Posted by rbanffy 5 days ago
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
" Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement. "
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
edit again: do they even need pc business, they make all their profits from server stuff now, they may as well wrap up the pc os division ;)
loss leader funda in action, prolly.
or, sort of: those who live together, stick together.
aka if you buy window pcs, you're likely to buy windows servers and vice versa.
In fiscal year 2026, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment (products & services) are as follows:
Dynamics Products And Cloud Services: $9.01 B
Enterprise and partner services: $8.26 B
Linked In Corporation: $19.82 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Commercial Products And Cloud Services: $102.00 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Consumer Products and Cloud Services: $9.18 B
Other Products And Services: $109.00 M
Search Advertising: $15.18 B
Server Products And Cloud Services: $129.43 B
Windows and Devices: $17.08 B
XBOX: $21.79 B
https://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/reven...
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
Then it got a virus.
30 minutes after I finished installing windows.
Like if you dig even slightly below the surface you get a dialog window straight from windows 95. Network settings for example, something I routinely have to deal with. It is absurd VPN companies make full-blown windows desktop software to tweak VPN settings on your PC because the default windows UI is so crap.
I doubt there's many people using them, so I can see why they don't bother to support alternative shells.
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
It's annoying because the x button on the windows is now a completely useless widget to me, and I have to close apps via cmd+q instead. It's even more annoying that I can't actually close Finder, even though I'm using a different filebrowser.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
Edit: just to add to that the same ads (for cloud storage and premium services) that people in the Microsoft world get pissy about very much exists on that side of the fence. It's a race to the bottom, Apple isn't there to lead by example.
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.
* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)
* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)
* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.
And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
Everybody should have simply ignored them. Win 10 yes, whatever you're trying to pull with 11, no. What could MS have done about that? Threaten to end support and then relent when nobody takes the bait?
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
No, it's just made it worse for you. You aren't the customer though. Enterprises are customers, you're just a lowly user.
Hopefully one day someone at Microsoft will remember that customers are actually made out of users.
Whether that is to the benefit of smaller enterprises is a separate question, but it's clear that almost all of the effort going into windows is (and has been) aimed at the enterprise. Users be damned.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/whats-ne...
Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
After a year or so, she is a happy camper, steam works, web works, all is good. Though once we start with the art software, that might be a bit tricky.
Only issue that it had was when after an os update the extra hdd mount points lost their execute flags for some reason, so unfortunately not a 100% technical free experience.
Depending on interests other solid sw is Inkscape, Blender, and GIMP. But those get increasingly intricate to use. I also wonder how the Adobe AI clones will do after their first one shot publicity.
I did not want a microsoft account for local logins, telemetry, i had already used linux for 15 years for work so.. new gaming computer is running Fedora. Steam is working nicely, Gog is working too. Amd rx9070 with no driver issues.
Something that took me way too long to figure out is that you can have Steam run arbitrary Windows software in a Steam-managed -er- Protonprefix. [0] Perhaps this might remove some of the hassle of handling Art Software if Wine doesn't quite work for you?
To do this, you can use the menu option to "Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library", browse for any old .EXE, and Steam will handle setting up Proton for you. You can also change the .EXE that that Steam entry points to after all that shit gets set up... so I _assume_ that you could first point to the .EXE for the Art Software's installer, let it run through the install process, and then change what the Steam entry points to to the .EXE for the Art Software.
[0] ...it's like a WINEPREFIX, but with Proton... get it???
This might be super helpful for her: https://getartcraft.com/apps. Works extremely well as a CC etc. replacemenmt.
Also https://capycanvas.art/ - a lovely native Linux replacement for Procreate, which I've been looking for ever since my 2018 iPad Pro stopped receiving updates.
In the meantime, Krita and a few online apps have been around and very successful.
Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.
Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.
In the end I cleaned 700 gb wasted.
That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.
If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.
The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.
What doesn't work specifically?
Shift delete bypasses the relocation of files to the recycle bin.
RMDIR [/S] [/Q] [drive:]pathhttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
I just recently installed Windows 11 on a computer and this is the steps that I followed
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
It's two steps:
1) During Windows setup you push Shift-F10
2) It opens a command prompt and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter it reboots and allows local mode.
