My favorite was when my new Windows 11 laptop started automatically backing up my files to OneDrive without telling me, then STOPPED LETTING ME SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS because my OneDrive was full. Full of stuff that I never wanted to back up.
So one of my main email accounts, which I’ve used within the free tier limits for 20ish years, suddenly went dark because I signed into Windows.
Of course while investigating, the UI offered helpful options like:
Pay for more cloud storage
(Not depicted: “Free up some space,” “Disable backups”)
Epilogue: After several rounds of disabling backups, then deleting the stuff in OneDrive, then Windows deciding that I couldn’t have wanted that and backing all my stuff up again anyway, I finally fixed it by deleting some key directories so the backup would just fail.
Thing is, installing win11 without linking a Microsoft account is still a rather large pain in the ass. 1000% worth it minf you, but they really don’t want you to.
I just did it this morning, when you burn the ISO to a usb drive using Rufus you get a nice little menu that allows you to pre-set a local account, disable the TPM check and more.
The biggest pain is downloading the windows 11 iso in the first place. You can only do that when the site believes you’re not already using windows.
Bypassing the online check on setup is basically required on new hardware anyways, since most 2.5g/wifi6+ networking drivers aren’t included in the installer.
this is a feature of rufus, not of windows, while it’s really cool, go rep rufus, not windows. Especially for the linux users who don’t use windows and have to suffer through what is sometimes arbitrarily confusing. I will say, there is a script out there that works great for flashing windows isos under linux. Uses a grub intermediary layer to ensure consistent behavior i think? Idk, i used it once.
If you’re in a situation where you absolutely must use Windows, at the out-of-box screen ,Enter a fake email address and a fake password a few times, and once it fails to sign in it will give you the option of creating a local account. Sneaky, deceitful, and underhanded, sure, but at least it’s still possible.
i’ve already commented this, but just to get my point across properly here, it’s these kinds of comments that bother me. They reek of “too occupied with whether we could do it, rather than whether we should do it.”
It’s a neat trick, but completely fucking ignores the problem. It’s like a car shipping from the factory with a bunged transmission but everyone going “well you can just not use first gear” or “well, doing a swap is easy” and my favorite “just re-gear it with third party parts, these ones don’t explode” Like, yeah, you could. Nobody would be buying that car though. For some reason tech nerds have a masochistic relationship to this shit and i dont understand why.
I am repping Rufus here, not windows. Painful as it may sound, truth is that most people creating windows usbs would do so from windows.
The tool you’re talking about might be Ventoy. Which is indeed a great way to make any type of bootable usb stick. Once installed you can just throw all sorts of isos (and more) to your usb drive and it’ll generate nice grub menu to pick from.
You’ll just have to use the classic oobe\bypassnro method instead to install windows. (The fact that you have to use a workaround to create a local account at all is still BS, there’s no denying that.)
i get it. It just pisses me off to no end when people bring up genuine issues and people go “oh but you can just unplug the fuckin ethernet” yeah and why do we need to fucking unplug it again?
I mean yeah i could just not install a shitty piece of software like windows, given my linux user nature, i should do that, but here i am trying to be reasonable, and people keep yelling at me, because apparently i dont know that “well uhm ackshually”
like the guy who responded to my comment with “well just use a fake email if you REALLY have to” like yeah, that’s cool, im sure there are other ways of doing that too. That was not the point of my comment though.
Ventoy is pretty cool, not what i was talking about though, woeusb iirc, really slick little script. Used it for a win 7 iso ages ago.
People having to work with Microsoft stuff (not just windows) have gotten so used to needing to find workarounds for everything that those genuine issues have become the baseline expectation.
Only having to fill in a wrong email/password a few times sounds like peak user experience compared to the shit I have to pull in Azure/Power BI/AD at times. My genuine first reaction when reading that post was “ah of course, that makes sense”.
Personally I use Linux for server/container stuff wherever possible. With the occasional excursion into Manjaro to see what’s happening on the desktop side.
see i think this is the primary difference here. If i were to open azure and see anything even remotely like that i would immediately stop using it and find something better. I simply don’t have time for bullshit like this, especially when i can just pay someone else less money, for something more primitive, that works more effectively for me anyway.
This is not as true as it once was. Not a gamer, so i cant direct you in the best direction, but im aware that people are running the steam deck, or gog, or installing Windows on a VM on their Linux.
