Gone are the days where you bought something from a shop with no stickiness other than good service brought you back. Now there are far too many Marketing Managers who see stickiness as a win, even though the win is only to the supplier and not to the customer.
It is similar to those web sites who ask you whether you want "notifications" from them in your OS! Nope.
And the whole time you better give them accurate information because if they ever lock your account you'll be expected to send photo ID so they can verify it.
The next step is subscriptions. The entire point of forced logins is because that allows them to build future features as subscription only. Think about how online SaaS works and how everyone eventually switches to a subscription product by keeping, but abandoning the existing service and building all new features on a subscription model. With everyone forced to log in Windows is essentially a SaaS. They're just not charging for it. Yet!
Remember when you could get a free custom domain on Outlook.com or GMail? Anyone on those services was allowed to keep their stuff, but huge effort has been made to devalue and de-market those historical accounts. Microsoft shut down the entire admin side of things and Google excludes them from most new features.
Get out your wallet. Prices are going up.
If you want this you can still have it, you just need to follow a simple rule:
Absolutely no non-free non community maintained software ever period.
Essentially, the problem is that the software is made to fit the developers needs, not the user needs. If they both have the same needs, that's great, if they don't most people are better off with a commercial solution.
Also keep in mind that in most major free software, the "community" is mostly for-profit companies that want the software to fit their own needs and they have no money to spend for anything else.
This is free software working as intended, and in some cases (like Linux), it works really great. But it is not a silver bullet and proprietary software still is the best answer in some cases.
---
Do you mint your own hardware as well? The problem with hard rules is there's numerous exceptions when it doesnt make sense to follow, invalidating the "rule" all together.
What’s different is the community pushes back on annoying examples where customers are mostly stuck with that they purchased and don’t have a say.
For example, using Apple Music was the default for the HomePod. Using any other music service was clunky (coincidentally or deliberately).
Another point is the Apple Watch. Switching to an Android phone would mean getting rid of two devices.
The reason it is wrong is the extreme power imbalance between you and the service provider. No matter how independent you are, or how much time you are willing to spend (another highly unequal resource), their ability to force others to use their system might also coerce you into using it as well.
Once Apple/Intel/Microsoft normalize requiring TPM-verified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module OS booting, this dark pattern will become even more oppressive.
Of course I will also not use a MS account to sign into my PC. Ridiculous thought.
It does not matter how many bad things a company can do, people simply doesn't care.
Around 1-2 years ago, I upgraded MS Office on my Windows laptop. It asked me for my username/password-- which I didnt think strange, as I assumed it needed it to upgrade.
And thats when I got a message "Good news! Your Windows machine now uses your Microsoft to login."
W.T.F.
I was never asked, never warned, just tricked into replacing my local login with an online one.
Took me 10-20 minutes of Googling to get my original setting back.
I have now turned off ALL updates for Windows-- it is my backup machine, for a few programs that only run on Windows.
Every update on Windows scared me (and still does), as I dont know what dark pattern they will try this time.
I bought a Dell Latitude E5450 for 350 eur about 2 years back. It was used but looked new. It came with Win 10 Pro, which sits on my NAS as a gzipped bit for bit copy now.
Everything works out of the box on Ubuntu 20.04 and will continue to work until it dies far from now. I can open the thing up and replace everything I would expect I could replace (inc battery). It's all I need speed-wise. If the kids drop it I won't cry. Fun fact: When I play MineCraft with my son (I do it from my work Win 10 computer), he has has booted, started MineCraft and dug a hole to bedrock before I even get to click on the MineCraft icon. The thing is fast and snappy and remains so.
I made accounts for both kids and they can do many things themselves, perhaps because the UI looks more like an iPad than Windows does (i.e., hit the menu and a grid of icons fly in to fill the screen.)
I'm dreading the day they ask for a local install of Office365 though... Or something like Adobe's tools. So far my oldest is 8 and it hasn't happened.
I googled something like "how to get more fps in minecraft" and the first result was a minecraft forum post to which the only response was "install Ubuntu". At the time, Ubuntu had a .exe installer, so I thought it was just like any other program and installed it to my C: drive along with everything else. I think I did have the concept of other OS since I'd used both Windows and MacOS previously, so I figured it out after the reboot. It did increase my minecraft FPS from ~15 to ~30 on average, so I didn't have any complaints.
I stuck with that laptop until high school, when I got a new laptop and started dual-booting Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else, which is where I'm at now.
While Mojang made efforts, the premise of the Java version was unrestricted server community and that remains the dominant paradigm.
Not everything should be for kids, not saying “think of the children” and use Win10 or iOS, just commenting on a less known value-add of a Microsoft Account for Minecraft parents:
How does Minecraft keep my child safe?
With the Better Together update now out on Windows 10, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS, and recently Playstation 4, any parent or guardian can rest comfortably knowing that there are a few systems in place to keep their child safe. [And able to cross play with friends on any of those.]
