It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days.
But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole:
* Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates
* Killing OneDrive is a like night of the living dead
* Edge popping up "ads" asking you if you want to pin apps when it closes(a lot of windows apps wrap edge, like streaming apps, and show this too on close!)
* Scary Power Automate crap getting injected on updates(haven't seen this in a while)
* Internet search results in the "Home" search
* Random popups and product recommendations
* Registry disabled "features" randomly resurrecting after Windows update
Holy. Hell.
Edit: I recall now; Windows was installing a power automate extension into Chrome during Windows Update un-prompted last year. Caused a minor panic.
If you're (understandably) concerned about the security implications most of the changes can be done manually going off the docs.
The other native Windows feature I really like is the clipboard manager, and I don't have a great replacement for that yet. I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't built one. If anyone has a recommendation that feels native instead of like a ported Linux widget, please share.
People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.
Then also in the past year or two the internet search results were lagging the entire search UI causing type jank and stutters.
I disabled internet results in the registry but a recent update seems to have caused that setting to no longer apply ;(
and even worse, in Edge!
i agree with most of what you said, but this is borderline fantasy.
the majority of home market share is not guaranteed, sure. with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isnt much for a home user to get locked-in with (except games that require windows-only malware i.e. anticheat)
but government, institution (hospitals, universities, etc.) and large non-tech enterprise? that will be windows for at least 20 more years even if they started to change everything now (which they arent). and the number of machines in those places absolutely dwarfs the number of home installs.
The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows.
It is possible, and fast if you want it.
Haven't they been doing this every 5 - 8 years since 2004?
out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly?
i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.
so, the quote i specifically replied to said that today windows is in "significant danger", and i said it isnt. we seem to be in agreement.
as for what the future holds, i think it will be much slower than other people. but maybe i am wrong! which would be fine with me.
but, today, windows is not in "significant danger".
I think they won, too.
I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.
governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines.
20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.
It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away.
To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally.
This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later.
20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.
i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few years at least, etc.
not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective).
time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though.
in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not.
It won't be sudden, until it is
this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government).
point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.
user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.
It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO.
different experience,I guess.
Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'?
Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)
office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on...
but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.
The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows. Gaming is abysmal on macOS on any of the current hardware.
That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.
I don't think you are aware of how much the landscape has changed regarding gaming and Linux.
I don't know. A company worth trillions of dollars does a pretty fine job of making Windows incrementally worse in new and interesting ways, each release.
There's some truth; the bloated company structure has contributed to these unforced errors, but just at an engineering level, people are releasing this tripe without the skill or training or backbone to know what is bad, and push back on toxic management decisions.
Engineers collaborating with oppressive management is a technical failure. Google is riddled with the same problem. I'm sure all the FAANG-a-likes do. Paying billions in salaries to sycophant devs. They have the market share to keep failing upwards. They don't deserve it.
It's a problem that played out in construction, automotive and software dozens of times over.
OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow.
Windows needs to fix itself fast.
now i'm using kde in linux land and it's the best and most customizable experience. I can't imagine going back to windows ever and would be missing a lot from linux if i went back to macos(though it would be fine).
getting macos keybinding in linux land is a game changer to me: https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy and this just makes me feel at home.
Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons, and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows.
[0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with.
[1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar
[2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.
A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc
I might also point out that Mac had keyboard shortcuts before Windows existed, so it's not really fair to describe them as the "different" one when MS chose their own, different shortcuts for Windows.
Not to mention the muscle memory for pressing CTRL in the corner of the keyboard rather than CMD where Alt is.
Though I will say that having "Copy" (cmd-c) being different from ^C (ctrl-c) was kind of nice. Though Terminal has done a nice thing of making it so if you highlight text, Ctrl-C copies the first time you press it, and sends ^C the second time.
It's not like you can't change it.
System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > add your browser > remap the Reload menu item to F5
Along with Karabiner you can pretty much make Mac OS work however you want it to when it comes to keyboard shortcuts.