The worst thing Linux has going for it, is that it involves taking a leap of faith that, evidently, most are not willing to take. Theres been 20 years of “Linux complicated, not for the average joe” that most of us have had ingrained in us for a while. My initial comment was more of a joke trying to poke fun of that very notion. Its more of an option than its ever been, to the extent that even running games isnt a dealbreaker anymore. In my experience, i started dual booting Mint and Windows sometime between 5-10 yrs ago and very quickly realized that theres very little I truly need Windows for. Im not that tech savvy, i cant code, the linux terminal is daunting and i dont use it for installing all my software. Just before the plunge, i didnt know about partitions; today, i still dont understand what "kernel* fully means, regardless of how many times ive heard it explained.
Somehow someway, it turned out that after everything i always heard, there was a hardly a learning curve in using Mint bc it was so similar to what i already knew. Before id spend hrs cleaning things that refused to delete off of Windows, or learning to deal with viruses, or just getting past the babyproofing Microsoft intentionally includes in their OS. That meant that i hsd the time and spare brain power to look up the (usually simple) solutions to anything that was new and unexpected about Mint. In the case of a gamer, the time u lose on Windows bs (even tho u typically dont notice until u try a less greedy OS) is more than enough to learn how to game on Linux. And if thats not enough, i still would recommend dual booting due to the lightweight nature of Linux and how much more enjoyable simply internet or file browsing is on Mint.
/endrant
i get it if its still not the time for u, but maybe it will be for somebody else reading.
Omfg i love this reply! Someone choosing Windows bc its best for them who keeps an open mind and is willing to try FOSS operating systems?! Holy shit thats a fucking win! Forgive me for simping harder on linux than trump does for putin when i say this, but these sorts of comments do more (imho) to spread Linux than harping on about how great it is to ppl who likely dgaf.
Im not gonna try and sway u, but im thrilled u tried and went with whats best. I make music and the DAWs on linux are… ill not say… so i do get it. I could run on a VM, but due to the size of the projects im running, ive yet to try it for fear of the VM or the DAW within it crashing. Its the one thing that i do all the time that forces me to keep my dual booting PC’s windows partition, tho it aggrevates me so. So im doing kinda what u said, Linux is my “everything but music” OS, and windows is dedicated to just that and literally nothing else. I literally only installed firefox on it prolly a year after installing windows due to it not being used for that purpose.
Im glad ur open minded, im glad u tried what u did. Your mentality makes me happy. I hope windows gives u less trouble than i know its capable of generating, best of luck to u, incredible internet stranger!
i had the same shit with google drive recently, legitimately had to CTRL A and delete everything. It should genuinely be criminal to not have “delete all button” Though to be fair, i think it kind of did tangentially a little bit? It was hidden behind like three menus, and didn’t properly update, and i still dont think i have everything deleted from there, i have no idea what google is doing honestly.
My grandfather is in need of a new computer, im not gonna try to Linux pill him, which leaves me with a windows 10 machine that will be EOL this year, and just hope nothing breaks with time. I think he would stop using technology if he saw the constant nags and popups in 11.
I dunno, Linux Mint Cinnamon is pretty dang close to the standard Windows 7 experience. He’ll have an adjustment period of about 2 weeks running into minor differences and then not have any issues.
Oh I am sure of that, thats how I got into Linux :p
But now convince a 70 year old man that the one thing he has been consistently using for almost a decade and a half is in need of a change.
But really I may push him on it again, I’ve assured him he can get to his excel documents and all that but it doesnt seem like enough and is now irate with the ads in solitare
Worked with my 76 year old dad. He happily does all of his stuff on Manjaro. Vivaldi looks like on Windows. And Kodi is even better than the satellite TV crap he had on Windows.
Older folks normally do just fine if you set up some desktop shortcuts and bookmarks. He’s likely gone through a few Windows versions and figured it out, after all.
If all he needs is a browser, get him a Chromebook. Sure it’s Google, which is arguably as bad as Microsoft, but you’re getting a simple machine which is hard to break, and Google is doing the tech support rather than you.
Or, if you don’t want to waste perfectly good hardware, install ChromeOS Flex on the existing machine.
My favorite was when my new Windows 11 laptop started automatically backing up my files to OneDrive without telling me, then STOPPED LETTING ME SEND AND RECEIVE EMAILS because my OneDrive was full. Full of stuff that I never wanted to back up.
So one of my main email accounts, which I’ve used within the free tier limits for 20ish years, suddenly went dark because I signed into Windows.
Of course while investigating, the UI offered helpful options like:
(Not depicted: “Free up some space,” “Disable backups”)
Epilogue: After several rounds of disabling backups, then deleting the stuff in OneDrive, then Windows deciding that I couldn’t have wanted that and backing all my stuff up again anyway, I finally fixed it by deleting some key directories so the backup would just fail.
