Windows 10 could start bullying people into using a Microsoft account to install

I use a mix of Windows 7 and *nix OSes both at home and work.<p>At work we do have some Win10 machines, and they are ALWAYS doing something completely off the wall bizarre and unexpected, also doing any sort of maintenance on them is a pain, the tablet-style interface shoehorned into some places just doesn&#x27;t work well.<p>I know Win7 support is over, but we don&#x27;t intend to leave it for Win10, we might leave it for Reactos or something else, but not Win10.<p>Some examples of Win10 issues:<p>sending tons of data to MS without permission.<p>Not allowing us to install with local account unless we disable network on the EFI.<p>Despite we trying everything to disable updates, the thing updates itself, reset several configurations, and reboot the machine.<p>One of the times it did that, it broke some ancient but mandatory software on our business (it was a PDF driver that was mandatory to be used by our bank that would issue the invoice for our clients, so when this happened we were forced to install all banking software on a Win7 machien so we could get paid...).<p>Showing ads out of the blue on Start menu and on the login screen.<p>Installed games without permission (not Microsoft ones, I mean stuff that is popular on mobile, from king.com and whatnot).<p>The list goes and goes on.

I feel like the tech in general is getting user-hostile... Everyone (websites, apps, cars, tvs, etc.) wants to track you and collect as much data as possible, websites nag you to install app on your phone, dark patterns everywhere, &quot;smart&quot; devices that won&#x27;t work without an internet connection or become bricks after a while, smartphone manufacturers forcing you to buy new phone by making apps slower on older devices, more closed protocols and walled gardens - the list goes on and on...

They&#x27;re already there. The ThinkPad I bought in December didn&#x27;t have the local account option available.<p>It&#x27;s currently in &quot;trick the user&quot; mode: it has you connect to wifi to download the latest security updates, then remembers the network and automatically tries to have you create an account a step or two later.<p>I avoided it by rebooting, going into the bios, disabling wifi, and then resuming setup - only when it couldn&#x27;t connect would it allow a local account. Just rebooting to restart initial setup doesn&#x27;t work, it remembers the network.

FWIW, I don&#x27;t see this set of steps in any of the comments here. And as of late I&#x27;ve been setting up tons of Dell Laptops, so I have this memorized.<p>Windows 10 Professional, freshly minted from Dell:<p>* &quot;Set up for organization&quot;<p>* &quot;Local account or domain join&quot; (it&#x27;s in small print in the lower left)<p>* Create a local Admin account<p>* Do not setup a password at this time (it&#x27;ll force you to set up recovery questions or some other nonsense.)<p>* set all the data sharing options to &quot;no&quot;<p>* skip entering data for the Dell registration<p>* On first login, hit ctrl-alt-del and set a password there.<p>Windows Home does not offer the choice to &quot;Setup up for organization&quot;, so you are forced to make a windows account. There&#x27;s no way easy way out of it.<p>Microsoft keeps saying &quot;Windows is a service&quot; and has that text somewhere in the install. I guess if you want an operating system, you have to turn to Linux.

I&#x27;m based in the UK. This has been going on for a good while outside the US. Back in mid November last year I struggled to get past the requirement to create an online account when rebuilding a friend&#x27;s laptop after a hard disk failure.<p>I scratched my head for a good bit thinking that I&#x27;d missed the old pathway that let you skip the online account step, but it turned out that the installer&#x27;s behaviour had actually been altered.<p>After some more dome scratching I eventually discovering that disabling the built-in wifi module (no wired LAN connection was made) caused the installer to let me create a local account instead.<p>Quite bloody annoying.<p>Footnote: this was an install from a bootable USB stick where I&#x27;d &quot;burned&quot; the full Windows 10 ISO image.

Windows 10 is a total catastrophe for business and private use.<p>It established ads and spying as normal for an OS, it removed abilities to administrate the OS in a meaningful way and mostly ignored users in favor of nudging people to their products. Products that I would declare to be mostly in beta phase. The bi-annual untargeted channel version couldn&#x27;t sort desktop symbols without bugs if you had multiple monitors attached till a few month ago.<p>And before anyone mentions that &quot;normal people&quot; like it and it is just the icky nerds that have reservations: Not in my experience. They hate MS spying on them too. It is just that there is often a lack of an alternative if they are caught up in the ecosystem.<p>I wonder how people even manage if they don&#x27;t have some friends and family to help them get rid of the bad stuff.<p>There are underlying improvements, but what use is a safer system if the malware comes preinstalled.

