Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account (theverge.com)
509 points 16 hours ago 727 comments
I suspect, though, people will realistically just migrate to Chromebooks, which I suppose are “Linux”, but not what I would consider the “Linux Desktop”
I don’t know anything about music production though.
There's an entire world outside of AAA FPS games-as-a-service that require kernel-level anticheat.
Do you know how valve used to make games and now it makes money? What happens when EA comes up with an amazing amazingly effective and cheap anti-cheat solution? And they offer it effectively for free to all indie developers, and it just works?
I don’t care, because I switched over to console for effectively this and other reasons. But Colonel level anti-sheet absolutely must be rejected.
Always-online single-player is supremely bullshit though.
While anti cheats have obvious benefits and are a dealbreaker for some, be careful what you wish for. It's a slippery slope. One chess streamer famously had to set up multiple cameras pointing at him from different angles to combat cheating accusations.
Originally anti-cheat was to detect the running of the mods but of course now are phoning home every thing you are doing on your computer.
When the next window image manager claims windows is secure ask them to turn off the virus scanner. They will look at you like your nuts.
So now my annoyance at windows does battle with my love of mods. I know the nexus folks are working on a new cross platform mod manager, but they have yet to support bethesda games (I suspect for some of the same reasons I had issues).
EDIT: by Linux, I mean Linux+Proton
Until anti cheat design changes entirely (and it may not be fully possible), the freedom and control Linux provides simply doesn’t work with them.
You know, design better games.
Flathub is the best app store around. Can't wait until they allow selling paid apps (they had a few contractors working on it last I checked)
Feels good to be on Linux, man.
Microsoft is a level of entrenched that Linux practically won't be able to beat for reasons that have little to do with technical viability and everything to do with legacy tools, having software that works with business formats (Office; any other office equivalent on Linux will still have compat issues and as long as those exist, they won't be a valid replacement - for much the same reason, although not fully locked to their platform, Adobe is a permanent barrier to Linux adoption) and video game DRM on popular titles keeping them basically in that position forever.
No argument on my end.
I have been running Linux since 2011, and so much more stuff is in the “Just Works” category, especially if you have AMD graphics. When I installed NixOS on my Thinkpad about a year ago, it was almost comical how easy it was for me; I had gotten used to having to waste an entire day messing with drivers and fixing issues in 2012-2015, so it felt kind of weird for stuff to work as expected immediately.
I am trying very hard to get my parents to use something like Linux Mint because the Windows 11 auto-update on my mom’s computer actually prevented it from booting (making me waste an entire remotely having them flash a live USB so I could rsync over her files to me…thanks MS!), so this might be enough of a final straw for them.
For me, it's always been the local account and network services. So long as I can run the thing with only a monitor and keyboard, I'm happy. The second I am required to have a net connection, or even a mouse, I will be looking for alternatives. It's 100% that simple.
I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.
One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.
Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).
Swap over whenever you need something on Windows, easy peasy.
Maybe it's just personal preference but I could also never really get the hang of Gnome.
Most people will stay on Windows... even with all the increasing annoyances from Microsoft... because there's too much important software that runs only on Windows.
And workarounds such as Linux Wine emulator or QEMU virtual machines are still not enough because lots of Windows software won't run in those environments for various compatibility reasons.
E.g. I can't migrate a friend to Linux because her embroidery software for her sewing machine has a USB hardware dongle for DRM. It doesn't work by passing it through as a USB device to a "Windows virtual machine" under Linux.
Other examples are Adobe Photoshop, CAD software like SolidWorks, etc. Too much inertia out there with Windows-only software.
If one does everything in a web browser (e.g. Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc), that's the type of usage profile where switching to Linux desktop is an easy no-brainer.
Some streaming services don't work on Linux, the ones that do have degraded video quality, and it generally feels like streaming services are deliberately trying to break the Linux experience because it's associated with piracy.
While I don't have any sort of built up library of work or experience with a specific propriatary software, consider reccomending Inkscape + the Ink/Stitch extension to do embroidery designs.
