Live data from Hacker News

Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

theverge.com

231–240 of 469 posts

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#231
post #187

Literally a trap to hand over your encryption keys. Never sign into an operating system with a cloud identity. You should have stopped using windows years ago. There is no excuse, especially thanks to Valve for their work enhancing wine ecosystem and making your games work.

> Literally a trap to hand over your encryption keys. I let my keys sync to my MS account. I mainly want to protect against untargeted theft of my computer, so having recovery keys online makes more sense than a recovery key printout or USB key in a drawer.

You may regret that one day. I try to live my life mitigating regrets. Good cryptographic key hygiene will pay dividends.

Also trust people, systems and corporations less.

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is great, Github only got better under Microsoft, and I'm actually one of the people who likes Teams... But even as a general fanboy (Win98 was the system that really got me into computers), it is just too much bullshit at this point. While before I had a Linux partition for specific work, and my main "digital life" on windows, I'm going to switch this around now. And it sucks so much, there is no good reason…

In WinXP there was something about WMP checking for the rights to MP3's that were already on your computer to verify that you were legally allowed to play them. I don't think users of Windows have been the primary focus for a long time.

That's a common misconception. What it would do was when indexing a folder with DRM'd music files, it would automatically try to add the rights to the store on your local computer. They weren't using that specific functionality to scan and report. And, it was opt in (when you first started wmp)

Getting track titles automatically (gracenote, etc) might be what you're mixing in - and that was also opt in, and even open source software has that functionality now (VLC, for example)

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have promised they'll fix this for the Steam Deck, so there's a chance this will change in the next week.

They have also said they would implement a rating system of how well proton will run various games. From 'Perfect' all the way down to 'unplayable'. I think it was their quiet way of saying they couldn't meet the standard they set, at least, not yet.

https://www.protondb.com/ has been around for a while and provides all of this. I consult it before buying titles.

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#236
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no excuse, especially thanks to Valve for their work enhancing wine ecosystem and making your games work. While Proton is great, it helps no one to suggest it's a solution to making all games work. There are absolutely enormous multiplayer titles still unavailable on Proton, if you can't play the games your friends play who cares if 99% of the rest of the Steam library works? Again, I think Proton is great…

Which games specifically do not work? Proton has been improving rapidly.

Games that require certain anti-cheats that either valve doesn't support or the dev doesn't opt into. It seems to be mostly related to multi player online games.

Also games that have issues with patented codecs, although valve is working around that by transcoding them to a different format, so they can play locally without the relevant decodre

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#237
> Set up your Windows with a Microsoft account (tiny text-only button “continue without Microsoft account”)

> Are you sure you don’t want to use a Microsoft account? (tiny text-only button “I don’t want to use a Microsoft account”)

> Last chance, are you really sure you don’t want to use a Microsoft account? (tiny text-only button “I don’t want to use a Microsoft account”)

At least it was something like this during the beta.

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#238

Literally a trap to hand over your encryption keys. Never sign into an operating system with a cloud identity. You should have stopped using windows years ago. There is no excuse, especially thanks to Valve for their work enhancing wine ecosystem and making your games work.

> Literally a trap to hand over your encryption keys. Never sign into an operating system with a cloud identity. Why does your trust model include "running a proprietary OS that can do anything at any time" but not "the OS explicitly requires a user account tied to an online account?" That doesn't make any sense. To be clear: there are plenty of great reasons to dislike this change. But they all fall under "user-host…

My trust model absolutely abhors closed source software. I compile binaries myself. I would not use Microsoft software.

However the this isn’t about me. This is providing advice in such a way that the casual windows user might see the threat to their keys.

The only reason they were allowed to rollout BitLocker was if they stole the keys. Funny that encryption only became a “problem” in the age of the iPhone.

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#239
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These morons at MS decided to force a very confusing and friction-ful Minecraft account migration from Mojang to MS just as all the kids are migrating from Minecraft to Roblox. I'm sure this is only accelerating Minecraft's demise.

This one absolutely kills me. Why do my kids need Microsoft accounts for this? Their official instructions ask for DOB and require checking some box about allowing my kids to sign into "third-party applications". Not to mention all the legal crap I'll have to agree to, settings to scrutinize and opt-out of to ensure privacy, etc. I am this close to just telling them that they're going to have to abandon their favorit…

I can't think of anything more off-putting when purchasing a game than having to create another account.

I have yet to migrate any of our family's 6+ Mojang accounts to Microsoft and I'm not sure that I will. Migrating to a Microsoft account also coincidentally creates an XBox Live account which is a hassle I don't need. If Minecraft needs to die in order to make way for the next creative, social, non-FPS game then I can accept that.

And I'm not convinced that Microsoft's forced migration from Mojang to MS accounts is legal.

Re: Windows 11 Pro will soon require a Microsoft Account during initial setup

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely false. It may not be for you, but it is not remotely a mess. I do everything from DevOps work, to gaming, to audio production in desktop Linux. It absolutely is a viable alternative for millions of people. But I concede, not for everyone. But your hyperbole is plainly false and likely to deter folks who would otherwise thrive in Linux.

Heavy Linux user since about 2000, was my main desktop (and laptop!) operating system from about 2002-2011. Mainly Mandrake (mostly early on), Ubuntu, Gentoo (on the laptop, and elsewhere—probably my most-used personal distro), and Debian. I most recently gave it a serious go about a year ago (Fedora and Ubuntu, plus some Void [Void was pretty nice!]) Can confirm it's a mess and there was no hyperbole in the original…

This really seems hard to credit at face value. The thing that most strikes me is

> Gentoo (on the laptop, and elsewhere—probably my most-used personal distro)

> In hindsight I can tell that I'd become blind to all the time I was losing to it. I'd lose 30 minutes or a whole day fucking with dumb shit that I never should have had to

Gentoo really isn't as much a distro as a personal distribution construction kit given that you can trivially swap out major components and put the resulting pieces together however you please rebuilt with any set of options you most prefer. If you were losing a lot of time its possible that this experience wasn't worthwhile meanwhile other people were using gentoo with the just the software they needed and not constantly messing with it and it was presumably working for them.

Having used a derivative of Gentoo I can say with confidence that it IS a lot more work and things that are set up for you rely on YOU to set them up including even building software with options that will enable the feature you desire to actually work. I multiple times ran into software that didn't work as expected because I hadn't built it with that option and started reading the use flags on software before installing it.

Because Linux is a large ecosystem with software provided by groups ranging from professional companies and excellent amateurs all the way to your cousin bob and his 3 friends you are going to see a variety of differing experiences as I'm sure you are aware. I have several times over 18 years installed distros to realize that something was holy shit wrong with the way they were run but as it comes out I was out a few hours and moved on to one of many better run software projects.

If you find software including distributions/desktops/browsers/tools that you have to work around random crashes consider installing different software. There is plenty of functional, stable, useful software for Linux. Your complaints kind of read like someone who has found the worst Italian restaurant in their city and loudly exclaimed that Italian food is universally awful because it consists mostly of soggy noddles and burnt meat. Well it doesn't.

Post reply on HN