“Made for Xbox” branding for proprietary accessories approved by Microsoft incoming. Anything else won’t work.
How hypocritical of MS to pull this on their consumers after making it such a big deal that competitors like Apple do this same thing. Pot meet Kettle.
Anyone surprised? MS is one of the shadiest companies out there. Google gathering user data? “Don’t get scroogled!” Microsoft account required for windows 11? That’s completely different. Gamers in particular just fell for their self-imposed image as the good guys because of Game pass and constantly bashing their competitors.
If I remember correctly, it was them first charging for online services under Xbox Live Gold for functionality that was usually free on PC.
Going way back to the beginnings of both companies, yes. Apple had the ‘walled garden’, where the idea was that you were safer with all things ‘Apple Approved’.
Microsoft and most of the industry went the other way at the time and MS grew exponentially.
Since they mentioned the workarounds but didn’t explain them, I’m copying my comment from another post a couple of weeks ago.
Lemmy probably isn’t the target audience for this, here’s the steps to bypass the MS account requirement when setting up W11:
Configure your keyboard, but before you select your wifi network press Shift+(Fn)+F10 to open Command Prompt.
Type in the following command and press enter. Your computer will reboot: oobe\bypassnro
After the reboot, configure your keyboard and location settings, and click the option at the bottom of the page to say that you don’t want to connect to the internet
Click the link on the next page to “Continue with limited setup”, then follow the prompts to enter a username and password.
Thr FN part is notable if you have a recent computer. A lot of laptops and keyboards ship out with media keys as the default on the top row now, and you must hold the FN key to use F10. Lot of people don’t realize this and think Shift+F10 isn’t working.
Possibly an easier option: you can let it connect to the internet, and then when it tells you to set up a Microsoft account, click on “Other sign in options” (or whatever it says beneath the text box). Then select “Domain Join instead”. It’ll let you use a local account, expecting you to join it to a domain later, then you just…don’t join it to a domain.
Always be sure to use something like O&O ShutUp10 or Winaero Tweaker after you reach the desktop, so you can shut off all the bullshit, otherwise it will keep harassing you to make an account. I think you need to uninstall OneDrive too, to stop it hijacking the address bar in file explorer with constant nagging to set it up
Good info, but everyone should know that Windows 11 Home can not join domains, and the option will not be there. Only Pro, Enterprise, and Education versions can do that.
Yes, that’s true. But I’m kind of going off the assumption anybody that actually wants to use a local account is somebody who knows better than to use the Home edition. Without group policy and a couple of the other configurable points, I’m not sure how viable it even is to use Home anymore if you want Microsoft off your back.
Usually notebooks ship with a fn lock function.
On our hp notebooks its fn + shift.
Now the keys work like regular Fx keys and for the function you need to press the fn key first.
In that case, it makes sense. I’m a developer and am stepping through code in a debugger pretty frequently, which makes heavy use of the F keys. I use the F keys far more often than the media keys.
We used to use that method for the company I was working for. We would setup laptops in advance and they were in the early process of setting up intune. Since we didn’t have a user account, we’d use your method to continue setup to get to the desktop.
I think we’d then run commands in pwershell to have the machine appear on intune.
It was a good few years ago and it was a very annoying, arduous time. They worked out the kinks eventually and that was no longer required.
I successfully did it on a brand new Inspiron laptop yesterday morning. I do regular device configs for my organization, and the moment this stops working, I’ll be here to rage about it!
"Colonel updates require a reboot, but just normal application updates do not. And most system updates do not. I partly misspoke about Android. I should have been more clear because I was referring to the A/B partition scheme, but yeah, to run the new system does require rebooting.
I love linux and been using it for decades, personally and professionally, but no, linux doesn’t have “hot patching” the same way as that article describes it. At most it can live patch the kernel (and only few distros actually use that), but definitely not for the last 20 years, and definitely not running processes. However, it does usually restart background processes after an update without requiring a reboot, but in my experience, often times the system becomes unstable after several such updates and rebooting is effectively necessary (though not forced, and that’s why I like it).
Yeah, the security in knowing that if you’re way top busy right now, you don’t have to install or even download any updates. And you don’t have to worry your system will suddenly become crashy, glitchy, and unstable because it decided on its own to install some things and let you know you can reboot whenever.
It’s so freaking annoying I have to use Windows at work. It takes liberty to do what it wants and then my workflow gets hosed.
I get that there is security, but if you force updates, I should have some kind of notice or “hey, we need to install mandatory updates. You can schedule in the next 24 hours when or you can get them over with”
For the home user, this is a giant PITA for which I wholly blame MS.
