"Challenge accepted." Much like with the TPM "requirement" and the others, I don't expect this one to stay undefeated for long.
replies(2):
It should absolutely be taken as a warning sign, though. Seriously, if at this point you're installing Windows and relying on the existence of that setting, you should be seeking alternatives.
Even Microsoft's current Storage Spaces Direct won't let you start a locally hosted Hyper-V VM without an Azure connection.
139 points | 5 hours ago | 125 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43511073
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
An acquaintance of mine works for Microsoft. Every time I meet him, he always tells me how much money hey makes. I'm sure it's double of what I earn when I have a good year. A big part of me wants to earn that money, too. But an unwavering part of me knows, I could never work for Microsoft.
At this point it is not just bitterness from their anti-Linux, anti-FOSS FUD days:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010201090600/http://www.dot-lie...
It is knowing that I don't align with their philosophies, at all.
I can feel it every time I try to use one of their broken, unloved UIs.
Moved to a Fedora Desktop, liberating to move back to an conflict-free OS whose primary focus is to serve its users, imagine that.
Since it uses Windows 11, I originally logged in using my Microsoft Account and a Windows Hello pin.
Safe mode doesn't load wifi drivers and the laptop didn't have an ethernet port, so I couldn't log in to my Microsoft Account to get into Windows safe mode. Didn't have a dongle with ethernet port at that time, so I had to backup the drive and reinstall Windows instead.
That's why I use Linux these days.
Big Tech and big money is not just Microsoft --- there's Apple and Google too, but if you don't want to work for MS, then the latter two might be "same but different".
Why did they do to Skype what they did (first turn it from p2p to centralized and spyable and then just ignore it and let it die)?
Same reason.
I couldn't face my own reflection in the mirror if my job was justifying obviously user hostile crap like this.
I’m seriously considering going back to Linux for my next work setup.
I would also say the same about require either a live.com or M365/EntraId account for local login on AD joined systems' installations. Unless of course they require you to setup a base-image with an internet connection and then convert accounts to local-only post-install, which sounds like a typical Microsoft approach.
Huawei famously shipped devices without Google Play and many were fine with it. And Samsung's devices, AFAIK the most popular Androids, can have the Google account removed. Play stops working, but you can still use Samsung's own app store.
That may not last, of course, Android could become closed source, but in the meantime I dare say it's strictly more open than Windows. And I hope Microsoft gets slapped by EU's DMA.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/hackers-could-read-n...
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/in-major-gaffe-hack...
Something that doesn't happen much, if at all, with Google or Amazon.
Microsoft is one of the most incompetent and impotent corpo out there and considering how much critical infrastructure relies on their software it would do good for the world if the government intervened like they should have back in the antitrust lawsuit days. Break them up. Separate the cloud, windows and office businesses. Make them stand on their own merits.
They are envious of the Google and Apple walled gardens/cashcows and are now determined to turn Windows into one.
Windows is no longer a product for users, the users of Windows are the product for Microsoft to be shoved into the Azure sales funnel.
https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/e3/a489371/microsoft-e...
> Microsoft executive Don Mattrick told GameTrailers in an interview that was filmed just before E3 that he understood why some people are frustrated at their policies.
> "Fortunately, we have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity," he said. "It's called Xbox 360.
> "If you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device."
At no point was any of this really optional. And when it was they made it difficult to find the option to skip.
Define "limited capacity". Other than Apple Services like iCloud, FaceTime, iMessage, Apple Music/TV, etc, it should just be the App Store that's unavailable without an Apple ID (which _is_ crippling on iOS, but not so much on macOS).
Sony capitalized on the larger always online controversy with a low budget ad poking fun at the concept[1], which was great marketing.
2017 called. It wants Windows S Mode back.
Needless to say it still isn't very popular. But this has been around for <checks notes> 8 years now
The same companies sell anti virus for Android today.
Also most users is not all.
I vaguely remember hearing that P2P Skype was the bane of sysadmins' existence. Skype would elect clients on high-bandwidth networks as supernodes. This tended to be business customers - the very organizations MS wanted to attract. Skype's prodigious hole-punching ability made it difficult to throttle, so it got banned from a lot of enterprises. MS essentially hosted the supernodes on Azure, which centralized it.
As for encryption, on the other hand, Wikipedia says MS specifically added the ability to eavesdrop for law enforcement agencies, though apparently Skype had already added a backdoor for the NSA before MS bought them: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Provided-Backdoor-Acce...
