- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
The workarounds people come up with to not make an MS account seem crazy to me. What difference does it really make if its a local account or not? You are still using windows so clearly you are ok with everything else, but the account is too much?
I shouldn’t need to have an internet connection to login to my desktop.
I don’t have a personal Microsoft account, and have no desire to create one more account, but am required by my organisation to use 1 Windows-only software for 2 hours every week. As such, I run that in a Windows VM on my computer, and this doesn’t seem like it’d be worth the effort of making a MS account
Using a Microsoft cloud account to log into my local computer means Microsoft owns credentials to a device in my house, and if they get hacked (which they do, all the fucking time), my device is less secure because of it and my data is less secure because of it.
There’s absolutely no need for my copy of Windows to require me to login using a cloud-based account.
You can use all manner of apps to disable the telemetry and privacy nonsense that people have issues with Windows about (and I similarly find Microsoft’s privacy-last approach to be tedious), but if your computer requires you to use a cloud account to log in, then your computer is susceptible to that cloud account being hijacked or hacked and Microsoft has given absolutely no good reason for this to be the case.
Logging in to a Microsoft account doesn’t provide any real benefit to the user at all, the best you can say is that you’re not prompted to log in again if you run the Microsoft Store or the Xbox app, and that’s not a compelling benefit.
Well, at least in 10, the username is something dumb and you can’t change it during creation (or everywhere easily after creation) when doing an online account. But linking after you create your account let you set it to whatever. So there may be people who are fine with online accounts but just want to set their usernames to whatever.
upgraded to 11 for free from win2k? dual boot linux and just running updates and rebooting the win11 every few months. paid $100 for win2k a long time ago. stupid giant passkey license, no thanks. got a free account and switched to digital at some point.
Is this what they mean when they say “stream of consciousness”?
edit: Fix ironic typo.
ChrisTitusTech’s latest video on it… You’re welcome. He has a curl you can use at any point in the installer to bypass the whole thing and land on desktop in a local account named admin
At this point they’ll restrict access to the registry.
i wonder if they could make a read-only config partition like with macos
Do custom installation (ISO) creation utilities like NTLite still allow you to remove the requirement?
I’m going to give Google money by buying a Pixel to free myself from Google…
Lol it’s been great getting off of Windows over the last few months.
I thought I would miss it, but Proton in Steam has been amazing on Ubuntu, with some exceptions (Stupid EA crap from skate. 2025).
Dual booting for now is OK, but gaming is pretty garbage anyway, so I will probably abandon Windows entirely soon. Definitely my last version of it. Feel so liberated having hobbies off computer anyway, and now using my computers with Ubuntu is actually enjoyable again instead of driving an expensive spy machine.
:)
I had no clue skate didn’t work for Linux until I went to play it :'( it was installed and everything. Bummer.
It shows as installable on Ubuntu in Steam, so I hilariously found out after installing Ubuntu and skate on my gf’s computer only to not be able to play it 😆
That sucks! I wish there was some connection between Steam and areweanticheatyet.com so we could know if it’ll run before we install it
Linux, your time has finally come
All Microsoft had to do for Windows to remain the most popular home and office OS in the world for decades to come, was to just not fucking suck.
The problem is that they realized that they could do both.
Woahwoahwoah, let’s not be unrealistic here.
But honestly I’m happy for the final push to Linux. I’ve been telling myself to make the change for a few years now but what’s happening with AI training and side-loading / complete loss of privacy / general horrible vibes in the closed-source tech-sector… Linux it is. I’m even ready for the learning curve. I grew up on dos, I’m sure I can find my way around it.
Well I paid for what I have, and no one is allowed to rob me of what I pay for so I’m good. Sorry Microsoft you don’t get to rob people any more than the rest of us. All it does is send people elsewhere.
I am horrified by what computers have become, from expensive magical tools to solve real problems, to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.

The future was here, once upon a time.
🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶
and still expensive
to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
Hmmm, I wonder which background economical system we all live in that could explain why every single technology ends up controlled by the top 1% to make our lives more miserable and their profits higher…
Those kinds of computers still exist, it’s called Linux.
I’ve never been more appreciative than I am now of the decades of effort that have gone into building this free and open-source operating system.
Imagine if we were here in 2025, with all the incumbent operating systems going to shit, but in a world where Linux didn’t exist and there was no alternative that wasn’t owned by a tech giant.
I don’t even want to imagine.
The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD
In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.