Which is to say that neither Windows nor Mac shortcuts are inherently better. It's just what we're used to. IME, the main difference is that once you learn the Mac shortcuts in a handful of apps, they'll pretty much work on the other apps you encounter, too.
If you combine mandatory online user accounts with telemetry and Windows Recall, you have a system for building out advertising profiles linked to known individuals.
Doesn't matter if I show them that I can be easily 10x faster, do stuff simply impossible otherwise, has tons of plugins etc. its just ignored.
TC is probably one of the reasons I don't care that much about problems in newer versions of Windows, I don't use Explorer, I don't use windows search, text is viewed with Lister and not Notepad...
Curious about this, what specifically?
I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.
A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer.
Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...
Having said the above, I think that KDE is almost there to have a functional UX that can replace Windows. Not there yet because of random bugs, but almost almost.
Once gamers actually switch to Linux, which is a viable thing, they'll teach their family members. Home users will switch to Linux, and Windows will become an exclusively enterprise and government thing. But once average person is comfortable with Linux because they have it at home, those institutions will start switching to Linux too. And that's how Microsoft will fall. Just like most other corporations - through their own greed.
I used to be, but in 2004 I switched to Linux.
I still use windows as a secondary operating system on another computer, though only Win10. I decided I will not transition to anything after Win10 as Microslop declared war on the users with Win11. Which was the case already before Win11, of course, but I feel the qualitative difference is too much now.
Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine.
When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug.
Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.
Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
Holy shit that's nuts!
It has been this way for 3 years.
This is why local backups should always have the highest priority.
Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.
The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive.
Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.
Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.
If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.
Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.
They're fighting to seize the very specific market segment of "I don't like Windows and don't want to use Linux or a Chromebook, and I'm also poor, but still want to pay a premium price for an underpowered tablet with keyboard glued to it."
Like here's a $500 PC:
https://www.amazon.com/Aspire-Copilot-WUXGA-Display-Processo... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-14-AI-review-Basic...
Twice the storage, twice the RAM, comparable GPU. CPU is a slower in single core, but comparable in multi-core. Faster storage. USB 4, HDMI, multiple USB A ports. Supports more than 1 external monitor. Yep, chassis and screen are worse but it's better in many other ways.
That is not remotely in the same category as the Neo.
The Neo costs a $100 more, needs a $30 dongle to connect to 90% of the stuff people have, has half the RAM, half the storage, slower storage. Has considerably worse I/O. But has a better screen and build quality comparable to a MacBook Pro from 2007.
It's different compromises. Personally I'd rather have more RAM, storage and IO than a prettier case and better screen.
Same thing with the USB A ports. Not really selling point imo.
And yeah, USB A? I got a cheapo C-to-A hub for my dwindling number of legacy devices. There’s no remaining upside to A.
It's a weird choice to pair with a budget laptop since monitors that support that are usually several dollars extra...
They got away with it forever because at $600 there was no competition.
I would say it’s more that Microsoft will make your $600 feel cheap, Apple will make it feel respectable.
A fun, brightly colored, relatively inexpensive, Windows-less laptop that you can use for doing your taxes while watching a movie has appeal. The performance isn't that important, so long as it is as responsive as the owner's phone.
I have an RTX 5070TI laptop. 95% I use it with Tumbleweed.
Unfortunately with work I don't have too much to play with LLM training and such.
The ultra poor person system is a used 200$ Thinkpad ( something about 2 years old) + your Linux distro of choice.
This is what the average computer user is using to try to run your apps and websites. And remember - a cheap laptop bought today is going to be in use for at least five years.
To me, all of those seem woefully underpowered, but $180 is $180...
Around 300$ it gets better, specifically if you're open to Dell and other brands.
And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac
For Mac, 30% are at 8GB, 43% at 16GB.
Windows has nearly nobody below 16GB (27%) and the biggest is 32GB (58%)
> The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.
I rest my case.
Just keep it under one browser tab, bro.
Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.
The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly. It seems pretty clearly a play for students who will eventually enter the business world with their personal laptop preferences.
This really is the key point.
The Neo is not a work laptop (At least, not for engineers). It's a low-end laptop designed to compete with Chromebooks.
