Maybe you do the same thing as me: only connect the internet once everything is done and all bloat has been removed

I&#x27;ve been installing Windows 10 w&#x2F;o an active network connection since its release. Sounds like that&#x27;ll become a more common thing for others.

It&#x27;s most definitely a dark pattern.Just how reddit now prompts you to enter an email when you register but it&#x27;s not marked as required and it doesn&#x27;t say optional either.

It&#x27;s only a dark pattern until online accounts are always required... (then it&#x27;s for forever).

You always install windows without a network connection so that you can run group policy editor to install your policies before first network connection. This has been best practice forever.

That&#x27;s a pretty clear dark pattern, no?At the very least, it signals that Microsoft really doesn&#x27;t want users creating offline accounts. Which is troubling, because their TOS for online accounts is quite onerous, and includes a couple of problematic restrictions, including a mandatory arbitration agreement.If I was a Windows user who relied on local accounts this would be very worrying to me.

&gt;Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account.”This is something I really can&#x27;t see the average user doing honestly.

Or you know, iCloud? The thing that most people here probably have.

I guess they want to emulate Google chromeOS and Google is busy emulating MS of the 2000s.  Shame.

That&#x27;s the same behaviour which has been the case for some time, right? Not that I&#x27;m particularly happy about it or anything.

I use that at work, so I didn&#x27;t realize the current situation, but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s an option in the home version.

I can confirm that&#x27;s the case, just did this last week.

I imagine another good path is to state it&#x27;s owned by an organization, then clicking &quot;Domain join instead&quot;. I can&#x27;t imagine they removed that, but it just dumps out to a local account because you can&#x27;t domain join in the OOBE.

No, last time I was installing Win10 was 23&#x2F;09&#x2F;2019 and there was an option to use offline account.Although, some system settings already require ms account.

I think it&#x27;s been that way for a while? Maybe  six months ago I wanted to add Windows to a Linux box I had, and I ran into this

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if this backfired on YouTube massively.Utterly useless dark pattern, and many thanks for sharing.

“They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet. Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account.”

There&#x27;s no indication of magical behaviour, it&#x27;s just unfriendly.

I&#x27;ll start selling cups with that line and Windows 10 logo &#x2F;s

At this point they&#x27;ve crossed over from &#x27;dark pattern&#x27; to &#x27;black magic fuckery&#x27;.

&gt; They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet.That&#x27;s not entirely true. When you get to the &#x27;Let&#x27;s connect you to a network&#x27; screen just click the &#x27;I don&#x27;t have Internet&#x27; link in the bottom left corner [1] and then choose &#x27;Continue with limited setup&#x27; [2]. This will take you to the local account creation step.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3409788&#x2F;how-microsoft-made-it-harder-to-create-windows-10-local-accounts.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;3409788&#x2F;how-microsoft-made-i...</a>Microsoft’s May 2019 Update (version 1903) appears to be much, much friendlier to local accounts.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.idgesg.net&#x2F;images&#x2F;article&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;1903-wireless-100802187-large.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.idgesg.net&#x2F;images&#x2F;article&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;1903-wirele...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.idgesg.net&#x2F;images&#x2F;article&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;1903-nag-screen-100802185-large.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.idgesg.net&#x2F;images&#x2F;article&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;1903-nag-sc...</a>

Seems like it&#x27;s still there, just harder to access now.The &quot;best&quot; sorted comment says:&gt; They have not removed it, it just is not visible by default if you are connected to the internet. Either run the setup without being connected to the internet, or type in a fake phone number a few times and it will give you the prompt to create a local account.

It&#x27;s a stupid question to ask, yes.I work on macOS, but I have a Windows partition for gaming. Simple as that.Other people need it to work. You might not like it, but it&#x27;s a perfectly productive environment.

I don&#x27;t know why people don&#x27;t.I don&#x27;t want Mac for I prefer cheaper handpicked hardware.I want to believe in Linux, so every now and then I get fresh Ubuntu installed.Now last time with 18.04 it would get blank screen immediately after logging in, which I was only able to fix by manually adding NVidia apt sources, and installing the latest driver from command line (which you have to google how to do on another device).Second thing I faced is trouble getting a tiling window manager (oh irony: I made my own for Windows after reading articles about Linux&#x27;s ones). Turns out, when you are trying to use, say, Awesome, it replaces the whole desktop environment. Which in default configuration makes desktop work like shit (personal opinion): you are no longer able to use Win key to search like in Gnome, window buttons are non-existent or look terrible, and window managing is actually very much non-intuitive (if it supports mouse resizing&#x2F;moving at all? you could not tell without reading manual). On Windows custom managers rarely replace the (perhaps not ideal but intuitive) default behavior completely, so are much easier to use. There was a mode of Awesome, which was supposed to replace only Gnome&#x27;s WM with it, but I was unable to make it work, and gave up.Finally, JetBrains Rider still turned out to be worse, than Visual Studio for debugging. Which I could probably live without if not for the other two.Basically, I want to work, and not waste my time on debugging the OS core components.

What kind of change would devs successfully push for?

I have windows 7 on virtualbox, because our software depends on a vendor who only provides a COM interface to their API. Thus we need some windows glue.Also, there is some really neat software built for windows and it comes pre-installed on virtually any computer you intend to buy for an office that people keep it as their main OS. So if you intend to write a service that runs on a client&#x27;s computer, it almost certainly has to be usable on windows.

Developing on windows really isnt that bad. Install scoop. Learn powershell and youll be fine.

For the same reason they kept using Windows in the first place: spreadsheets (read &quot;business&quot;).When most of the business world relies on Windows, more and more software gets developed for it which in turn encourages even more people to use that shit. Seriously, if you want to stop this madness (Windows), you should start at the top of the pyramid and persuade businesses to switch to something &quot;sane&quot;.

I use Windows because pretty much every program ever runs on Windows. Buy some weird device? Hey, it has drivers! Want to play the latest game? Hey, there&#x27;s a Windows version! The same is simply not true of other platforms. The reality is that it&#x27;s the most popular OS, so when someone can only write their computer program once, they do it for Windows. It sucks, but that&#x27;s how it is.I use Linux for pretty much all my work, though, preferring a Linux VM to a Windows-native setup. I have tried to make Powershell usable, but the console is terrible (and the replacements are equally bad) and the language itself isn&#x27;t that amazing. (Their &quot;curl&quot; equivalent requires you to open IE once to activate some setting, for example.) I also hate putty. Never in the history of computing has a program made it so difficult to use the same font for every server you connect to, or to talk to something on a serial port, etc. The way Windows deals with serial ports and the like is so silly that I just have an RPi on my desk for interacting with USB devices... I ssh to that, and then don&#x27;t deal with Windows anymore.

