Windows 11 LTSC just came out last week and no online account needed (also no crapware, no TPM, no Secure Boot etc.)
I'd buy it, but it seems you can only get a volume license or so? How tricky is that to get?
Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
161–170 of 270 posts
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is famously a handful of very different and very large companies who don't seem to speak. The DevDiv part is a lot different now than 20 years (or even 10) ago. The other sides of Microsoft are mostly the same as they always were. Microsofts OS division have bet everything on the strategy that "enthusiasts" aren't going to run Windows anyway. It's a segment they never cared about, and nothing indicates they…
I don’t agree with this. You can run macOS without this crap so why can’t you run windows without it? macOS is arguably less enthusiast oriented than windows. Microsoft is one facade regardless of who is underneath it and they are aligned in user hostility at the moment. Even devdiv is a mess.
> You can run macOS without this crap so why can’t you run windows without it?
MacOS is a service tied to selling an expensive piece of hardware. They don't need to make money by selling MacOS, they make money selling the Mac.
Microsoft makes money selling Enterprise Windows licenses, Office subscriptions, OneDrive subscriptions, AppStore cuts etc. But they let Acer put an OEM copy of Win11 Home edition with very little markup because it's likely that these customers will a) ensure thir employers keep running windows because everyone knows it and b) they are likely to buy a OneDrive/Office365/whatever subscription.
> Even devdiv is a mess.
How so?
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also suspect one of the driving reasons is to inflate reports. Sony is doing a similar thing by requiring PSN accounts on PC games - its to show their share holders that MAU number go up.
Absolutely. It's just maximizing some sort of metric that ultimately translates into P&L for the PMs. Everything else is largely irrelevant. If the users bitch and moan, but the PM is getting paid more, they'll be incentivised to keep doing what they are doing. The product may end up dead in 10 years time as the userbase is driven away, but by then everyone responsible is long gone. We can all pontificate about actin…
Basically you're saying the incentives are misaligned with what's best for the user. This -however- may yet be a fixable problem wrt corporate governance.
(And here some people thought misaligned GAI was the biggest threat to human society. But more mundane misalignment problems can crop up anywhere I guess)
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#164I recently had to install windows on 2 computers after some years without doing it. Had to spend an entire day debloating the thing. Had to use a handful of tools and powershell scripts to do it. I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one. The only thing…
>I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second They did make everything slower than it used to be when it comes to new UI elements, but the context menu can also be slowed down by third parties. On my machine, the primary cause was the shortcut to AMD radeon settings. You can remove it with this powershell command : Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers AdvancedMicroDevicesInc-RSXCM |…
It’s for these weird edge cases that I love macOS’ new Startup Items menu. It includes a list of everything that starts at boot, and everything running in the background that’s not the OS or Apple. I had been waiting for a feature like that all my life. Sure, put a weird little service hidden somewhere as a login item, but tell me so.
I can now turn off Microsoft’s license validator !
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could very well be, but less shitty is the wrong metric. Can get shit done is the right metric, regular users don't care about corporate telemetry and adware so long as it doesn't get in the way of getting their stuff done. A good example of what I mean is a work event I attended a year or two ago. We had a bunch of guys up on the stage and between the lot they probably had over a century of combined Linux exper…
How? I thought this was a solved problem. I've been using arandr for a decade.
Hard to guess, if someone doesn’t use many different setups they might just not be familiar with arandr.
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#166Windows 11 LTSC just came out last week and no online account needed (also no crapware, no TPM, no Secure Boot etc.)
I'd buy it, but it seems you can only get a volume license or so? How tricky is that to get?
If you are a home end user just pirate it, iso is available everywhere and you can activate it with MAS
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
.NET Core would be great if it weren't tainted by the New Microsoft policy of turning all tools into spyware. Now you have to remember to set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 everywhere and meticulously ensure that it doesn't get stripped from the environment when launching subprocesses, changing users, etc.
The list of what is gathered: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... As you can see, it is system data and basic crash reporting, something that helps with the health of .NET ecosystem and has no monetary value.
They used to gather all command line arguments until they later decided that (oops!) it's "not acceptable per our privacy policies"[0] and they really shouldn't have been doing that. They have also had issues with anonymization not being implemented properly, the opt-out mechanism not working in some edge cases, forgetting to even tell users about the need to opt out, and who knows what else. The risk of accidentally exfiltrating your data one way or another seems pretty high.
Also, monetary value is not the only reason you might want to keep information private.
[0] https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145#issuecomment-22010...
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The list of what is gathered: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tools/telemetr... As you can see, it is system data and basic crash reporting, something that helps with the health of .NET ecosystem and has no monetary value.
They used to gather all command line arguments until they later decided that (oops!) it's "not acceptable per our privacy policies"[0] and they really shouldn't have been doing that. They have also had issues with anonymization not being implemented properly, the opt-out mechanism not working in some edge cases, forgetting to even tell users about the need to opt out, and who knows what else. The risk of accidentally…
The issue dates back to the release candidate of the second version of .NET Core, 8 years ago. Surely we can do better than "it used to be bad at x point in time and this can never be rectified".
I like my privacy more than the next guy, but you are not arguing in good faith (which is all too common, because people like to use much inferior technologies and make .NET a scapegoat, instead of learning better and ceasing idiotic self-sabotage)
Edit: Heh, in HN jail. In response to the comment - you should apply this logic to the languages steered by Google, Oracle and Apple. .NET is completely unrelated to Recall and whatever happens to it, it could have been as well a separate company.
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m very uncomfortable with the degree to which I’ve become dependent on VSCode, GitHub, and Typescript. Microsoft has the same incentives to exploit their users now that they always have.
I've purposely avoided all three of those for that very reason. I've spent 30 years working with Microsoft stacks. It paid the mortgage off but it's been hell from a churn and lock in perspective. So much ROI was wasted on rewrites because of their policies and schizophrenic direction changes. I'm in a different space now and I am blessed that my editor is vim, my language is either Go or Julia and my VCS is Fossil.
> Go
Funny. Great choice! Almost makes one believe the company behind it is not the biggest driver of AdTech in the world, whose business model is built entirely on selling user data, and that company also has propensity to kill much beloved and heavily used projects no matter how ridiculous the move is.
Re: Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
#170More user hostility. Less user choice. I remember a few years ago on here everyone crowing about the new Microsoft and how it wasn't like the old one. It's notably worse a this point.
> I remember a few years ago on here everyone crowing about the new Microsoft and how it wasn't like the old one.
People here still do this, despite all evidence to the contrary!
I have concluded that a large percentage of hn users simply work at Microsoft or one of its subsidiaries (eg GitHub).