Microsoft should not have hidden this away like they have and it should be an option for everyone installing Windows, and I recognize this isn't a solution for the non-technical user.. but for you specifically if it's something you're comfortable doing, it's an option to allow you to avoid having to use a Microsoft account when installing Windows.
If we always just say 'Oh, well, if you do XYZ then you can manage to do A despite B' then we're eroding our control and agency. Slowly the bypasses will phase out, as they have slowly been in this case, and then we're really in a poor state.
I had a tech support client who came to be because they valued their privacy and didn't want an account but who had no idea how to make that happen. They didn't even really know what to be looking for.
And yes, I later learned that aka.ms is a real Microsoft URL. But when it was first described to me it sounded exactly like ransomware and had exactly that effect.
You're right that I probably made an assumption that someone posting on hacker News would have the technical ability to hit a keyboard combination and type a command on a command line and hit enter, which is essentially what's required currently to utilize the local account ( https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/ )
My reply was intended as more of a direct message to OP, as opposed to general advice I think every end user should know and follow. I should have been more clear.
For now I just use a customer-supplied email address which I used to setup a Microsoft account, setup Windows and use that account, immediately create a local-only 'admin' account with full rights, delete the online associated account, and start creating user account(s) from there.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
There are also community projects like NTLite ( https://ntlite.com/ ) and Windows ISO Debloater ( https://github.com/itsNileshHere/Windows-ISO-Debloater ) for the more technically advanced that want full control to prevent the bloat from even making it to your machine during installation at all (instead of having to clean it up after the fact)
https://rtech.support/guides/bypass-11/
I have a Microsoft account, but I prefer to use a local account to avoid a lot of the "value add" that comes from using the Microsoft account.
That said, the process is:
1) while installing Windows press shift f10
2) a command prompt will open and you type OOBE\BYPASSNRO
When you hit enter the computer will reboot and allow local mode.
I fully recognize that this is a hidden option that most people don't know about, but if you do, it seems pretty straightforward to me for someone that's already at a level where they're comfortable manually installing Windows, but I recognize I have an blind spot due to my own technical abilities.
I'd recommend creating a sysprep answer file (with LLM's its pretty easy, also rufus can do it) instead of the trick mentioned above.
Which part failed for you?
Couldn't open a command prompt? Error entering the command.
Note the command is case sensitive.
Something like that:
1. Proceed through ordinary steps until account screen.
2. Choose "Set up for work or school".
3. Choose "Sign-in options" and select "Domain Join".
4. Enter username, password, recovery questions.
That's it. Despite the name, the domain join is not happening at installation time. I assume user can join domain once the installation is complete, but it's not enforced or even signalled in any way.
At least back then more of the original engineering talent that Microsoft had was still around, and you would even run into them on irc from time to time. 20 years on, I suspect a lot of the foundational personalities that drove engineering decisions have since retired or been made redundant, and that reflects the weird UI fracturing and endless regressions. I doubt they can recover at this point.
I got off on Windows 95.
Support for Gaming - not Wine, but hardware support and performance.
Those same studios are using GNU/Linux on their game servers, or even targeting Android NDK for their games.
How very Apple of them.
(I even heard "it's good for a laptop to be heavy" in the early 2000s)
Day 2: install Linux distro, total process is like 4 hours because at every step you double check that you won't lose your Windows data because it's your first time installing Linux. Realize that your distro doesn't support modern displays and never will. Call it a day because you're mentally exhausted.
Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays. The process is only 3 hours because you're already familiar with it. Spend the rest of the day looking up which Linux programs are good replacements for Windows ones. Hint: all of them have bugs that affect your particular use cases - KDE shits itself when it sees a folder with 20k images, DaVinci Resolve has lots of issues with audio drivers and video codecs and gives zero error messages, no native Linux audio player supports all exotic music formats in my library so I need to run foobar2000 which obviously crashes when it sees WMA lossless and then UI fails to scale properly, lots of random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.
Day 4: connect $DEVICE. Look up drivers.
Day 44: $DEVICE works.
Day 104: $DEVICE works AND survives system update.
In my case that were keyboard (support for extra keys) and steering wheel.
Day 204: invite friends for video games. Spend the entire evening trying to fix controllers because they're fucked - if I first connect Steam Controller and then run Steam, then Steam shits itself. I need to specifically do it the other way around. Also, Xbox One controller drivers have an incompatibility with X360 controllers so I couldn't simply connect the old dongle and play like that.
