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Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

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Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#621

Post by amaccuish »

viraptor wrote: post #216
tanr54ok wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t just one app, there are plenty. Excel and adobe cs are the obvious ones. If you’re not in programming (exclusively) you’re stuck on Windows or Mac.

Latest excel has gold level support: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... I know there are plenty of things that don't work with wine, but realistically, how many of them does each person need to work, and how many are "defaults"? For example if you spend 90% of your time in illustrator, do you need excel specifically, or "an app with text in cells"? And if you're crunching market data in e…

That's not the latest excel, which would be Excel 2019.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#622

Post by tanr54ok »

viraptor wrote: post #216
tanr54ok wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t just one app, there are plenty. Excel and adobe cs are the obvious ones. If you’re not in programming (exclusively) you’re stuck on Windows or Mac.

Latest excel has gold level support: https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... I know there are plenty of things that don't work with wine, but realistically, how many of them does each person need to work, and how many are "defaults"? For example if you spend 90% of your time in illustrator, do you need excel specifically, or "an app with text in cells"? And if you're crunching market data in e…

The crowd on HN is biased towards software development, something overwhelmingly well supported on Linux (it’s my daily driver as much as possible for that). But I assume there is a long tail of other professionals here... using their systems for actual industry work that isn’t programming. An area that is terrible on Linux sadly.

Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere are not “defaults” on any system I know of. If you need to draw an arrow on a screenshot, there are ironically more free beer and open source programs available on Windows to do this (even gimp). If someone wants to pirate adobe that isn’t an aspiring designer (which is sort of a rite of passage), and has it just to collect that’s cool, but irrelevant... but I assume if someone has the CS on their machine it’s to do actual work with industry standard tools - that certainly is the case for me.

There are plenty of things to do in Excel that are best served by excel and not crunching market data. I have tried libreoffice calc multiple times in the past. Google sheets is also cool for certain things, but no excel killer.

And here’s the kicker: If you need to just put arrows on screenshots or an app with text in cells (and you’re not a dev), then you don’t need a desktop running Linux or windows... you can do with an iPad.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#623

Post by ohthehugemanate »

npmaile wrote: post #13

I understand correcting the title to be more accurate to the situation, but I think the discussion should be focused on how Microsoft is taking power away from users, and has business incentive to do so. I don't like that the greater tech community rallies behind Microsoft for doing some basic contributions to open source and then hand waves away moves like this. Edit: the comment section has shifted and I'm less dis…

"some basic contributions" is a little unfair, don't you think?

* 2 of the top 7 programming languages in use on GitHub are Microsoft created and maintained.

* Jockeying for top place among companies contributing code to projects on GitHub, for 4 years running.

* Top 5 contributor to the Linux Kernel

* Massively popular IDE in VSCode

* Enormous contributions to Kubernetes and the entire community around it,including creating/maintaining Helm.

* Big parts of Azure are open source, including their kubernetes implementation, ML toolkits, IOT components, and even the infrastructure underneath the whole thing, Service Fabric. (Demonstrably capable of orchestrating the varied workloads and scale of the second largest cloud provider in the world).

* Owner/maintainer of GitHub, which for better or worse is the platform for the vast majority of open source.

I don't like windows, I don't like office, and I don't like this move... But let's try to maintain some intellectual honesty here. Microsoft is not anywhere near a "basic" contributor to open source.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#624

Post by vetinari »

arbol wrote: post #418
logimame wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently hackintoshed a XPS 15 9550, and holy shit it became the best laptop I’ve used so far. Everything (including bluetooth and wifi) works, no butterfly keyboard shenanigans, still decent performance, lots of ports (including hdmi and usb 3), the touchpad works perfectly (with all multitouch gestures).

I don't suppose you have a link to a write up or guide you followed?

Try r/hackintosh vanilla guide. You may find, that other guides are refering to old/obsolete tools, and thus will not work with current macOS.

Also expect learning new things and spending several evenings trying. Compared to hackintosh, installing Linux on random hardware is a walk in the park.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#625

Post by heyitsme »

mcny wrote: post #579
proc0 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games is literally the only reason keeping me installing Windows. Hoping this changes with some viable alternative.

> Games is literally the only reason keeping me installing Windows. Hoping this changes with some viable alternative. If you have the money and the space for a second computer, use the computer with Windows for that specialized task and use a real* computer for everything else? We've been whining about this nonsense for over two years now and I think we need to take a hint. * that does not force you to restart at its…

I have little time to play games these days, but I do that. Have two machines, both always on, one of them a windows one for games, the other runs linux for everything else. I use a usb switch to, on-the-fly, change all the relevant devices (mouse, keyboard, headphone dac/amp, etc) and adjust the monitor input to use one or the other. It works extremely well, and takes ~1-2 seconds to switch.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#626

Post by giancarlostoro »

chank wrote: post #47
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #42

Microsoft is clearly taking moves that enable "PC as a service". I imagine the end game is something like you pay Microsoft so much a month on a subscription, receive hardware that is preconfigured with and tied to your Microsoft account details or your company's Azure AD configuration and locked down with InTune, unhackable with properly implemented Class 3+ UEFI and Secure Boot, etc. You then purchase additional so…

Deal is, big corps want it. Everything as a service. Easy to write off. Easy to ramp up and down as needed.

Macs are easy to write off too I am sure. Also going all in on Linux and donating to appropriate projects is another easy write off. Both of which do not have subscription services.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#627

Post by giancarlostoro »

mastazi wrote: post #63

This is incredibly bad. In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing lately, but Windows is a glaring exception, it’s getting worse and worse at an alarming rate. In the last two months we had two consecutive updates that broke basic functionality for users who disabled web results in Windows Search (which is a very common setting among those who care about privacy) https://www.zdnet.com/article/window…

Wonder what happens if you try to install without any network connectivity whatsoever. Like when it asks for internet just dont connect. I feel like it falls back to an offline account.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#628

Post by bigwavedave »

GVIrish wrote: post #493
CRConrad wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several people here have talked about “hacks” like what happened to ypur son, and I'm of course not saying they're wrong. I don't quite get the idea what it's supposed to get such hackers, though, so I think you shouldn't rule out sheer incompetence: Maybe someone else has a family member with the same or a similar name and was trying to add rhem, and a search threw up your son's name and they added him by mistake? S…

As a sibling comment said, some people are griefers who only seek to inconvenience or otherwise harass others. Particularly with online games.

Especially as a form of revenge. Yeah, it's petty, but it's been my experience that "petty" (and so many other gamers are going to down vote this) describes 90% of gaming cultures.

Re: Microsoft has removed the “use offline account” option when installing Windows

#629

Post by LexGray »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #514
navigatesol wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But should we realize in a couple years that this was overhyped and desktop OS and apps won't go away, everyone will have migrated to OSX or Linux if Windows quality continues to decline at that rate. Windows still claims nearly 80% of desktop market share, while OS X has less than 15%. Linux is around 2%. Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires…

> Assuming people in any significant number care about having to use an online account is naive. Apple requires it. macOS does not require a cloud account. Technically you don't even need one for iOS, but most people will create an Apple ID for the App Store (and I hope this distribution monopoly on iOS will eventually be broken up).

In a similar way for macOS enabling the offline root user has been under Network Account Server > Directory Utility forever. Microsoft is not alone in their logic here.
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