Start?<p>You already have to disconnect form the network to be able to use the &quot;offline account&quot; option in the installer (last I checked, which was like a couple of months ago).<p>So this has been going on for a while.<p>Edit (merge the other comment I deleted):<p>To clarify, this was a Home Edition. I understand that the Pro edition doesn&#x27;t behave this way.

What makes it worse is when their account set up is broken. For an interview yesterday, I attempted to install and get an account for Skype. The back end broke, and when I tried to do create a general Microsoft account to confirm it was the back end, I was banned from using my email because of &quot;suspicious activity&quot;.<p>To make it more fun, their &quot;Technical Support&quot; chat failed as well, so I was unable to get a human to even talk through this.<p>That would be even worse if that prevented me from installing or using Windows.

They do still have the option to force local accounts only. Fire up Group Policy Editor &quot;GPedit&quot; then Computer Config&#x2F; admin templates&#x2F; system&#x2F; user profiles&#x2F; and enable &quot;Only allow local user profiles&quot;.<p>&quot;If you enable this setting, the following occurs on the affected computer: At first logon, the user receives a new local profile, rather than the roaming profile. At logoff, changes are saved to the local profile. All subsequent logons use the local profile. &quot;<p>This is on Windows 10 Pro. There&#x27;s a surprising number of settings that can be configured here. As Microsoft continues to dumb down menus and the control panel they are normally tucked in here. Or you may rarely have to dig into Powershell and the registry, very rarely.

Not going to lie... I setup win10 2 weeks ago and I didn&#x27;t see (notice!) the local options.<p>As I use Outlook.com&#x2F;Onedrive I didn&#x27;t care until I opened up my terminal and noticed my username was the first 5 letters of my email. What the hell. I don&#x27;t get why they would do that instead of just using your firstname or asking you at least. or at the very least use _everything_ up till @ instead of the first 5...<p>This irked me beyond belief and after googling a bunch of crazy ways to &#x27;fix&#x27; this, the easiest turned out to be creating a local account &#x27;chris&#x27;, deleted my MS account, then attached the MS account to &#x27;chris&#x27;

I mean people are bullied into hooking up Google Chrome with their gmail, and then their entire web history is &quot;backed up&quot; on Google&#x27;s servers. At least Firefox&#x27;s Sync features have been end to end encrypted, you lose your password, you lose your files &#x2F; history. If you log into a gmail account it would force it on Chrome in the past, so I stopped using gmail on Chrome altogether.

&quot;Start&quot;? It&#x27;s been making it a struggle to do so for a while.

Every day it seems more realistic to just install Windows 10 LTSC [0] instead of dealing with this crap.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;whats-new&#x2F;ltsc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;windows&#x2F;whats-new&#x2F;ltsc&#x2F;</a>

That headline seems really bad. Windows has been in &quot;bullying&quot; mode for years now. Installing without a Microsoft account has been very difficult for a long time. The change now is to refuse to install at all without a Microsoft account, which is not &quot;bullying&quot; any more, it&#x27;s something else.

They&#x27;ve already started. We&#x27;ve been replacing Dell laptops at work these past couple months and it was nearly impossible to fully boot Windows without signing in via a Microsoft account. The whole process just felt ridiculous, especially on a computer clearly intended for a business.

It gets even more notorious with time. I bought a new laptop recently and with Windows 10 Home instead of my Pro norm with it, and was very shocked to see how much control did I lose if were I a normal user. The mandatory and force restarting updates, web results in searches, king games, nag-ful notifications, edge self promotion, telemetry etc. I can&#x27;t imagine what [profanity] that normal users had to live on with in most recent Windows. I&#x27;m waiting for the last straw that is gaming and am ready to ditch Windows completely.

