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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

#661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering if this is really the right move as in "desktop is definitely going down and everything will be web based". In that case sure, why bother throwing money at it. 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.

if home wireless printers ever become usable (reliably over wifi) i might then consider web based an option, but only because i know that will never happen

I’ve had flawless wireless printing on Mac OS with an HP printer for years. iOS too. Didn’t realize it was still flaky. Guess I got lucky with my combo.

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

#662
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In these situations there usually is no actual logical reason. The corporate "reason" is that a new CEO must be seen implementing dramatic changes (activity > progress). In this case I'm not sure if Satya the Saint [tm] started this roadmap, but for sure he managed to associate himself with it and take credit for it. As others said, a new CEO can easily reverse the whole process in order to have a "new" little triump…

Given Satya's background, it seems fairly clear what the board were looking for when they chose their new CEO, and he's delivering exactly what we might have expected. To be fair to him, from a business perspective, look at Microsoft's share price since. As long as the cloud hype continues and no-one is looking too closely at where Microsoft's money is (and in some cases now isn't) coming from, the stock is likely to…

> I'm still a little surprised that none of the other IT giants appears to have identified the Windows 7 EoL next year as a rare opportunity to grab a significant chunk of the desktop market and been building a credible competitor.

Who, exactly, would be positioned to do that? Apple's not interested. RedHat/IBM I guess I could see, but their customer base is very different.

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

#663

...and from what I can tell, their online account security is craptastic. Here’s a true story that happened to my family. My son is the only person in the house who uses Windows. For his game machine. He set up a Microsoft online account. It got hacked - someone set up a fake family and managed to get my son’s account listed under it as a child. As a consequence, he couldn’t install any new software. I’m not sure wha…

The family accounts are crazy anyway. I once worked for an agency that had just bought its first Windows Phone for testing. Setting it up I dutifully signed in with the company’s MS account, but found that I couldn’t install any apps and there were loads of restrictions. It took me multiple hours of debugging to realise that because someone at the past had entered the company’s formation date in the birthdate of the…

That sounds okay for a child though.

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

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Windows 10 LTSB exists for this specific use case

It does but good luck getting licensing. They explicitly try to make getting the LTSB/C difficult because they know everyone would buy it if they offered a "clean" version of Windows. But - if you can swing it - LTSB/C is the only thing that I would prefer for any sort of automation etc.

Checking around, here in Germany averages for Enterprise LTSB vs standard Enterprise is €275 vs €70.

Standard Enterprise comes with forced updates and mandatory restarts, yes?

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

#665
post #418

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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.

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

I've been a Hackintosh user for the past decade.

I've not done it yet, but the next time I need to do a brand new Hackintosh setup, I'm planning on using ESXI. It seems perfect—you're getting very little performance loss in exchange for a setup which is (kind of) officially supported by Apple.

Maybe when I actually do it, I'll discover some terrible downside, but it seems incredibly appealing.

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

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is _by far_ the best platform for embedded development. Vscode is available as an official snap (on Windows you need to download and update it manually), Segger tools and openocd are fully supported. GCC cross-compiler and even some flashing tools are part of the distro and just an apt-get away. This also means that everyone get the same tools (same version, same bugs). Which makes collaboration much easier.

> This also means that everyone get the same tools (same version, same bugs). Everywhere I've worked solved this by having the toolchain available via a network share that you would mount/copy, or checked into p4 so that everyone would be on the same version and you would know what compiler version was used to build a particular release. I suppose you could achieve the same thing by building in a Docker container.. T…

Yeah, but everything is easier if it's native to your machine :)

We have used Docker images in past but it gets really annoying with large code trees and access permissions for programmers and debuggers...

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

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything works with a local account. I don't even need to have an Apple ID. Like App Store? Or are we talking about "for varying degrees of 'everything'"?

Have you ever used a Mac?

Mac App Store definitely requires Apple ID.

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

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why N VMs? You had one before, you can have one VM with multiple apps (if you can even count office parts as multiple apps)

Sorry, kinda mixed the "Need office" requirement I wrote about and my previous "Different VMs for different needs" (Office was one, a Windows product I build extensions for was in another, then the corporate environment tends to keep VMware images around to simulate a customer environment / to prepare a demo system for sales etc etc). You're right. One VM could work for office and other utilities. Unfortunately for m…

If you can set up stuff in Windows VM, you can enable RemoteApp and freerdp can just show a seamless window. Kind of like parallels.

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

#669
post #242

...and from what I can tell, their online account security is craptastic. Here’s a true story that happened to my family. My son is the only person in the house who uses Windows. For his game machine. He set up a Microsoft online account. It got hacked - someone set up a fake family and managed to get my son’s account listed under it as a child. As a consequence, he couldn’t install any new software. I’m not sure wha…

Yep, and last I checked (earlier this year I believe), there’s still a 14-character length limit on the MS account password. My bank’s better than that for crying out loud. Forget diceware or any other sane scheme, say hello to random hard-to-type punctuation characters. And now you’re forced to use that as your computer password too, which you probably have to type multiple times a day. (Okay, thankfully local accou…

As many people said already you can use longer passwords.

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

#670
post #579
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…

Yeah I do have a laptop for work only, however the gaming desktop is always that much more powerful and some things are tempting to do there (not to mention better display). Windows now has embedded Linux, so I can see maybe a setup that uses the same files from Windows by launching some Linux environment when I need to work. I just hope that because of this Linux/Windows integration, some of the reverse can happen and Linux can get DirectX support for current version.
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