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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

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Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#71

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

malfist wrote: post #46
kstrauser wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be the first time that sentiment's ever been expressed.

Why do you say that? A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc

The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.

Not to mention the muscle memory for pressing CTRL in the corner of the keyboard rather than CMD where Alt is.

Though I will say that having "Copy" (cmd-c) being different from ^C (ctrl-c) was kind of nice. Though Terminal has done a nice thing of making it so if you highlight text, Ctrl-C copies the first time you press it, and sends ^C the second time.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#72

Post by hackyhacky »

dahdum wrote: post #30

You’ve always been able to install and use without an account (oobe\bypassnro). As long as power users and businesses can avoid it, they have no real incentive to change.

Note on Current Status (2025/2026): Microsoft is actively removing this command in newer Windows 11 updates, especially in 24H2/25H2 and Insider builds. If oobe\bypassnro fails, the command is not recognized, or simply reboots without enabling the option, you must use alternative methods.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#73

Post by bobbob1921 »

longislandguido wrote: post #35
TheRoque wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13 inch screen though.. it's really small And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say

I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....

I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#74

Post by Jare »

nananana9 wrote: post #48
Jare wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall macos forcing it. They definitely over-suggest it and the ecosystem (especially for dev) is very full of it and I consider that a problem, but it's limited in scope. If you don't want the Apple ecosystem, as far as I know you never need an AppleID.

I had to make one to download Xcode from the store. I couldn' figure out a way around it, but admittedly I have about 4 hours of macos experience.

Yes, I was bunching up Xcode with "Apple ecosystem". I presume you can get clang/gcc without AppleID (but haven't actually done it myself), and for sure many other dev tools.

I'd definitely much prefer if even for "ecosystem" the companies would not require online account except where truly necessary (purchases?), but for operating the OS itself, I do feel there's a line in the sand where online account requirement = no.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#75

Post by wvenable »

freediddy wrote: post #26

I have Windows and Mac PCs/laptops. I've used Windows since Windows 3.0, for 30+ years now. In the early 90s I invested in Windows NT 3.5 as a college student and learned how to use that over Windows 3.1 or OS/2. I attended the Windows 95 celebration in person. I almost went into becoming a Microsoft MCSE because it would have doubled my pay but went the programming route instead because I loved it more. I'm still on…

With a few small tweaks, Windows 11 is just as good if not better than Windows 10.

Now maybe you shouldn't have to do those tweaks but it's certainly not a major hardship.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#76

Post by bombcar »

jcelerier wrote: post #63
999900000999 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people. I have an RTX 5070TI laptop. 95% I use it with Tumbleweed. Unfortunately with work I don't have too much to play with LLM training and such. The ultra poor person system is a used 200$ Thinkpad ( something about 2 years old) + your Linux distro of choice.

200$ ThinkPad...? The current best sellers on Amazon US are two 180$ brand new laptops. Intel Celeron N4020, 4Gb ram, 64 GB storage, 1366x768. This is what the average computer user is using to try to run your apps and websites. And remember - a cheap laptop bought today is going to be in use for at least five years.

The only things I recognize on that are the CPU brand name (there have been times the Celeron has been good bang for the buck), the RAM, and the storage (I guess and the resolution).

To me, all of those seem woefully underpowered, but $180 is $180...

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#77

Post by wvenable »

jmclnx wrote: post #11

>Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State. In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and n…

Age verification just requires that one be able to provide an age when setting up an account. Like, for example, when you setup an account for your child on the device. This doesn't seem to require any sort of online account requirement as far as I understand it.

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#78

Post by SirMaster »

dpark wrote: post #45
throwa356262 wrote: post #7

Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?

Apple does not tie the local account to the cloud account the same way. On a Mac you create a local account and you can (and almost certainly will) create a cloud account to link to it. But they are separate accounts. In fact I’m pretty sure Apple blocks you from setting the passwords the same on both, presumably with the intent of reminding you that they are not the same entity.

But what about our phones? Why are people so OK with an online account for their phone or tablet but not laptop?

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#79

Post by dymk »

longislandguido wrote: post #35
TheRoque wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13 inch screen though.. it's really small And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say

I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....

I don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine

Re: People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

#80

Post by Tostino »

user432678 wrote: post #25
WarmWash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

I actually hope “product people” won’t be involved as long as possible. “Product people” is mostly a reason of our current state of enshitification of most of the products. I would actually try my best to gatekeep.

You really think it's product people pushing enshitification rather than the people who want to financialize every aspect of our lives?

Every product person I have worked with was just a SME in their domain, and pushed for a cohesive piece of software that solved their (users) needs.

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