was ever part of a backdoor. But it is good for a laugh.
        fsflover 4mo ago
        It's safe to assume that Windows is backdoored, as it's closed, not audiatable and is a part of PRISM. It's not a proof, but this is how good opsec works. And yes, this is not equivalent to what the parent said, but your reaction should be similar.
jmclnx 4mo ago
If only Windows users fully understood why M/S wants you to create an account, people would leave en-masse. The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.
- tredre3 4mo ago
  > That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless. Does the encryption keep the user's data safe if the device is lost or stolen? Yes? Then it fulfills its main purpose.
  - jmclnx 4mo ago
    We need to define "safe". Safe from coffee shop people or in a dorm, probably yes. If you lock your laptop with a good screensaver and have a decent PW, those people are not getting in anyway. Plus with smart phones hardly anyone carries their laptop around these days. But with what M/S is doing with Windows 11 "security" any ad company with $, lawyer with a warrant or alphabet soup agencies, can get a decent idea with what is going on even if they cannot get to see your data in Excel or Word. But most M/S office data is now in the "cloud", so all bets are off for those files in many cases.
  - halfcat 4mo ago
    Except for the bitlocker vulnerability that lets someone with the physical computer bypass it. Other than that, it works flawlessly.
  - themafia 4mo ago
    Non technical users still write down their passwords. So: no. Do technical users have the option to install something better? Yes? Then this has no purpose.
    - davkan 4mo ago
      For the vast majority of users bitlocker just means that if someone steals your laptop or you leave it on a bus then short of a concerted effort by someone with technical ability, no one will have your photos or tax documents. It absolutely serves a meaningful purpose even if it has significant shortcomings.
johnea 4mo ago
It does make me wonder why people keep running this OS...
- bigstrat2003 4mo ago
  Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) there is no viable alternative. It might be that they have software which requires Windows, it might be that they think it's too complicated to set up Linux, or it might just be that they aren't aware any other option exists. But those all boil down to the same thing: people think they have to use Windows, so they tolerate its nonsense.
- 1over137 4mo ago
  Some important software only works on Windows alas. Not everyone does everything from a web browser.
  - tcfhgj 4mo ago
    Alternative OS are not limited to browser software...
    - hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
      Right, but that doesn't solve the problem they brought up in the first sentence of their comment.
  - keithnz 4mo ago
    a lot of the compatibility stuff on Linux runs windows software, so that's usually not a huge blocker. Having recently switched to Linux as my main (used to run it in a VM) the real issues are all these things that don't quite work out of the box (different distros might get different results). For instance my audio when playing dota2 would randomly cut out and not return when using discord. It took a bunch of fiddling around to get both to work. Then there's weird compatibility things depending on choices you make, for instance, I used RustDesk a lot in windows. But it doesn't really work well in linux with wayland. So while my overall experience is Linux is pretty good... I'm now in a world where I can end up with all kinds of random issues, all likely solvable, but all likely semi unique to my setup.
xg15 4mo ago
> "To avoid the next problem: 'Microsoft locked my data behind bitlocker, and now I can't get it back.' they need to store that key on the MS account." Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?
- mynameisvlad 4mo ago
  You can save your recovery key in different formats (printed, on a USB stick, etc). The online recovery is just automatic.
  - vladvasiliu 4mo ago
    I think that when you have an MS account with the automatic online key backup, BitLocker is actually turned on automatically, and the user isn't presented with the option to back it up elsewhere. You need to know about this, and manually back it up.
  - polski-g 4mo ago
    So the encryption of your personal computer is at the whims of the least competent employee at Microsoft?
    - mynameisvlad 4mo ago
      I'm not exactly sure what your point is. This has always been the case considering Microsoft made the encryption itself.
- sieabahlpark 4mo ago
  [dead]
- superkuh 4mo ago
  Very much so. And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands. This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.
hollow-moe 4mo ago
That's a long article ridden with ads just to say "a redditor complains about shitty Windows OOBE requiring a Microsoft account (this has been the case for 10 years already)". Alternatives exists and are viable, now people still prefer pouring energy into complaining to a wall instead of actually moving. Getting abused is deserved at this point, it's been more than 10 years now, get a grip.
- usea 4mo ago
  > Getting abused is deserved at this point Nobody deserves to be abused.
  - blooalien 4mo ago
    > "Nobody deserves to be abused." I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand (or care) how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.
laughing_man 4mo ago
[dead]
h4kunamata 4mo ago
Yet they use it, they do not really care, they even install Windows games that requires kernel level spyware read anti-cheat. There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows. An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.
- Cider9986 4mo ago
  People don't know about the stuff you're describing. They use the OS that comes with their PC or is the one everyone else uses.
  - Neywiny 4mo ago
    ^^^^^ https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ Just like how Linus from LTT (just trust me bro on the source) said one day he needed a tool (hammer?) so he walked into the hardware store, found what looked like a hammer, and bought it. End of journey. And then he finally realized how a regular person buys tech. Most people do not care, do not know they should care, and do not care enough to know if they should care enough.
    - wincy 4mo ago
      Yeah but they could have gotten a Makita XWT15Z 18V LXT Lithium Ion Brushless Cordless Impact Hammer instead? (This is like my niece buying a $5000 Alienware to play Roblox because she thinks she “needs a gaming PC”)
      - Cider9986 4mo ago
        At least she can play Minecraft with shaders.
        amlib 4mo ago
        I bet that $5000 PC came only with a 3050 and some high end shaders lag on it lol
password4321 4mo ago
I was in a hurry trying to log into my kid's Minecraft account, wound up clicking something to associate it with the Windows account... now the PC is in restricted mode and I'm having a hard time restoring the previously associated Microsoft account (among other things, have to ask permission to open the browser and approve the requests logging in on my phone)! Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.
- Jordan-117 4mo ago
  I ran into this trying to set up a new Dell laptop for my mom. It shipped to her in "S mode", meaning that among other things I couldn't install arbitrary software from the web. I assumed there'd be some straightforward way to disable it (even if it might be a little buried to discourage normies). But after several hours of searching through tutorials and mucking about in Windows settings, the command prompt, BIOS, and even the system registry, and I flatly could not do it. Never seen anything like it before. Ended up wiping and replacing Windows with Linux Mint, which she was happy with.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - xigoi 4mo ago
    Microsoft keeps being the best advocate for Linux.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Except normies don't have the option at computer stores. Even the OEMs that do offer the option to have Linux pre-installed keep pushing for "Works best with Windows". What is a non technical user to do, the choice ends up being macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS thin clients.
      - rolph 4mo ago
        this is the primary problem to begin with. MS windows installs are not being purchased because they are better or more desirable, the option to purchase non MS installs has been scuttled by MS licensing and bundling thier way into exclusive OEM installs. Bundling of Microsoft Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows Microsoft litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation
throwaway81523 4mo ago
There's a similar thing with Google accounts and Android, amirite? I've avoided having a Google account but it hasn't always been easy.
- m463 4mo ago
  you can use an iphone without an apple id. - you have to dodge dark patterns to get through setup without one - you can't install software
- opan 4mo ago
  I've mostly just used LineageOS for several years now, but I believe the first time setup pushes you to sign in to a Google account, but you can easily skip it. If you do sign in, it's sticky/permanent and I think may require a reinstall to get back out of it.
  - throwaway81523 4mo ago
    Lineage is interesting but doesn't support my phone or others that is want. Same with Graphene.
- as1mov 4mo ago
  Surprisingly no, you can use an Android phone without an account. Though you cannot install any applications from the Play Store, tbf I'll count that almost as a positive.
  - type0 4mo ago
    Does it allow users to receive Android updates?
    - as1mov 4mo ago
      I think it does, since the updates are from the manufacturer. I have a OnePlus tablet configured without an account and I'm able to update it no problems.
esalman 4mo ago
I have used a Windows OS almost every day of my life since 1999 or so. Last December I had a choice and switched to MacOS for work laptop. Since then I seldom use Windows and I don't really regret. I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.
- Agentlien 4mo ago
  What news are you referring to? The only news about Xbox I've caught is that it's declining in profit because they removed Xbox exclusives.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Asha is doing some good decisions, or it seemed so until the XBOX Reset blog post. However beyond XBOX, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers as per amount of owned studios especially since ABK acquisition, so even when XBOX is doing bad, Microsoft Publishing is doing great.
    - Agentlien 4mo ago
      That doesn't seem to address my comment. I was specifically asking why esalman wrote > In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox Since I wasn't sure what good news they were referring to.
      - esalman 4mo ago
        Mainly they admitted that they lost substantial amount of subscribers when they hiked game pass prices last year. They also gave away free Xbox consoles to attendees at Xbox fanfest.
- m463 4mo ago
  Did you create an apple id? At least macos doesn't require it to install software. ios is a different story.
ActorNightly 4mo ago
This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles. Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app. Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.
- halfcat 4mo ago
  You don’t have to login with the online account. Before you install: - Disable the network cards in the BIOS - Install - When prompted to setup the network press Shift+F10 - Type: start ms-cxh:localonly - Setup the local account - After install completes re-enable the network cards in the BIOS Nothing could be easier. Truly the most user-friendly OS.
  - yndoendo 4mo ago
    Microsoft is even trying to get Windows IoT / Embedded to be MS accounts vs local. The same method for disabling ease of local user accounts are being enabled there. Windows IoT still forces all the useless trash to be installed ... such as XBox game bar. I have to spend every few months going through the means to disable this trash via the registry so it can be automated in air-gaped systems. Original Window Embedded, pre-IoT branding, allowed full customization. Now it is near equivalent to standard desktop. You have to pay me to use Windows OS ... even with gaming.
  - thewebguyd 4mo ago
    If you have Pro edition you don't have to do any of that. Click "Sign in options"->Domain Join Instead That's it, it''ll have you create a local account.
  - t0bia_s 4mo ago
    There is easier method. Set up local account during creating Win bootable install device via Rufus. During actual Win install it skips all steps about crating local account. Done.
zer0zzz 4mo ago
I have not needed to use windows for anything productive for 15 years.
- sharts 4mo ago
  At this point it sounds like you can’t use windows for anything productive for the next 15 years
- hurtigioll 4mo ago
  some people do more than just write code
  - opan 4mo ago
    What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.
    - DANmode 4mo ago
      Mostly hardware with previously-shipped drivers, and no updates planned.
    - Telaneo 4mo ago
      Adobe. Games with kernel anti-cheat. Office 365 (I think this mostly applies to overly complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros? There are also a bunch of people here who say LibreOffice has bad UI, or that they (somehow?) have documents that are complex enough that LibreOffice can't display them properly. Openoffice is somewhat better on those fronts, but neither are good enough if it's for actual work).
      - newtonianrules 4mo ago
        > Games with kernel anti-cheat. This one’s easy, if they don’t support Steam Deck (basically a proxy for Linux support), I don’t play them.
everyone 4mo ago
I'm doing more and more on Linux Mint these days, but there are a few niche things that still only work good on Windows. Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IOT is great tbh.. Install it without internet and you dont need a MS account at all.
- DANmode 4mo ago
  Do they still offer this ISO officially? Link? Thanks
  - everyone 4mo ago
    I have no idea, I just have a copy from TPB. Its still supported tho. Still getting security updates. I think until 2030 ish? I'm not sure, I think the older versions of LTSC had longer guaranteed support than the newer ones.
  - DaSHacka 4mo ago
    I think massgrave has a link to the iso on the Microsoft website in their listing of windows versions.
- oreally 4mo ago
  double recommend it for those who still want to stay on windows and are doubtful about linux
madduci 4mo ago
Windows has reached the point where it deserves only to run in a virtual machine for some needs. Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work
- globular-toast 4mo ago