Lossless WMA is an ancient exotic format so yeah, fair to push back. But Xbox controllers are the standard gaming controllers so there's no excuse. The rest of my complaints are Linux fuckery.
BTW my keyboard is also from Microsoft and someone did all the difficult things in the driver except one simple last step, which is like two extra lines of code. There are like ten forks of this driver on GitHub, each of them adding the same two lines.
The driving wheel is NOT Microsoft. The whole software stack had a critical bug that made the wheel unusable after a few minutes of gameplay. People worked on this for a long time. It finally got fixed, a few months after I joined the Linux party. BTW the Linux driver/userland tool implemented correctly LEDs on the wheel EXCEPT they were missing a parser of a file format that took me a day to manually implement and connect. It would take me at least a week though to make it a quality contribution. If I need to redo this for a new game, I'll publish my code.
I feel like there's a common theme that Linux usually almost works and for every functionality you need to spend a day fixing it because the developers did do all the difficult work, but then either botched UI, failed to implement non-core functionalities, or didn't test less common use cases. When my Fedora refused to update until I removed Wine, the official response was along "your program your problem".
WSL and Virtualization Framework.
Hmmm day 2 should be: making a backup of my windows data, that way I can do the f... I want during installation.
> Day 3: install a distro that does support modern displays.
Apart from LTS/enterprise versions, all distros are running the same kernel generations. They all have the same hardware support really.
The rest of your text soup doesn't mean anything. Like this: "random shit like Wine installation causing system update to fail.", this really sounds like hallucinations and inventions.
The part about $DEVICE and drivers is like looking at a kid trying to connect a Nintendo SNES controller to a PS5 and complaining it doesn't work to well.
I mean yes, but an update on my Linux box just installed a new kernel, uninstalled the old video card driver, and didn't install a new video card driver.
I have taken to asking claude "is it safe for me to reboot now?" before restarting after updates. So far 3 times in a row it has come back with "no, your system won't startup".
Edit: I also just woke my desktop up from sleep and the alt-tab service failed to resume. Just... wut.
Just as an exMple I'm on arch myself and after last update if I use X11 screen saver with lock some service crashes and the computer cannot be unlocked.
Maybe next update will have a fix but then something else will be broken instead.
Linux (as in the kernel+user space of your choice) is a perpetual alpha. Has been for 30 years and will always be.
Whenever GTK/Gnome becomes reasonable stable it's time for a rewrite!
(And I'm a Linux user since red hat 7.2)
For instance, I use RecompLauncher as an AppImage, but I launch the recompilations themselves from a desktop shortcut after closing the launcher to get every CPU cycle for the game.
Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
Ultimately if all those things are too hard for you there are a number of immutable "image" based distros where packages/drivers aren't managed individually during updates and where you can always boot to the previous version. Maybe that is what you need.
Cosmic desktop uses a separate executable just for alt-tab. Currently there is a bug where sometimes it falls to grab ahold of a surface when the system wakes from sleep, and the process dies, and then alt-tab doesn't work.
> Also if you are able to know that the new video card driver hasn't been installed, you also know that you can solve this by doing it yourself. In that case why wouldn't you do it?
If I run my distro's updater, and I then reboot when it asks me to reboot, I expect my system to properly start up.
I've had that not happen so many times now that before rebooting I ask Claude if rebooting is safe.
Most recently I was informed that my kernel had been updated, my old graphics driver uninstalled, but the installation of the new graphics driver had not proceeded as expected. Mind you the updater reported everything as a-ok.
It may have been ok anyway. Without further details we can't say. Most drivers are included with mainline kernels so your "old graphic driver" may have been an out of distribution gfx driver (nvidia?) that doesn't support new version of kernel for example or said driver may have been replaced by something else with a different name.
But not an experience for non-technical friends.
I am using Nvidia so I have to be very careful. I regularly run into issues with system vs flatpak driver versions getting out of sync and losing acceleration in most of my apps. Thankfully it has happened so many times now I know how to resolve it quickly.
Well then you look at a random webpage from CNN and I guess they’re all competing for how trashy they can make their products.
There can’t be any pride left at all in that place.
Sometimes, some articles don't have content, but eh. Works for me.
