Thankfully I only use it for some cross-platform testing and occasional gaming.

"The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation"[1] looks like a good book on the subject that I plan on reading.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/New-Goliaths-Corporations-Industries-...

You're welcome.

Not a Windows user, but that wording of the setting is making me irrationally angry

It really, really irks me.

It is not quite a requirement, I have my Windows 11 Pro running just fine with no Microsoft account. They do attempt really hard to make it look like it's required though. Even going as far as showing a fullscreen app after Windows update that only has options for registering or login, but luckily Alt+F4 closes that abomination.

I suppose they might make it mandatory unless you have some special version of Windows which is hard to buy (like LTSC). But make it too hard they risk that market. Anyway, now bypassing it involves opening a command prompt window, only the more technical users will do so, and that’s a small enough minority they probably aren’t missing much.

Sounds more likely to me that they'll just abandon those market segments.

I know it is a pipe dream but I wish they could be forced to sell this to the general public.

I have looked into buying LTSC. Apparently you need a business (I own a “shelf” company which has never done anything, but legally it counts), and a Microsoft volume license agreement. I looked into the later. Supposedly there is this trick where you order all these useless-but-cheap Identity Manager CALs to cheaply meet the minimum order requirement for a volume license. But I got a bit stuck working out what to order (or even if it was still available through resellers in my country). I lost interest at that point.

Is there a “US Government Edition”? Is it different from the Chinese one?

How does G differ from LTSC?

This info is publicly available so more detailed info should be easy to find.

Telemetry is a bit of a non-issue for many national security applications-they run on special air-gapped networks with zero direct access to the public Internet, Windows can try to phone home to Microsoft all day long, it’ll never get through.

Install flight simulator on a Win10 PC with local login only and launch -> sign into an xbox account -> after you enter your name and password, you get a dialog box where you have to agree to sign your Microsoft Account on that PC with two dark pattern options that lead to the same result.

I couldn't find any combination of group policy editor, registry, and services.msc around it. You can either close it and lose access to the game you just paid for, or proceed and then you get your account signed into email and a bunch of other crap you dont want and have to spend hours getting rid of all traces of that account in your system(but it's never 100% gone). Only way to bypass it is to buy the game through Steam.

Between MacOs Linux and Microsoft, Microsoft has the last respect for you as a user and nobody should use it if they don't have to.

The main problem is that randomly, Teams invite end in some "an unkown error occurred" and when this happens there's no recourse. It never happened with Zoom, Jit.si, Goto Meeting, Google Meet or whatever else I've used.

The absolutely worst of all is WebEx, fortunately it's rapidly disappearing.

Then they do absolutely crazy weird things!

I recently got a new laptop. My account is `adavis@<domain>.com`, my user name on my old laptop using that account is `adavis`.

What did Windows 11 do when I create my user on laptop. Oh it makes my user name `adavi`, yes it truncated my username.

After scouring the internet, trying a few different things to rename my account to no avail, nothing worked! Until I found a command to bring up an account management window that looked dated to the win 2k era ish (and can't be found via any settings window). It allowed me to create a local account with the name `adavis`. I then logged into it, deleted my `adavi` account then was able to associate my new local account with my Microsoft account.

Only "proper" solution is to /not/ sign into your MS account when seeting up the new machine for the first time. Create a local account with the name as you want it, and then only afterwards link it with your MS account (if you have to).

Only problem is, latest Win11 installer does not allow you to create a local account anymore at all. So you need to install Win10, do the work-around-dance, and then upgrade to Win11. I only relaized this after halway through my most recent format.

Every time when I ssh into one of my other boxen, I have to remember now to go 'SSH myname@ip' else windows helpfully defaults to 'mynam@IP'

You can create a file ".ssh/config" in your user directory, just like under linux, and inside of it put "User myname", and ssh will use that as a default and you won't have to specify it with @ everytime.

In the "Let's connect you to a network" page, use these steps:

* Use the Shift + F10 keyboard shortcut to open Command Prompt.

* Type the following command to release the current network configuration and press Enter: oobe\bypassnro

Note: The command is a single phrase without spaces.

Note2: This will reboot the machine and restart the installer again (why?? because fu for not wanting a MS account that's why)

https://rufus.ie/en/

During the pandemic, a key security component of our remote work architecture was to use Azure AD Conditional Access to restrict users to login in M365 apps from AD joined laptops + some Inutne compliance rules.

A weird situation was that, for a new laptop, we could not login using a domain account, as it was not joined in our domain. We also could not create a local account to join it. Not sure how IT solved that.

They can either remove that policy from their azure AD, or remove the machine from the azure ad.

Or update their policies to allow for azureAD joined machines.