Do custom installation (ISO) creation utilities like NTLite still allow you to remove the requirement?
I’m going to give Google money by buying a Pixel to free myself from Google…
Linux, your time has finally come
Lol it’s been great getting off of Windows over the last few months.
I thought I would miss it, but Proton in Steam has been amazing on Ubuntu, with some exceptions (Stupid EA crap from skate. 2025).
Dual booting for now is OK, but gaming is pretty garbage anyway, so I will probably abandon Windows entirely soon. Definitely my last version of it. Feel so liberated having hobbies off computer anyway, and now using my computers with Ubuntu is actually enjoyable again instead of driving an expensive spy machine.
:)
I am horrified by what computers have become, from expensive magical tools to solve real problems, to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
Hmmm, I wonder which background economical system we all live in that could explain why every single technology ends up controlled by the top 1% to make our lives more miserable and their profits higher…
Those kinds of computers still exist, it’s called Linux.
I’ve never been more appreciative than I am now of the decades of effort that have gone into building this free and open-source operating system.
Imagine if we were here in 2025, with all the incumbent operating systems going to shit, but in a world where Linux didn’t exist and there was no alternative that wasn’t owned by a tech giant.
I don’t even want to imagine.
Yes, competition is good.
It is just a problem when the competition is big tech and can ignore everybody else as they get even more money from somewhere else like Azure.
The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD
In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.
I think it’s almost certain that Linux’s niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.
Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.
Sure, if it wasn’t Linux then another project may have got the love and attention.
I’m not glad it was Linux specifically, just glad there is a credible FOSS alternative of some kind, and in our universe that’s Linux.
You might think there’s no such world where we wouldn’t have had some credible alternative, and as reasonable as that is - because freedom and independence are things people intrinsically want - I’m sure if you flap the butterfly wings enough times there’d be a universe where we all just collectively decided that commercial operating systems were the answer.
Glad I don’t live there.
Yeah. Look at the shitheap we had to settle with when Reddit enshittified beyond redemption. We’re really lucky to have such a well-polished alternative to Windows right now, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that Windows was awful from the beginning. If a halfway-decent operating system like OS/2 had become the default then we might be really scrambling right now.
I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.
As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it’s a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.
and still expensive
Well I paid for what I have, and no one is allowed to rob me of what I pay for so I’m good. Sorry Microsoft you don’t get to rob people any more than the rest of us. All it does is send people elsewhere.
Where’s the regulation that prevents this? Appalling.
This “subscription” mentality is ruining value for a lot of society but, holy shit, do you ever rake in those huge amounts of monthly cash, for very little work.
It’s not our mentality, it’s their strategy.
Wars breed new strategies.
Sometimes it’s free trade as a carrot and embargo as a stick, like with, well, one can try to nail it to Napoleonic wars, but as old as life. Sometimes it’s mass production and standardization and ergonomics and scientific industrial design, one can try to nail these to WWII, but also as old as life. And sometimes it’s controlled escalation as a way to reach your goals without triggering nuclear response, which one can nail to the Cold War.
American strategy of the Cold War is being used against world markets, ladies and gentlemen. Together with the previous two strategies mentioned.
The Soviet one was the opposite, to try to make even the smallest transgression cause firmly the same response, so that controlled escalation wouldn’t work, but unfortunately one is founded in human psychology (plus game theory) and the other in rational knowledge (just game theory), the latter always loses. It was called scientific-technical revolution and meant literally its name - instead of gradual escalation, which favors the stronger side, you should create technical means to punch a fatal wound, nothing gradual.
So - the subscriptions themselves matter very little, they are just slowly transitioning everything big to dependence upon remote components available over the Internet.
It’s funny, actually, so much gradual work, and in the end it’ll be just wasted time - even making computers is not magic. State of the art processes could as well be that for most of humanity, but for many purposes Pentium MMX is a good enough computer, and such are not magic.
And especially making computer software of the kind that’s being “metropolized” like this is not magic. Most of it is complex simply because of legacy, backwards compatibility and as a barrier for competitors making alternative implementations.
I am never abandoning you, Linux
I will be switching to Linux once my laptop is obsolete!!! I will only be getting Linux stuff from there on in!!! :-)
You’re going to immediately wonder why you waited so long.