Well, I like Windows. I also like, and regularly use macOS, Android, iOS (well, iPadOS now) and Arch Linux. I don&#x27;t have any interest in stopping my use of any of those operating systems.

why do people still use windows?Ask my mortgage company.

Both my previous linux install attempts resulted in effectively unusable machines. BIOS tweaks were required to even get usable software rendering on one, which didn&#x27;t support my quad 4K monitor setup. Without the tweaks, I was dumped to a blank screen on boot. I might&#x27;ve been missing working audio drivers on the other - which I was using as a media PC.As a gamedev, for my actual work machines, I rely heavily on windows-only tools, and I want to debug on the actual target platform customers would use (so, windows again.) Gamedev generally uses windows for even it&#x27;s build servers. Maybe with a token mostly ignored linux box. Or a couple of mac minis if dabbling in mobile.

why do people still use windows? It&#x27;s stupid and naive to ask that, but I keep wondering why devs aren&#x27;t successful in getting changes made at their companies.

I always do that for the same reason. I do use a Microsoft account with Windows, but I want to pick my own name for my own user folder in C:\Users. So I install Windows with a local account, and then after logging in I connect it to my Microsoft account.

Ha-ha-ha, that&#x27;s the only reason I do that too. E.g. create a local account first, then sign-in.

I use a symlink for that so I can type the path I&#x27;m used to and old program configs still worked transfering over

Interestingly, this is exactly the reason why I perform setup with a local account: I can control the username.

I just want them to let me pick my own god damned name for the home folder. I hate the weird shit they pick for me.

I setuped a Windows VM today.
It&#x27;s still easy to do, but you need to know where it is, or to persist like me: clicking around then i found it behind &quot;set up for organization&quot; and &quot;domain join instead&quot;.

MS has been open-sourcing a lot of stuff in the past few years, which I see more as meaning that their IP has little intrinsic value anymore. MS used to sell software, so code was sacred and not meant for others to see; now it&#x27;s more about services, so code doesn&#x27;t really matter much anymore, and if it&#x27;s code that can help people use their services, open-sourcing makes sense.You can see this with Google, Facebook, and all the others which release huge amounts of FOSS; they are not in the business of selling software either.

Open source contributions for Microsoft are just like charities for big corporations with despicable practices. They can use it to say &quot;hey we are not that bad, after all we support FOSS!&quot;

I&#x27;d argue that a company at the near trillion dollars scale can and should be Contributing mere than the few tens of millions they&#x27;ve put into open source, but you are not wrong and I&#x27;m not particularly willing to die on the hill I&#x27;ve climbed.

&quot;some basic contributions&quot; is a little unfair, don&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;maintainer of GitHub, which for better or worse is the platform for the vast majority of open source.I don&#x27;t like windows, I don&#x27;t like office, and I don&#x27;t like this move... But let&#x27;s try to maintain some intellectual honesty here. Microsoft is not anywhere near a &quot;basic&quot; contributor to open source.

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&#x27;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&#x27;m less disappointed.

I can&#x27;t even get into my Microsoft account. When I go to reset it, Microsoft claims that there is insufficient information to reset and unlock the account. Meanwhile I can&#x27;t log in to the account (because it&#x27;s locked) and still receive notifications about the account (click here to unlock it)

Just change your login method? I use pin at home desktop and password on my laptop.

The online account is crap. I converted my offline account recently to the online one, just to see what&#x27;s the difference.The difference is that I cannot even set a password, it asks me to set up a PIN number to log in. Of course you can set it to accept letters in your PIN, so it can function as a regular password.But what the hell is the point?(In fact, I didn&#x27;t set any PIN the first time and at the next reboot I had to log in with my Microsoft account password, which is decidedly more complicated that the not-very-secure one I use to log in my PC. Thank god I have a password manager on my phone.)

That&#x27;s what Windows S mode is 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;s-mode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;s-mode</a>

&gt; to use windows on a computer you don&#x27;t have root access to that isn&#x27;t allowed to run a non ms os or to distribute software that ms gets a 30% cut.That&#x27;s basically how the SurfaceRT worked, isn&#x27;t it? So they&#x27;ve already attempted this once.

Absolutely. They are starting to give away a year or two of Microsoft 365 (Office + Azure AD + other crap) to trap corporate identity.

It&#x27;s not going to happen. They are still going to support the embedded Windows use-case that has been supported for decades.

This seems like it is preparatory to removing it entirely.It wouldn&#x27;t be shocking if in 10 years you need a Microsoft account to use windows on a computer you don&#x27;t have root access to that isn&#x27;t allowed to run a non ms os or to 
distribute software that ms gets a 30% cut.If it isn&#x27;t so it will be because they don&#x27;t think they can get away with it.

Who told you that?  Look at all the games on steam proton.  All the best indi games run fine on linux.  I was playing eve online last night and subnautica a few days ago.  Ksp, factorio, minecraft ... there are tons of great games on linux.

I&#x27;m sad Windows still has a (basic) monopoly on computer gaming.

Because there are no good options. The best most people can achieve is the least-worst collection of trade-offs for their particular situation.

What else is any average user going to switch to exactly?

Some are limited to having to use it - while still agreeing with the McDonalds assessment.For instance, I&#x27;m a musician , teacher and producer and I do most of my work in a DAW called Cubase. It runs on Windows or Mac, and my main workstation is on Windows. I&#x27;ve been banging on about how great it would be to have it running on Linux for maybe 20 years, but it&#x27;ll never happen. I&#x27;m sure people will suggest switching to something like Bitwig (which does run on Linux), or any of the free options, but either they don&#x27;t do everything I need (free options), or I just can&#x27;t get used to using them and they still don&#x27;t work in a way that I&#x27;m comfortable with after nearly 30 years using Cubase.

You gotta literally workout hard to keep things under your control if you&#x27;re a poweruser who&#x27;s aware what happens under the hood - there are 3rd-party tools that help you achieve that. But if you&#x27;re an &quot;enthusiast&quot; kind of user you probably don&#x27;t bother at all with control over the system taken from you.

Say what you want about McDonald&#x27;s food quality&#x2F;genericness, but their UX destroys windows in terms of dark patterns.

Its pretty much the McDonalds of operating systems these days, I do not know how people put up with it.

&gt;Windows is a serviceWindows used to be a fucking operating system. That’s all I want it to be.

