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Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

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Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess downvotes come from people that believe vim + grep + printf debugging is peak development environment. Quite amazing that they even go for something such advanced as vim, instead of sticking with ed, for I believe there exists some Linux user claiming that ed doesn't lack anything that VS has.

No you’re just completely ignorant. You can trivially set breakpoints, use conditional breakpoints, watch variables, step over, through, and into in exactly the same way. Hell, even raw-dogging lldb directly on the CLI is incredibly user friendly, fast, and has a ton features you wish were more exposed by common IDEs. Don’t feel like debugging right now? Take a heap snapshot and do it later! Don’t even need to launch…

> to debug multiple binaries simultaneously in the same solution requires launching multiple instances of the entire IDE

Eh? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...

> complicated and unmodifiable shortcut keys for common tasks. Killing the proces

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/identifyi...

Debug.TerminateAll is right there in the list

> No you’re just completely ignorant

Forgive my skepticism

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess downvotes come from people that believe vim + grep + printf debugging is peak development environment. Quite amazing that they even go for something such advanced as vim, instead of sticking with ed, for I believe there exists some Linux user claiming that ed doesn't lack anything that VS has.

No you’re just completely ignorant. You can trivially set breakpoints, use conditional breakpoints, watch variables, step over, through, and into in exactly the same way. Hell, even raw-dogging lldb directly on the CLI is incredibly user friendly, fast, and has a ton features you wish were more exposed by common IDEs. Don’t feel like debugging right now? Take a heap snapshot and do it later! Don’t even need to launch…

Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?

I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.

I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.

(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#543
I've been running Linux on my main desktop for decades (from when VMware workstation gave me access to windows on the same PC without rebooting). A couple of years ago VMware became worse and worse and KVM/virt manager is still missing critical features (gui performance is horrible on Nvidia unless you want to dedicate entire card and monitor to windows).

I'd love to have a nice solution to run run old windows XP and 10 on modern Linux with even 50% native performance (on Nvidia) but it's not looking like my wish I'd getting closer to being fulfilled.

So perhaps it is better Microsoft is actively trying to kill windows. Once it is dead it will be less of a moving target. We have amazing ways to run DOS. I hope one day the same can be said for windows. I have decades and decades of software I like to fire up once every few months to use (ham radio antenna simulation, PCB design, etc. Software I own actually own fully paid licenses for that becomes a pain to run). Currently I use kvm/virt manager and I'm suffering the bad GPU performance and crashes if I try to standby the PC.

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#544
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games with anti cheat :(

Well at least you should then have that on a dedicated gaming machine - treat it like a console. Not the same box you do your surfing, socials, banking and coding etc on. I think the intersection of people who can afford a rig for competitive online gaming but can't afford to keep it separate should be very small. Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough (fun times with anticheat). Gi…

I wish I was good enough for competitive gaming. It’s just where my friends hang out - I shouldn’t need a separate machine/boot just to play games with friends

> Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough

That’s a guaranteed ban by most anticheats

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults to 60hz. I have to go through a whole process of unplugging the "undetected" monitors and plugging them back in. Are you using GNOME? mutter has this problem where it does not retry commit on the next CRTC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3833 . If this is actually what's happening on your system, switching t…

GNOME is typically the worst of all the options if you need feature support. They aggressively nack wayland proposals, and subsequently don't implement those proposals - while almost the entirety of the ecosystem does.

Seriously, it's bizarre to me how aggressively they pushed to use Wayland but then hold it back like that.

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers. If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already. They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically se…

The reason they don't meaningfully enforce their copyright on consumer PCs is precisely because they do care about their market share. If you buy a computer with Windows (or get it installed) in what I suspect is the overwhelming majority of the world, it's an 'illegitimate' copy and it works 100% fine, including operating with Microsoft's servers. As you mentioned, they could trivially stop this if they wanted to, b…

The funny thing is that I would be totally willing to pay for a license if in exchange for no ads and no needing a Microsoft account.

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#548
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I daily drive Ubuntu, the user experience is comparable (in many cases better) to Windows 11. The only sticking point for me is display drivers. HDR on Wayland is barely functional (in my experience), and getting things like hardware accelerated AV1 encoding, full Vulkan API support etc to work has been extremely difficult. Every time I login using a Wayland desktop, only my main monitor is detected and it defaults t…

All of my problem was solved by disabling hybrid graphics and use the dedicated card only. I had not a single bug since then on X11 (I didn’t try Wayland yet, because it was almost completely unusable with hybrid config). The only drawback is battery life, but that wasn’t great even before. I could never reach the ~4 hours, which was possible with Windows. Even with the dedicated card disabled. So, I’m not entirely s…

Same, on my laptop. Hybrid graphics destabilised both Debian (with Nvidia drivers installed) and the Windows 11 installation I have on there for SharpCap. Switching to Nvidia GPU only made everything rock solid.

This was my first experience with hybrid graphics, and so far I'm not impressed.

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#549
post #520

So I just figured out a workaround that actually works! At least until Microsoft puts out a new Windows installer that fixes this, here's what you can do: First, make sure you unplug your ethernet cable or turn off WiFi before you start installing Windows. This way your computer isn't connected to the internet during setup. When you get to that screen where it's asking you to sign in with a Microsoft account (you kno…

According to the linked article, that's the specific thing they removed in this latest test build

Re: Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account

#550
post #344
post #300

The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is Windows 11, with perfect timing too as modern Linux has been a joy to use as a daily driver. Normally I'd be unhappy when a sleazy corp forces me to give up on 25 years of muscle memory of using my preferred OS, but I'm thankful they gave me the push I needed to rip off the ad/spyware laced Windows Band-Aid that I only need to do once in my life. It's been over a year sinc…

The best thing to happen to Linux Desktop is not that it has improved but that its biggest competitor has dropped the ball? That’s not really praising it.

Yes, of course? Linux could be immaculate, but having less than 5% user share is a bigger issue that is best solved by the current market leader cratering.
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