Not that I'd know, I've probably seen <10 apple laptop devices in my life and never used one.
Apple’s real differentiator is their silicon. M series chips are just incredibly good and you get a full workday out of them on battery.
The M1 Pro I still have at work is easily the best laptop I have ever used. For side projects I use an M4 air with maxed out RAM and it has no issues with anything I have thrown at it.
For instance, almost none of the useful settings from win32 apps sync - migrating to a new PC is painful, your apps don't move, your settings are all missing. It takes weeks, you don't just login to it. So this idea that it makes all your settings sync is maybe 10% true.
The argument for this online account (vs just a container for apps) is that you think a few Windows appearance settings must be synced always, or that you want to save things like your BitLocker keys in the cloud (which probably makes them visible to FBI or whoever else). And the security implications need to be spelled out in plain language. And in the end, it's a pretty bad argument - Grandma doesn't need BitLocker, but the people who do want a clear explanation. A lot of the rest could live in a "Microsoft apps" credential layer: Edge, OneDrive, Office, etc.
I want to feel like I can login to a recovery console and fix a bad partition. I want to keep using the same username across Linux and Windows. I want to recover a router with the old laptop that has actual ethernet, and who knows if it has cached credentials? My Microsoft account is my least used one, and who knows if it is secure?
One last thing: logging in with biometrics is amazing, but why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password?
Please fix it all.
FAFAIK, all characters that are allowed in a user password are also allowed in device PIN codes. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure there's domain policies to alter/restrict this. And the idea behind it is sound: that PIN is tied only to a single device, meaning that even if someone watches you enter your device passcode (or uses a keylogger), they can't go to a different machine or online portal and re-use the captured credentials there.
I have not had any issues I can remember with Linux wifi for as long as I have used wifi.
Maybe worth checking what Steam Deck's connection has configured differently given it's on the same network?
I think I'd probably say that the problem with Windows is it's made and maintained by people who own macbooks.
Linux is indeed for people who can love linux. For people who don't like computers, there's basically no solution.
Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS.
Ironically, 3 of the 4 are unix based with product people in the loop.
Linux can work as the savior of computer users, but it's not going to happen with a bunch of people who fetishize using a computer like trinity in the matrix.
We don't need three garbage corporate operating systems mismanaged by MBAs, we already have two!
Anyone who's ever tried to get support online with a question about Linux will quickly meet *actual* user hostility as they're asked why they didn't know to check for the config file in the filing cabinet in the basement behind a locked door saying beware of leopard, how dumb they are, etc.
Do we think these companies aren't selling anything??
Every product person I have worked with was just a SME in their domain, and pushed for a cohesive piece of software that solved their (users) needs.
I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account.
I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software.
Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.
Both of them deserve equal amount of shame because they're both trying to do the same, force you to have an online account associated with a local user profile, either directly or indirectly.
Not sure why it has to be a contest who "we should shame the most" or whatever, how about saying both of them suck when it comes to this?
It's just better without Microsoft.
The direct answer, though, is largely one of execution. Microsoft isn't just pushing this heavily. They are doing so poorly.
I will say that I think the forced linking has encouraged other unpleasant behavior like the profile folder hijacking to OneDrive. I rather like having this stuff in OneDrive. I do not like that it is pushed so aggressively. “We moved all your stuff to OneDrive. You need to subscribe so we don’t delete it.” This feels hostile. So some of the distaste with logins tied to the cloud is probably more about the surrounding ecosystem.
Why even post this?
I'd definitely much prefer if even for "ecosystem" the companies would not require online account except where truly necessary (purchases?), but for operating the OS itself, I do feel there's a line in the sand where online account requirement = no.
Try to run any developer tool or "xcode-select install" and it'll download the command-line tools independently from Xcode.
(and then bring your own IDE)
You can install XCode CLI dev tools without an Apple account, which comes with clang and swift for example. With this, you can build most Mac software, but I don’t think you can run Swift tests without a full XCode.
As the sibling comment notes, you can install GCC/llvm and whatever other open source tools and build Mac software without full XCode.