I bought a Husqvarna Designer Jade, and the included windows-only software was a 'Lite' version, with an upsell for more advanced features (and pricing that was an additional 25-50% of the embroidery machine itself!), and I suspect a hardware dongle since I spotted references to it. I've been able to get by Ink/Stitch for the simple hobbyist jobs we've needed to do. The machine's USB port just expects a usb storage device, and the ink/stitch software can write the .vp3 files it needed to run a job.
My disagreement isn't because wine or proton exist, it's because most people only use a web browser. They check their email, watch tiktok and netflix, and write documents. 90% of people would have all their computing needs met by a basic chromebook.
More likely though, it's going to be "Eh, do I really need a laptop?" and we'll see even more people than we do already just using their phones and maybe an iPad.
I already see it with the non-tech employees at my work. Very few even have laptops at home. They have an iPad, maybe, a gaming console, and their phone. Sooo many people do almost all of their computing from their phones now.
This comment could have been written at any point in the past 20 years.
We're a few years out from machines that, by law, cannot run an alternative OS on bare metal. As it is, Linux only runs on bare metal because Microsoft, the sole Secure Boot key authority for almost all OEMs, deigns to allow it.
My TL;DR: a. Get a Microsoft 365 subscription, so you can set up Entra ID and avoid the 'consumer' account nonsense; b. It would sure be nice if the EU DMA would also be applied to this obviously monopolistic situation; c. Do, however, note that there are exactly zero Linux distros that even come close to offering comparable functionality...
Source: I'm sort-of the IT manager for several around-50-employees businesses. All of these offer a choice of Windows, Mac or Linux laptops, because that's what needed to attract quality employees these days.
For Windows, it's really simple. Order HP or Lenovo without an OS, put on the Windows 11 Enterprise image, and send it on along with the Entra credentials. User powers the machine up, selects 'for work', enters the AD credentials and gets a working desktop with AV, firewalling, Office and so on.
MacOS? Slightly more involved story: we need to provide instructions on how to successfully navigate the forced Apple sign-in story, then download some dependencies to get to the point where the Windows users already were.
Linux? Oh, boy... Even when standardizing on something like Ubuntu LTS, basic compliance and policy enforcement is a huge pain. As in: hours and hours of support. I've evaluated several supposedly-solutions for this, and, ehm, no...
And: to be perfectly clear: I'm wide-open to suggestions for something better! If you can offer Ubuntu LTS, (or, well, anything) but with AV, firewalling and basic policy enforcement that can be remotely attested, I'm all ears!
We're talking about individual users, people who buy a computer for their kids or for themselves.
Fancy hosted domain and entra setups and enterprise activations are not relevant to this discussion.
Anticheats makes multiplayer games hard to run on Linux (still sad that Apex walked back on Linux), and hardware may have sometime random issues on Linux (for some reason my mic was not working well on Discord (did not investigate, suspecting something on the software side since I could hear myself well when testing but my friends couldn't); I cannot use multiple screens with my current video card without my text editor dropping to 10FPS for some reason).
Plus Microsoft Office for people that prefer the ribbon over menus (but the browser version probably works well enough).
Though I feel that sleep is more reliable on Linux than on Windows today with "modern" sleep.
Mac is an option, but Apple is plenty hostile to their users, and you're tied to their hardware.
Linux is an option, but good luck getting that business software you absolutely need that only runs on windows working.
Running everything online in a SaaS is an option, but at the end of the day those services aren't generally any less hostile than MS.
Well unfortunately, MS screwed me. When I upgraded my PC I was apparently supposed to transfer the license before deleting the old PC from my account. Doing it in the wrong order lost the license forever - no way to transfer it.
Despite having one license, one account, and one PC registered, MS refused to help. I tried to call support, but there are NO on-call support anymore. Only automated online support. No chat. Nothing. I tried over and over for a couple days and got nowhere.