If your child is playing the Java Edition of Minecraft then they're still being protected by all the great features Mojang has baked into the legendary game. However, the Java Edition of Minecraft does not require Xbox Live integration since it does not support crossplay with other devices, and therefore loses out on many of the parental control features parents enjoy elsewhere.
If your child is playing Minecraft on PC, it might be worth getting them the Windows 10 version instead. It's always on-par with every other platform for new features and updates, supports crossplay between platforms so your child can play with more of their friends, and can be moderated by Xbox Live and Microsoft Account parental controls. That's a win-win-win.
https://www.windowscentral.com/minecraft-guide-how-keep-your...
// Note that summer camps tend to require the Bedrock version and Microsoft account for this reason. It’s possible to get interop, unofficially, e.g.:
BedrockConnect: https://github.com/Pugmatt/BedrockConnect
Geyser: https://github.com/GeyserMC/Geyser/wiki/Supported-Hosting-Pr...
Probably not, unless you are a gamer.
I did something similar with my last linux laptop, and none of the workarounds to put the partitions back worked when I needed a quick windows test machine.
Source: built a new PC a few weeks ago and naively assumed they'd just give me a product key or ask how I wanted to receive it.
I have no reason to believe that Microsoft will not pull a Google and start spuriously locking people out of their accounts (as happens every few months on HN), which may then prevent me from logging in to my own computer.
In fact, I've already been locked out of my Microsoft account for "suspicious activity" (which was literally just purchasing Minecraft) and was required to enter a phone number to unlock it. Literal theft - I was compelled to either give up additional personal information or lose access to the software I paid for.
Got an answer to the question though, so thank you anonymous internet stranger. I wish I could confirm that your solution worked...
Product companies should take note, I'd probably own a few more electronics if they didn't require that consumers 'create an account' or associate an email address in order to use the thing.
I forget what my last straw was, but I went full Linux for all of my home computers around 2012 or so. At the time it bricked a piece of novelty hardware for me which I later ended up selling anyway, and that was not a hard choice to make.
My life has been so much better.
I segregate my usage of Windows and Mac OSs to work. I enjoy my OS sanity when at home.
They were using S mode because it's impossible to disable without logging into a Microsoft account first.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
Having used Microsoft OSes since DOS, this was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
After dabbling in Linux for years, this was motivation to commit 100% to using Linux as my main OS. It was mildly painful at first, but after sticking with it, I would never go back.
My favorite thing about Linux is that it does what I tell it to, and that's all it does.
The "we'll protect you, but you need to login and install everything through our store" paradigm is an awful trade, in my opinion.
Updates could remove old Windows applications I had installed, change the default application association, or just break the installation. Every warning that I thoughtfully chose to dismiss came back with every update. Don't like to integrate your AV with the cloud? We will make sure you to warn you on every. single. update.
It felt like I didn't own the system nor that I was the administrator of it.
All this made me switch to Linux permanently. It made me take the steps from dualboot, VMs and experimentation.
For those few times per year when I need Windows, I connect a separate disk with Windows, boot it up and do my thing.
Usually the next time I come back to the computer, Windows has forcefully rebooted back to Linux. Thanks.
If Windows 11 requires an account, I guess I'll stick to my old Windows 10 installation until it stops working. Hopefully I won't need Windows for anything by then.
I would love to switch back in response to this. Unfortunately, I've since transitioned to working fully remote and I worry using Linux for my work might not be viable.
the last straw for me was one time when i had 10 minutes to kill before i headed out the door, so i sat down to do stuff on my computer, but when i turned out in it decided it wanted to update, and took most of the 10 minutes to do that. so dumb
using seamless mode in virtualBox is pretty neat too
Oh you don't know how good we have it. You just wait until Pluton comes out. Right now there is always a patch, a registry hack or some kind of modification that makes everything bearable. With Pluton you are 100% at the mercy of MS.
I can understand from a company perspective that this kind of thing reduces piracy (and losses for a $2tn company), potentially improves the Windows upgrade route in future, and has minor benefits to some customers (cloud storage + 'take your account anywhere').
But there's exactly zero technical reasons to push this onto customers.
I mostly use Linux all the time now so it won't be a problem to completely ditch Windows, but it's a shame that it's come to this.
It feels like they just want that sweet recurring Office 365 and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate revenue, and they'll effectively give you Windows to get it.
Last I checked, you can still use an old used Windows 7 key to activate 10 on a brand new motherboard. They could stop it, but they don't make more than a token effort.
I guess data is the next billion dollar department in Microsoft, and this is them harvesting even more of it.
Yes, you will. Eventually. They'll continue to beat you down until you submit. Because, here's the secret. Even though you built the machine from the ground up, hand selecting all the parts, once you install Windows, the machine belongs to Microsoft. No, really, it does. They certainly think so. And they're a rich powerful organization, so it must be so.
I won't be party to this BS, this isn't the future I wanted to facilitate.
However - you're right. Whenever I want to play a video game, there's a 90% chance I have to use Windows to do it. So now I keep two computers - one for gaming, one for everything else. Each time I log into the gaming computer I'm reminded how much Windows sucks.