Completely agree. As a Linux power user I get a sort of smug satisfaction reading about problems like these. That said, I do wish others had more choices than a convenient OOTB experience that exploits users and a respectful experience that they must invest large chunks of time and effort into setting up.

Arguments like this also ignore the success of Chromebooks. The &quot;average&quot; person doesn&#x27;t actually care about the things you listed. Some professionals might. But the average person isn&#x27;t a photoshop user, and libreoffice works well enough. A default Ubuntu install doesn&#x27;t require much if anything in the way of settings mungery, and I recall many a nightmare of getting drivers working on Windows back in the day.

I agree, but unfortunately, end-users just want to buy products that just work without fiddling around with settings, etc.The HN audience and generally programmers are usually pro-Linux which makes sense, but they keep forgetting that apps like Office, Adobe, etc are only on Windows &#x2F; Mac which Linux has to resort to fiddling with hacks like Wine which is not enough for an out-of-the-box experience with end-users.The mindshare, user experience of Mac and Windows just prevents end-users from bothering to try, fiddle and learn Linux just to do serious work for anyone that is not a programmer these days.

Use an operating system which respects you as the owner of your computer, not as a commodity to be exploited.

Then explain all those &quot;Windows with WSL is the only Linux desktop I&#x27;ll ever use&quot; posts.

Windows remains the most convenient OS for video games, and given HN&#x27;s userbase (mostly young men), I think a lot of people here use Windows.

You&#x27;d be surprised about this. A ton of developers use Windows even if they are developing software that runs on Linux servers (myself included). Especially so in the last few years with WSL being quite good and Docker being available.2019&#x27;s Stackoverflow report for OS usage put Windows at 49.3% for &quot;Professional developers&quot; with MacOS at 29.2% and Linux at 25.3%.I happen to have a few tech courses on programming and Docker and none of it requires writing Windows specific apps. Just general web apps. Over 50% of the people who take my courses are on Windows. Windows usage for Linux based development is real.

Pretty sure you couldn’t be more wrong.

I for one am finding W10 with WSL, Docker and the new Console fantastic.Can&#x27;t wait for WSL2 in 2020 with half second Docker starts++.

I am! I reckon it&#x27;s a neat OS. They&#x27;ve improved it dramatically (except for that... Candy Crush auto install, that is annoying).I have used WSL a lot, and now I use VS Code Remote to develop on a Debian 10 VPS. It&#x27;s glorious.Being able to build a custom computer that I can do work on, and that I can play games on, and that run the Adobe suite of software, and not pay through the nose for high specs is wonderful.After 10 year of using Apple and OS X, I felt patronised having to pay double the price for performance. The nail for me was when OS updated were forced through their Apple Store.Windows 10 updates are far more seamless.

Quick poll: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkto.run&#x2F;p&#x2F;NGWCZJO1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linkto.run&#x2F;p&#x2F;NGWCZJO1</a>

I use vscode on Windows with the remote ssh plugin. It&#x27;s amazing, and I&#x27;d never go back. I can kick of compilations of large projects on an 80-core server instead of my laptop. When I need to, wsl works great for small compilations.

I run Windows 10. I&#x27;m running it now. It works well, and I don&#x27;t want to cut my nose off to spite my face by worrying about Satya Nadella seeing my internet searches. I&#x27;m not that important that I have to worry about these things.I tend to run it on the &quot;Happy Path&quot; only make a few changes to keep some notifications from bothering me. And I don&#x27;t buy machines from vendors that try to &quot;add value&quot; by putting crapware or shovelware on the machine. (I buy Supermicro-based boxes from Thinkmate, and use Surface Book notebooks.)I write software all day long in Erlang, F#, and CUDA&#x2F;C++ and have to write software that works with popular film and audio production software (which runs on Windows platforms)

Most people on HN, I would postulate, don&#x27;t use Windows. We might use VS Code, we might use Azure, but we aren&#x27;t using Microsoft&#x27;s operating system.

&gt; In some cases, your ability to access or control your personal data will be limited, as required or permitted by applicable law. How you can access or control your personal data will also depend on which products you use.&gt; Not all personal data processed by Microsoft can be accessed or controlled via the tools above. If you want to access or control personal data processed by Microsoft that is not available via the tools above or directly through the Microsoft products you use, you can always contact Microsoft at the address in the How to contact us section or by using our web form.Same source.

How is anything you quoted a problem? Activity history being synced to your Microsoft account is an entirely opt-in feature. It&#x27;s designed to assist in the scenario of &quot;I moved from my desktop to my laptop and want to open that file I was working on a few days ago....now what did I name it and where did I put it?&quot;

They watch what companies like Google get away with to see how far they can push things.&gt; Activity history helps keep track of the things you do on your device, such as the apps and services you use, the files you open, and the websites you browse. Your activity history is stored locally on your device when using different apps and features such as Microsoft Edge, some Microsoft Store apps, and Office apps.&gt; If you&#x27;ve signed in to your device with a Microsoft account and given your permission, Windows sends your activity history to Microsoft. Once your activity history is in the cloud, Microsoft uses that data to enable cross-device experiences, to provide you with the ability to continue those activities on other devices, to provide personalized experiences (such as ordering your activities based on duration of use) and relevant suggestions (such as anticipating what your needs might be based on your activity history), and to help improve Microsoft products.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;privacystatement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privacy.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;privacystatement</a>

Since I’ve migrated to web IDEs, my daily driver has become a Chromebook.Privacy concerns apart, it gets the job done and the battery life is over 14 hours. I’ve migrated from Linux, which is also pretty good as a desktop, but feels a little less polished than ChromeOS.

It might have, if Linux evangelists had pulled their heads out of their asses and actually made what people wanted instead of assuming everyone was too dumb too use a computer and only needed a pretty web kiosk and email. If they had made the OS function in a sane way instead of the Rube Goldberg machine of cobbled together systems that it is. To this day I still hear people blame Linux Desktop&#x27;s complete and utter failure on pre-installs and lack of prettiness, ignoring completely the complaints of all the ways Linux Desktop just plain sucks, even when they were made by Linus himself.

If only the Linux on the desktop dreams of a decade ago - along with those Linux-installed PCs they tried to push at Walmart - had a more optimistic outcome...

Yep. I am an unapologetic Unix diehard, but the core NT system is nice. Flexible, portable, supports multiple personalities (even if they barely use it like that; WSL1 being an example of leveraging it), parts are borderline microkernel-ish, by all accounts very nicely designed. Then... There are the user-facing parts of the system. The GUI, the licensing, the telemetry&#x2F;spyware, ads, forced updates, WHY IS XBOX ON THE SERVER BUILDS, just... All of it. So, I live on Linux and the odd BSD... well, really just &quot;Not Microsoft&quot;. Because a beautiful kernel under that userspace is still a loss.