  I installed it on a VM the other day, and trust me it was only because my job, which pays me, required it. I couldn't believe it was trying to get me to sign in to a Microsoft account to finish installation. I had to look up some arcane way to skip it. The article I read listed other methods, many of which no longer work so it seems they really want you to log in. Then it was showing me shit like the FTSE 100 price right on the desktop, and some stupid thing about the football world cup. All totally unsolicited spam. I couldn't believe people put up with Windows some 15 years ago when I ditched it. Now I'm convinced some people are just conditioned to being in an abusive relationship and can't imagine any different.
  - VTimofeenko 4mo ago
    Moving 15 years back puts you into glory Win7 days. IIRC, the spam started with win8 which was released ~13 years ago and was very mild at first
    - keyringlight 4mo ago
      That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
      - VTimofeenko 4mo ago
        I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning. I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.
freediddy 4mo ago
I was forced to switch to Windows 11 despite promising myself that I would never do this. WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better. Whoever you are, I hate you.
- moi2388 4mo ago
  Product owners are the worst thing to happen to products since sliced bread.
- mdavid626 4mo ago
  The new taskbar was written by an intern on his first day using Copilot in Javascript. Zero fucks were given that day.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4mo ago
  Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back. It only cost $8. I literally hate the Windows 11 taskbar.
  - ycuser2 4mo ago
    Winhawk is worth a try aswell (free): https://windhawk.net/ https://windhawk.net/
    - layer8 4mo ago
      And OpenShell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
  - freediddy 4mo ago
    THANK YOU. I bought it off Steam and it's exactly what I needed!
moomoo11 4mo ago
godspeed for anyone still using windows in 2026 i’m happy on mac even with its ux regressions, and my ubuntu workstation.
giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I ditched Windows in 2022. I'm not going back to Windows unless Microsoft makes an OS for professionals that is stripped down out of the box to show how serious they are. No ads of any kind, no garbage online account features, nothing, just core offline-ready Windows. I bet it would perform drastically better too.
- marak830 4mo ago
  Yup, Windows 10 LTSC here. It's a lot faster and smoother, but I'm already transitioning to Linux on my other boxes. Will probably move before LTSC runs out as well. edit: I realised I overplayed how much faster and smoother it is. compared to standard win 10 or 11. Example being my login screen sometimes struggles to come up when the computer is locked (work around double mash CTRL-ALT-DEL)
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    I have a Surface Book 2 which was insanely fast when I bought it. Its pretty vanilla, I dont like to tweak Windows often it usually feels like it degrades, its been sluggish the last two years or so. Idk what Microsoft did but used to be vanilla Windows was performant enough, they must have fired their performance guys? Idk
    - marak830 4mo ago
      Yeah, their performance has gone in the toilet. Recently we needed an old system setup just for group meetings in the office. I installed 11 on it - it struggled, gave up, threw a linux install on for giggles and it's buttery smooth.
- cafebabbe 4mo ago
  Same (2024), but i wouldn't come back in a hurry if they did so. Basically everything works now in Linux world, including my obscure devices, music & video editing, and my whole steam library... with better performance. It's sort of insane.
awesomeusername 4mo ago
Linux succeeded in the datacenter because of some atrocious choices MS made early on. Now it's going to succeed on the desktop for the same reason Bye bye windows
- pmontra 4mo ago
  Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one: First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install. Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes. It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well. There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target. Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
  - simianwords 4mo ago
    > Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes. No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?
    - cjs_ac 4mo ago
      Microsoft is called Microsoft because they make software for microcomputers. Networking and multi-user systems aren’t in their DNA.
      - simianwords 4mo ago
        Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.
        4mo ago
donkeylazy456 4mo ago
asking account for insider program is evil.
cm2187 4mo ago
I enjoy windows 10 hugely now that it is out of support. It became way better when microsoft started tormenting the users of win11 instead of win10, and now that windows update doesn't bring new catastrophes and unexpected reboot, the OS is finally not interfering with usage anymore.
- tommica 4mo ago
  You are not worried about 0-days and other malware?
  - tommek4077 4mo ago
    A simple trade off. Guaranteed malware from microsoft, or potential attacks that you can mitigate with firewalls, airgaps or Anti-Virus software.
  - olyjohn 4mo ago
    Not really. The odds are way higher that an update will hose your system and data.
  - gib444 4mo ago
    You mean Windows 11, or 10? I joke
  - bad_username 4mo ago
    I use Windows 10 with a relatively obscure firewall software with a per-process/per-service whitelist, and try to not be stupid on the Internet. I also do regular backups. This should cover most of the risk model applicable to me. Has worked so far.
    - robtherobber 4mo ago
      I don't suppose that you can share the setup with us? What firewall, how are the backups performed, how regular etc.
  - sviruz 4mo ago
grougnax 4mo ago
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mdavid626 4mo ago
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3stacks 4mo ago
And what are you going to do about it, Windows 11 users?
toofy 4mo ago
this is why ive finally ditched windows for everything. ive been a dual boot linux user for years, but still booting into windows for games and work. no more, i just couldn’t take the: - constant nagging - ads for all of microsoft’s other shit that i absolutely did not want to use. copilot, onedrive, xbox, and on and on. - the nonstop “sign in to your microsoft account” etc… - settings i very deliberately changed reverting back on update. - how stupidly long updates would take. i just finally went to linux for everything. i was concerned about work stuff, and i ahve to admit, its absolutely definitely not perfect, but it still … feels? … better. i’m not sure this is the right phrase, but it just feels more fun. i feel good when i diagnose a linux bug, like productive or something. that feels more like fun to me compared to the dark patterns of windows which feels frustrating. if that makes sense. i’d rather spend 20 minutes fixing a weird quirk on linux than the deal with the assault microsoft is constantly throwing at me when using windows. and id absolutely rather put up with a feature that isnt fully complete yet on linux than deal with dark patterns on windows. and gaming? at this point, if a game doesn’t work on linux, i just play something else that does. there are just way too many choices of rad games that run good on linux. it does help that the games i’ve been playing lately (like cyberpunk) run a bit better on linux anyway. the only holdout for me at this point is video and photo editing, i have to break out my macbook for lightroom and premiere still. but from what i understand linux is moving very very fast in that area so i’ll just use my mb until those are caught up. the day i can ditch my adobe subscription will be the type of “let’s go to the bar and toast with shots” kind of day. and from what other people say, it’s very close. the cherry on top for me is, weve moved our parents machines to linux mint. my gf and i jokingly wonder if they would have even noticed if we hadn’t told them, firefox just works for their facebook and amazon lol. huge bonus that i can update their machines with a quick ssh apt update which takes literally seconds vs windows which sometimes takes half hour plus.
- ewoodrich 4mo ago
  FWIW every one of those issues can be solved by running Win11Debloat one time (except update length which is variable based on hardware, but auto-update/restart can be disabled). https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat Persists after updates, and is a straightforward easily auditable PowerShell script enabling/disabling Windows/app features via approved OS provided API interfaces without any hacky brittle workarounds that eventually stop working. It's the first thing I install on any fresh Windows 11 install for the past 4+ years. I get more ads on MacOS thanks to their lovely Apple TV, iCloud, etc push notifications than I ever see on Windows 11 (≈ 0) after running it. I've updated hundreds of times across multiple machines and it's never stopped working. I'm only reminded it exists by its absence whenever I use an out of the box Win 11 install on a new PC which is painful in comparison. I actually prefer debloated Win 11 to plain Win 10 because I get all the benefits like vastly superior multi monitor support on 11 with basically zero negatives.
guesswho_ 4mo ago
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tenderfault 4mo ago
I switched to Windows 10 as my main development machine few years ago after 25 years of continuously crashing Linux with an enormous pleasure. FreeBSD, well, there's nothing to crash there, that's the problem with it. Nothing. I didn't know almost anything about this Windows OS so I just started playing some sort of whac-a-mole game with it. I don't know what I did but right now I'm a happy (windows 11) user. I use Hyper-V with great success for driving my Linux and FreeBSD development. I like powershell and the dotnet platform and storage spaces and ntfs and many other. Good technologies, it feels good using. Windows terminal is almost OK. I stay away from crap like WSL and Code. I still use mutt for mail, not Office. And I can just play a game without any problems. There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows. Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff. No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene. When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it... I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- ptx 4mo ago
  > I like powershell and the dotnet platform and [...] Windows terminal [...] There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow [...] I just hope they don't notice me... Did you make sure to disable telemetry in .NET, and also separately in PowerShell, and also separately in Windows Terminal, and also of course in Windows itself? Otherwise your machine is sending your data to Microsoft by default. Of course, even if you do disable all of those, there are likely to be other Microsoft programs with their own telemetry enabled by default. And even if you disable those, they could at any moment add more telemetry that you don't know about.
deepsun 4mo ago
Don't MacOS users all have apple.com accounts? I hear no complains though. BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?
- Gud 4mo ago
  No.
- zuhsetaqi 4mo ago
  They might have all an Apple Account but thats not a requirement at all on macOS. Thats the difference between complaining customers and customers thatuse it because thez choose to use it.
- askonomm 4mo ago
  Most probably do yes, but it's not a requirement to use any of Apple's devices. You don't need to do some command-line kung-fu to get around online account requirement like on Windows, you can just click "Skip" at the online account step, and that's it. Perhaps you hear no complaints because unlike on Windows, MacOS does not spoon-feed you 10 screens of dark-pattern-riddled upsell ads with options of "Remind me later", "Yes" during set-up. It quite literally feels like being spat on, considering Windows is not a free operating system, and yet it still riddles you with ads and dark patterns as if some horrible shareware from the mid 2000s.
- morpheuskafka 4mo ago
  It's not really needed at all for macOS, but remains mandatory for even free apps on iPhone/iPad, so yes virtually all users have one. Same goes for free macOS App Store apps but that's not the only or even most common way to install stuff.
xeyownt 4mo ago
You don't need an online account to back up your encryption key. All you need is your password. And a well-designed disk encryption tool.
INTPenis 4mo ago
It wouldn't be so bad if they could manage proper SSO, but they keep forcing you to re-authenticate for some reason.
zubspace 4mo ago
Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great! There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio. But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise. [1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus https://github.com/pbatard/rufus
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  Would make perfect sense if your competitor does it and automatically every customer is saving a microsoft subscription per employee.
  - zubspace 4mo ago
    In some industries, Microsoft subscriptions are a drop in the ocean. Switching out things like Entra ID, Office, and print/scanning solutions would cost so much more, and come bundled with enough risk that no sane project manager would take it on lightly. As a C# software provider, making something Windows- and Linux-compatible is easier than ever. So giving up on Windows is effectively the wrong move, because you would miss out on the behemoth companies that are simply too large to transition easily. I know the majority of HN readers are fed up with Windows. That is completely understandable. But not everything about it is bad.
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      So you can list what is good about windows?
      - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
oefrha 4mo ago
I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t automatically create the user folder based on real name on the MS account, with space in it, fucking up and complicating all sorts of things.
sixseven 4mo ago
Now that Words/Excel are losing their battles against online documents, gaming is the only thing that's keeping me on Windows. Though I honestly enjoy using Windows 10, no way in hell will I upgrade my OS to Windows 11.
endymion-light 4mo ago
Lifelong windows user here - gave up last year, switched to macos for laptop & ubuntu for desktop - haven't turned back since
alkonaut 4mo ago
Without the MS account, it is _much_ harder to sell OneDrive, Copilot, Office365-whatever subscriptions etc to their users. I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things. But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.