You can fix it by never logging on with an email address.
Thing is, installing win11 without linking a Microsoft account is still a rather large pain in the ass. 1000% worth it minf you, but they really don’t want you to.
I just did it this morning, when you burn the ISO to a usb drive using Rufus you get a nice little menu that allows you to pre-set a local account, disable the TPM check and more.
The biggest pain is downloading the windows 11 iso in the first place. You can only do that when the site believes you’re not already using windows.
Bypassing the online check on setup is basically required on new hardware anyways, since most 2.5g/wifi6+ networking drivers aren’t included in the installer.
this is a feature of rufus, not of windows, while it’s really cool, go rep rufus, not windows. Especially for the linux users who don’t use windows and have to suffer through what is sometimes arbitrarily confusing. I will say, there is a script out there that works great for flashing windows isos under linux. Uses a grub intermediary layer to ensure consistent behavior i think? Idk, i used it once.
If you’re in a situation where you absolutely must use Windows, at the out-of-box screen ,Enter a fake email address and a fake password a few times, and once it fails to sign in it will give you the option of creating a local account. Sneaky, deceitful, and underhanded, sure, but at least it’s still possible.
i’ve already commented this, but just to get my point across properly here, it’s these kinds of comments that bother me. They reek of “too occupied with whether we could do it, rather than whether we should do it.”
It’s a neat trick, but completely fucking ignores the problem. It’s like a car shipping from the factory with a bunged transmission but everyone going “well you can just not use first gear” or “well, doing a swap is easy” and my favorite “just re-gear it with third party parts, these ones don’t explode” Like, yeah, you could. Nobody would be buying that car though. For some reason tech nerds have a masochistic relationship to this shit and i dont understand why.
I don’t use Windows. I remember this from tech support days though.
I am repping Rufus here, not windows. Painful as it may sound, truth is that most people creating windows usbs would do so from windows.
The tool you’re talking about might be Ventoy. Which is indeed a great way to make any type of bootable usb stick. Once installed you can just throw all sorts of isos (and more) to your usb drive and it’ll generate nice grub menu to pick from.
You’ll just have to use the classic oobe\bypassnro method instead to install windows. (The fact that you have to use a workaround to create a local account at all is still BS, there’s no denying that.)
i get it. It just pisses me off to no end when people bring up genuine issues and people go “oh but you can just unplug the fuckin ethernet” yeah and why do we need to fucking unplug it again?
I mean yeah i could just not install a shitty piece of software like windows, given my linux user nature, i should do that, but here i am trying to be reasonable, and people keep yelling at me, because apparently i dont know that “well uhm ackshually”
like the guy who responded to my comment with “well just use a fake email if you REALLY have to” like yeah, that’s cool, im sure there are other ways of doing that too. That was not the point of my comment though.
Ventoy is pretty cool, not what i was talking about though, woeusb iirc, really slick little script. Used it for a win 7 iso ages ago.
People having to work with Microsoft stuff (not just windows) have gotten so used to needing to find workarounds for everything that those genuine issues have become the baseline expectation.
Only having to fill in a wrong email/password a few times sounds like peak user experience compared to the shit I have to pull in Azure/Power BI/AD at times. My genuine first reaction when reading that post was “ah of course, that makes sense”.
Personally I use Linux for server/container stuff wherever possible. With the occasional excursion into Manjaro to see what’s happening on the desktop side.
see i think this is the primary difference here. If i were to open azure and see anything even remotely like that i would immediately stop using it and find something better. I simply don’t have time for bullshit like this, especially when i can just pay someone else less money, for something more primitive, that works more effectively for me anyway.
You can also fix windows by installing a real operating system.
Don’t cut yourself on that edge brah
This is not a helpful recommendation.
Indeed. Helpful would be, “try Mint bc that is likely to be the easiest for Windows faniliar users to assimilate to, all it costs is your soul.”
deleted by creator
This is not as true as it once was. Not a gamer, so i cant direct you in the best direction, but im aware that people are running the steam deck, or gog, or installing Windows on a VM on their Linux.