I feel the same way - Windows 10 is my daily driver, and mostly I love it!But I use Pro and Enterprise editions - I would find it really irritating if my Start menu was spammed with ads and apps I didn&#x27;t install.And disabling local accounts (or at least making it even harder to use them) is a scummy move.

I use Windows on a day to day basis, and you might sometimes find me defending that.However, I hate stuff like this. You are right, it is user hostile.Windows 10 under the hood is solid, but this kind of thing really pisses me off. It’s the same issue with ads or bing in the start menu, you literally can’t turn it off anymore (you used to be able to with the Registry Editor or GP).I use MacOS as well regularly, and you just don’t get this kind of crap from Apple (just different kinds of crap).

The fallacy is &quot;post hoc, ergo propter hoc&quot;, in attributing these changes to Natella and not to changes in the industry.

Agreed, but it is something of a technicality - for typical users, the result is the same as if the option was removed entirely.

The very first comment on that Reddit thread shows that this is a UI change. The functionality is not removed but only hidden if you have an active connection.What Microsoft is doing with this dark pattern is bad for everyone, but we must accurately represent the situation.

You can get very close to the Windows GUI with pretty much any of the popular desktop environments: KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, and even GNOMEKDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, and MATE will get you close right off the bat.

Is this on Home or Pro? On Pro, I have them disabled via Group Policy, and I _never_ get an unexpected update, just occasional notification saying &quot;Required updates are ready to install&quot;.

Keep experimenting! I hope you find a GUI that suits you, which you can pair with a free software OS. :-)

I have Enterprise on one machine, Pro on another. I don&#x27;t recall ever having a reboot forced, but sometimes they make it really annoying, popping up a &quot;please restart now to apply updates!&quot; message multiple times a day - I&#x27;d really like a &quot;remind me in x days&quot; option for these notifications.

The most recent occurrence of this hydra is usocoreworker which most likely replaced previous Windows Update services components; sometimes it&#x27;s even impossible to kill it even by temporarily elevating rights of task manager or console (for taskkill use) by 3rd-party tools. It can spawn in the background even if you postponed updates - guess that&#x27;s the MS insurance that OS will receive updates despite of user settings choice and update feature will be immune to bypassing (but luckily, that is possible - at least for this moment, if you of course try hard enough).Gods, I miss the good times of XP, Vista and 7 where it was possible to control updates and avoid potentially dangerous patches.

there were no forced updatesI have attempted to disable those &quot;for real&quot;, and the lengths that MS has gone to in an attempt to stop people from doing it is extremely disturbing; there&#x27;s half a dozen different services and scheduled tasks with various names which are involved, and if you don&#x27;t disable all of it quickly, it all comes back. This Hydra-like persistence is something that hitherto was only seen in malware.I too preferred the Windows GUI, and have been a Windows user since the 3.x days, but the gradual destruction of options (especially in appearance preferences) and increasing user-hostility has pushed me towards experimenting with Linuxes and BSDs more. I&#x27;ve always liked the Unix CLI and filesystem layout, however --- sh&#x2F;bash is so much more powerful and consistent than COMMAND.COM&#x2F;cmd.exe (and PowersHell feels more like an overengineered obese clone of the Unix shells), and the &quot;everything is a file&quot; metaphor and single-rooted filesystem is very elegant. I guess my ideal OS would be a combination of a Linux&#x2F;BSD kernel with a Windows GUI.

Seconded.I&#x27;ve been using Plasma since the KDE 3.4 days, although I&#x27;ve dabbled in other desktop environments. I love it. I honestly miss the experience when I&#x27;m using other operating systems on machines other than my own personal ones.And other Linux desktop environments are also honestly pretty good. Plasma&#x27;s just my favorite, not the only good one.I hope some people do try Linux on account of stuff like this and find a happy home in it. It feels really good not to be insulted, deceived, or bossed around by your OS.

If you love features, KDE Plasma is fantastic, the environment with Kubuntu or KDE Neon. I think it has more features than Windows. 
And then there is like antiX or MX Linux where it runs so quick and smooth, using minimal resources, like Windows 2000 with its services disabled.
Linux is great and everyone can find the distro that suits them well.. even if it might take a few tries to find it, ha.

Microsoft has been able to strategically link their brand with platforms people use and trust -- like github -- allowing them to seem more progressive and open. Ultimately getting everyone to drop their guard.

I’ve always been confused about this too. A couple of big open source contributions and the world turns a blind eye to massive privacy invasions

I don&#x27;t understand why so many people on HN praise Satya Nadella. I guess good PR is worth much more than actions.Before Nadella, Windows wasn&#x27;t nearly as user-hostile as it is now. There was no mandatory telemetry, there were no forced updates, end users weren&#x27;t treated as betatesters and QA wasn&#x27;t non-existent. And now they are taking away the ability to use Windows without Microsoft Account.Of course there are also many other problems with Windows 10, like the UWP fiasco, but they&#x27;re minor in comparison to what Microsoft is doing with user&#x27;s freedom and privacy.I always preferred Windows to Unixes, but at this point I think it&#x27;s time to give up and switch to some Linux distribution. It&#x27;s clear that the situation will only get worse.

I really think if you explained this properly to most end users they will still want something like what Microsoft is moving toward. Let Microsoft worry about it, is what they&#x27;ll say. Non-tech people don&#x27;t want to buy and upgrade operating systems. They see the operating system as part of the device.I&#x27;d like to say selling operating systems to non-technical people doesn&#x27;t work, but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s ever really been tried. The bulk of Microsoft&#x27;s OS sales have never been to end users, but to OEMs and companies on Software Assurance.Now technical people are certainly involved where an IT department builds systems for companies, but I think Microsoft wants to eliminate that too.

It&#x27;s a total managed solution. Predictable.  Requires less human capital to administer.  Contract is negotiable with M$.

&gt; people spend $X per month on the Adobe Suite, and people tend to enjoy that.I work in the graphic design industry, and I&#x27;ve got news for you... people do not enjoy Adobe&#x27;s move to subscription pricing, and on the contrary still complain about it.Anecdotal evidence, I suppose, but seriously... I haven&#x27;t met a single person who prefers Creative Cloud to just buying the suites.

To the end user, what makes this model preferable to buying the operating system software? For some businesses higher up the stack, it makes sense-- e.g., people spend $X per month on the Adobe Suite, and people tend to enjoy that.

Hell, even small companies would. I work at a company with roughly 50 staff and honestly I reckon my bosses would love this.