I just feel really bad for the average computer user who knows intuitively this is wrong but doesn't know how to do things like install linux or have the money to purchase an Apple machine.
And no, I am not going to remember that, or change it to something simpler. (Yes I know about entropy and correct horse battery staple!)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/sign-in-to-your-...
I don't know the actual answer because I don't work for Microsoft but I'm lazy enough to assume it is about money. Its financially rewarding for Microsoft to have hordes of Home users online. That telemetry is valuable. Those eyeballs are valuable. That level of engagement is valuable. Its telling that Pro and Enterprise versions operate without the same level. Home users always online is worth Microsoft either enforcing or in the very least "encouraging" this state.
That is a sufficient theory for me. I might not have the full picture but its accurate enough to form opinions and predict Microsoft's future behavior. I'd expect multiple pathways around leveraging that online presence even further. You haven't seen anything yet. This is just the beginning.
Knowing every user is signed in and authenticated means they can develop new features as a (connected) subscription service. They can attribute usage and bill you for it. That's what it's about IMO. All new features, even ones that should be part of the core OS, will eventually be subscription services. I bet anyone using a free account will be getting their last feature update when they install Windows 11.
I've seen the exact scenario play out over and over with SaaS. Windows with forced logins is essentially SaaS and they can use the same dirty tactics to make you pay forever if you want a usable product.
It could backfire with an OS though. I'd be pretty excited for a version of Windows that doesn't get any new features or have any "online" features.
- Screen tearing. I Googled around and installed the Nvidia drivers for my laptop, but it never went away.
- No detection of tablet mode.
- No auto screen rotation.
- Slow Blender rendering. Probably a PEBKAC with my driver setup, but it just worked in Windows and it was easy to select Nvidia vs. integrated graphics.
- MS Teams shared my desktop as a giant blur.
- LibreOffice is still bad and incompatible with what my company does in Office, though that may matter less with Office Online.
Is there a distro that Just Works more so than Ubuntu? I'm sure I could have solved all of the above with enough time and effort, but I'm not in a good position to do that right now.
Being on KDE means I am ahead of Windows.
Using MS Teams in ungoogled chromium for maximum privacy works.
I have no experience with Nvidea drivers, but I see a lot of hits at disabling the Nouveau driver. But again, this might be solved with running a more recent kernel.
It's not as simple as Windows, but my time investment to read the release notices is minimal. An other benefit is that your system doesn´t slow as your os install ages.
Aside, don't expect switching OS-es to be a walk in the park. Most things will work as good as on windows. You'll probably have to do some custom configuration for your laptop. Tweaks for your specific laptop model will be documented on the arch wiki.
This is quite a bold statement. I'm not a developer and recently installed a number of linux distros to try which is best. Some of them were actually easier to install than Windows or MacOS. For example Linux Mint was a breeze, and I used full disk encryption and other 'advanced' settings.
I say this from the bottom of my heart as someone that loves Linux: If you have a laptop with Nvidia graphics - don't bother trying to run Linux. The experience is just miserable.
There are two major things in the way:
1) Nvidia's drivers themselves are not very good and present day-to-day problems (like screen tearing and other artifacting), especially when trying to use Wayland (the next generation window manager on Linux). This may be fixed soon, Nvidia has been finally laying the groundwork for better compatibility with Wayland desktop. Alternately, if all you need is X11, then go ahead and don't bother with Wayland, which sidesteps this problem nicely. But if you have a higher DPI display and want decent display scaling, or ever plug into an external display, unfortunately Wayland is a necessity, and currently, it's miserable with Nvidia.
2) Power management/graphics switching is a miserable experience. There is prime render offload, but it's not very intelligent. Which means you have to remember to start applications with a flag every time you want to use the Nvidia GPU, which introduces all kinds of bugs. Alternately, you can just leave the Nvidia GPU as default, but that introduces more bugs (for instance, on my XPS, it killed my audio because somehow the Nvidia GPU took over audio output and after months of trying, I still couldn't fix it). Furthermore, it completely drains your battery. This is something that is almost certainly not going to be fixed.
On desktop, Linux is 95%-99% usable. On an Intel or AMD laptop, it's the same way. But on a laptop with Nvidia graphics, it's just not worth the headache. There's no complete solution, there's only tradeoffs.
That said, I recommend openSUSE Leap as an OS, because I find it's the best of all the tradeoffs. It's very stable, there's a corporation behind it that needs to keep it running. The release cycle is nice for desktop. YaST makes things very easy to manage the PC. The only real "tradeoffs" are that you need to install AV codecs from a community repository, and Nvidia drivers from a community repository (both are easily enabled through YaST).
The trade of is that you have to love it or hate it because you can barely change anything, but it deserves to be loved. I'm back to Windows for an undetermined span of time but I'll gladly reinstall ElementaryOS as soon as I can probably pay for it.
I think it’s an excellent choice for a standard desktop or laptop.