Having to use an account to get apps from app store (Apple) vs. having to use an account to install and use the OS in the first place (Microsoft) = not even a a competition
The Windows Hello PIN is protected by the TPM. This means you can't brute force it like a password could be.
[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/prov...
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
Either way, I've been happily on Fedora for a while now, with very minimal "fuck I can't do that here"
That's right. It sounds like a bug but this is Microsoft we're talking about here. They're probably brainstorming for ways to lock you from your own computer.
You can solve this problem by creating an offline account with Admin privileges after setting up Windows with your online account, but most users won't do that.
https://christitustech.github.io/winutil/userguide/
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://christitus.com/windows-utility-improved/
It's an open source textGUI powershell suite with hyperlinks to all the toggle tweaks, maintained by one talented MS engineer and contributed to and eyeballed by a hundred odd contibuters.
Requiring an online account to use Windows isn't really the same thing.
Your's is a reiteration of Microsoft's preferred talking point that has no basis in reality. Tying local authentication to the cloud tremendously increases the attack surface for those who don't need it. TPMs do nothing to change this fact. The only connection between a TPM and a Microsoft account is that Microsoft chose to tie those two together for their own benefit.
The big 4 will be seen as a hostile power within Europe? The big 4 ARE (mostly) European. What are you talking about?
Sales contracts? What do you mean in what context?
I agree that it would be cool if the original p2p Skype somehow resurfaces, but I can't make any sense of the rest of your post or what it has to do with the subject at hand?
Tough, isn't it ? Your security is very important _for us_. Your privacy is very important _for us_. See PayPal, Stripe, Google and other "services" for examples.
To directly answer: I have a Win 10 without MS account. Disk got corrupted, chkdsk cannot repair, cannot boot. Checking messages on screen was something like "online chkdsk failed". Unplugging the ethernet cable "fixed" the issue.
I don't believe the problem is the engineers, the leadership of Windows fails to understand what the OS is meant for: getting out of the way so you can access the apps.
Which is perplexing, because this is essentially the opposite strategy than what gave windows value to begin with.
They can play the long game.
Yeah, Microsoft is a big place.
I heard the Acquired podcast episode on Microsoft, and I can’t pretend that their business strategies failed; they didn’t, and arguably it is the most successful company in history. I have a lot of respect for the business side.
And the things that rub me the wrong way are part of their success, e.g. embedding WWW into the OS early on.
The main reason I can’t work for them is their Vogon aesthetics. They’re like a square pair of shoes: not meant for you.
(1) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...
Perhaps they think it doesn’t matter once everything is in the cloud.
God I hate what this industry has become.
Windows is over. I moved to Apple silicon a while ago and never looked back. Even though macOS has its warts, it's not hostile to its users.
Normal mainstream users can't stay on very old operating systems like Windows 7 because they'll eventually be forced to install newer software that's not compatible with it. Outside actors other than Microsoft force os upgrades.
- buy a new printer and it only has drivers for newer os like Windows 10/11 and later
- need for installing newer software like latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Adobe suite, TurboTax 2024, etc. They don't install on Win7. For Windows 7, the last version of Chrome was January 2023. Last version of Firefox was August 2024.
So setting aside commercial apps like Adobe, TurboTax, etc. -- why can't a user just stay with old version of Mozilla Firefox that's compatible with Win7 and turn off updates?!? Because bank websites like JP Morgan will block the user with an error "You need to upgrade your web browser" because the SSL/TLS encryption algorithms in old Firefox versions are obsolete.
Deliberately trying to freeze your computer on Windows 7 or Windows XP means relegating it into a "museum piece" that becomes less and less useful for practical real-world tasks. That's ok for an isolated machine that runs old video games but no good for online banking.
Once GrapheneOS is installed, no further interaction with Google is required. You can happily and easily use a main profile without play services/Gapps (and Graphene allows you to block 'network' at the socket layer if you do need to use apps).
You could then have a 'work' profile or use private space which is isolated from your main profile that uses play services/app store but it is absolutely not required.
It _is_ a learning curve for sure, but I do not feel Google is going out of its way like Microsoft is here to make it burdensome. (In fact, Google is quite welcoming to OEM unlocking unlike some other phone manufacturers)
The only segments left targeting Windows as a platform are games, replacements/extensions to the OS tools, and a bunch of legacy .NET LOB apps. And since the Steam Deck and clones, Wine/Proton are (very) slowly becoming the actual target for games rather than Windows.
[1]: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
For the few programs that really need Windows, I use Qemu/KVM with Virt-Manager and Samba for sharing files.