Do they though? My friends that work IT in corporate settings seem to tear their hair out every time MS (or anyone) tries to auto-push an update that they haven&#x27;t had a chance to rigorously test for compatibility and security with their existing stuff. Some of them have fiduciary responsibility to not add&#x2F;change&#x2F;upgrade software without carefully testing it first. That doesn&#x27;t seem compatible with the trajectory Windows is now on (and that Apple has been on for some time).

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.

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

Microsoft would get involved in Trust issues if they were approaching a monopoly in the PC world. However, one can&#x27;t rely on law to stop a huge corporation like Microsoft dominating the whole PC world.I wonder how Apple would respond to this move by MS, since Apple is also shifting towards services. Maybe they will let people install macOS on their own machines (which pass certain requirements)? Will they remove apps made by MS from Appstore? And what will Google&#x27;s reaction be to all this? Are they going to advertise Chrome books as cheaper alternatives to MS Windows? Or will they remove MS apps from Google Play as well?Interesting, yet dark, times indeed.

However, OP is not talking about a mobile device, but a PC. The PC is in the same device bracket as Macs. And Apple does not provide Macs &quot;as computer as a service&quot;. Everything works with a local account. I don&#x27;t even need to have an Apple ID. The OS also remembers your choice of disabling telemetry, without resetting it after the next update.Apple provides managed and unmanaged. Microsoft appears not to provide unmanaged in the near future. This would remove the entire Windows PC bracket from the list of unmanaged options. That would be an enormous loss, and not just for some &quot;folks who prefer DIY&quot;.

Just like Apple makes the iPhone a &quot;Mobile computer as a service&quot;. It&#x27;s a managed device that makes life much safer and easier for most people.There will likely always be the DIY solutions for folks who prefer that. And that&#x27;s good too.

I see the potential for a future (and the tech is getting there, with Stadia, etc) where OEMs only sell to cloud operators and instead the consumer is sold essentially a graphics card and network card as a streambox. At that point, we can say goodbye to open source ideals, when [[Cloud Provider]] can charge for installing whatever software they want and keep it locked down otherwise.

That seems really unlikely. People are used to devices being things that you buy once and keep forever without a subscription. Why would Microsoft go out on a limb and do something weird like that?

Microsoft is clearly taking moves that enable &quot;PC as a service&quot;.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&#x27;s Azure AD configuration and locked down with InTune, unhackable with properly implemented Class 3+ UEFI and Secure Boot, etc. You then purchase additional software subscriptions, such as your Photoshop, etc., through the Microsoft store, with Microsoft taking a cut like Apple.If your computer breaks, pay the $50 or $100 insurance and receive a new one from Microsoft, if it&#x27;s not folded into your monthly &quot;Microsoft Technology Subscription.&quot;So when Microsoft completes its takeover of the PC, what&#x27;s the platform and OEM landscape going to look like? This endgame clearly puts companies like Dell, HP, Asus, etc. and the companies that provide parts like Intel, AMD in a subordinate position to Microsoft. They probably won&#x27;t like that.Will they give up? Will they try to start to make hardware for Apple? Will these companies embrace Linux and provide a third way?

Yeah, I&#x27;ve always found that behavior really annoying. And it&#x27;s basically impossible to fix it after the fact without making a separate account. The trick, if you know it before hand, is to make a local account (I guess you need to be offline for that now) and then link it later.

If I use my live.com account, Windows sets system username automatically with first five letters of my first name. Then I see this stupid choice every time I open Windows console.

The reason why I feel like I’m stuck is based on my personal use case. Basically I need two things:A. Being able to use some proprietary software not available on LinuxB. Being able to self build so I can select the HW that works for meWith Linux I lose A and with Mac I would lose B. I’m thinking that a combo Mac Mini + Tower PC with Linux could work, but using two OSes at the same time, even with shared NAS, KVM switch etc., would not be the best in terms of UX(Edit I had mixed up “A” and “B” in my sentence)

It is bad, but I do not think you are stuck. But there are two fronts -- business offerings are going the same way. There is lots of pressure to use almost exclusively MS hosted services. And, in that market, not everything has a good replacement.

As a fellow embedded software engineer, I made the migration from Windows to Linux some time ago. You&#x27;ll see that except for old targets (or highly proprietary ones like fpga) most if not all tools used today are actually open source ones (ide based on eclipse, gcc toolchain, jtag debugger...). Once you understand how they all play together you&#x27;ll see that it&#x27;s actually easier to work on Linux, as those tools are in their primary element, not half bad ports to Windows !

Hmmm, this is kind of the wrong way round. In my experience all the good stuff is on Linux, and windows have these bad broken ports. Depends on a lot things I&#x27;m sure...

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.

You haven&#x27;t seen it coming with Windows 8 ?

I&#x27;ve done lots of embedded development on Linux, and it&#x27;s mostly been a painless experience. Segger has a Linux library which works great, as well as Embedded Studio which runs on Linux. GCC-arm and several other compilers are avaible. I&#x27;ve been working a lot with Nordic Semiconductor&#x27;s ARM-based SoCs, and I&#x27;d say Linux is a fully viable environment for the applications I&#x27;ve worked on.

&gt; 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.Ayup. Win10 finally broke the camel&#x27;s back and I started the process of figuring out how to transfer as much as we can to Linux.The hardest part is that our embedded development stuff is all Windows. :( I&#x27;ve been trying to get VSCode, Segger, and embedded boards to play nice together. I haven&#x27;t been sufficiently successful that I could start pushing it onto the dev team yet.

I&#x27;m wondering if this is really the right move as in &quot;desktop is definitely going down and everything will be web based&quot;. 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&#x27;t go away, everyone will have migrated to OSX or Linux if Windows quality continues to decline at that rate.

That explains it then. Time to move house.

What is the reasoning behind that? Putting a major desktop product as part of the cloud organization seems a bit ridiculous from afar.

Not putting effort into making Windows better is different than telling all the .9 billion Win10 users to go f themselves.But still, if all those .9 billion Windows users still decide that FOSS is too hard, who am I gaf?

It&#x27;s not part of Azure, it&#x27;s part of Experience + Devices, which is a different top-level group from Cloud + AI.

&gt;&gt; getting worse and worse at an alarming rateThat&#x27;s because Windows Division does not exist anymore as a separate business unit within MS. It&#x27;s now a part of Azure. And Azure doesn&#x27;t really care all that much about making desktop excellent. It&#x27;ll just keep it good enough for you to buy more Azure, but not more than that.