- bayesnet 4mo ago
  I do not think that it is as well-reasoned as that. Far more likely IMO that teams are being evaluated on upsell uptake and so push these requirements to make the number on the dashboard go up. Anyway, I’d be more sympathetic to this way of thinking if windows wasn’t getting worse over time. But it seems like investment in the OS is being disfavored for investment in AI-in-things-no-one-wants-AI-in, which is inverse of the subsidy direction you propose
- 0x1d7 4mo ago
  > I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. Then buy Pro. Most people aren't happy to spend more money.
jwr 4mo ago
A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the SwiftKey keyboard app (for iOS). Recently the other shoe dropped: they introduced a requirement to be logged in "for data backup", you get a banner on top of the keyboard that cannot be permanently turned off. I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.
- morpheuskafka 4mo ago
  Apple is very strict about keyboard extensions so I am surprised it is allowed. They require it to be functional even if you don't allow any data sharing back to the app, let alone a cloud account, but I guess banners make it past?
Dachande663 4mo ago
I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton). The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice. [0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
liotier 4mo ago
... And that is the straw that broke the camel's back - and convinced my elderly father to accept my offer to migrate to KDE. Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !
My_Name 4mo ago
I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows". Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs
- krater23 4mo ago
  Exactly my turn. Win 10 is clearly the last Windows for me. For private I still use Win 7, for work I used Win 10, but the driver support for my old dell laptop(2014) is so shitty, that it's overheating and throttleling as soon it has to do some normal things. When the last bastion of Windows, the driver support is falling, I can switch to Linux. Since 2 month I use openSuse on this device and be happy. No running fan, no problems. Windows is dying.
- mancerayder 4mo ago
  I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).
senfiaj 4mo ago
If MS isn't going to fix this, I'm not going to use Windows 11 again. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-use-windows https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...
mixxit 4mo ago
Went to Kubuntu long into win11 thanks for the memories Microsoft
s_dev 4mo ago
Install Windows IoT. It's for internet of things devices and has more strict updating procedures than conventional Windows. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family/windows-iot https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family... Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.
- zparkes 4mo ago
  is media ungated/downloadable for iOT? also downgradable from pro or home?
amelius 4mo ago
I'm tired of needing an Apple account to use my hardware.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
shantnutiwari 4mo ago
I think those of us who cared have already left-- for me Mac and Linux (2 laptops). Everyone else is a hostage now; tough luck
patdoli 4mo ago
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neuropacabra 4mo ago
As much as I avoiding any Microsoft technology at any cost. I do have a gaming rig at home, and yes I have Windows on it. I only use it to launch Steam and GOG, nothing else except the casual web browsing. I have been driving Arch btw and was fine, but these days you CAN install Windows 11 locally without Microsoft account. So I took it a shot for better game compatability. This is not Linux/Window flame. I am trying to say, local account is possible and is working.
- mafuy 4mo ago
  Afaik local accounts have become harder and harder to create, intentionally, to the point where it's impossible for most people. It most definitely is not something that can be relied on to exist in the future.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  It's certainly possible, but it certainly ain't a happy path. If you have to do shift+F10, strategically disconnect your ethernet cable, or remember to tick a box when making your bootable USB to be able to make local account, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.
  - neuropacabra 4mo ago
    True
zombot 4mo ago
The operative question is: Will it make them draw any consequences?
stainablesteel 4mo ago
this is among the same kind of problem that people have with facebook and google, and these "login with your ___ account" problems if so much of your life is centralized through a few accounts, then these companies shouldn't have a legal right to ban you from using it
roody15 4mo ago
Yes it’s hard to see Microsoft become what feels to me a shell of what it once was. Back in the day I got MCP certification and MCSA certification for server 2008/2003. I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective. With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished. Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle. For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.
ta8903 4mo ago
I hope more people boycott products that require making an account to use. Most developers who would care about this sort of thing seem to draw the line at requiring a subscription, but IMO requiring an account is just as bad. There are cases where you do need an account for syncing data or whatever, but I don't see why I need an account for a fitness tracker, just show me the stats on the watch itself. Worst example of this is phones requiring an account to let you install apps, how did we let them get away with this?
breve 4mo ago
> "I don't need tips, I just want Microsoft to change it," They won't change it unless you give them a reason. Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.
liendolucas 4mo ago
> A user can set up a computer with a Microsoft account, switch to using a PIN every day, and never think about that account again. Then, one day, after a firmware update, a hardware change, or an unexpected issue, the system may display a BitLocker recovery screen requesting a recovery key. This is absolutely TRASH behavior. One of my siblings not only experienced this but after setting Bitlocker off it turned on ONCE AGAIN automatically after some time. I urged him to print those fucking codes on paper just in case after we carefully recovered them. This is one of the worst things that can happen to a non technical user.
daemin 4mo ago
One thing I disagree with the article about is that drives should not be encrypted by default. For the vast majority of people an encrypted drive is just data loss lying in wait. I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data. I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.
- antiframe 4mo ago
  > I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. Everyone has different security needs. But (maybe it's different on Windows), what's hard about popping the disk to another machine and then decrypting it with the key? Does Windows not give you access to the key?
  - nandomrumber 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - okanat 4mo ago
    Windows does give access to the key. The issue with Microsoft account and especially Windows Home onboarding is that it doesn't tell you that it encrypted the drive and there is a backup key (which it uploads to Microsoft account, often readable by authorities with a court order). Many normie users not only get locked out of their laptops but they also forget their Microsoft account password causing complete loss of data.
    - antiframe 4mo ago
      Not your key, not your crypto. => Not your key, not your data. Why would anyone want to encrypt their data and then hand their private key to anyone is mind boggling.
thrownaway561 4mo ago
I get all the hate with the requirements for Microsoft account, but I have to admit, they have made life easier. Case in point, moving to a new computer is absolutely painless now with a Microsoft Account because of OneDrive and Winget. Make sure that Onedrive is setup to backup all folder (desktop, documents, pictures. you can do this by clicking the gear icon and selecting Manage Backups) Next have this simple batch file run whenever the user logs in. It basically uses winget to update all packages to the latest version and export a list of all those packages and save it onedrive winget update --all --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements --silent winget export -o "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt" Now if you move computers, you just log in with your Microsoft account so that you will have your desktop and everything because onedrive will come over. Now just do an import with Winget and you will have 95% of your programs installed. Yes I know there might be some programs that aren't available for installation through Winget, but almost ALL popular programs are available. winget import -i "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt" It's that simple. Something that use to take days now takes minutes and 3 commands. Plus the fact that everything is backed up to the cloud, you just can't beat it. Yes I get the same stuff can be done with Google Drive, Dropbox replacing Onedrive. Chocolatey, ninite as a package manager instead of winget. Using Onedrive and winget are native and available on ANY Windows 11 machine and they WORK.
fortran77 4mo ago
I don't know what the disconnect is. I'm running Windows 11 Arm right now on the best laptop I've ever owned -- an Asus Zenbook A16 with OLED screen and 48 GB of RAM (all for $1699). It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom". I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription. I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks. I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.
- 34679 4mo ago
  1. Personal Computers are personal. Inviting an outside observer into one is no different than inviting one into the bathroom. What I do in there is my business. 2. Friction. This is likely MS's attempt to slow-walk Windows into a subscription service. If nobody resisted, that walk wouldn't be slow.
- projektfu 4mo ago
  Do you like coming back to your work and finding that it rebooted on its own schedule and lost your context? That's my biggest frustration. If I only had one computer, it would be fine, but I manage an organization that's too small for enterprise and so I have to deal with the silly ads and gizmos on a dozen computers, managing group policy requires a domain and a lot of expertise I shouldn't need, and I'm not even sure I can turn some of this stuff off using group policy. By contrast, I got a few Chromebooks and all my employees prefer them. If it weren't for a few legacy things, I'd switch entirely to ChromeOS or ChromiumOS.
  - fortran77 4mo ago
    I run pro, so I have a group policy that eliminates forced reboots. For most users, forcing updates isn't a bad idea.
newtonianrules 4mo ago
Just install Ubuntu already (if it supports the apps you need, most of which probably have web versions) and be done with it. Ubuntu 26.04 had a significantly better install experience than Windows 11.
- Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
  Ubuntu won't run my software of choice(s). Come on, Steinberg - we need a linux Cubase. Ms can go whistle, and my w10 machines are treated better than ever.
AnodicElegy 4mo ago
This stuff drives me nuts. Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Every time I log in to a Google account within the browser, it nags me to link the account to the browser itself. One time my partner clicked the popup that asks to link the account by accident (this is very easy to do and probably Google's intention) and it hijacked all of my bookmarks. When I logged out of the account, everything was gone. I looked into Firefox and Edge, but they have the same profile crap. I don't need or want to log in to my browser! I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.
- kristofferg 4mo ago
  I wish you a smooth transition. These days odds are everything will work out of the box.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  > Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Consider Chromium (the open source build) instead of Chrome when you migrate to Linux. It is in the main repo of most distributions. Chrome is literally spyware. Also Firefox (with the real uBlock Origin, not the watered down version for Chrome/Chromium) is excellent.
_-_-__-_-_- 4mo ago
I've been a daily windows user since 1998. I'm a geek. So, of course, I experimented with other operating systems. I've had Mac OS X laptops since 2006 (off and on), but I always had a main windows desktop. In 2018, I installed Manjaro XFCE on my laptop and forced myself to learn Linux and use the system. Now, I still have a windows desktop, but my laptop and my server run Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and I go weeks without ever powering-on my windows box. It's really great!
techteach00 4mo ago
I'm still on 10. Basically don't care about the security risks. I will be forced to do something once new games won't work with 10.
bastard_op 4mo ago
Either you drink your Microsoft poison, or you leave.
kokada 4mo ago
I think it is fair to encrypt the user hard drive since the majority of users are unaware that they're even leaking secrets and PII when e.g., they sell a laptop without wiping the disk first. But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article. Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  You’ve forgotten the most important fact: users don’t provide enough of a revenue stream. Therefore they aren’t represented at the table when decisions are being made that effect their fate. Similar to how there is no actual citizen representation in the Congress of the US. Now stop whining and get back to work.
JALTU 4mo ago
Well now, let's not get our knickers in a twist! The beatings will continue until morale improves.
sporkland 4mo ago
I just made a crappy Microsoft account that I don't check or tie to anything. I'm sure it will backfire at some point.
rldjbpin 4mo ago
while i understand the sentiment to switch out, i find one thing quite intriguing. the same crowd (read the website title) is happy to create workarounds to make their workflow adapt to the new os. however, very minimal mention of the various efforts to bypass and disable annoyances m$ is throwing at us. even the article mentions the OOBE as a major point. personally have been able to use windows without ever logging in since windows 8.1. the iot (embedded) version is the path of least resistance for most. it even contains old paint and calculator from windows 7! might be a skill issue, but i've found it easier to debloat once than to figure out fractional scaling in linux.
usalovakab 4mo ago
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schultzdavid 4mo ago
[dead]