I wish to keep using this setup, I just hope buying hardware with good Linux support in the future does not become too difficult. I fear moving away from x86 will make things harder.
If I want to use a decent OS, I can do most of my development on Fedora or Arch or some other Linux distro at my workplace.
For proprietary stuff that won't work there, honestly, Windows 11 is not that bad as far as Windows go. I do not get ads, I use a local account without problems and I can do development actually decently with PowerShell, vcpkg, VS Code which Microsoft offers for free and which work on all platforms.
TL;DR: There are hills with a much better view to die on.
And no one on this forum really needs app store when homebrew exists
Obviously this is a way of 'legitimizing' consent to data collection and it would be very interesting to see a breakdown of every byte of data MS gets sent (even file explorer communicates with a US IP address).
I genuinely think the EU needs to take a look at this, I would be very surprised it this wasn't abusing their monopoly-like position for mandatory data collection (although, they probably welcome it!).
They want narrative control and squashing rising political opposition.
But I expect the new leadership will not put much value on this. I imagine it'd play out that first to "to enhance the security and improve the UX" they'll start a shoving a bunch of nagging dialogs in the users face "this app is not safe" etc.
Then they'll add a flag to enable "unsafe mode" where the user can run unverified / unsigned code.
Then finally they'll just nuke the flag.
After all requiring that the ecosystem with the most "important" apps such as their own office suite, slack, adobe etc. grind out new versions with digital signing is not out of alignment with these companies incentives and development cycles either.
In fact I would not find it surprising if these companies would actually be approached by Microsoft to participate in any such scheme and get offered some kind of "discount" or reward (whether it's app store discount or whatever else) and these companies would only see it strengthening their own moats against any possible competition.
And I'm talking about the consumer use case, not the corporate.
Also, on more libre software, the community can release LibreOffice and VLC builds like crazy. Ditto with Sumatra PDF, Gimp, Krita...
Consider how much has changed since the first 25 years of MSFT. Both in business and in life in general.
irm https://get.activated.win | iex
I completely removed Windows from all of my personal notebooks and workstations.
>Windows is no longer a product for users, the users of Windows are the product for Microsoft to be shoved into the Azure sales funnel.
So true. I won't be running win11 outside of a VM and anything but win11 IoT. You know where to find it...
Many years ago music on Linux was hard, and years behind. Software was limited and the audio driver situation was a mess. But now you get professional software directly in the package manager and choose between several very reliable sound systems and even use the far majority of VST Plugins.
Not all software does this but I also don't recall it being unusual.
He even stated back then that he’s have Office run over the internet if he could.
Another example of this is how Xbox Live has been a thing since the original Xbox. Long before iOS and Android. And more recently, Xbox Live has become more than just a subscription service but a full on streaming platform.
Let’s also not forget that traditionally enterprise licenses for Windows would be billed annually. By this, I don’t mean someone purchasing Windows Server for their home lab, but actual data centre use. (I’m pretty sure this was the case, been a long long time since I’ve gone through a Microsoft audit, let alone been purchasing data center licenses, some someone do correct me if I’m misremembering here).
So I don’t think any of this is a knee jerk reaction to Apple and Google eating their market. I think it’s always been their long term strategy but it’s just taken this long for the wider industry to align.
Now with the gaming market being increasingly subscription based, other software vendors switching pricing format (eg Adobe) and the internet being far more accessible than ever, MS are in the best place they’ve ever been to press home the final missing piece: Windows Home.
- Printers: the W7 cohort probably overlaps with users of classic HP Laserjets (I know it's not just me!).
- Chrome: Supermium adds W7 support back into the latest(ish) version.
- SSL/TLS: does such an issue exist on W7? It's exactly what pushed my mother (at the age of about 65, and hating having to learn anything new) to upgrade to 11 from XP a year or so ago. I do all my Internet banking on W7, via several different banks as I often move around chasing the best interest rates, and never had a problem with any of them. (Vivaldi, Supermium, Firefox 115ESR.)
- Some software such as Adobe XD: yeah, unfortunately it's not supported. Depends how much it's needed I suppose. I may be forced to "upgrade" sometime this year but I'd really rather not.
It's not perfect, it sucks, but it's better
no
> Can you still buy something without having to register and without that software always be communicating to home servers?
yes
Can you still buy a software product and do whatever you wish with it, for as long as you want and without having to pay subscriptions or be forced to upgrade?
yes
Software is no longer a product like a chair and table which you can just buy and move it from the store to your home. It is more like a managed service like a utility connection. It is available for use only as long as the vendor allows it. You buy a subscription and play nice. The buyer might also not have the admin user privileges on the software they bought with their money.