For business machines, I lump the company IT in with MS, because there are Policies for this stuff they should be managing.
I say this as an IT person responsible for things like this. The first rule is don’t fuck with user machines during business hours, the second is to allow them to postpone stuff as needed.
Can only imagine getting an update, then a reboot, while I’m on an outage call trying to get a critical system back up. And hoping my laptop comes back up and my VPN still works.
Can’t say I’ve experienced forced reboots on either my home or work PC; I always have gotten an option.
Do you have to ignore updates for a while until they’re forced? I’m pretty quick with updating when I’m notified- typically that evening when I’m done with the computer.
I’ve been building my own windows PCs since 99, using every main version of consumer Windows except ME. Never been forced while in the middle of something.
With Win10 and later (I honestly don’t remember with Win 8), by default updates happen in the background, and will be applied and a reboot scheduled.
It won’t necessarily force a reboot, but it can reboot when you’re not there. I’ve had updates with reboot happen when I was away for 30 minutes, on a machine I was setting up and hadn’t yet configured policies.
The updates quietly happening in the background are still a problem because they can’t be paused or canceled and they use a lot of sysrme resources to get done. And when they’re complete, your experience is less stable till the reboot.
I usually notice them when my work computer slows down and things start having more bugs than usual. My work computer has very respectable specs
Current versions of windows literally let you set an update reboot window. So set up the times you use it, and then forget about it and let it install whenever it wants.
I honestly, and sincerely, do not understand all the hate Windows gets with current updates. The alternative at the moment is “hope the user remembers to update” which we have seen in action and which does not work.
Is it annoying when you don’t set things up properly? Sure! But that’s a failing on the users side.
I’ve been using Windows for decades, and the last time I had it unexpectedly reboot for an update was years ago. Because I’ve actually taken the 10 minutes to understand the system, and how to configure it to do what I want.
I haven’t used Windows 11 interestingly, so I don’t know if they’ve changed their update habits, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Windows 10 is the last edition I’ve used. Since Windows 8, I had plenty of issues with Windows and Microsoft, and it got worse every release. I’ll bullet-form my personal complaints at the bottom of this page.
My final straw for Windows 10 in my personal life was a forced restart, and I had all my update settings where I wanted them, and still, I lost a really important session to that reboot. Since I was pretty comfy with Linux, I went that direction. Since then, Linux has gotten more user-friendly and plays videogames, way more than Mac. It’s still not something I recommend to most people, but probably someday, it’ll get to a Mac or Windows ease of use.
At work, most of us haven’t been migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and I still get updates installing in the background a lot, causing issues even on our Windows servers. I’m sure our ops team can tune these abhorrent update defaults, but it’s just a frustrating experience nonetheless.
I think a prompt or reminder could go really far to let the user configure that during setup.
Here are some of my complaints over time:
Force installs and bloat. Inclusion of bloat by default. Reinstallation of bloat on updates.
Resetting of my settings and registry edits regularly.
Ads on the desktop
Needless nagging to use their other bullshit like Onedrive. You think it’s good? Great! Let me uninstall it and use the cloud providers of my choice.
Forcing an inferior start menu without a choice to use alternatives or the old ones.
Windows tracks insane amounts of users’ data and actrivities, and I do not trust them to admit to all the tracking they do but the tracking they admit to doing is already mind-boggling.
Windows 10’s forced upgrade and Windows 10 popup scandals were completely dishonest and disgusting, and I have not heard enough apologies for what they did. This personally affected me and broke a bunch of crap before Windows 10 was even well-baked.
A history of forced updates. A history of forced reboots. A history of lost work. This is me and my family. It sounds like Windows has reverted some of their worst practices, but the precedent is set, and I’ll never trust Microsoft to stick to it.
The Windows seeker’s scandal personally affected me. They put all sorts of beta garbage on my computer without telling me. This caused a loss of files. They’ve made a resurgence on their unethical behaviors in the browser space. I have faith they’ll continue to revisit their other old habits. Look up Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it’ll get you started. IE was their old baby. Edge is the new one.
Buying and killing small companies and studios, such as Rare, a bit like EA had done
Moving away from some of the nice things earlier Windows versions did, like a start menu with a neat list of organized and searchable programs.
Having just 1 UI experience that isn’t super customizable and breaking 3rd party UIs.
Fullscreen popups and nonsense over nothing
Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has been a factor most of my life. They still push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior to the Nth’s degree. Again, that reading on Embrace-Extend-Extinguish will give you a taste of their BS.
