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Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

pcworld.com

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Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#81

Post by hans_castorp »

devsda wrote: post #59
orphea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that we all are in an echo chamber. Most people are not pushed anywhere, they don't care. They don't even know that Microsoft is hostile.

Yeah. Only MS knows the actual impact of their decisions. The fact that they are removing a workaround says that it doesn't impact them much i.e. their actual users don't care. Despite all these shenanigans, their regular users will be oblivious to the harm and power users will still grudgingly use it.

I guess(!), MS makes most of their profit from Windows licenses with enterprise licenses, where all users are managed through ActiveDirectory.

If that assumption is correct, then I guess the financial losses of private users not migrating to Windows 11 might be negligible.

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#82

Post by haspok »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #35
bee_rider wrote: post #15

I have a theory, which I have no way of backing up or testing at all, that the entire slump in the laptop segment is driven by the fact that Windows is just utterly user-hostile garbage, and there aren’t any alternatives really, other than MacOS, which is too tied to Apple. Like any reasonable tech savvy person I use Linux of course, but I’d have trouble suggesting it… lots of people just don’t want to use the termin…

I agree. I've been a Linux user since 2017, and in the last year transitioned to an M1 MBP for the battery life (cheaper than buying an inverter+batteries in South Africa with loadshedding). Tried to upgrade to a new machine last month. New-ish (and not name brand) hardware made Linux unusable on it (keyboard & BT wouldn't work), while Windows was passable. After some work I decided to try working on Windows again. H…

To be fair, it is quite typical for cutting edge hardware not working in Linux for the first few months. Kernel devs have to catch up, and depending on your distro this might take a while. Best is to wait until support matures, or go with last year's option.

(Not that it really makes much difference in Intel-world anyway, the difference these days is not very noticeable - I am typing this on a Thinkpad X1 Gen 5, which was released... in 2017. Can't justify buying a new laptop, each year I have a look and wonder, what the benefit would be.)

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#83

Post by advael »

baq wrote: post #47
ta1243 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing holding me from Linux I've spent the last 25 years using linux and seeing this statement. There's always something.

Let's be honest here, the something is 99% drivers. It was printers, then it was wifi, now it's gpus. DNNs and LLMs at least made the compute part of the gpu driver Linux-native (from the vendors' perspective), one would hope the graphics part of the graphics processor would come next, but alas making big iron do work is done from macos and windows laptops.

Weird I haven't had a graphics issue since like the 8000 series of cards for like, the normal driving graphics right off the card use case. Optimus is definitely a little fucky with multiple GPUs and sometimes new CUDA versions break libs if you're keeping it bleeding edge updated, but most ML workflows use environment management to get around the clusterfuck that is the python ML ANN ecosystem anyway. Nvidia does a lot of work to make it hard to work with their cards but since GPGPU started taking off in the 2010s this sounds like a blast from the past, as a lot of the need for getting good performance out of cards on compute servers - which inevitably run linux because it has any kind of reasonable headless userspace and is easier to write reliable software for - has driven better driver support in general

In discussions between people who don't use linux, their notions of what the pain points even are seem to lag by sometimes over a decade

I find myself equally ill-informed on the pitfalls of windows ecosystems of late, except the ones that make the news for how insane they sound, but in my defense I also don't go around claiming I intermittently try to use it but just can't make the jump

As microsoft continues to tighten the screws, I just hope all these reluctant users can get out before it's too late

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#84

Post by xg15 »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts? This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft accoun…

The also seem to have an odd relationship to the US government, to the point where they sometimes come over as a half-public entity. (See the domain seizure and other anti-cybercrime operations where the FBI and DHS were very openly cooperating with MS, even though MS had no direct involvement in the cases)

Maybe they just think of them selves as part of the government already and believe they are too big to fail...

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#85

Post by account42 »

eptcyka wrote: post #34
ta1243 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing holding me from Linux I've spent the last 25 years using linux and seeing this statement. There's always something.

It might be different people saying that, and with time, some blockers are removed, some people migrate, and a new set of would be linux users get bumped up in the queue where they are now at their last obstacle to using linux.

A lot of these "blockers" are, to put it bluntly, merely excuses.

Like ggp here didn't mention why he thinks ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner are a must for him but but I doubt that they are truly irreplacable. More likely they provide some non-essential utility which would make this more about tradeoffs, or about just taking the plunge to feel the grass on the other side of the fence with your own feet.

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#86

Post by thallium205 »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts? This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft accoun…

Piracy

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#87

Post by Dalewyn »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #75

I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks Windows should stay frozen forever as Windows XP, I appreciate we're finally getting 15-20 year old features like search filtering in the task manager. But whoever's bonus metric is tricking people to sign in with MS accounts is really making it a gross experience. I managed to finally get my new machines install on a local account using "OOBE\BYPASSNRO" although none…

>and let the Pro version just be an actual tool to use hardware.

Pro has Group Policy, among which is an option to block Microsoft account logins at the OS level. It kind of breaks Microsoft 365 subscriptions if you need Office 365, but that's obvious.

Other Group Policies include ones to turn off Windows Autoupdates, block OneDrive, block Copilot, and more.

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#88

Post by aniviacat »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts? This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft accoun…

Two reasons I can think of to force the creation of a MS account is to

a) make it easier to get started using MS products (e.g. Office), since you don't need to go through the hassle of creating an account; it just works and

b) once (almost) everyone has a MS account, using MS oauth may become the default login mechanism for many third party services (although Google is already starting to take up this space).

Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts

#90

Post by coffeeling »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts? This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft accoun…

Money is money, and companies want more. Of course if they notice they can both sell you the product and have you be the product, they'll ask themselves "Why not both?"

The login thing is also probably partly because it does genuinely make the user experience better - log into a computer, To Do has your tasks, OneDrive and OneNote start fetching your notes and files, Edge seamlessly syncs your browser history, and so on. Things Just Work™. MS has a cloud-based clipboard and Edge has a OneDrive-backed AirDrop clone. All of that needs accounts to function properly.

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