570 points by josephcsible 4mo ago

they also force you to give a recovery account. i’m thinking microsoft’s hands are tied in this matter, it might be the government forcing a kyc strategy

xg15 4mo ago
"KYC" simply for operating your own PC?
- lenerdenator 4mo ago
  Of course. How else are they to know that you posted criticism of the President on the internet?
  - DaSHacka 4mo ago
    So far there haven't been any instances of that, from what I'm aware of. A particular foreign nation, on the other hand...
    - lenerdenator 4mo ago
      That's the goal, though. The current batch of elite have come up in a place where they have no real incentive to act in any way except that of their choosing. They're also exceedingly thin-skinned. If they think they can get away with ruining people who criticize them online, they'll do so.
Telemakhos 4mo ago
Apple doesn't force you to create an AppleID unless you want to use Music and the App Store. You can still run macOS as a standalone local user. So, it's not government-forced KYC.
- opan 4mo ago
  I believe on my Mac (non-primary machine, FWIW) I ended up signing into an Apple account, and I doubt I did that for no reason. I don't rely on iCloud or spend money on apps. Is it required to get Xcode, which is required for some things from homebrew to work? You did mention the App Store, which maybe applies here. Is the App Store the only way to get Xcode?
  - mjevans 4mo ago
    Yes, it's that. Xcode is the only reason I've ever touched an Apple account.
notavalleyman 4mo ago
Which government? And what's your evidence
- tupac_speedrap 4mo ago
  It's an open secret that Windows is backdoored for the NSA to be fair and that isn't even including the truly dodgy stuff like Intel Management Engine being a backdoor on a BIOS level with remote access
  - DaSHacka 4mo ago
    Do you have a source for literally any of those allegations? I'm as big of a Windows and ME hater as they come, but I'm not aware of any proven backdoors in either. Especially ME, which has been thoroughly reverse-engineered by the security community by this point. The only 'backdoor' discovered was the undocumented killswitch command that disables it after initialization.
    - fsflover 4mo ago
      Not the parent, but have you heard of Snowden leaks? Also this from the old times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
      - 0x1d7 4mo ago
        Snowden says nothing about backdoor'ed Windows. And _NSAKEY... There is no evidence that it was ever part of a backdoor. But it is good for a laugh.
        fsflover 4mo ago
        It's safe to assume that Windows is backdoored, as it's closed, not audiatable and is a part of PRISM. It's not a proof, but this is how good opsec works. And yes, this is not equivalent to what the parent said, but your reaction should be similar.