NPR's site is nice too:
My last few years of Windows were more frustrating than Linux has ever been. Everything locked down and a never ending string of crashes and issues that are impossible to properly diagnose or repair. At least on Linux, when there's an issue, it's clear what it is and where to report it.
(Disclaimer: I have an AMD GPU and I don't play competitive multiplayer games. All other games have just worked so far.)
It's untrue in comparison to Windows, and MacOS (at least for software dev, when I last used it 1.5 years ago).
Linux easily has the lowest maintenance burden if you pick a boring distros. It can be a huge pit of wasted time, _if you actually want to fall into that pit._
Linux, sometimes works without faff. But in my experience it's at best 50:50 if you get that, or constant crashes, hangs, broken peripherals, etc. (Of course any time you mention this the luck 50% pipe up with "it works for me".)
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/worldwide-pc-shipments-have...
At the top of the Windows 11 context menu are some small icons without text for high usage actions which I assume are:
1. select-for-moving (cut), perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
2. duplicate-in-place-with-number-appended-to-duplicate-filename or select-for-copying (copy), perhaps Gnome's "Copy to..."
3. something to do with the clipboard--maybe copy contents to clipboard
4. something to do with text entry--maybe rename the file/folder, perhaps Gnome's "Rename..."
5. share via social media applications or cloud file sharing applications, or move the file/folder locally perhaps Gnome's "Move to..."
6. move to recycle bin (delete)
Menu options with text are unambiguous for "Open", "Open with", "Compress to ZIP file", "Properties", although Gnome will state "Open with {name_of_default_app}" to make it clear exactly how a file will be opened without having to guess.
I guess "Copy as path" might just copy the full filesystem path to the clipboard. I can't remember the last time I wanted to do that.
I guess "Always keep on this device" prevents the file/folder being backed up to some cloud storage provider. I'd rather open up an application dedicated to cloud storage backups and be able to review current backup options there all in one place for all types of data/files.
The "Free up space" option I'm less clear on--will a local application pop up and suggest what I can delete within the folder, will a cloud storage provider application pop up and suggest the file not be synchronised with the local device and only be kept in cloud storage, etc.
The bottom option "Show more options" is not expandable so I assume there are so many other options an entire new window is needed to display them all. Maybe it'll give me useful but rarely used options from a list of hundreds available, such as "count how many words are in this file" for text files...?
The former meant it have higher priority in caching, the latter is just evicting from cache immediately.
I think the analogy to traffic signs is flawed even further. Traffic signs icons are also standardized, have been for many years, and are taught in required safety classes. Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
That's... exactly how meaningful icons are born. First you put icon with text, and once everyone understands the meaning of the icon, you remove the text, because it's not necessary anymore.
Do you think that US drivers would be left completely clueless when seeing the "yield" sign without the text, or would they recognize the icon?
> Not even close to the situation with mystery UIs in computer programs.
Android UI offers three buttons at the bottom of the screen. There's never been any text there. Yet somehow, most people have no issues using them. How come? Follow-up question: if you wanted to put text there, whete exactly would you do that, and what would it say? In real life, what about public toilets? Many places don't have a text "toilet", they just have a symbol of two stick figures, one wearing a skirt, yet we're all fine. Emergency exit? Sometimes it's without text, just a green light with a white stickman running through a door. Red X is also widely recognized as "closed" or "don't enter".
Finally, please tell me what you see in top-right corner of a window in your computer. If you see spelled out words "minimize", "maximize", "close" then yeah. Otherwise I'd like to ask you what makes these three buttons so special that they don't need text.
Payment terminals have green-yellow-red buttons at the bottom. No text, just icons and colors.
Point is, "icon without text" is an idea that exists in the wild and works.
> First you put icon with text
They skipped this step. It's a really, really important step. And you have it to leave it for a while.
In other words, people who were born alongside with four of these icons are already sending their own kids to schools.
But I'm not gatekeeping it, just that I'm not a fan of the cheering around "linux on the desktop". If that happens it will no longer be what makes linux great.
10 was better, but I’d pay for a modern version of windows 2kpro UI. Bring back msn messsenger.
It’s basically a gaming box, everything else is on a Mac or Linux machine, all on my desk.
And somewhat excel because excel is badly implemented on mac
I'd pay for this, compatible with Windows 11 apps, but basically works like NT4.