Why wait? Linux Mint will run the shit out of your laptop right now.
Not OP, but I have to keep one Windows PC around. My favorite mod for my favorite 20 year old 4x game will not run on Linux, even though the game itself will.
The rest of my PCs are running either Mint or Xubuntu.
Qemu vm not option? Try virt-manager or similar. If 20 year old game performance impact probably not bad.
I’m waiting for actual fire to start in my laptop before switching. I’ve had to do so many tricks to keep Win 7 going that I’m invested in keeping this thing going as long as possible. Plus all my porn is on it.
Try Pop OS Cosmic (Like MacOS) and Linux Mint Cinnamon (Like Windows) they are both amazing. They are both customizable to look however you want too
Im running cosmic desktop on arch, its actually very good! I have enabled automatic tiling of windows and its just super convenient. Like a tiling window manager but with all the stuff most people want built-in (top bar, notifications, screenshots, screen sharing etc).
You cant customize it as much as a real tiling window manager but if all you want is for your windows to tile, its awesome.
I can add that in my experience, switching to Linux tends to have a positive impact on performance and keep the laptop usable for longer, I highly recommend you try it with your current laptop.
I’ve got machines that are obsolete for even Windows 10 that run Linux just fine. The best time to start is now.
If you have a drive where you can back up your stuff before installing a new OS, there’s no need to wait.
I despise that I have to use this OS at work. I would never run windows on my own computer again. Its just insanity. Next they’ll require a credit card to make a Microsoft account.
I could see them requiring government-issued ID. The age verification laws coming into effect in various states and countries make this a logical step for Microsoft. They might even start their own age verification service where you give them your ID and they vouch for your age with the sites you visit in Edge. Of course it would have the totally accidental side effect that everything you do on your computer could be monitored and legally tied to your identity.
The only thing you should give Microsoft is the finger.
The bird bird bird, the bird is the word.
its on our work computers, i believe windows 11 with all the BLOAT too.
“It would bypass critical steps…”
Which step is that, data collection? Shoving OneDrive down my throat by putting my Desktop in it with no way to easily remove it?
collecting data, and training AI of course.
Here’s your bypass:
In OOBE, go through MS account creation. Tell it you were born today. It’ll let you set a password for the MS account before rejecting you due to COPA requirements. At this point, you can make an offline account without having even created an MS account, let alone having to use one.
This will not go away - it’s a legal thing. MS doesn’t want to deal with COPA stuff for very young kids, so this flow exists. Enjoy.
My go to is to pop open the console and run “ipconfig /release” right before you create an account. Win 11 will have you set up a local account if you don’t have a network connection.
Doesnt work on these newest versions anymore.
OOBE\BYPASSNRO has been off and on for me, but so far nuking the network connection has always worked for me. I’m setting up a few new computers tomorrow, it will be interesting to see what tricks still work.
Yes please let us know. Wont know till we order another batch of newer computers in a few weeks.
I guess i could download the latest test build on a test machine and reset it and try.
Back in my day, we had to make ourselves looks older online to get things, not younger! hehe
This is the rule for any account or mobile game, too - if it asks your age before asking for consent to farm, put any age below 13. It’ll either not farm you because it’s illegal or it’ll kick you out. If the latter, good riddance really
I’ve always done 1/1/1984 for obvious reasons but this is a good tip
I’ve used 1/1/70 since it’s the unix epoc, what’s 1/1/84?
Thank you both for telling me the answers to your security questions.
Don’t worry, Lemmy censors security information and passwords automatically, see: ******
hunter2
*******
Why are people just replying with asrerisks?
12345
That didn’t work. Maybe it doesn’t realize that’s the combination to my suitcase?
Rufus can be used to disable account creation along with other settings.
rufus doesn’t help with preloads that you don’t want to or can’t, for whatever reason, overwrite with a ‘clean’ install.
If os can’t be installed off a usb then that means linux can’t either, which makes it a pretty sad machine to spend money on.
So it must be a work or school device then? Which users wouldn’t be installing OS on anyways with it being handled through IT.
There are plenty that will boot/install Linux just fine but won’t do a nice clean install of Windows 11.