jmclnx 4mo ago

If only Windows users fully understood why M/S wants you to create an account, people would leave en-masse. The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.

tredre3 4mo ago
> That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless. Does the encryption keep the user's data safe if the device is lost or stolen? Yes? Then it fulfills its main purpose.
- jmclnx 4mo ago
  We need to define "safe". Safe from coffee shop people or in a dorm, probably yes. If you lock your laptop with a good screensaver and have a decent PW, those people are not getting in anyway. Plus with smart phones hardly anyone carries their laptop around these days. But with what M/S is doing with Windows 11 "security" any ad company with $, lawyer with a warrant or alphabet soup agencies, can get a decent idea with what is going on even if they cannot get to see your data in Excel or Word. But most M/S office data is now in the "cloud", so all bets are off for those files in many cases.
- halfcat 4mo ago
  Except for the bitlocker vulnerability that lets someone with the physical computer bypass it. Other than that, it works flawlessly.
- themafia 4mo ago
  Non technical users still write down their passwords. So: no. Do technical users have the option to install something better? Yes? Then this has no purpose.
  - davkan 4mo ago
    For the vast majority of users bitlocker just means that if someone steals your laptop or you leave it on a bus then short of a concerted effort by someone with technical ability, no one will have your photos or tax documents. It absolutely serves a meaningful purpose even if it has significant shortcomings.

johnea 4mo ago

It does make me wonder why people keep running this OS...

bigstrat2003 4mo ago
Because they feel (rightly or wrongly) there is no viable alternative. It might be that they have software which requires Windows, it might be that they think it's too complicated to set up Linux, or it might just be that they aren't aware any other option exists. But those all boil down to the same thing: people think they have to use Windows, so they tolerate its nonsense.
1over137 4mo ago
Some important software only works on Windows alas. Not everyone does everything from a web browser.
- tcfhgj 4mo ago
  Alternative OS are not limited to browser software...
  - hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
    Right, but that doesn't solve the problem they brought up in the first sentence of their comment.
- keithnz 4mo ago
  a lot of the compatibility stuff on Linux runs windows software, so that's usually not a huge blocker. Having recently switched to Linux as my main (used to run it in a VM) the real issues are all these things that don't quite work out of the box (different distros might get different results). For instance my audio when playing dota2 would randomly cut out and not return when using discord. It took a bunch of fiddling around to get both to work. Then there's weird compatibility things depending on choices you make, for instance, I used RustDesk a lot in windows. But it doesn't really work well in linux with wayland. So while my overall experience is Linux is pretty good... I'm now in a world where I can end up with all kinds of random issues, all likely solvable, but all likely semi unique to my setup.

xg15 4mo ago

> "To avoid the next problem: 'Microsoft locked my data behind bitlocker, and now I can't get it back.' they need to store that key on the MS account." Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?

mynameisvlad 4mo ago
You can save your recovery key in different formats (printed, on a USB stick, etc). The online recovery is just automatic.
- vladvasiliu 4mo ago
  I think that when you have an MS account with the automatic online key backup, BitLocker is actually turned on automatically, and the user isn't presented with the option to back it up elsewhere. You need to know about this, and manually back it up.
- polski-g 4mo ago
  So the encryption of your personal computer is at the whims of the least competent employee at Microsoft?
  - mynameisvlad 4mo ago
    I'm not exactly sure what your point is. This has always been the case considering Microsoft made the encryption itself.
sieabahlpark 4mo ago
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superkuh 4mo ago
Very much so. And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands. This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.

hollow-moe 4mo ago

That's a long article ridden with ads just to say "a redditor complains about shitty Windows OOBE requiring a Microsoft account (this has been the case for 10 years already)". Alternatives exists and are viable, now people still prefer pouring energy into complaining to a wall instead of actually moving. Getting abused is deserved at this point, it's been more than 10 years now, get a grip.

usea 4mo ago
> Getting abused is deserved at this point Nobody deserves to be abused.
- blooalien 4mo ago
  > "Nobody deserves to be abused." I beg to differ; Most people don't deserve to be abused, but those who dish out abuse on those who never asked for it, or on other such "innocents" absolutely deserve a full measure of abuse, since they clearly don't understand (or care) how it feels to be on the receiving end of it.

laughing_man 4mo ago

[dead]

h4kunamata 4mo ago

Yet they use it, they do not really care, they even install Windows games that requires kernel level spyware read anti-cheat. There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows. An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.

Cider9986 4mo ago
People don't know about the stuff you're describing. They use the OS that comes with their PC or is the one everyone else uses.
- Neywiny 4mo ago
  ^^^^^ https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/ Just like how Linus from LTT (just trust me bro on the source) said one day he needed a tool (hammer?) so he walked into the hardware store, found what looked like a hammer, and bought it. End of journey. And then he finally realized how a regular person buys tech. Most people do not care, do not know they should care, and do not care enough to know if they should care enough.
  - wincy 4mo ago
    Yeah but they could have gotten a Makita XWT15Z 18V LXT Lithium Ion Brushless Cordless Impact Hammer instead? (This is like my niece buying a $5000 Alienware to play Roblox because she thinks she “needs a gaming PC”)
    - Cider9986 4mo ago
      At least she can play Minecraft with shaders.
      - amlib 4mo ago
        I bet that $5000 PC came only with a 3050 and some high end shaders lag on it lol

password4321 4mo ago

I was in a hurry trying to log into my kid's Minecraft account, wound up clicking something to associate it with the Windows account... now the PC is in restricted mode and I'm having a hard time restoring the previously associated Microsoft account (among other things, have to ask permission to open the browser and approve the requests logging in on my phone)! Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.

Jordan-117 4mo ago
I ran into this trying to set up a new Dell laptop for my mom. It shipped to her in "S mode", meaning that among other things I couldn't install arbitrary software from the web. I assumed there'd be some straightforward way to disable it (even if it might be a little buried to discourage normies). But after several hours of searching through tutorials and mucking about in Windows settings, the command prompt, BIOS, and even the system registry, and I flatly could not do it. Never seen anything like it before. Ended up wiping and replacing Windows with Linux Mint, which she was happy with.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- xigoi 4mo ago
  Microsoft keeps being the best advocate for Linux.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Except normies don't have the option at computer stores. Even the OEMs that do offer the option to have Linux pre-installed keep pushing for "Works best with Windows". What is a non technical user to do, the choice ends up being macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS thin clients.
    - rolph 4mo ago
      this is the primary problem to begin with. MS windows installs are not being purchased because they are better or more desirable, the option to purchase non MS installs has been scuttled by MS licensing and bundling thier way into exclusive OEM installs. Bundling of Microsoft Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows Microsoft litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

throwaway81523 4mo ago

There's a similar thing with Google accounts and Android, amirite? I've avoided having a Google account but it hasn't always been easy.

m463 4mo ago
you can use an iphone without an apple id. - you have to dodge dark patterns to get through setup without one - you can't install software
opan 4mo ago
I've mostly just used LineageOS for several years now, but I believe the first time setup pushes you to sign in to a Google account, but you can easily skip it. If you do sign in, it's sticky/permanent and I think may require a reinstall to get back out of it.
- throwaway81523 4mo ago
  Lineage is interesting but doesn't support my phone or others that is want. Same with Graphene.
as1mov 4mo ago
Surprisingly no, you can use an Android phone without an account. Though you cannot install any applications from the Play Store, tbf I'll count that almost as a positive.
- type0 4mo ago
  Does it allow users to receive Android updates?
  - as1mov 4mo ago
    I think it does, since the updates are from the manufacturer. I have a OnePlus tablet configured without an account and I'm able to update it no problems.

esalman 4mo ago

I have used a Windows OS almost every day of my life since 1999 or so. Last December I had a choice and switched to MacOS for work laptop. Since then I seldom use Windows and I don't really regret. I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.

Agentlien 4mo ago
What news are you referring to? The only news about Xbox I've caught is that it's declining in profit because they removed Xbox exclusives.
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Asha is doing some good decisions, or it seemed so until the XBOX Reset blog post. However beyond XBOX, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers as per amount of owned studios especially since ABK acquisition, so even when XBOX is doing bad, Microsoft Publishing is doing great.
  - Agentlien 4mo ago
    That doesn't seem to address my comment. I was specifically asking why esalman wrote > In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox Since I wasn't sure what good news they were referring to.
    - esalman 4mo ago
      Mainly they admitted that they lost substantial amount of subscribers when they hiked game pass prices last year. They also gave away free Xbox consoles to attendees at Xbox fanfest.
m463 4mo ago
Did you create an apple id? At least macos doesn't require it to install software. ios is a different story.