Having fewer features and techs than Linux that I like to use, such as specialty filesystems, IO schedulers, process schedulers, swapping systems (ZRAM/ZSWAP) etc. Being stuck on NTFS (are you kidding me?) REFS is too little too late and you can’t even boot off it
Way worse IO/Disk performance and features
inferior memory management
Overall, I don’t want to do business or help in the success in an organization I do not like by offering up my data, watching their ads, and using their products less than necessary. I like some of the things Bill Gates has done, but it doesn’t change any of my views on this.
I felt like clarifying that the updates issues I faced were the last straw and that if anyone was interested, I listed the other reasons I quit working with them and never looked back. That’s why I wrote all that at the bottom.
Even if Microsoft does some things right, they still have a history of doing things wrong and have a bevy of other dark patterns. I do not trust them to get it right anymore. They could go back to their old ways tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully, it’s not my problem except at work
Win 11 Pro user here. It doesn’t care what time you set for updates, it’ll do them when it feels like anyway, or annoy the piss out of you with notifications.
It might be that I don’t leave the PC on all the time, I just hit sleep. But still, it shouldn’t strong arm me into updating after a day or two of the download. Also hate having to RegEdit Edge off the thing after each one.
Windows lets you pause updates for some time, maybe a week or so, after that you’re going to take them whether you like it or not. Granted, you had a week or so to prepare, so it’s ok to some extent, but don’t tell me Windows doesn’t force you…
Hmm, good to know, I’ll have to try, just out of curiosity. Is that available on Windows Home or just Pro? Anyways, it’s not something that many people would easily figure out, so for most non-technical people they effectively cannot disable them.
you still need to reboot your linux machine or relogin if you updated a process that’s currently running (and in most cases most system processes can’t be just restarted) (…and otherwise you’ll just stay at the old version bit with new data which might cause some instability)
yes, there’s kernel hot-patching but it only affects the kernel, only viable for minor and security upgrades, does not come pre-configured on most consumer distros and not really suitable for home use.
So what are the hidden features? The article doesn’t say and I scrolled through all the comments and nothing popped out at me other than a bunch of comments of people bashing windows and sucking their own dicks over Linux?
The hidden features are flags that Microsoft enables or disables for random users as part of A/B testing. The article contains a link to the various flags that can be enabled depending on your edition and version of Windows.
Afaik it’s a tool to interact with an API to override A/B testing in an official way.
Apparantly some tool already exists that does it. Just not the official way.
I nearly said “20” but then realized I’m almost twice that old myself and the NES is a couple years older than me. Friggin’ millennials. We’re ruining the aging industry too.
As an American, all I can say is thank you Europe for continuing to have sensible legislation that forces these companies to have decent policies worldwide if only to comply with EU laws. I only use Windows on my company provided laptop but just because I don’t need to worry about it personally doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t care about how it affects others.
Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can’t run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
Or what? Your computer will take out a club and beat you to death?
You can’t convince me someone couldn’t do it with a simple registry edit, or even just replace the icon with something else by swapping an icon file somewhere in Windows/
IDK, MS really went all the way with backwards compatibility. They literally built emulators for the 360 and OG Xbox in order to let people play old games using old disks they already owned.
I’d be shocked if they didn’t stay committed to this.
The rumored Series X refresh doesn’t have a disk drive.
It’d be hard for Microsoft to remain committed to game preservation in that way without them.
To me, this sounds more like they’re looking at Nintendo’s virtual store playbook and wondering how many times they can sell the same games to their customer base.
Apple ensures its operating systems are clean, polished, and without bloat.
Except for all the uninstallable Apple bloat such as Apple Music, Apple TV, etc. And the numerous bugs and issues, such as still not being able to have the touch pad and mouse scroll wheel have different settings.
I remember when everyone was complaining about how terrible Safari is. The lead developer started having a go and ranting on Twitter, saying that raising bug reports is not constructive feedback.
I do have a Twitter account but for the life of me I can’t remember what the password is so I can’t actually see the responses, since apparently you need to sign in to see responses now, but if you do have Twitter you can see the responses here’s the link. x.com/jensimmons/status/1491064075987873792
Some nitter instances might work. This one did. Not a shitshow at all, especially as she didn’t say that “bug reports aren’t constructive feedback”
Everyone in my mentions saying Safari is the worst, it’s the new IE… Can you point to specific bugs & missing support that frustrate you, inhibit you making websites/apps. Bonus points for links to tickets. Specifics we can fix. Vague hate is honestly super counterproductive."
There’s plenty of bug reports in there and she’s behaving how I’d expect a developer to: by asking further questions and version use for stuff that should be fixed. Didn’t see any point where she lost her temper in any way
Safari is still a pain for frontend developers to deal with. At least IE6 was a static target and we were well aware of all the bugs. Some of the bugs and workarounds even had names, like the “peekaboo bug” and the Holly Hack".