I think it’s almost certain that Linux’s niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.
Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.
I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.
As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.
Sure, if it wasn’t Linux then another project may have got the love and attention.
I’m not glad it was Linux specifically, just glad there is a credible FOSS alternative of some kind, and in our universe that’s Linux.
You might think there’s no such world where we wouldn’t have had some credible alternative, and as reasonable as that is - because freedom and independence are things people intrinsically want - I’m sure if you flap the butterfly wings enough times there’d be a universe where we all just collectively decided that commercial operating systems were the answer.
Glad I don’t live there.
Yeah. Look at the shitheap we had to settle with when Reddit enshittified beyond redemption. We’re really lucky to have such a well-polished alternative to Windows right now, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that Windows was awful from the beginning. If a halfway-decent operating system like OS/2 had become the default then we might be really scrambling right now.
I mean, we already do live in that universe, just for the mobile space.
Yes, competition is good.
It is just a problem when the competition is big tech and can ignore everybody else as they get even more money from somewhere else like Azure.
Don’t forget to donate to your favorite distro (and other open source projects) to help them keep the lights on.
Gotta do our part to fight the massive mega corps from devouring every aspect of our lives.
This “subscription” mentality is ruining value for a lot of society but, holy shit, do you ever rake in those huge amounts of monthly cash, for very little work.
It’s not our mentality, it’s their strategy.
Wars breed new strategies.
Sometimes it’s free trade as a carrot and embargo as a stick, like with, well, one can try to nail it to Napoleonic wars, but as old as life. Sometimes it’s mass production and standardization and ergonomics and scientific industrial design, one can try to nail these to WWII, but also as old as life. And sometimes it’s controlled escalation as a way to reach your goals without triggering nuclear response, which one can nail to the Cold War.
American strategy of the Cold War is being used against world markets, ladies and gentlemen. Together with the previous two strategies mentioned.
The Soviet one was the opposite, to try to make even the smallest transgression cause firmly the same response, so that controlled escalation wouldn’t work, but unfortunately one is founded in human psychology (plus game theory) and the other in rational knowledge (just game theory), the latter always loses. It was called scientific-technical revolution and meant literally its name - instead of gradual escalation, which favors the stronger side, you should create technical means to punch a fatal wound, nothing gradual.
So - the subscriptions themselves matter very little, they are just slowly transitioning everything big to dependence upon remote components available over the Internet.
It’s funny, actually, so much gradual work, and in the end it’ll be just wasted time - even making computers is not magic. State of the art processes could as well be that for most of humanity, but for many purposes Pentium MMX is a good enough computer, and such are not magic.
And especially making computer software of the kind that’s being “metropolized” like this is not magic. Most of it is complex simply because of legacy, backwards compatibility and as a barrier for competitors making alternative implementations.
I am never abandoning you, Linux
Don’t plug to many, otherwise people might start jumping ship!
just making it easier to act like they don’t even exist. I’ll never, EVER get an account for MY computer.
Same, I refuse to have my OS linked to anything other then a local account.
Especially since most email accounts now need cell phone numbers, and home addresses.
There’s no online accounts needed for Linux.
exactly
I installed windows 11 a dozen time at work (never at home) and I just click on “domain login”, it just creates a local account and then after the install I have to manually join the domain. No Microsoft account enforcement at all.
It’s regular Windows 11, not Enterprise, we are a small company.
But I’m wondering, this bypass is too easy, is it because it sees that the DNS server is also an active directory server, so it allows that, or the trick is that you tell him you want to join a domain?
Or maybe it’s a domain enrollment bug because we’re using samba 4 under Debian as active directory server and not Windows server/entra id/whatever they call it this month?
I just click on “domain login”
It’s regular Windows 11, not Enterprise
You need to have 11 Pro or better to domain join a computer.
Your computer would also need to be joined to your domain to allow the login, so there is definitely some config going on that is not available to the typical home user.
I don’t think they ever said they plan to require it for Windows Pro or above skus. It’s only home (you know the one business shouldn’t be using anyway) that they said they wanted to enforce it on.
They actually did a lot of mess with Pro as well. There has been a “watering down” of Pro since Windows 10 to make sure that they can still do their anticonsumer crap to users. I imagine they also are trying to push businesses to get Enterprise instead of picking up relatively easy/inexpensive Pro licenses.
Is this about Windows Home edition? I don’t need to do anything hacky to get a local account but I also don’t use Home edition.














