121–130 of 210 posts
How can you set up / use Windows without an Internet connection? Surely that's not an unsupported use case anymore, is it? There's gotta be plenty of places where Internet connectivity is not available or is restricted.
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I'm with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point. I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).
I do all my development work on linux. I have a self-hosted linux server. I used ubuntu as my main desktop computer OS for a full year, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, games that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on linux, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on windows. Saying that you can game o…
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Well, it's bald -faced lie but I wouldn't disagree that it's bold. The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Microsoft account is merely for that purpose is preposterous on its face. Not that I was ever a regular on windows, but I think I've at least found there to be a necessity to be on windows for certain desirable games or for PC apps. So I've always kind of recognized…
I'm with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point. I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).
The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities.
Sayonara, Windows.
I had to install Windows 11 on a laptop last year, for the first time since win2k. I managed to dodge the online Microsoft account and create a local account, and was proud of myself... And the installer asks "Enter your name", so I enter "Firstname Lastname". Now my $HOME directory is `C:\Users\Firstname Lastname` with a space character in it! Ironically, the whole point of the Windows machine was to install ESRI's…
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This script just added single key to the registry and rebooted the machine (restarting the installer). The underlying functionality which allowed to use local user, if registry key was present, was coded into the installer itself. So if they just removed that 2-line bat file, it's not a big problem. You still can add that entry to the registry, just with more complicated command. Here's its code: @echo off reg add HK…
It's probably safe to assume that they'll remove the BypassNRO functionality altogether from Setup, not just the script that enables it.
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What they're doing might actually be illegal under antitrust law, since it's effectively 'tying' a market-dominant desktop OS to provision of online services. If they are genuinely determined to get rid of the existing workarounds, there might be grounds for a formal complaint on that basis.
It's dumb on every angle. How many people are going to these lengths to avoid an MS account? Even if they suck it up and stick with Windows, will this really convert them into MS Store app buys or whatever? I doubt it. They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.
Windows set up is actually insane, I did it in a VM recently to test my app on Windows. I would say not only does it require a Microsoft account but you also have to agree to (at least) 3 EULAs about sharing/selling your data that are unskippable. Pretty sure it also makes you set your ad preferences. Absolutely insane for an OS, I don't know how people put up with it as a daily driver.
Also I doubt it's just me but every other day when Windows forces an update "restart and update/shutdown and update", upon restarting I am again prompted by Microsofts dark patterns for all the telemetry, defaulted to ON (location, biometrics, etc).
Literally every second update windows wants to re ask me and I have to either select "skip for 3 days" (comical) or walk through each step and toggle each one off...
Unfortunately Microsoft no longer innovates and can only continue to try to data mine but they are fighting a losing battle.
At this point revenge may be best to just use a cracked windows install on a VM using a dummy email. You want telemetry, have at it ;)
How can you set up / use Windows without an Internet connection? Surely that's not an unsupported use case anymore, is it? There's gotta be plenty of places where Internet connectivity is not available or is restricted.
All of those people are still happily running XP.
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The best marketing campaign for Windows is finally deciding on a distro only to be presented with a bunch of bullshit options (gnome, cinnamon, xfe, kde, mate, etc) the average person is expected to somehow understand the difference between or care about if they did. And no, someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is not going to feel comfortable picking at random. Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot witho…
> Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows This is fixed now with most desktop systems using UEFI. The bootloader will always show a "UEFI setup" option, and that in turn lets you pick alternate boot choices.
Oh, another M$ account creation trick. When they discontinued Skype they said you could just log into Teams with your Skype credentials. Not so! That just forces you to enter an email address (that's not already associated with a M$ account) and guess what.. now you have ANOTHER M$ account. After this the Skype credentials are invalidated.
Nvidia does the same thing for their geforce experience tool. For a tool that shouldn’t require an account. Bait and switch.