Safari is a moving target that has so many bugs and issues that none of the other major browsers have.
The main takeaway of this article about Microsoft’s horrible decisions is “Apple bad”? OS flame wars really haven’t gotten less ridiculous in the past decades…
I was making a sarcastic response to the comment above mine and its chain, which devolved mindlessly into “Apple bad” as things tend to when Apple is mentioned.
Apple is not blameless but they are a shit-ton better than Microsoft. I have to have M$ for a few work apps but I’m primarily MacOS for desktop and Linux for everything server-side. I avoid M$ as much as possible.
Don’t forget the fact they’re locked onto luxury hardware, and you can’t build your own flavor for it. Even worse is, notebook manufacturers copied them so much there’s less variations among them. I was looking for some “subnotebook” as a potential portable PC, but I had like a few options (many of which would have included AliExpress junk), but there’s an endless supply of same-looking 14-16" ones, that are thin (“real” portability according to techbros), lightweight, “desktop replacements”, and run at a constant 95°C.
USA politicians are paid for and if anything they will never do this in fact they will do the exact opposite and make it easier for corporations to exploit people.
Today when I updated Windows11, I got copilot and we were discussing how it’s unacceptable to not let me uninstall Microsoft Edge, well I was, Copilot was just chilling it, but it did agree eventually
But this is only happening in Europe, which means Microsoft didn’t suddenly turn pure hearted, it’s just the law forcing them into it …
Yup, but then you’ll still have the same frustration we have now, running the script every time there’s a feature update and the bloat gets reinstalled. If it wasn’t for games and work I’d be using nothing but macOS and Linux.
I used to be super anti-apple but now buy MacBooks for the longevity. Less ewaste. Over time actually more cost effective. My daily driver is a nearly 9 year old MacBook that I replaced the battery on 2 years ago. Still getting official updates too. My father laid out twice the price of it for a high end XPS machine in 2019 and it died inside 5 years. Apple actually fix manufacturing issues without a huge amount of fuckery like HP/dell. I can’t speak to iPads and iPhones but Macs just last longer so end up being cheaper in the long run.
The problem is that showing enough politicians money effectively makes you become the government. There’s minimal chance of a law being introduced unless a rich person or corporation backs it, and EU laws would interfere with their shady business practices.
Not big enough to force companies to make large changes. The US is, China and India are. But what about Australia or New Zealand? Or any of the individual south american countries? Too many changes, microsoft or one of the other big players will just pull out of the market, or threaten to pull out.
will just pull out of the market, or threaten to pull out.
That would be wonderful. They would no longer be able to enforce their patents in countries they don’t trade in; GNU/Linux users worldwide will have (patent infringing) access to the Australian/NZ version of whatever
It would suck for the games I play that need windows, but it would also give more incentive to those to port them to Linux
No thanks. I don’t need more apps bloating up my browser and slowing it down even more. Plus what if they don’t support my choice of browser? Now we’re back to square one. Just port the programs over to run on the OS. Much less headache that way
That’s more finger printing to get tracked by, no thanks. I like to keep my browser apps slim and generic as possible to blend in with other privacy concerned people.
At th same time, I 100% understand why you would find it appealing, and recognize it may very well be a good thing overall.
Lots of things already have Linux alternatives; I’ve heard people mostly stay on Linux for the anticheat-enabled games that are usually only one developer setting away from Linux compatibility.
Wrappers can be used to do it locally.
Some Android apps are basically nothing more than a web agent.
Give me the basics of the web end with a pretty html5 rendered front end locally and done. No need for web apps for which you are required to be online at all times.
Valve only started doing 2-hour refunds after Australia twisted their arm about it. They brought it to the world, and it became an incredible selling point. Perhaps this will be the same thing.
Very common tactic for many of these sites. They’re either paid by Microsoft or they’re just run-of-the-mill Microsoft boot lickers.
If you search for how to disable or bypass something in Windows, these SEO’d junk articles pop up and trick you into reading them. It’s usually a long preamble full of arguments for why you really shouldn’t try to disable or bypass the thing, because Microsoft’s shit doesn’t actually stink, and they know better than you. Then at the bottom they put the generic instructions that may not even work anymore, that you’ve likely already read.
The few times I watched the update round-up it was short amd to the point for each feature they reported on.
And no it’s my genuine opnion. BUT I watch them rarely so it may have changed since the last time.
The pros are pros IMO. I’m not a fan of my desktop files clogging up my other computers and if the easiest way is through local accounts I’ll do just that and deprive Microsoft of trying to sell me on the functionality of their suite of subscriptions. No loss to me
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