ActorNightly 4mo ago

This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles. Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app. Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.

halfcat 4mo ago
You don’t have to login with the online account. Before you install: - Disable the network cards in the BIOS - Install - When prompted to setup the network press Shift+F10 - Type: start ms-cxh:localonly - Setup the local account - After install completes re-enable the network cards in the BIOS Nothing could be easier. Truly the most user-friendly OS.
- yndoendo 4mo ago
  Microsoft is even trying to get Windows IoT / Embedded to be MS accounts vs local. The same method for disabling ease of local user accounts are being enabled there. Windows IoT still forces all the useless trash to be installed ... such as XBox game bar. I have to spend every few months going through the means to disable this trash via the registry so it can be automated in air-gaped systems. Original Window Embedded, pre-IoT branding, allowed full customization. Now it is near equivalent to standard desktop. You have to pay me to use Windows OS ... even with gaming.
- thewebguyd 4mo ago
  If you have Pro edition you don't have to do any of that. Click "Sign in options"->Domain Join Instead That's it, it''ll have you create a local account.
- t0bia_s 4mo ago
  There is easier method. Set up local account during creating Win bootable install device via Rufus. During actual Win install it skips all steps about crating local account. Done.

zer0zzz 4mo ago

I have not needed to use windows for anything productive for 15 years.

sharts 4mo ago
At this point it sounds like you can’t use windows for anything productive for the next 15 years
hurtigioll 4mo ago
some people do more than just write code
- opan 4mo ago
  What are some common hold-ups you know of? I don't program but have still used GNU/Linux on my main machine for over a decade now. It can browse the web, play games, listen to music, watch TV and movies, you can draw, you can edit video, you can stream to Twitch.
  - DANmode 4mo ago
    Mostly hardware with previously-shipped drivers, and no updates planned.
  - Telaneo 4mo ago
    Adobe. Games with kernel anti-cheat. Office 365 (I think this mostly applies to overly complex Excel spreadsheets with lots of macros? There are also a bunch of people here who say LibreOffice has bad UI, or that they (somehow?) have documents that are complex enough that LibreOffice can't display them properly. Openoffice is somewhat better on those fronts, but neither are good enough if it's for actual work).
    - newtonianrules 4mo ago
      > Games with kernel anti-cheat. This one’s easy, if they don’t support Steam Deck (basically a proxy for Linux support), I don’t play them.

everyone 4mo ago

I'm doing more and more on Linux Mint these days, but there are a few niche things that still only work good on Windows. Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IOT is great tbh.. Install it without internet and you dont need a MS account at all.

DANmode 4mo ago
Do they still offer this ISO officially? Link? Thanks
- everyone 4mo ago
  I have no idea, I just have a copy from TPB. Its still supported tho. Still getting security updates. I think until 2030 ish? I'm not sure, I think the older versions of LTSC had longer guaranteed support than the newer ones.
- DaSHacka 4mo ago
  I think massgrave has a link to the iso on the Microsoft website in their listing of windows versions.
oreally 4mo ago
double recommend it for those who still want to stay on windows and are doubtful about linux

madduci 4mo ago

Windows has reached the point where it deserves only to run in a virtual machine for some needs. Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work

globular-toast 4mo ago
I installed it on a VM the other day, and trust me it was only because my job, which pays me, required it. I couldn't believe it was trying to get me to sign in to a Microsoft account to finish installation. I had to look up some arcane way to skip it. The article I read listed other methods, many of which no longer work so it seems they really want you to log in. Then it was showing me shit like the FTSE 100 price right on the desktop, and some stupid thing about the football world cup. All totally unsolicited spam. I couldn't believe people put up with Windows some 15 years ago when I ditched it. Now I'm convinced some people are just conditioned to being in an abusive relationship and can't imagine any different.
- VTimofeenko 4mo ago
  Moving 15 years back puts you into glory Win7 days. IIRC, the spam started with win8 which was released ~13 years ago and was very mild at first
  - keyringlight 4mo ago
    That's an interesting dividing line, and I think also needs to be compared against big companies setting opt-in/out defaults or the "Yes/Maybe later" patterns. What I find curious is that there's been the opportunity for spam for a lot longer, in a way the Win8 live tiles were an evolution of the widgets that first appeared in Vista, and they introduced active wallpaper along with IE4 (or was it Win98?) although that opportunity would have been much less effective as internet availability was much less.
    - VTimofeenko 4mo ago
      I can totally see Internet availabilit correlating with the rise of unwanted stuff in the install. Believe it started with 3rd party games being part of the OS at first. I don't recall the yes/maybe later dialog "options" in win8 though, at least not in the beginning. I actually really liked the win8 start menu change and the live tiles, even wrote some tiny homegrown apps with them. My logic was always "if I am opening the start menu, I will want to interact with that menu and only it until it's closed", so having it fullscreen made sense.

freediddy 4mo ago

I was forced to switch to Windows 11 despite promising myself that I would never do this. WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better. Whoever you are, I hate you.

moi2388 4mo ago
Product owners are the worst thing to happen to products since sliced bread.
mdavid626 4mo ago
The new taskbar was written by an intern on his first day using Copilot in Javascript. Zero fucks were given that day.
BuyMyBitcoins 4mo ago
Check out Start11. I’m forced to use Windows 11 for work but I’ve managed to get the Windows 10 taskbar and start menu back. It only cost $8. I literally hate the Windows 11 taskbar.
- ycuser2 4mo ago
  Winhawk is worth a try aswell (free): https://windhawk.net/ https://windhawk.net/
  - layer8 4mo ago
    And OpenShell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- freediddy 4mo ago
  THANK YOU. I bought it off Steam and it's exactly what I needed!

moomoo11 4mo ago

godspeed for anyone still using windows in 2026 i’m happy on mac even with its ux regressions, and my ubuntu workstation.

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

I ditched Windows in 2022. I'm not going back to Windows unless Microsoft makes an OS for professionals that is stripped down out of the box to show how serious they are. No ads of any kind, no garbage online account features, nothing, just core offline-ready Windows. I bet it would perform drastically better too.

marak830 4mo ago
Yup, Windows 10 LTSC here. It's a lot faster and smoother, but I'm already transitioning to Linux on my other boxes. Will probably move before LTSC runs out as well. edit: I realised I overplayed how much faster and smoother it is. compared to standard win 10 or 11. Example being my login screen sometimes struggles to come up when the computer is locked (work around double mash CTRL-ALT-DEL)
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  I have a Surface Book 2 which was insanely fast when I bought it. Its pretty vanilla, I dont like to tweak Windows often it usually feels like it degrades, its been sluggish the last two years or so. Idk what Microsoft did but used to be vanilla Windows was performant enough, they must have fired their performance guys? Idk
  - marak830 4mo ago
    Yeah, their performance has gone in the toilet. Recently we needed an old system setup just for group meetings in the office. I installed 11 on it - it struggled, gave up, threw a linux install on for giggles and it's buttery smooth.
cafebabbe 4mo ago
Same (2024), but i wouldn't come back in a hurry if they did so. Basically everything works now in Linux world, including my obscure devices, music & video editing, and my whole steam library... with better performance. It's sort of insane.

awesomeusername 4mo ago

Linux succeeded in the datacenter because of some atrocious choices MS made early on. Now it's going to succeed on the desktop for the same reason Bye bye windows

pmontra 4mo ago
Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one: First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install. Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes. It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well. There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target. Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.
- simianwords 4mo ago
  > Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes. No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?
  - cjs_ac 4mo ago
    Microsoft is called Microsoft because they make software for microcomputers. Networking and multi-user systems aren’t in their DNA.
    - simianwords 4mo ago
      Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.
      - 4mo ago

donkeylazy456 4mo ago

asking account for insider program is evil.

cm2187 4mo ago

I enjoy windows 10 hugely now that it is out of support. It became way better when microsoft started tormenting the users of win11 instead of win10, and now that windows update doesn't bring new catastrophes and unexpected reboot, the OS is finally not interfering with usage anymore.

tommica 4mo ago
You are not worried about 0-days and other malware?
- tommek4077 4mo ago
  A simple trade off. Guaranteed malware from microsoft, or potential attacks that you can mitigate with firewalls, airgaps or Anti-Virus software.
- olyjohn 4mo ago
  Not really. The odds are way higher that an update will hose your system and data.
- gib444 4mo ago
  You mean Windows 11, or 10? I joke
- bad_username 4mo ago
  I use Windows 10 with a relatively obscure firewall software with a per-process/per-service whitelist, and try to not be stupid on the Internet. I also do regular backups. This should cover most of the risk model applicable to me. Has worked so far.
  - robtherobber 4mo ago
    I don't suppose that you can share the setup with us? What firewall, how are the backups performed, how regular etc.
- sviruz 4mo ago

grougnax 4mo ago

[dead]

mdavid626 4mo ago

[dead]

3stacks 4mo ago

And what are you going to do about it, Windows 11 users?