However, moving from Ubuntu to Manjaro (KDE Plasma) based on recommendation from someone on HN, oh it almost /just works/ without issues. There's just little gotchas along the way but atleast it doesn't make me want to tear my hair out like Ubuntu flavours do.
Recommend a simpler laptop that is well known to work well with Linux. There are resources out there to determine how well Linux will run on it before purchase.
Well, Microsoft are getting rid of tablet mode in Windows 11, so soon it will be at parity :p
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoi...
I use Ubuntu, but don't do anything heavy graphical, so don't have those issues you're mentioning and it works great for me.
zorin os is another one to check out. ui is more like windows and i think it has a tablet mode
it's supposed to be "ubuntu-based", but the usability difference between the two is night and day.
Forcing them to log in with a MS account allows MS to provide a lot of the services people expect using Android or iOS as their primary devices. For one thing, both those devices pretty much require an online account as well. And they contain far more sensitive data.
But more importantly, they also provide frictionless backups, syncing, and a whole host of online services as table stakes, and MS wants to do the same.
This. 100 times.
The main compute device people as a population are familiar with is the cellphone/tablet, and usage patterns that differ from this are becoming the odd man out.
Consumer tech. Commoditization. Etc.
We've come a long way from the 1970's. The computer as a commodity is actually not the same as a computer as a gizmo for the technically minded enthusiast.
The online account option let's MS provide these services. Forcing the account prevents users from opting out. Even on iOS, it is possible to use an iPhone without an Apple account. An iPhone b without an Apple account is severely handicapped by the inability to sideload apps. On Android it is not hard to set up an account without logging in to Google.
MS could (and should) allow the same.
The objections are more abstract, as in "it's my bloody computer, allow me to do what I bloody want!" Well... Microsoft says no apparently.
I haven't looked particularly into the differences between 'normal' Windows 10 and the other tiers but in the past, 'professional' versions were actually missing things (codecs etc.) that you'd want on a general usage PC.
Microsoft ships Bitlocker with every OS and given the TPM requirements one can speculate that it will be turned on by default on every Windows 11 computer.
I've seen an increase of tech support posts where people boot up their computer after an update or motherboard change and they're asked for Bitlocker decryption keys and they don't know what those are. Their data is lost forever. Their computers are bricked.
The experience of working in IT and modding online tech communities has taught me that computer literacy is very poor even among those who use computers every day. They're just appliances to most people. And this is OK. The problem is that the people who can't figure out what a right click does will never figure out how to back up their full disk encryption keys or even what they are.
Forcing a Microsoft account on Home SKUs eliminates this problem.
Of course, people will create less-attributable accounts.
Teams seems like a big bet for Microsoft, so that's one reason.
What do you mean it does not makes sense? I am not using MS login myself but saying it doesn't make sense is ridiculous.
It's exactly same as what Apple does.
As for people who say it's required on Windows: It's not. You can create local account during setup, the link is there once you cancel your online login. It's hidden at first, but it's there. You don't even have to disconnect your internet or anything like that. Shit move by MS (dark UI pattern) but it is totally possible.
Short of not connecting to the internet first the only way I saw where it was possible to create an offline account was to first attempt to sign in using an incorrect password with a hotmail account. It was only after failing that where an option appeared to create a local account.
It doesn't stop there too. Now once in a while when they turn the machine on and reach the login screen, there's a big banner that says something along the lines of "Hey, you're missing out on very important features and are less secure by not registering an account with Microsoft..." with a call to action to link a MS account. This also hides the login screen by default and the only way to ignore that and get to the login screen is to click somewhere in the empty space but for a non-technical user this isn't intuitive. They always try to click the only thing that looks clickable. It's so shady.
Sadly I had to make a MS account for them in the end to unlock Windows "S" mode into a regular version of Windows 10 Home so I could install an app that wasn't in the app store on their machine. The only way to do that was to make a MS account for the Microsoft Store but fortunately you can still login to Windows itself with the offline account. It never ends.
Same with their email service, where you can register an account without issues and after a few weeks of use I was presented with an unskippable input field for my phone number. Don't want to give MS your phone number? Too bad, better hope you don't need those emails anymore.
It's insane. Every I reinstall windows and try to download Firefox, the number of times Microsoft pleads to continue using Edge is increasing.
Like, look, I don't want or need to give you my phone number, capiche? Try Tinder and get off my case. Thanks.
Any of these possibilities would be nice:
* The market presents a kinder (and equally-affordable x86) solution and users follow.
* ReactOS lurches leaps and bounds ahead.
* Microsoft realises this trajectory is wrong and rows back.
* Everyone wakes up and realises that Stallman was right.
For the foreseeable, none are likely. What we really need is something to go horribly wrong that demonstrates practically why remote control and data collection of your own system is a bad idea. That will be the only way the point is driven home for the passive masses, unfortunately.