The same might happen to cars and all other smart devices as well. Cars might always be connected to the car company, which might have some remote control over the car. Phones are already like this. It is a matter of time, all your home appliances are partly controlled by the companies who sold them.
If that worked on Linux, I would not longer need Windows at all...
I am on a 10+ year old Laptop with Slackware, for desktop use it is just as fast as any modern Laptop with Windows, I would even say it is faster.
Also you will find Libreoffice is just as good as M/S Office. Just ignore the fud. FWIW, I believe many foreign countries will start migrating to Linux and I heard that is already happening in China.
Can one still assume one can install and operate those apps without Google Play?
[1]: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/is...
[2]: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/is...
It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft forces everyone with local accounts to switch to a Microsoft Account just to access their own machines. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future, local accounts are completely disabled, except maybe on specialized enterprise versions of the OS.
I'm exhausted by the anti-consumer behavior of American companies, constantly restricting user choice and access, undermining privacy, and hiking up prices, all in the name of "profit".
No, you can log in without being connected to the internet (that obviously happens a lot on a daily basis, where people are using a laptop with no connectivity until after they sign in).
It's also very naggy about signing up to iCloud and using an Apple Account.
It doesn't force you - but it's still annoying.
My brother is stunned that I'm still using such an old phone (8 year old Moto). Unfortunately, no recent model Moto phones can run Lineage. My next phone will probably be a Pixel with Graphene or Lineage.
Early on I consulted ProtonDB to see if my games would run, but honestly now I don't even look at it any more. While YMMV depending on the games you play, I haven't encountered really any major bugs and zero crashes. The most I found was some strange shadow texture rendering artifacting in Baldur's Gate 3, but it was contained to a particular part of a particular map.
A decade ago it was kind of rough, but now? I am never going back to Windows for gaming. Playing games on Linux is light-years better than what it used to be. If you're curious but haven't tried it because you had bad experiences in the past, I'd encourage anyone to give it another go.
I have two, sadly.
1. I use my Windows PC for flight simulators. While many simulators will indeed run under proton, the hardware devices (VR, joysticks, throttles, pedals, panels, etc.) usually will not, or at best run with minimal functionality.
2. I develop cross-platform software and need a Windows PC to test that environment.
A third for some people:
3. There is no great alternative to certain visual media software. e.g. Affinity Photo/Adobe Photoshop has no equivalent on Linux. No, GIMP is not anywhere near equivalent- in the same way that Nano is not equivalent to Visual Studio Code.
Just a note to readers who are interested in this: some games in your Steam library may still not work with Proton, but the ones that do work should have rather few issues. (I play exclusively on a Steam Deck so “should” is in reference to the variance in hardware among bespoke machines.)
And people will buy it. Because "general purpose computing" is a niche feature for nerds. (Astronaut 2: Always has been.) And it presents enough problems and extra work that most consumers woyld gladly give it up. Most consumers just want something thet can do Facebook/Excel/Spotify/Netflix/games with.
Instead Microsoft is trying to upsell cloud storage, backup and ad-free email (along with Office apps) with Microsoft 365. And on the biz side they’re getting into the biz of offering managed patched online Windows VDIs, kind of like Citrix.
Also Microsoft Store-only Windows is a deal killer for Windows in businesses. A lot of specialised LOB (line of business) apps run on Windows and the Store is a non-starter for those. And in home contexts there’s a bunch of legacy apps that people keep Windows for, dropping support for them will mean switching to ChromeOS or macOS just got easier.
So yeah — I fully agree they’ll absolutely shove you in into the Azure or M365 sales funnel, and individual users no longer feel like a priority. But non-store apps aren’t quite dead yet.
What MS wants (from a charitable interpretation), is the ability to encourage/enforce full disk encryption (Bitlocker), TPM-based MFA and TPM-backed passkeys (Windows Hello), as well as tight integration with their product suite (Office/OneDrive) and browser (Edge). Syncing settings, apps and other things between devices (or on setup) is also a win, though it's pretty basic right now.
Though silly to a technical crowd like HN, FDE for regular users requires a way to not lose all their data if they forget their password or some other issue happens with secure boot or the device. Non-technical users aren't going to understand the importance of backing up their Bitlocker recovery key, and without it, they're hosed. During online setup, MS stores this key online to the MS account, so it is recoverable.