&gt; In general I have a positive opinion about what MS is doing latelyDont get fooled. They got better because they have competition. The company is still mostly a marketing firm longing for the days when it could abuse positions of monopoly.There has been no changes in their structure that would change their core ethics.

May I recommend Keypirinha [1]
over Launchy? I recently tried all of the launchers I could find for Windows and KP was by far the best, and does not get enough recognition in my view.[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;keypirinha.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;keypirinha.com&#x2F;</a>

I keep hearing about this. This is what’s keeping me from upgrading to 1903, as I find disabling Bing Search absolutely essential.So, have you followed the advice in the support document? Did it help?

Thanks for that search problem link I am exactly one of those users and start menu search just isn’t working. I have switched to Launchy as an alternative after years of being happy with the start menu search. I can finally look for a solution now, nice.

My initial thought was that they completely removed the option only in the Home version of Windows.Since (I don&#x27;t think) you can join Windows Home to a Domain, is that true? Is the option for a local account now only available in Windows Pro, unless you install Windows Home disconnected from the Internet?

Nice...no normal user would click that.This is terrible.

Is there anyone that even knows what &quot;Domain join&quot; means? If the button was there but hidden, would that count as &quot;still there&quot;? What if it was there but labeled &quot;Click here to brick your computer&quot;?

Weird location because local user accounts have little to do with domains. :P

I didn’t feel the need to specify that in my comment because the linked Reddit thread already explains it, it’s the top upvoted comment, you can see it just below the initial post. When I said “this is incredibly bad” I was referring to the dark pattern, I wasn’t trying to suggest that the option had been completely removed.

Do you actually need to be running a domain controller? Or is it local?

First of all, I would have had no idea that&#x27;s what &quot;domain join&quot; meant. But second, I love how the option is down there with &quot;terms of use&quot; and other things you&#x27;re very unlikely to ever read or look at. And third, it&#x27;s cute how even if you somehow find your way to this option, they have the &quot;but even better, use the online account!&quot; Oh my god.

It is still misleading.Under &quot;Domain join instead&quot;, I would assume that I could enter an appropriate domain credentials and the computer would join the domain. Essentially the same thing, that the OOB assistant in RHEL8&#x2F;Fedora does, when choosing Enterprise login.

&quot;Domain join instead&quot;? That&#x27;s bizarre, it&#x27;s not even proper English. They really don&#x27;t want anyone to click there.

They didn&#x27;t removed it. 
The title is misleading, The button is still there, but they renamed the button. 
It&#x27;s under &quot;Domain Join Instead&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tA9fo1R.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tA9fo1R.png</a> 
And there you can create an offline account: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;eBLi5cv.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;eBLi5cv.png</a>

The trope is backwards. If a business doesn&#x27;t charge they have no choice but to make the user the product. If the user pays they have the option.

This sort of thing cannot be remedied apart from regulation.

As someone in another thread mentioned, it&#x27;s because the marketing budgets are way bigger than what people would, or even could, pay.Whichever corporations are paying for these revenue streams of monetized data and attention, they can (and do) easily outbid whatever a human customer is willing or able to pay for software or services that don&#x27;t track you.It&#x27;s pretty obvious when you think about it. All the incentives for commercial software &#x2F; services &#x2F; sites anywhere are stacked against the user actually paying with money instead of data.There isn&#x27;t even a good infrastructure for getting&#x2F;passing this money, unlike the giant system of ad networks passing tracking data back and forth.People (complete idiots, IMHO) have been saying this is the transaction, you&#x27;re paying with your data for the &quot;free internet&quot;. But for starters, there is no choice. Also, nobody asked me. I&#x27;ve been &quot;paying&quot; with my data without consent for YEARS, even though I try not to.And now we see it&#x27;s not an either&#x2F;or question. They can just make you pay for the service AND extract your data and track you. Because why not both? Again we don&#x27;t have a lot of choice.

&gt; I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product.I think this is worth thinking about for a bit. The trope is that if you&#x27;re not paying then you&#x27;re the product.But it doesn&#x27;t follow that if you are paying you are not the product. That depends entirely on business decisions that customers have little visibility into.For any product you pay for, there may eventually be a decision to extract additional revenue streams by monetizing your data or attention.The fact that this happened with cable TV and advertising before the era of the internet indicates that this is far from a new pattern. I expect to see it a lot in the next few years.

&gt; 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&#x27;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 whims

Proton (Steam&#x27;s custom WINE) is really really good (you can turn it on for all games). Of course it still breaks games that use excessive DRM, but I avoid those games anyway.

You would be surprised at how good is Wine at running Windows games today.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fhwOgTaxJTI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fhwOgTaxJTI</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pr_dVP_bV14" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pr_dVP_bV14</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-7ATaLC4ixE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-7ATaLC4ixE</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R9oXKvymIFs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R9oXKvymIFs</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;doitsujin&#x2F;dxvk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;doitsujin&#x2F;dxvk</a>

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

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.

I agree with the last paragraph of your comment, but still I think users should be able to choose. “Security by dark pattern” doesn’t sound to me like the best solution we could possibly come up with.

Where is the increased security of using an online identity verses a local machine account?  Windows Hello?

I disagree with your premise. For many people this will force increased personal security and make their accounts more easily recoverable in case they forget their passwords.I&#x27;m something of a security expert, having consulted on architure implemented by several of the largest anti-virus distributors and retailers in the world. My honest opinion is that people need a dramatically better understanding of how domains work. If they want the increased privacy they should need to understand how to setup and use a local domain well enough to find the new location for creating a local account.For those who cannot do this, their device security and therefore personal privacy is far better served by registering a microsoft account.Any privacy concerns stemming from trust should be addressed by laws governing the acceptable use of user data. California is already pursuing such laws, and we should be supporting those efforts because they are addressing the true root cause of most modern privacy issues.

It really seems like the current management is hell-bent on destroying any remaining goodwill among Windows users.&gt;I’ve always assumed that I’m locked into using Windows but after all this crap I’m starting to look into alternatives even though they’v got shortcomings on their own.Yeah, I really wish there was an alternative I liked better.

I friend of mine recently moved from Windows to Mint (Linux). Reckons it&#x27;s great.