Non-technical users want a stable system that doesn't constantly change. Windows loves to hit you with popup notices or UI changes where if you take the "ok" route things about your system change, or you accidentally click a notification that comes up and suddenly your browser is changed or worse. They also don't want to turn on their machine and have to wait 30 minutes for an "important update". They just want to turn their machine on and have it be exactly how it was yesterday.
A non-technical person I know thought he was hacked and wanted to buy a new computer because a shortcut icon was moved from his desktop to his recycle bin and he thought someone wiped out his computer. Now in Microsoft's defense they didn't delete his shortcut, but that's the type of mindset non-technical folks have. The slightest change is a catastrophic event.
I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.
* The FTC actually does its job and takes action against Microsoft for antitrust violations.
The web as an open platform is a dev manifesto; for everyone else it's just a glorified entertainment and information hub, and making it safer and easier for them is what the market wants. Not more openness, but less of it, because less openness means less cognitive mode. They don't want to think about 100 ways to do the same thing, each with a different license and complex venn diagram of incompatibilities. They just want to get on with their day.
"If something goes horribly wrong"... even in that case, the vendors are less likely to fuck up than most users. Google/Apple/Microsoft clouds are much better at keeping data safe against device failures and ransomware than local Windows installs managed by average users ever were or could be.
If anything the future is really dumb computing, where the internet is just another appliance not too different from your radio or the television. Apps with corporate content hubs, not open platforms.
Computing as an open platform was due to the industry by and large being created by engineers. Now with mass adoption, we're seeing a switch to producer vs consumers, with different paradigms/devices/needs for each, like the differences between magazine publishers and readers. Readers don't care what software was used to create a magazine, they just want to pick it off a newsstand and read it. Same with digital entertainment; the underlying stack shouldn't be their concern if their intended usage is simply content consumption. Windows adds only unnecessary complexity to their usage. Stallman is not an average user, and it would be a massive disservice to humanity to design for the average user as though they were Stallman.
Not all freedom is beneficial. Sometimes it's just yet another useless decision to have to make in a world already overflowing with excess information. The human brain did not evolve to make careful cost-benefit analyses for every trivial thing in a post-internet world.
Even devs are moving towards serverless. Content creation might eventually move to "OS"-less, where content creation is moderated by walled hubs like Adobe apps on the iPad and developer experiences happen in virtualized clouds with web-based IDEs. Bare metal appeals to engineers, but for everyday users and developers, again, it's just excess cognitive load. Please don't make people think about useless crap. There are already infinite upcoming crises -- of the global sort -- for anyone born in the last few generations. Computing trivia is just... trivia, no more inherently interesting than the proper type of lubricant to use on the machines in the factory that makes their toaster. Don't make them think without good reason.
I can't believe it's come to this...
This kind of advertising actually worked on me.
Then: "Disable secure boot, wipe SSD, reinstall Windows without connecting to the Internet".
You'll end up with a relatively bloat-free non-S Windows 10 install with a local account, no BitLocker (although it can be enabled later), and Windows will generally install all the hardware drivers for you.
Anything missing that you want can be grabbed from the manufacturer's website. Once everything's done, re-enable secure boot.
Once the setup is done and the O/S configured exactly the way I want it (which often takes me considerable time), I'll then mirror the drive.
I then progressively repeat the process in stages, first with essential utilities, text editors and maintenance tools and work up to bigger programs, word-processors etc. At the end of the process I'll end up with at least four mirrors. If anything goes wrong I can restore the image which typically takes me 7 to 10 minutes and I'm right to go.
Doing the job in multiple stages is good idea if you want to remove traces of a program that, say, won't allow easy re-installation for licensing reasons. All such program are relegated to a latter-stage image, so the process then is to restore the immediately preceding one that is 'clean'.
Only when I'm finished saving the last image and I'm totally happy with the installation do I connect the internet.
I would set it up without access to internet as the easiest way to force it. It is pretty awful this has to be done this way. Eventually I will just exclusively use Ubuntu and call it a day.
I have some issues with choices made in Haiku, but overall it has a clearly superior understanding of desktop and personal computing and it would be great if it could become a reasonable alternative for me within the next decade.
Absolute trash OS, sorry.
I found a way to revert it and make the account an offline account afterwards, but I was so furious about this crap.
That being said, I don't see the banner you mention.
More accounts equals less security. That's a fact. If Microsoft believes this, it's not worthy of our trust.
If it's just marketing hype, ditto. I don't trust companies that outright lie to me.
I just run installs offline if possible, for home use, and make sure any place I'm working has a WSUS server/etc I can point MDT to.
It is different with the "S" Home edition which is what comes with a lot of decently spec'd laptops for typical personal use.
I run Pro here and there's a secondary text link off to the side that you can click to make an offline account. That link doesn't exist with the Home edition (specifically the "S" edition, I don't know about the regular Home edition).
In all cases this is with the US version too, which might play a role in what's seen when people install Windows across the world.
Yes, these decisions annoy myself and most users on this site, but we are in the minority here. Most people do not care and just want to be up and running. They want security/configuration to be easy. They don't want to have to think about it. I think that a lot of this will be good in the long run for security.