MS isn't going to limit the integration and security they can provide by adhering to a local-only OS concept. It's not what most users actually want, and their competition (Apple, Android) does the same thing, so users are used to it. I just wish they had a light (inexpensive) version of the Entra/Intune package for home users that want to be able to manage multiple devices and get the real advantages of the online link.
I too planning to use a gaming centric distro for my next gaming PC build. The horseshit they've been pushing at me on 10 has been atrocious. The lie that 10 would be the last. Injecting pages into Chrome. Windows acts more and more like literal malware.
This really appears to be the simplest explanation -- turn every desktop into a thin client, served by walled-garden apps, and with Azure integration/dependencies.
Then charge subscription fees to turn all computer owners into renters. Oh, and show ads too, while you're at it.
Microsoft.
They can reverse their decision at any time. Inasmuch as you are able to boot Linux on your PC, it's only because Microsoft deigns to allow it.
I was recently trying to integrate EasyAuth OIDC with a custom IdP and it was a terrible experience. No logs indicating why it wasn’t working. I had to dig down into the configuration xml schema to discover EasyAuth didn’t even support client_secret_basic auth method so we couldn’t use it in the end. Every product is like this. Great if you do everything MS wants you to do exactly, but if you have any requirements not blessed by Microsoft you’re SOL.
It depends on what type of user one is. If one wants to be spoon fed and data-raped by Google then your statement is true.
But there are other options that make an Android smartphone both functional and viable without both a Google account and Google apps.
Except for test accounts on test machines sans anything of any use to Google installed, I've never had a Google account and I manage perfectly well, and I've used Android since version 4.
On rooted devices I hack Google to pieces, all Google apps are removed so is just about any other software that communicates with Google. On devices that aren't rooted, I'll disable all Google apps including Google Play Services and the Play Store, make sure a firewall is installed and that all apps except those with explicit permission are blocked from internet access and rerouted via a VPN to a nonexistent network. And so on, and so on….
Everything I want to use works, Google software is replaced with apps from F-Droid and other sources of non-Google origin. Still, I've no trouble viewing YouTube and I do so without ads, also I've no difficulty using the Play Store and downloading apps without a Google account.
There's really nothing that Google can offer me in addition to the third party apps and services that I already use. This phone has 215 apps installed and a second phone has 307—these apps are sourced from both F-Droid and the Play Store. Most apps however are open source/from F-Droid, etc.
For those who don't want to go to the extremes that I have there are many halfway measures one can take to minimize Google's impact.
BTW, in the past I've uploaded stuff to YouTube which I've done with 'dummy' test accounts.
I am glad they've added bots years ago which made me stop playing so I do not miss it.
I used to leave an extra old laptop on with it running, maybe 15 years ago, on a public address.
During the arab spring, tons of traffic could be seen connecting clients in north africa. It truly did route around things.
I miss the days when you bought a high quality version of something that you kept using for years.
Microsoft does have the leverage in this case, as long as folks want to continue using Windows.
Microsoft forced Win10 down people's throats. I had all of my machines Windows Update processes turned off and somehow it STILL got onto my systems. I suspect Skype was the mechanism through which Microsoft did this, as they owned Skype then and I still used it.
Other operating systems could still collaborate with manufacturers to have their key be trusted.
Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its...
I've read online that people have attempted to use wine in order to emulate the Windows environment with no success.
Besides, it's a good challenge; this site is called Hacker News, after all.
You can also move Mac OS X out of the way by running an ARM Linux VM on the Apple ARM computers.
Old Intel based computers are terrible for power usage. Modern computers that are ARM based are much better for the environment.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...
Does MS try to force an automated upgrade on anyone who installs it.
I don't find that the distribution makes that much of a difference?
I just use Arch Linux, and install all the programs (gaming centric or otherwise) that I need when I need them. I guess I'm lucky, because the Steam Deck's distribution is based on Arch Linux, but I used it before it was cool.
I suspect the main differences between the distributions is what you get by default, and that can be a huge factor in terms of convenience?
I know a fair bit about OS internals but especially when I'm gaming I want to play rather than read and follow technical docs.
Sorry, not sorry.
I have no idea why people even consider updating, must be some really weird case.
There is zero new value in the latest Windows versions, just plain nothing new, there is really no reason to switch.
Devs don't test on low spec machines and MS fired the team that maintained the testing PC zoo a decade ago.
Unless you refer to Windows SmartScreen? That is a different thing - really about how popular some program is (though Microsoft did put it under Windows Defender at some point so it can be confusing) - and isn't about the antivirus (which is what i was referring to).