&gt; 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.I think following the money shows part of why this is true.It used to be that MS had three cash-cows: Windows, Office, SQL Server. Everything else, even Exchange, sharepoint, etc, on their own, made relatively little or a loss but were part of the larger ecosystem and therefore used to sell the other three.It is now the case that the cash-cows are Azure (including AzureSQL), Office, SQL Server (on-prem). Windows is very much off the top list and is there mainly to sell the rest of the ecosystem and the fact that dumping it (or even just de-prioritising it too far) would look very bad.That MS ecosystem is increasingly OS-agnostic and going forward this is going to continue to be the trend. SQL Server runs on Linux too now. VSCode is cross-platform and either that will continue to grow more of Visual Studio&#x27;s features of VS itself will start to become cross-platform. Office has online versions which while having many notable feature gaps are pretty useable for many tasks and are getting more so. Much of what runs on Azure is not Windows either very much so (i.e. is running on Linux in VMs) or effectively so (running as app services where neither the dev nor the admin cares about the OS underneath as long as the right APIs are available).Given the amount of effort desktop Windows must take, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;d be happy to dump it sooner rather than later: let someone else deal with all that hardware compatibility faf and all those &quot;real&quot; man-on-the-street demanding-but-clueless end users on the desktop and all the security issues that come with them, keep server Windows going for Azure&#x2F;similar (where the range of virtual hardware can be nicely constrained compared to real hardware variance and the security surface can be easier to manage too), and support other OSs in VMs as well as possible to make running them on Azure resource as friction free as it can be (aside from the friction of needing to pay!).

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) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-1903-microsoft-details-search-fix-as-new-update-bug-hits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;windows-10-1903-microsoft-deta...</a>Now, MS is trying to force upon customers this cloud login garbage, which is obviously not acceptable if you are privacy conscious.I build my own PCs and have spent hundreds of dollars in Windows 10 retail licenses, I pay for the service so I don’t want to be the product.I’ve always assumed that I’m locked into using Windows but after all this crap I’m starting to look into alternatives even though they’v got shortcomings on their own.(Edit: replaced Amp link with real link, sorry I didn’t realise it was Amp)

Man, I just set up a Windows laptop for my wife past week and made sure to skip it. I guess she bought it at just the right time...

Isn’t LTSC better as a desktop? It’s just Windows 10 without the user hostile crap.But I have never run Windows Server

Windows 10 Server supports Store, LTSC does not.

If you&#x27;re going to pirate, might as well pirate Windows Server, which is basically the same kernel with a far less offensive (and bloated) userland configuration.

Why do you even need Windows in that case? Internet isn&#x27;t any different when seen from Ubuntu and if you really have to use Windows, because AutoCAD and Photoshop, then you&#x27;re paid enough to not worry about 260 usd.

Buy pirated Windows LTSC on ebay (or actual, if you have 260 usd to spare), it solves most of Windows 10 problems

I dislike this because I would need to use a much more complex password for my home computer. Or I can choose to use a simpler to type&#x2F;remember password for the online account and I don’t feel comfortable with that.I’m sure that many of you use long complex passwords for your computers but I don’t for my home computer. I have to type if often to login and the environment is not a high risk area. I do use longer and more random passwords for accounts with a wider exposure.

I recently set up a ci system in Windows, spending over a month getting things working with various versions of visual studio, etc.I tried with Windows 10, and widows server 2019. The end result was that Windows 2019 is super fast to set up, and literally compiled the same c code in half the time it took in Windows 10. The user interface was a lot snappier, and just felt nice, like how xp felt after disabling all the eye candy.If it weren&#x27;t for the insane pricing, server 2019 would be the ultimate windows os...

Astonishing story, thanks for sharing. It actually says a lot about their level of customers support and care.

Even people who are bad at their jobs are real people. We can’t assume that everyone of low intelligence or motivation is sub human.  Just say agency and authority, that made your point.

If you contact a company through their official channels and they connect to a third party, they get to keep the blame.

Forget customer service, not even Microsoft&#x27;s internal IT helpdesk is staffed by FTEs.

I&#x27;m almost certain that you were not talking to a real Microsoft employee. Most Fortune 500s have their helpdesks and customer service outsourced to the Tatas and Wipros, Cognizants and HCLs of the world, who may or may not further subcontract the actual bodies filling the roles. Quite frankly, first-level support is useless and ignorant; at best they have scripts for common issues, but to do anything you need to defeat their efforts to no-op and close the ticket, and instead get escalated to a real person with some agency and authority.

That&#x27;s why I gave it back after a week. That and updates.

Face logon takes some seconds to initialize, and if you interrupt it it gets confused. But the solution to your issue is to have the type cover closed when you unplug it.

Happened to me all the time when I used SP4. However, biometrics can be disabled through settings or group policy!

&gt; I&#x27;m not convinced that their offline security is good, either.If they have physical access to the device there isn&#x27;t much you can do anyway.

&gt; ...and from what I can tell, their online account security is craptastic.I&#x27;m not convinced that their offline security is good, either.I sometimes will pick up my Surface Pro 4 and disconnect it from the charger. Disconnecting from the charger usually (but not always...not sure what determines it) wakes it. It then turns on their equivalent of Apple&#x27;s Face ID, and tries to log in.Sometimes I don&#x27;t actually want that yet, as I just picked it up to take it somewhere else. So I&#x27;ll hit the power button to put it back to sleep. The screen blanks...and then sometimes it quickly comes back, logged in.The thing is I&#x27;ve sometimes had it do this when I&#x27;ve been careful to have my face out of view, holding it so I can only barely see the screen around the edge to see if disconnecting power will wake it up and I&#x27;ll need to hit power to put it back to sleep.This doesn&#x27;t happen all the time, but it has happened several times, leading me to wonder if there is some sort of glitch if you interrupt a face-based login attempt at just the right time via the power button causing it to think it logged in.Anyone else seen this?

It&#x27;s also a &quot;griefer&#x27;s first social engineering&quot; hack, so it has at least some small &quot;fun&quot; difficulty connected to it. To add a child account when you aren&#x27;t directly creating the child account on the same device, Microsoft requires an Invite flow that sends an email to the child account asking them to accept &quot;joining the family&quot;. So either the griefer also had the password to the account to login to the account on their machine (or otherwise access emails to it) or they somehow social engineered the victim to accepting an invitation to &quot;join them&quot; for something. The griefer can blame the victim for being gullible and claim that it wasn&#x27;t the griefer&#x27;s fault the victim fell for it.

It is a griefers hack.  Your son gets denied and basically has to do work, or make a new account.

This isn&#x27;t the case with me. My MS a&#x2F;c (which is also my Windows login a&#x2F;c) has a 44 character password.

Are you talking about online microsoft account or something windows specific? Because that&#x27;s not true, my password has been 40+ characters for a long time and I change it pretty often.For local login you can use a PIN, or set up windows hello, if you don&#x27;t want to type in the long password every time.

&gt; last I checked (earlier this year I believe), there’s still a 14-character length limit on the MS account passwordIt was 16 chars. And it hasn&#x27;t been true since 2016.