You can also install Apple container support without an Apple account.
Microsoft is a cloud provider now -- their software exists to support their cloud business.
Most people DO use one, though, because that's how you access the iCloud services that underpin the Apple ecosystem. But it's not MANDATORY.
My understanding is that you cannot even log into a Windows machine without an MSFT account. That's a big difference.
An Apple account together with an iPhone and MacBook let’s you share clipboard, passwords, notes etc., a no brainer.
Windows laptop and iPhone? I guess an Apple account still is more useful here too, actually. So the average user does not really need an MS account, hence the annoyance.
The answer is: Because the Apple Login is not calling out for every service, including login.
Windows had a good thing going (if you ignored some bad releases), but them pushing it too far with 11 and the Linux desktop making great strides, sort of put the nail in that coffin for me.
Not sure what they can do to make me reconsider. It's a trust issue now.
Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback.
I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.
2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.
"Ya I hate that. Working on it." - Could mean anything, which I would argue in this case, is equivalent to being meaningless. Does this mean Hanselman has a team with tickets lined up for the next sprint to allow offline accounts as a first-class workflow? Or does it mean he sent an email to the relevant stakeholders asking, "Hey guys, what can we do about this"?
I am not encouraged that we will see a change in momentum from Microsoft on this issue.
I look back fondly to the time I had using my Dell XPS when WSL first came out, they had me hooked. I've been using MacBook Pro for about a decade now and I can't even fathom going back to windows. Every time I open the start menu I feel personally attacked.
I used to obsess over reading xda developer forums and playing around with my android phone. I would laugh at the "sheeple" using apple products for not being customizable and giving away their freedom.
At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.
I am the same. I used to fiddle and obsess on customising every last thing possible. Now I just want the damn thing to work, and MacOS does exactly that.
I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better".
If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.
Now maybe you shouldn't have to do those tweaks but it's certainly not a major hardship.
For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing.
Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.
For giggles, I just logged into my charity's Outlook account. I tried to log out, but it's showing me a "Your privacy matters" popup explaining why my privacy doesn't matter, and the "sign out" menu item stopped working, presumably until I agree to let them hoover my data. (Aside: the "To adjust your optional connected experience, go to Privacy settings." link doesn't take me to my privacy settings. It takes me to a page telling me how to get to my privacy settings.)
You cannot convince me that anyone at MS actually uses their public-facing auth system for anything ever. MS gets love for backward compatibility, but I see it as laziness. Instead of making one system that "just works", like Google and Apple and AWS and every other large vendor on the planet has managed, they half-ass support all 537 different auth systems they've ever deployed, driven by what I imagine must look like a giant nested switch/case behind the scenes. "OK, the user didn't have an "@" in their username, so call `legacy_pw_auth_23(form.password)`. It did have an "@", and also a "@minecraft." in it, so call `minecraft_v1_real_pw_authorizerer(form.password)`, unless it also contains `foo@minecraft.`, in which case call `minecraft_migration_2014_null(form.password)`, except in February, which has 28 days most of the time, where we call..." Heaven help you if it guesses wrong and sends you down the wrong twisty passage.
I'm far from a Google fanboy. I use their stuff for work, and it's alright, but it does not spark joy in my day. Still, I bet if the Microsoft Account login worked anywhere near as clearly, reliably, and rationally as Google sign-on, then Windows wouldn't get 1/10th the pushback we're seeing. If I couldn't authenticate to my own desktop any more reliably than I could auth to Outlook, I'd want nothing to do with it, either.
This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.
I bought a Windows Pro license a decade ago (maybe for Win7) and I'm still using the same license for Windows 11 on a new PC.
One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State.
In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.
That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.
Windows account login provides decent value: Bitlocker recovery, device management, Onedrive sync (even the free version), simpler RDP & remote RPC authentication.
You won’t even defeat telemetry with a local account. Windows TOS grants telemetry consent.
Why do you guys care so much about this? It feels like a bikeshed – something easy to complain about with little nuance. What will be won if MS concedes?
It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money.
I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.