Also, and to generalize - we need to stop judging these decisions based even on everyday single computer user's needs and consider the needs of the computing using _public_.
... and the public definitely does not need Microsoft to remotely control access to all Windows machines.
Surely us HN readers have the knowledge to definitively state this as fact.
But having only one secure login helps keep things simple(r), Microsoft can help keep associated devices secure and bad guys out, 2FA gets easier, and there is an easy way out in case of forgotten passwords and the like. For most people I guess that's pretty convenient and helpful.
Besides, I don't think there's need for a term like computing-using public – let's talk about the general public. There won't be a lot of people in the general public who aren't either using a computing device like a phone or somehow affected by others using computing devices to store photos and phone numbers and the like.
The general public is in dire need of very secure systems that can be used with a minimum of specialist knowledge, attention and maintenance effort, strongly resist being used insecurely, and that still look good and are reasonably fun to use and still allow for activities like software development to happen. That's immensely difficult and I'm not aware of any good definitive solution to this.
This isn't just a question of being nice to grandma either, this is more about not leaving whole first-world economies vulnerable to highly sophisticated attacks with huge blast radii. We haven't seen much in the way of those, but who knows what we might have seen if platform security of the big targets hadn't kept up as well as it did?
This whole complex is something a lot of people deep in the tech bubble seem to not really get: There are millions of power users, true, but there are billions of people who just want to pay their bills in an app or play a game or message their friends. The latter cohort is not intrinsically motivated to become IT pros at all (more like scared of the complexity and very disinterested), and they're not getting paid to secure their home computer, so some buy anti-virus and that's it. People don't want insecure computers, but the learning curve, time and effort required, the extremely dry subject matter, the unclear benefits, the overall scariness, that just doesn't happen at scale. Humans are amazing at conserving energy, and this checks a lot of conserve-this-energy boxes.
iPhones are relatively hard to get into an insecure state; it's possibly, but the options to do so are limited and most aren't frictionless. I don't doubt most Windows home installs so far have been running with a passwordless admin account, with pretty much no restrictions on what to run and install, and many many footguns have been discharged as a consequence.
The saving grace, so far, has been that most of those billions who have started using privately-owned computers in earnest in the last decade or so have been using mobile platforms, which have been pretty well-secured from the get-go; but to keep their non-phone offers relevant to this huge market, Microsoft and Apple will have to pivot their general computing devices towards that audience a lot more. That involves making them much more secure by default and much more resilient security-wise to being configured and used "wrong". That may be bad news to professionals and enthusiasts, but so far Apple seems to keep macOS enthusiast-friendly enough by making dangerous choices scary and adding friction, and Microsoft still has other licenses than Home that I believe are more enthusiast/pro-friendly.
But seen in that light, requiring a Microsoft login makes a lot of sense, at least to me. Whether that's the main decision driver within MS, or the opportunity to gather even more data and engineer more stickiness and lock-in, I could only guess. They're surely not sad about another step towards a Microsoft Panopticon you can't get out of, but it's not like the security side is bogus, or not a big deal.
If this mindset was prevalent in other industries as well then all kitchen knives would come with a mandatory 2 hour long instruction video on how to keep your fingers away from the blade.
This started as a very simple, creative game for kids, and now the only way to play is to enter through the gift-shop. Minecraft was already one of the best selling games of all time. Is it really necessary to constantly expose 8 year old kids to aggressive marketing to maximize profits?
In this case it was the Switch version of Minecraft.
No indication whatsoever that (what I consider to be) a totally unrelated signup would be needed to collaboratively play the (very expensive) Switch game.
In my case, a bunch of kids needed to wait while I attempted to create a Microsoft login with my private email address (yes I buckled - unfortunately explaining privacy to an expectant and impatient crowd of eight-year olds isn't realistic).
But then I found halfway through the process, that I'd somehow used the same email for Skype many years ago, and the password was naturally long-forgotten - blowing that signup attempt.
Not fun to need to create a new email account, and go through the whole signup and login flow all over again, just to play a game that's been sold as a self-contained entity for a totally different non-Microsoft platform.
What price do I set on my privacy and control? vs What price do I want to pay for inconveniences?
Privacy is a value (abstract) and inconvenience is a concrete experience (concrete). Many people find it easier to reason about concrete experiences then about abstract notions.
Edit: Thanks @yourusername, I had missed the part where it's only for the home edition. I'm glad there is still a way.
Spend the time to get acquainted, soon you will see you can do almost everything you need on linux (and more) that you can on Windows/macOS, but with less mental overhead (after you are used to linux, it really is simpler).
Also saving files in Debian is a bit of a pain. I think it keeps searching instead of actually typing the file name when you save a new word doc from libre office or another application.
Plus other services, like Netflix and Hulu, may not work out of the box. You’ll have to find a workaround but I think their official stance is still “Linux is not a supported platform”.
Don’t get me wrong Linux is great and it’s in a wonderful spot compared to 10 years ago. But it still does not have the polish or UX that users from windows and Mac expect in an operating system.
Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something painful. The path of least resistance will always be running Windows. And in addition even the most polished Linux versions have issues. I've run them all. They are nice, but once you get into an obscure singular case, the console dance start. Wifi, sound, bluethoot, video, media-keyboard or mouse, fingerprint reader. There's always something.
We People who have been using linux for years are already used to it: google for a couple of minutes, open the terminal and copy/paste a bunch of commands. Sometimes it works, other times we compromise by not using that feature that doesn't work.
For people used to Windows this is very painful.
Windows 10 was also not subject to this requirement, yet you're harassed when you try to keep your local login.
Imagine McDonald's applying such dark UI patterns: maybe forget part of your order, put your change on the table under a napkin so you don't notice it, only offer you the free ice cream the 3rd time you ask, etc. People would be up in arms!
But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?
No evil to see here, sir!
The requirements doesn't list internet... and I was pretty sure my friend pressed some button or something that asked him for online login, when he tried to install Ubuntu for raspberry (because I'm not hardcore linux guy and I use Ubuntu and I will be able to assist him better in that OS), but after some googling around, it really turns out to be true - cant install without SSO login.
The solution for that guy? He just installed a different OS.
Also Canonical/Ubuntu seems just have a particular bad track record of stuff like this. Most Linux distorts are better.
The open source world actually needs to implement this + a decent offline alternative to Alexa or be left behind.
I will never want to use a Microsoft/whatever account either but other people will.
They can start doing their job without signing in with any accounts, one step fewer.
I was recently spurred to action by two things.
1. The forced news widget in my taskbar. 2. Being forced to sign into a Microsoft Account to setup my father's laptop. The onscreen prompts promised me that I could disable the account later if I wished.
We all see what's coming here. We're experiencing different levels of it all over the place.
My work machine (as in, the device I use to make my living with and the only device I can't actively "play with") is now running Arch.
I'm out. You guys can do what you want, but there is zero chance this nonsense doesn't continue and get worse.
Then also owned a macbook pro 2018 with mojave, that crashed every 2 days like ol' windows. switched to ubuntu for my thinkpad, still hibernate wasn't reliable. end up putting win 10 pro on the thinkpad, n stability from hibernation is amazing. it feels like the old os x.
so yeah, win 11 for me is a moot point - no need to upgrade
You created this problem. You kept buying Windows when they added telemetry, ads and other forms of privacy invasion, so you emboldened to go one step further. And when they are done with this they will invade your privacy more and more.
If Facebook can require Facebook login for the Oculus then Microsoft can require Microsoft Login for Windows. It works. You made it work.
If wolves accept the convenience of eating leftovers from human camps what is the worse that can happen? Yeah, they got domesticated. That just happened to you. By using a Microsoft account now you are living inside Microsoft's data farm as marked cattle.
It is not your computer anymore. You gave computing away by being complacent just like the wolves were.
Your decisions matter, and your decisions have consequences.
The current trend is making "personal computers" less personal.
I just can't imagine a team of smart techs cheering this on with "Great idea!"
What pressures transpire to induce really smart teams to make such extravagantly poor decisions? It's a mystery.
I.e. this runs counter to hardware makers goals.
At this point why not just make the OS free ? I actually like office 365, by far it's the easiest way to backup my data
lol... until they lose your data (like Canon cloud service), until they increase subscription cost heavily or block access to your account (e.g. due to "ToS violation".
Good luck
Some commenters report heavy dark patterns when trying to create a local account, but the experience is somewhat less burdensome on the “Pro” edition of Windows 10. If I recall correctly, I was immediately given the option to choose between an “online” vs “local” account after install. I opted for the local account and then immediately disabled all of the telemetry.
I have to recheck telemetry settings after updating to make sure they haven’t sneakily re-enabled it. I recall at least one time the existing settings were still disabled but they added a new telemetry setting which was enabled by default after an update.
For the average consumer it is likely that a MS account is a good path. No different from connecting your iPhone to the App Store and iCloud, which most consumers do.
For the average consumer such things as automatic updates and some degree of management is a good thing.
Profesional and enterprise users are a different matter. In this case what is being presented here is a nonexistent problem. If a professional or enterprise user can’t figure out how to install and run Windows with the degree of control they desire, well, they might not actually be pro users. Using Hone edition? Please.
This is not a problem.
Something to gripe about for fun and entertainment? Sure. Have a blast. A problem? Nope. Never has been and never will be. MS has always provided professional users with the flexibility they require. Not doing so would destroy their business.
The Windows 11 changes will enable this plan by tying every computer to a real identity and using that identity to watermark all content.
I'm switching to Linux.
You do it by serving corporations, owned by a few of the ultra wealthy, who have captured all the economic productivity gains that MS-like software has brought the world economy.
My fear is that Microsoft is going to wreck it all in a fit of mindlessness. I wrote them a letter when they were in danger of impulsively stealing TikTok. So many of us depend on their products that we’d be devastated if they destroyed their ecosystem for no good reason. (Someday Microsoft may need to pick a fight with the CCP, but it had better do so for a good reason.)