Modern Thinkpad E16 (AMD) is one of them, a clean USB won’t work, it will always stick at not finding required drivers.
You need to inevitably create a USB install from the MS USB Media Creation tool, running on the machine itself from the included crapware Windows - to get an installer USB that will work.
Different if you’re just pushing a wim over the network from endpoint/scm, but it’s basically broken for local users.
I had this issue at work, I was able to fix it by using the windows media creation tool instead of just writing the iso to the drive. Not sure why that worked, but it has every time so far.
That’s unfortunate. Looks like thinkpads aren’t worth getting. I generally do not trust manfucturer preinstalled OS.
I would still get a ThinkPad, but then, I would never be putting Windows on it anyway.
I generally do not trust manfucturer preinstalled OS.
Especially pertinent for Lenovo.
Only if you want to run Windows on that model I guess. My kid has an E16 AMD and installed Fedora Linux from a USB no problem.
Do you have more info regarding that ThinkPad E16?
I’m mostly working with T series laptops and haven’t had the problem, but always good to know if or when an E16 shows up.Usually all ThinkPads work mostly the same regarding Linux support (bar the usual Nvidia driver shenanigans if you ever trip that), but I’d be concerned about the E-series themselves. If you want a cheaper than T-series ThinkPad you should get an L-series one. Not as expensive as the T-ones, but still retains some usable chassis durability, double replaceable memory slots, replaceable keyboard, etc.
I’ve started calling the E-series as E-waste.
If that actually becomes a thing people do, that could prompt MS to start to require either submitting to a face scan or showing some government ID just to install Windows, though, if the way Google’s handling KYC on YT if your account gets flagged as underage, and soon Android app dev, as well as KYC going out across other sites, is any indication.
I’m pretty sure having to KYC just to install an OS is the last thing people want right now.
Let them. The entire world is slowly migrating to Mac and Linux. I haven’t even had the option of windows at my last 3 jobs. (To be fair, I’ve never had the option of desktop Linux, but this last one said pick a computer—I’m not positive that they would’ve balked at Linux.) That said, idk what’s so great about Mac over Linux, but I guess it’s not corporate friendly.
I’m trying to think of which MS products we even have in our ecosystem. Office, I guess. Corporate world will never wean themselves off of Excel.
What if they just ask your age as step 1 of the setup?
Same thing, that doesn’t change anything.
Where is Windows ME?
It repeatedly crashed for me.
GoodAwful times.Don’t know. I use Win 9
From the other time this was posted:
95 is the stick, and ME is the stick up someone’s butt.
NT?
Solid, for its time but lacking USB support. But that made sense (at the time); a server OS didn’t need ISB support yet.
Win2k?
In my humble opinion that was probably the best windows of its era. Windows XP sp2 was the most important change with its own firewall.
Windows 2000 was the hammer. Windows XP was the hammer dressed as a Teletubby, with a 6-inch chain attaching it to an activation anvil.
I installed windows 11 a dozen time at work (never at home) and I just click on “domain login”, it just creates a local account and then after the install I have to manually join the domain. No Microsoft account enforcement at all.
It’s regular Windows 11, not Enterprise, we are a small company.
But I’m wondering, this bypass is too easy, is it because it sees that the DNS server is also an active directory server, so it allows that, or the trick is that you tell him you want to join a domain?
Or maybe it’s a domain enrollment bug because we’re using samba 4 under Debian as active directory server and not Windows server/entra id/whatever they call it this month?
I just click on “domain login”
It’s regular Windows 11, not Enterprise
You need to have 11 Pro or better to domain join a computer.
Your computer would also need to be joined to your domain to allow the login, so there is definitely some config going on that is not available to the typical home user.
I don’t know why it was so easy for you, but the last four Windows 11 machines I set up over the last two years definitely required increasingly complicated hacks just to not create an online account.
I don’t think they ever said they plan to require it for Windows Pro or above skus. It’s only home (you know the one business shouldn’t be using anyway) that they said they wanted to enforce it on.
They actually did a lot of mess with Pro as well. There has been a “watering down” of Pro since Windows 10 to make sure that they can still do their anticonsumer crap to users. I imagine they also are trying to push businesses to get Enterprise instead of picking up relatively easy/inexpensive Pro licenses.