toofy 4mo ago

this is why ive finally ditched windows for everything. ive been a dual boot linux user for years, but still booting into windows for games and work. no more, i just couldn’t take the: - constant nagging - ads for all of microsoft’s other shit that i absolutely did not want to use. copilot, onedrive, xbox, and on and on. - the nonstop “sign in to your microsoft account” etc… - settings i very deliberately changed reverting back on update. - how stupidly long updates would take. i just finally went to linux for everything. i was concerned about work stuff, and i ahve to admit, its absolutely definitely not perfect, but it still … feels? … better. i’m not sure this is the right phrase, but it just feels more fun. i feel good when i diagnose a linux bug, like productive or something. that feels more like fun to me compared to the dark patterns of windows which feels frustrating. if that makes sense. i’d rather spend 20 minutes fixing a weird quirk on linux than the deal with the assault microsoft is constantly throwing at me when using windows. and id absolutely rather put up with a feature that isnt fully complete yet on linux than deal with dark patterns on windows. and gaming? at this point, if a game doesn’t work on linux, i just play something else that does. there are just way too many choices of rad games that run good on linux. it does help that the games i’ve been playing lately (like cyberpunk) run a bit better on linux anyway. the only holdout for me at this point is video and photo editing, i have to break out my macbook for lightroom and premiere still. but from what i understand linux is moving very very fast in that area so i’ll just use my mb until those are caught up. the day i can ditch my adobe subscription will be the type of “let’s go to the bar and toast with shots” kind of day. and from what other people say, it’s very close. the cherry on top for me is, weve moved our parents machines to linux mint. my gf and i jokingly wonder if they would have even noticed if we hadn’t told them, firefox just works for their facebook and amazon lol. huge bonus that i can update their machines with a quick ssh apt update which takes literally seconds vs windows which sometimes takes half hour plus.

ewoodrich 4mo ago
FWIW every one of those issues can be solved by running Win11Debloat one time (except update length which is variable based on hardware, but auto-update/restart can be disabled). https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat Persists after updates, and is a straightforward easily auditable PowerShell script enabling/disabling Windows/app features via approved OS provided API interfaces without any hacky brittle workarounds that eventually stop working. It's the first thing I install on any fresh Windows 11 install for the past 4+ years. I get more ads on MacOS thanks to their lovely Apple TV, iCloud, etc push notifications than I ever see on Windows 11 (≈ 0) after running it. I've updated hundreds of times across multiple machines and it's never stopped working. I'm only reminded it exists by its absence whenever I use an out of the box Win 11 install on a new PC which is painful in comparison. I actually prefer debloated Win 11 to plain Win 10 because I get all the benefits like vastly superior multi monitor support on 11 with basically zero negatives.

guesswho_ 4mo ago

[dead]

tenderfault 4mo ago

I switched to Windows 10 as my main development machine few years ago after 25 years of continuously crashing Linux with an enormous pleasure. FreeBSD, well, there's nothing to crash there, that's the problem with it. Nothing. I didn't know almost anything about this Windows OS so I just started playing some sort of whac-a-mole game with it. I don't know what I did but right now I'm a happy (windows 11) user. I use Hyper-V with great success for driving my Linux and FreeBSD development. I like powershell and the dotnet platform and storage spaces and ntfs and many other. Good technologies, it feels good using. Windows terminal is almost OK. I stay away from crap like WSL and Code. I still use mutt for mail, not Office. And I can just play a game without any problems. There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows. Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff. No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene. When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it... I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ptx 4mo ago
> I like powershell and the dotnet platform and [...] Windows terminal [...] There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow [...] I just hope they don't notice me... Did you make sure to disable telemetry in .NET, and also separately in PowerShell, and also separately in Windows Terminal, and also of course in Windows itself? Otherwise your machine is sending your data to Microsoft by default. Of course, even if you do disable all of those, there are likely to be other Microsoft programs with their own telemetry enabled by default. And even if you disable those, they could at any moment add more telemetry that you don't know about.

deepsun 4mo ago

Don't MacOS users all have apple.com accounts? I hear no complains though. BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?

Gud 4mo ago
No.
zuhsetaqi 4mo ago
They might have all an Apple Account but thats not a requirement at all on macOS. Thats the difference between complaining customers and customers thatuse it because thez choose to use it.
askonomm 4mo ago
Most probably do yes, but it's not a requirement to use any of Apple's devices. You don't need to do some command-line kung-fu to get around online account requirement like on Windows, you can just click "Skip" at the online account step, and that's it. Perhaps you hear no complaints because unlike on Windows, MacOS does not spoon-feed you 10 screens of dark-pattern-riddled upsell ads with options of "Remind me later", "Yes" during set-up. It quite literally feels like being spat on, considering Windows is not a free operating system, and yet it still riddles you with ads and dark patterns as if some horrible shareware from the mid 2000s.
morpheuskafka 4mo ago
It's not really needed at all for macOS, but remains mandatory for even free apps on iPhone/iPad, so yes virtually all users have one. Same goes for free macOS App Store apps but that's not the only or even most common way to install stuff.

xeyownt 4mo ago

You don't need an online account to back up your encryption key. All you need is your password. And a well-designed disk encryption tool.

INTPenis 4mo ago

It wouldn't be so bad if they could manage proper SSO, but they keep forcing you to re-authenticate for some reason.

zubspace 4mo ago

Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great! There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio. But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise. [1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

LtWorf 4mo ago
Would make perfect sense if your competitor does it and automatically every customer is saving a microsoft subscription per employee.
- zubspace 4mo ago
  In some industries, Microsoft subscriptions are a drop in the ocean. Switching out things like Entra ID, Office, and print/scanning solutions would cost so much more, and come bundled with enough risk that no sane project manager would take it on lightly. As a C# software provider, making something Windows- and Linux-compatible is easier than ever. So giving up on Windows is effectively the wrong move, because you would miss out on the behemoth companies that are simply too large to transition easily. I know the majority of HN readers are fed up with Windows. That is completely understandable. But not everything about it is bad.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    So you can list what is good about windows?
    - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago

oefrha 4mo ago

I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t automatically create the user folder based on real name on the MS account, with space in it, fucking up and complicating all sorts of things.

sixseven 4mo ago

Now that Words/Excel are losing their battles against online documents, gaming is the only thing that's keeping me on Windows. Though I honestly enjoy using Windows 10, no way in hell will I upgrade my OS to Windows 11.

endymion-light 4mo ago

Lifelong windows user here - gave up last year, switched to macos for laptop & ubuntu for desktop - haven't turned back since

alkonaut 4mo ago

Without the MS account, it is _much_ harder to sell OneDrive, Copilot, Office365-whatever subscriptions etc to their users. I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things. But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.

bayesnet 4mo ago
I do not think that it is as well-reasoned as that. Far more likely IMO that teams are being evaluated on upsell uptake and so push these requirements to make the number on the dashboard go up. Anyway, I’d be more sympathetic to this way of thinking if windows wasn’t getting worse over time. But it seems like investment in the OS is being disfavored for investment in AI-in-things-no-one-wants-AI-in, which is inverse of the subsidy direction you propose
0x1d7 4mo ago
> I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. Then buy Pro. Most people aren't happy to spend more money.

jwr 4mo ago

A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the SwiftKey keyboard app (for iOS). Recently the other shoe dropped: they introduced a requirement to be logged in "for data backup", you get a banner on top of the keyboard that cannot be permanently turned off. I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.

morpheuskafka 4mo ago
Apple is very strict about keyboard extensions so I am surprised it is allowed. They require it to be functional even if you don't allow any data sharing back to the app, let alone a cloud account, but I guess banners make it past?

Dachande663 4mo ago

I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton). The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice. [0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

liotier 4mo ago

... And that is the straw that broke the camel's back - and convinced my elderly father to accept my offer to migrate to KDE. Also, I can now shield him from most of the incomprehensible unsolicited dialogs that triggered support calls. I haven't had to field a single complaint since I tuned his desktop !