This is what free software people have been warning against for decades now, and yet governments and big structures still willingly give their hands to be tied instead of allocating some funds to the development of solutions that don't have this problem and would be far more cost-effective in the end.
When will the world wake up?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
That's nearly 25 years old. Fortunately we can still use Free operating systems on at least desktop and laptops, but if you choose to use proprietary software, you get what you get.
Like, what we also warn about the fact that a majority of people on earth directly or indirectly depend on projects like, I dunno, coreutils, openssh and what not which receive fuck-all funding.
Don't you think you are already devastated by that dependency?
This still does not work properly for me when mapping SharePoint drives. (Since going fully remote this is is the only type of mapped drive I use.) Every once in a while I need to open up the SharePoint URL in Internet Explorer in order to get the drives working.
They do try to encourage you to log in with an Apple account, but they don't seen to use dark patterns to do this. You can use a Mac without one but you will miss out on the store and any iCloud feature... but the machine still works fine.
There is an "allow your Apple account to unlock your local account" feature, but again no dark patterns. You can just uncheck it.
At the same time, I worry this might mean I may no longer be able to work from home, if my employer "upgrades" to Windows 11 and introduces some dependency on it. I guess if this happens I may need to accept commuting for two hours a day, again.
"Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified."
I guess this mining technology requires the mining user/body to be connected to the internet, hence this move by Microsoft to require an active online account facilitates to role out this patent technology.
[1] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...
At work I’m constantly updating registry to take videos, pictures etc out of my explorer window. Fracking clueless. Why should any of this be in Windows Pro is beyond me.
Otherwise, I can't see, how this masquerade of pretended ownership may continue.
> dir C:\Users\giantsfan123@yahoo.com\Downloads
Seems ridiculous to me.
The people who are MOST upset about this are the HN crowd. We're control freaks who are used to Linux, and the thought of Microsoft making us log into their filthy servers to run our own PCs maddens us.
So yeah, ReactOS may become a viable techie OS at some point. I encourage everyone to contribute to it if possible, as it is open-source.
My business depends a lot on Azure AD. A couple months ago, Azure AD went down for several hours worldwide. It was a wakeup call that SLAs can be broken and that the vendors are usually not transparent regarding the uptime of their platforms (the status pages are always green!).
One case in point would be: If that business happens to be located in the E.U. where GDPR prevents employers from exposing their employees to privacy liabilities of this sort. For example GDPR is already a major stumbling block to the adoption of Office 365 by european business, which is why many are using ancient versions of office, microsoft-alternatives, or are using Office 365 but without being able to really sleep all that soundly, hoping that employees won't sue and privacy regulators won't act. The legal position, however, is quite clear.
Using linux as HAL and Wine as a compatibility layer has a much greater chance of ever becoming mainstream.
There's a difference between "supported" and "possible." Add a layer of marketing and UI magic and you get a lot of confusion.
Edited to add: Just because it's a new OS, doesn't mean the guts of the thing went through huge changes. The ways you create an account is probably the same from 10 to 11. It's just the GUI which is changing.
Things are fine in here as long as you stay in line and stick to the rules.
- What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
- What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
- Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
That doesn't make sense and isn't how signing into windows with a microsoft account works now.
> What happens if your Microsoft account gets blocked (rightfully or wrongfully)?
A microsoft account that was created to set up a computer and then never touched again?
> What happens if the next Windows update, Microsoft "helpfully" activates onedrive sync of your folders by default and exfiltrates your data? (HTC did this to me before with their Sense UI).
> Maybe the latter leads to the folder if OneDrive syncs some copyrighted data to their service they think you're pirating?
Seems a little farfetched to me. I'd rate it on a similar level of risk to apple requiring me to create an id if I want to use any apps on my iphone.
... don't then. I thought I read Pro editions will still let you use a local account?
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I don't like this move either but you need an account to use a Mac, iPhone or Android and nobody seems to fuss about it.
So why only target Microsoft for doing what their competitors have been doing for a along time and why not protest against Apple and Google for making this practice the norm in the first place through their monopoly in the mobile space?
You can use Android without an account too. I have it set up that way on my phone, I use F-Droid and Aurora Store (in anonymous mode). I previously used MicroG which was amazing but I moved back to OxygenOS for other reasons. But even with full Play Services installed you can use them (and push notifications) without a Google account. It significantly cuts down on tracking doing that.
Android pushes a Google account heavily but it's not mandatory. You can't use paid apps then but the only paid Android apps I use (Nine Email and Cryptomator) provide a way to pay them directly and sideload it, using a license key. For which I thank them! It also shows that I'm not the only one wanting this, as they clearly see value in offering this option.
Only with iOS it's difficult as Apple is so difficult about sideloading. I don't use iOS as a result (except for work but only for testing).
And yes I protest against these practices.
The initial boot makes this seem impossible.