I gotta be honest man, I do not understand someone who pirates executable code. I (and I assume most of the hn audience) am not some starving student with nothing to lose. I would much rather run linux than pirate windows.
Commenter was suggesting using original Microsoft ISOs and verifying through massgrave.
Zero malware
I tried to get a few of them to use chromebooks but the need for quicken or another app they used for decade(s) keeps them windows based.
The OS installation images come from Microsoft. They're the same amount of malware as the OS that comes preinstalled on your laptop. Probably a tad less, depending on the brand.
So where is the contradiction?
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts/b...
If Microsoft can't do it, if Apple, Google, Facebook, X , OpenAI can't do it, then maybe we shouldn't allow companies to operate at scales which inevitably lead to widespread consumer harm.
They should be required to provide human customer service, with some sort of legal liability to ensure their products perform as advertised, without an end-user having to spend tens or hundreds of hours chasing down a solution, spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer, and all the rest of the hassle.
This is a legislation and regulation issue - the data barons are exploiting the effective absence of any accountability for harms they casually inflict on the public, ranging from gotcha situations like the OP to viral self harm trends among kids to mass surveillance and commercial invasion of privacy.
Pirate everything, support open source, pay content creators directly.
If they want to have billions of users, they damn well better be able to handle each and every one of those users in a commercially responsible fashion, or they have no business operating at that scale. We should be done with the "oops, we're too big and we make too much money to care that we just casually wrecked your life, oh well!" If the solution is to force users to have to buy a new PC, or a new phone, or create a new account, or anything in that vein, it's almost intentional, and casually malicious.
It's not like these companies don't know what they're doing, they can simply afford not to care. Until there's regulation and accountability that's more expensive than ignoring the consumer casualties, things will continue to get worse.
The reality of the situation is: If it were enough of a problem that the bad outweighed the good, people wouldn't use it, but yet they still do, so it's not enough of a problem.
The key words are monopoly and lock-in. Those things can really scramble the bad vs good equation.
They're not really afraid that individuals are going to rip off Windows, they are afraid that system builders are going to rip off 20 copies of Windows for machines that they build. In fact, given that they are so into Azure and GAME PASS and all sorts of thing you've never heard of, Windows might just be a loss leader.
What a PITA it took until I got a human though.
This happened to me too! It's absolutely insane that a license I bought through my account can't be transferred somehow...
My newest NUC is somehow recognized by Windows 11 as being entitled to a copy, and I can reinstall on it repeatedly while keeping the activation, so at least we've got that going for us.
But after Proton, all the machines in my house exclusively run Linux. I sincerely hope I never touch a windows machine again for the rest of my life :)
I learned that there are two ways of buying a Windows 11 license. One way results in getting a traditional license key that can be reliably transferred, and the other way (tying the license to your Microsoft account) risks losing your license. :( I'm very careful to only buy licenses the former way, now.
There were hints of where Microsoft was heading in Windows 10, but at least a lot of the worst “features” could be disabled.
I find 11 just completely unacceptable software to run on any system I own.
Apparently checking a checkbox in rufus is more complicated.
I actually just set up a new laptop this morning with Windows 11 LTSC 24H2. I'm an engineer, I can edit config files and burn bootable USB drives and install Intel storage drivers in the setup environment and validate sketchy batch files and compare ISO hashes. Now that I'm done, it's got a pair of fully-offline user accounts, it stays out of the way, it boots in seconds, the Windows-only software I have to use for work is no longer nagging me about being out of support, I'm quite happy with it.
But it was not trivial. Had I not known what I was doing, there were a dozen ways it could have gone wrong. I suppose it's nice that I'm not vulnerable to Mossad surreptitiously installing a MITM-patched OS while I sleep, but secure boot makes it scary simple to turn your new laptop into a $1800 brick. And I have a good sense for which links are the tools I actually want to download and run, and which links are scams.
But it's nowhere near smooth enough for me to point a non-technical peer at it and say "Oh yeah, if you don't want your OS to do that, just install LTSC."