As many people said already you can use longer passwords.

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 account is still possible.)

It&#x27;s a really nasty dark pattern. Most users won&#x27;t realise they have to disconnect from the internet to sign up and will fall for Microsoft&#x27;s trap.

Today you still can use and create an offline account. If you’re offline. People here don’t read the original thread.

&gt; ...and from what I can tell, their online account security is craptastic.There&#x27;s something weird and shady going on: I did created MS account to get this &quot;marvelous&quot; free Windows 10 offer once the update was smuggled on my Windows 7 installation and in subsequent buggy releases I had to reinstall the OS from scratch. So I had to login to activate this thing but I choose to not use the account later switching to local one (I did created an offline one during OOBE) and yet, Windows is still holding credentials to the online account somewhere because Activity section of the MSA Privacy page is still registering OneDrive activity coming from my desktop. I am not logged anywhere in OS, credentials manager is cleared out, OneDrive application is removed but still, it happens.

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

IIRC this particular family had several thousand children. I don’t think it was a mistake.

Several people here have talked about “hacks” like what happened to ypur son, and I&#x27;m of course not saying they&#x27;re wrong. I don&#x27;t quite get the idea what it&#x27;s supposed to get such hackers, though, so I think you shouldn&#x27;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&#x27;s name and they added him by mistake?Shouldn&#x27;t be able to happen, of course, but given it&#x27;s Microsoft we&#x27;re talking about, who would swear it couldn&#x27;t?

&gt;My MS account had my desktop&#x27;s Win 10 Pro N (the one with less crap)Not sure what you mean by &quot;less crap&quot;. The only advantage of the N versions is that it doesn&#x27;t have Windows Media Player. You need enterprise to set telemetry level to lowest, and enterprise LTSC to not have Windows store (and a bunch of other UWP apps) installed by default.

It seems to me MS customer support is incapable of doing anything meaningful with your account, except making it easier to be hacked via social engineering.My MS account had my desktop&#x27;s Win 10 Pro N (the one with less crap) license attached to it. When I bought a new laptop with Win 10 Pro (regular, non-N), my desktop would suddenly claim that its license was invalid. Great. Called support, but nothing they could do except recommending to reinstall Windows. No guarantee the other system would then not go into that &quot;your license is invalid state&quot; if I use the N license again. Solution: Screw them, I&#x27;ll install kmspico.I&#x27;m probably lucky I use that sh*tshow of an OS only for gaming, and Linux for everything else (including work - we&#x27;re essentially a Linux company even though most of our customers (embedded devs) still use windows.

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 MS account Windows Phone thought I was a child and blocked me from doing a load of the things I needed to do.

Thanks for that lovely story. It made me laugh at how badly MS is navigating whatever the fuck it is they envision this path they are going down&#x2F;paving.However, it did give me a Business Idea; (this is for some hungry 20somethings out there):Sell a machine image which is basically a windows VM on top of Linux with support, which can handle and navigate all this bullshit that MS is throwing at common users, instead of trying to force the population to become sysads themselves.

...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 what the point of this particular hack is, but that was the result.So we called Microsoft customer service. It turns out that there is no way to get an account removed from a family once it’s listed there. The Windows rep we talked to had a recourse, though. He proposed that we, the three of us, attempt to reverse-hack the fake “dad”’s account over the phone by trying to guess his password. I had to explain to the gentleman that, even though we were within our moral rights to do this, a) it was almost certainly illegal, and b) doomed to failure.He didn’t understand the issue. Eventually we had to agree to disagree, and hang up on him. We never got my son’s account back. We wiped his computer and installed Windows via “use offline account”. I’m glad this was last year and not today, I guess?

Windows is pretty common for control systems in factories. One factory I worked in used a web application, the one I&#x27;m in now uses VB applications. One of the control systems I use is running Windows2K. These computers have Internet access too.

Because they&#x27;re all consumer level OSes now, unless you can afford an enterprise license. Not every organization can.It used to be perfectly reasonable to run light industrial and test equipment on Windows.

Why are you perpetuating the myth that there is a difference?

Why are you using a consumer level OS&#x2F;setup for this?PC&#x27;s setup in a corporate environment are tightly controlled, even with Windows 10.

Technically, maybe. Commercially, the licensing is a huge mess. In some areas with low volumes you certainly don&#x27;t want (or maybe MS won&#x27;t even sell to you under reasonable terms) to deal with that. Even with medium&#x2F;high volume I would find it nightmare.

Thanks for this. I must&#x27;ve shrugged it off initially for using the &quot;IoT&quot;-buzzword (who are they selling too?).Reading up a bit on it here[1], and again, I&#x27;m appalled. I don&#x27;t want to waste time and money cherry-picking Windows versions. There&#x27;s IoT Core, Mobile and Enterprise, and then there&#x27;s Enterprise LTSB, apparently with year codes too, what gives?Nah, all this time and money wasted doing that can be invested in making the jump to Linux, because unlike Windows, chances are, that that will be indeed just a one-time investment. Linux also has a plus of making ghosting hard-drive images much easier, since there are no licensing issues to consider, and therefore could also be done completely offline (PCs are hooked up to local network for remote VNC connections, but are blocked from the Internet).It may be wishful thinking, but I hope that just like servers are 99% running Linux, the same may one day be said for industrial applications... looks like I&#x27;m on the front line, lock and load![1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;Forums&#x2F;vstudio&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;86c34321-c8bd-46d4-937f-7fda2e249410&#x2F;is-windows-10-enterprise-and-windows-10-iot-enterprise-the-same" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;social.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;Forums&#x2F;vstudio&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;86c34...</a>

You should use the appropriate edition of Windows 10 for your use case: Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. You can disable all the updates and everything you want.

As someone who uses Windows for industrial PCs, I&#x27;m pretty appalled.We&#x27;ve been hanging on to Windows 7, including side-loading drivers into the installation image for modern hardware, because this kind of stuff that Windows 10 does is in these cases simply unacceptable (random tip: Go for AMD, their Windows 7 support is way better than Intel, do not use Intel chipset series 300).I can&#x27;t have PCs bogged down downloading updates or randomly restarting when they&#x27;re controlling endurance test rigs designed to run 24&#x2F;7.Driver issues with Linux, no real vendor support and (believe it or not) stability was the reason Windows prevailed in these applications. And MS threw that all out the window.Oh well, I&#x27;d get paid to rewrite the control software in Linux, I&#x27;m not really complaining, I just hope there&#x27;s enough driver support (looking at you, National Instruments...).

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