The worst thing Linux has going for it, is that it involves taking a leap of faith that, evidently, most are not willing to take. Theres been 20 years of “Linux complicated, not for the average joe” that most of us have had ingrained in us for a while. My initial comment was more of a joke trying to poke fun of that very notion. Its more of an option than its ever been, to the extent that even running games isnt a dealbreaker anymore. In my experience, i started dual booting Mint and Windows sometime between 5-10 yrs ago and very quickly realized that theres very little I truly need Windows for. Im not that tech savvy, i cant code, the linux terminal is daunting and i dont use it for installing all my software. Just before the plunge, i didnt know about partitions; today, i still dont understand what "kernel* fully means, regardless of how many times ive heard it explained.
Somehow someway, it turned out that after everything i always heard, there was a hardly a learning curve in using Mint bc it was so similar to what i already knew. Before id spend hrs cleaning things that refused to delete off of Windows, or learning to deal with viruses, or just getting past the babyproofing Microsoft intentionally includes in their OS. That meant that i hsd the time and spare brain power to look up the (usually simple) solutions to anything that was new and unexpected about Mint. In the case of a gamer, the time u lose on Windows bs (even tho u typically dont notice until u try a less greedy OS) is more than enough to learn how to game on Linux. And if thats not enough, i still would recommend dual booting due to the lightweight nature of Linux and how much more enjoyable simply internet or file browsing is on Mint.
/endrant
i get it if its still not the time for u, but maybe it will be for somebody else reading.
deleted by creator
Omfg i love this reply! Someone choosing Windows bc its best for them who keeps an open mind and is willing to try FOSS operating systems?! Holy shit thats a fucking win! Forgive me for simping harder on linux than trump does for putin when i say this, but these sorts of comments do more (imho) to spread Linux than harping on about how great it is to ppl who likely dgaf.
Im not gonna try and sway u, but im thrilled u tried and went with whats best. I make music and the DAWs on linux are… ill not say… so i do get it. I could run on a VM, but due to the size of the projects im running, ive yet to try it for fear of the VM or the DAW within it crashing. Its the one thing that i do all the time that forces me to keep my dual booting PC’s windows partition, tho it aggrevates me so. So im doing kinda what u said, Linux is my “everything but music” OS, and windows is dedicated to just that and literally nothing else. I literally only installed firefox on it prolly a year after installing windows due to it not being used for that purpose.
Im glad ur open minded, im glad u tried what u did. Your mentality makes me happy. I hope windows gives u less trouble than i know its capable of generating, best of luck to u, incredible internet stranger!
deleted by creator
i had the same shit with google drive recently, legitimately had to CTRL A and delete everything. It should genuinely be criminal to not have “delete all button” Though to be fair, i think it kind of did tangentially a little bit? It was hidden behind like three menus, and didn’t properly update, and i still dont think i have everything deleted from there, i have no idea what google is doing honestly.
My grandfather is in need of a new computer, im not gonna try to Linux pill him, which leaves me with a windows 10 machine that will be EOL this year, and just hope nothing breaks with time. I think he would stop using technology if he saw the constant nags and popups in 11.
I dunno, Linux Mint Cinnamon is pretty dang close to the standard Windows 7 experience. He’ll have an adjustment period of about 2 weeks running into minor differences and then not have any issues.
Oh I am sure of that, thats how I got into Linux :p
But now convince a 70 year old man that the one thing he has been consistently using for almost a decade and a half is in need of a change.
But really I may push him on it again, I’ve assured him he can get to his excel documents and all that but it doesnt seem like enough and is now irate with the ads in solitare
Can you get away with just installing it and telling him it’s the new windows?
You know, if there’s a real nice solitare applet just maybe
You have a choice. Kpatience is pretty good.
You mean like installing Windows 11 when he’s used to Windows 10 or even older? 😁
He’s on 10 now, with some gripes that I likely could regedit, it really depends how harsh w10 EOL goes and how hard they try to fill some landfills
Worked with my 76 year old dad. He happily does all of his stuff on Manjaro. Vivaldi looks like on Windows. And Kodi is even better than the satellite TV crap he had on Windows.
This is lemmy and I live in a country which gives 0 fucks about copyright, so allow me to speak very freely
PIRACY PIRACY PIRACY!
PIRATE a copy of Windows 10 LTSC and let Microsoft choke on your cock and balls!
DMCA My Ass M$IT lawyers
Older folks normally do just fine if you set up some desktop shortcuts and bookmarks. He’s likely gone through a few Windows versions and figured it out, after all.
If all he needs is a browser, get him a Chromebook. Sure it’s Google, which is arguably as bad as Microsoft, but you’re getting a simple machine which is hard to break, and Google is doing the tech support rather than you.
Or, if you don’t want to waste perfectly good hardware, install ChromeOS Flex on the existing machine.