Any tips for moving to Win11 LTSC? (I've been avoiding Win11 for as long as I can...)
First, just using more cross-platform software on my Mac. Ditched Safari for Firefox; replaced my MacOS-only password manager; using iMessage less.
Bought the cheapest Framework 13 laptop, running stock Fedora. Omarchy is interesting but too weird for me. Gnome, is still familiar enough.
Using the Linux machine more and more, feels very fresh. To be honest not feeling this excited in a long time. Perhaps the year of Linux on the desktop is indeed coming.
> not being able to load the latest .Net; Teams and more and more other apps refuse to run despite the OS still being "in support" now
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how secure boot works, but why would it prevent you from using the hardware? At worst I'd think you'd just need to reinstall your OS. That's not a brick.
It's only going to get more and more unpleasant in the commercial desktop OS landscape - need to start contributing money and effort to few OSS projects to keep the dream alive.
I have found my Windows apps for everything work (or have equivalent or better Linux versions) and will soon be switching my non-technical wife over to Linux to avoid Windows 10.
For her, I've looked at her workflows and setup a configuration that I can use on her new machine that will setup all of her apps and menu settings so it's as seamless a transition as possible. She rarely needs to update her computer or apps, the latest Debian 13 "Trixie" release is what I'm going to try for her.
Other than that, there’s literally nothing I need from Microsoft currently.
MS is little more than a rent seeker to me.
Many ultra-popular games don't work due to anticheat, but some do. Dota 2, Counter-strike, Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, among others work perfectly fine. We've also reached a point where virtually every offline game will work too.
We don't even need native games. Proton, when it works, is amazing. Win32 is effectively now the stable ABI that Linux always needed but never had.
The real problem is kernel level anti-cheat, which will never happen on Linux, but more importantly, gamers should be pushing back against it even on Windows. It's invasive. The latest of which you can't even enable virtualization support in Windows if you want the anti-cheat to run, which also means you lose virtualization based security, no WSL, etc. It's completely obnoxious and I hope Microsoft cracks down on it, because if they do then more games will run on Proton.
I realized recently that at some point I stopped even checking ProtonDB before buying games on Steam, I guess because its been so long since I've run into one that didn't work. I play a pretty wide variety of games, but not so much the type of competitive multiplayer FPS that seems to have the worst Linux compatibility due to anti-cheat.
They gotta make back those hundreds of billions they lit on fire to chase the dream of eliminating all their employees with AI. This will force a lot of places to pay for Azure Endpoint to setup their stuff if you really can no longer sign in without an online account.
How is this possible in a world where MS wants installations to be online?
Meanwhile, Linux installer recognized the wifi right away and worked perfectly fine at full speed.
I think I've been blocked from continuing an installation once, so I assume you'll just have to plug something in that it can detect or grab an install image which has the drivers.
I swapped over to primarily use linux a while ago, but was surprised that they've made windows 10 look like (what I think is) windows 11. When did that happen?
Do note what others have said about mods and some publishers' multiplayer games and music software. I am not affected but it's best to keep in mind.
1. no more random reboots
2. fast updates
3. much lower idle cpu use
4. cleaner operation with fewer crashes
5. no ad garbage from the OS to worry about
6. much much faster linux environment (WSL2 is atrocious).
It was 600% worth switching. Caveat -- I used linux as a daily driver in the late 90s early 2000s, and went back to Microsoft for work compatibility. Linux is much better now, but I still wouldn't try to get my parents to run it.
I say this as someone with very little tolerance for linux bullshit - my job is hard enough I don't want to wrestle with OS bullshit.
It's just okay. Windows 11 is worse.
This has worked always after they started pushing creation of online accounts.
imglorp•1h ago
paxys•1h ago
dijit•56m ago
Unfortunately, many MBAs will see it as leaving money on the table.
So yes, the product might cost some money, but that doesn’t mean it’s meeting financial targets, since they grow year on year.. but PCs as a market are not growing at the same rate.