My_Name 4mo ago

I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows". Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs

krater23 4mo ago
Exactly my turn. Win 10 is clearly the last Windows for me. For private I still use Win 7, for work I used Win 10, but the driver support for my old dell laptop(2014) is so shitty, that it's overheating and throttleling as soon it has to do some normal things. When the last bastion of Windows, the driver support is falling, I can switch to Linux. Since 2 month I use openSuse on this device and be happy. No running fan, no problems. Windows is dying.
mancerayder 4mo ago
I found Fedora Workstation 'mature' and an easy thing to switch to - there are a few Gnome conveniences like taskbar and menus that can be easily turned on (Claude helped me there).

senfiaj 4mo ago

If MS isn't going to fix this, I'm not going to use Windows 11 again. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-use-windows https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...

mixxit 4mo ago

Went to Kubuntu long into win11 thanks for the memories Microsoft

s_dev 4mo ago

Install Windows IoT. It's for internet of things devices and has more strict updating procedures than conventional Windows. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family/windows-iot https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family... Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.

zparkes 4mo ago
is media ungated/downloadable for iOT? also downgradable from pro or home?

amelius 4mo ago

I'm tired of needing an Apple account to use my hardware.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

shantnutiwari 4mo ago

I think those of us who cared have already left-- for me Mac and Linux (2 laptops). Everyone else is a hostage now; tough luck

patdoli 4mo ago

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neuropacabra 4mo ago

As much as I avoiding any Microsoft technology at any cost. I do have a gaming rig at home, and yes I have Windows on it. I only use it to launch Steam and GOG, nothing else except the casual web browsing. I have been driving Arch btw and was fine, but these days you CAN install Windows 11 locally without Microsoft account. So I took it a shot for better game compatability. This is not Linux/Window flame. I am trying to say, local account is possible and is working.

mafuy 4mo ago
Afaik local accounts have become harder and harder to create, intentionally, to the point where it's impossible for most people. It most definitely is not something that can be relied on to exist in the future.
Telaneo 4mo ago
It's certainly possible, but it certainly ain't a happy path. If you have to do shift+F10, strategically disconnect your ethernet cable, or remember to tick a box when making your bootable USB to be able to make local account, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong.
- neuropacabra 4mo ago
  True

zombot 4mo ago

The operative question is: Will it make them draw any consequences?

stainablesteel 4mo ago

this is among the same kind of problem that people have with facebook and google, and these "login with your ___ account" problems if so much of your life is centralized through a few accounts, then these companies shouldn't have a legal right to ban you from using it

roody15 4mo ago

Yes it’s hard to see Microsoft become what feels to me a shell of what it once was. Back in the day I got MCP certification and MCSA certification for server 2008/2003. I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective. With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished. Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle. For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.

ta8903 4mo ago

I hope more people boycott products that require making an account to use. Most developers who would care about this sort of thing seem to draw the line at requiring a subscription, but IMO requiring an account is just as bad. There are cases where you do need an account for syncing data or whatever, but I don't see why I need an account for a fitness tracker, just show me the stats on the watch itself. Worst example of this is phones requiring an account to let you install apps, how did we let them get away with this?

breve 4mo ago

> "I don't need tips, I just want Microsoft to change it," They won't change it unless you give them a reason. Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.

liendolucas 4mo ago

> A user can set up a computer with a Microsoft account, switch to using a PIN every day, and never think about that account again. Then, one day, after a firmware update, a hardware change, or an unexpected issue, the system may display a BitLocker recovery screen requesting a recovery key. This is absolutely TRASH behavior. One of my siblings not only experienced this but after setting Bitlocker off it turned on ONCE AGAIN automatically after some time. I urged him to print those fucking codes on paper just in case after we carefully recovered them. This is one of the worst things that can happen to a non technical user.

daemin 4mo ago

One thing I disagree with the article about is that drives should not be encrypted by default. For the vast majority of people an encrypted drive is just data loss lying in wait. I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data. I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.

antiframe 4mo ago
> I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. Everyone has different security needs. But (maybe it's different on Windows), what's hard about popping the disk to another machine and then decrypting it with the key? Does Windows not give you access to the key?
- nandomrumber 4mo ago
  [dead]
- okanat 4mo ago
  Windows does give access to the key. The issue with Microsoft account and especially Windows Home onboarding is that it doesn't tell you that it encrypted the drive and there is a backup key (which it uploads to Microsoft account, often readable by authorities with a court order). Many normie users not only get locked out of their laptops but they also forget their Microsoft account password causing complete loss of data.
  - antiframe 4mo ago
    Not your key, not your crypto. => Not your key, not your data. Why would anyone want to encrypt their data and then hand their private key to anyone is mind boggling.

thrownaway561 4mo ago

I get all the hate with the requirements for Microsoft account, but I have to admit, they have made life easier. Case in point, moving to a new computer is absolutely painless now with a Microsoft Account because of OneDrive and Winget. Make sure that Onedrive is setup to backup all folder (desktop, documents, pictures. you can do this by clicking the gear icon and selecting Manage Backups) Next have this simple batch file run whenever the user logs in. It basically uses winget to update all packages to the latest version and export a list of all those packages and save it onedrive winget update --all --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements --silent winget export -o "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt" Now if you move computers, you just log in with your Microsoft account so that you will have your desktop and everything because onedrive will come over. Now just do an import with Winget and you will have 95% of your programs installed. Yes I know there might be some programs that aren't available for installation through Winget, but almost ALL popular programs are available. winget import -i "C:\Users\<user>\OneDrive\WingetPrograms.txt" It's that simple. Something that use to take days now takes minutes and 3 commands. Plus the fact that everything is backed up to the cloud, you just can't beat it. Yes I get the same stuff can be done with Google Drive, Dropbox replacing Onedrive. Chocolatey, ninite as a package manager instead of winget. Using Onedrive and winget are native and available on ANY Windows 11 machine and they WORK.

fortran77 4mo ago

I don't know what the disconnect is. I'm running Windows 11 Arm right now on the best laptop I've ever owned -- an Asus Zenbook A16 with OLED screen and 48 GB of RAM (all for $1699). It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom". I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription. I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks. I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.

34679 4mo ago
1. Personal Computers are personal. Inviting an outside observer into one is no different than inviting one into the bathroom. What I do in there is my business. 2. Friction. This is likely MS's attempt to slow-walk Windows into a subscription service. If nobody resisted, that walk wouldn't be slow.
projektfu 4mo ago
Do you like coming back to your work and finding that it rebooted on its own schedule and lost your context? That's my biggest frustration. If I only had one computer, it would be fine, but I manage an organization that's too small for enterprise and so I have to deal with the silly ads and gizmos on a dozen computers, managing group policy requires a domain and a lot of expertise I shouldn't need, and I'm not even sure I can turn some of this stuff off using group policy. By contrast, I got a few Chromebooks and all my employees prefer them. If it weren't for a few legacy things, I'd switch entirely to ChromeOS or ChromiumOS.
- fortran77 4mo ago
  I run pro, so I have a group policy that eliminates forced reboots. For most users, forcing updates isn't a bad idea.

newtonianrules 4mo ago

Just install Ubuntu already (if it supports the apps you need, most of which probably have web versions) and be done with it. Ubuntu 26.04 had a significantly better install experience than Windows 11.

Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
Ubuntu won't run my software of choice(s). Come on, Steinberg - we need a linux Cubase. Ms can go whistle, and my w10 machines are treated better than ever.

AnodicElegy 4mo ago

This stuff drives me nuts. Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Every time I log in to a Google account within the browser, it nags me to link the account to the browser itself. One time my partner clicked the popup that asks to link the account by accident (this is very easy to do and probably Google's intention) and it hijacked all of my bookmarks. When I logged out of the account, everything was gone. I looked into Firefox and Edge, but they have the same profile crap. I don't need or want to log in to my browser! I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.

kristofferg 4mo ago
I wish you a smooth transition. These days odds are everything will work out of the box.
drnick1 4mo ago
> Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Consider Chromium (the open source build) instead of Chrome when you migrate to Linux. It is in the main repo of most distributions. Chrome is literally spyware. Also Firefox (with the real uBlock Origin, not the watered down version for Chrome/Chromium) is excellent.

_-_-__-_-_- 4mo ago

I've been a daily windows user since 1998. I'm a geek. So, of course, I experimented with other operating systems. I've had Mac OS X laptops since 2006 (off and on), but I always had a main windows desktop. In 2018, I installed Manjaro XFCE on my laptop and forced myself to learn Linux and use the system. Now, I still have a windows desktop, but my laptop and my server run Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and I go weeks without ever powering-on my windows box. It's really great!

techteach00 4mo ago

I'm still on 10. Basically don't care about the security risks. I will be forced to do something once new games won't work with 10.

bastard_op 4mo ago

Either you drink your Microsoft poison, or you leave.

kokada 4mo ago

I think it is fair to encrypt the user hard drive since the majority of users are unaware that they're even leaking secrets and PII when e.g., they sell a laptop without wiping the disk first. But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article. Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.

Henchman21 4mo ago
You’ve forgotten the most important fact: users don’t provide enough of a revenue stream. Therefore they aren’t represented at the table when decisions are being made that effect their fate. Similar to how there is no actual citizen representation in the Congress of the US. Now stop whining and get back to work.

JALTU 4mo ago

Well now, let's not get our knickers in a twist! The beatings will continue until morale improves.

sporkland 4mo ago

I just made a crappy Microsoft account that I don't check or tie to anything. I'm sure it will backfire at some point.

rldjbpin 4mo ago

while i understand the sentiment to switch out, i find one thing quite intriguing. the same crowd (read the website title) is happy to create workarounds to make their workflow adapt to the new os. however, very minimal mention of the various efforts to bypass and disable annoyances m$ is throwing at us. even the article mentions the OOBE as a major point. personally have been able to use windows without ever logging in since windows 8.1. the iot (embedded) version is the path of least resistance for most. it even contains old paint and calculator from windows 7! might be a skill issue, but i've found it easier to debloat once than to figure out fractional scaling in linux.

usalovakab 4mo ago

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schultzdavid 4mo ago

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