For machines on Windows 10 Pro, click on the “Domain join instead” button during OOBE. AD joins cannot be completed during OOBE, so it falls back to asking you to create a local account.

debian linux. feels twice as fast as windows and there is zero concern its going to do something insidious.

Just as bad is forcing you to set up a pin number on top of your password in order to log in. It wouldn&#x27;t let me not pick a pin during a recent installation so I had to set one up, finish installing and then remove it in the settings somewhere. Very odd. I don&#x27;t even mind it being offered as an option, maybe some people prefer an alphanumeric pin...

It&#x27;s not explicitly mentioned in the article, but the fact that presumably installing from the <i>same</i> disc will somehow produce different behaviour at different times (is it phoning home during the install, to decide what to do?) is rather disturbing.

NVIDIA has also removed the possibility to set up an NVIDIA SHIELD TV without a Google account, there is no option to skip logging in during setup. The requirement for a Google account is not advertised on their site [1]. Other devices with the same Android TV version have a skip button on the Google account screen.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nvidia.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;shield&#x2F;shield-tv&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nvidia.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;shield&#x2F;shield-tv&#x2F;</a>

Bought a surface a few months ago, nice hardware, but windows 10 is horrifically spammy&#x2F;scammy. Immediately replaced it with arch.

The install experience is so much cleaner if you don&#x27;t let it near a network.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xubuntu.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xubuntu.org</a>, you&#x27;re welcome.<p>Or use Windows 7 if you have to. Windows 10 is just malware and bloatware built around Windows 7.

Which distribution of Windows 10? I&#x27;m thinking it&#x27;s only the Home version.<p>I just setup Windows 10 Pro for my brother in-law yesterday and had no problem choosing a local account.

Again? Some enterprises never learn.<p>Also, on one side they get points on the developers side, but they lose more on the consumer side with those practices.

Stupid requirement that does nothing but discourage the use of other related MS services --- the ones MS actually earns money from.

Surely not the enterprise and server version?

Most people here don&#x27;t like having a MS account, but is it really so terrible? When I log in each day I&#x27;ll use my AWS account, 2 or 3 google accounts, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Slack. You can&#x27;t use a phone or a tablet without a Apple&#x2F;Google account, surely having a MS account to use Windows isn&#x27;t such a big deal.

Windows 10: It&#x27;s not your computer.

Stop using Windows.

What a clickbait title. That&#x27;s not what the word &quot;bullying&quot; means. Microsoft is nudging people, maybe forcing them. But definitely not bullying...

tldr; Among mainstream OSs I&#x27;m most happy with Windows today<p>For the last few years I&#x27;ve been using Windows 10 rather than macOS. In general Windows seems mid-to-long-term more stable than macOS. But maybe that&#x27;s because I&#x27;m used to treating macOS like a nicer Linux while they&#x27;ve been locking down many Linux-like abilities (kernel modules, tracing&#x2F;debugging, etc). But there&#x27;s also been the macOS filesystem and permissions model changes that have made upgrading a pain.<p>I do have a Microsoft account but I don&#x27;t do anything with it. I don&#x27;t use any Microsoft products that are not included in the base install. I tried Hyper-V for a while but it was painful to configure so I&#x27;ve been using VMWare with more success.<p>Generally speaking, it seems like Microsoft is looking further than a year from now -- getting design and quality right compared to macOS which no longer seems to have any particular direction. It&#x27;s not just in their software; I&#x27;ve been seriously impressed by build quality and pricing on the Surface line of tablets and laptops. I actually mistook a Surface book for a 2015 macbook pro. In contrast, I really don&#x27;t want to gamble with post-2015 Apple hardware.<p>And although I do a lot of development on my laptop, I&#x27;m trying to move to developing in the cloud or a home-server because compiling kills my battery. Windows enables this use-case fine. To be fair, macOS would too.<p>I haven&#x27;t had any issues with unwanted ads. The only ads I&#x27;m aware of are the lock-screen backgrounds that show different places around the world... I don&#x27;t really consider them an ad though.

Good luck to their marketing and sales team. It&#x27;s gonna be a fun game to convince people to do so when you have perfectly equivalent and usable, totally free, and now cute open source OS&#x2F;distros.<p>People started to sell TAILS on usb keys for $10, if someone packs Linux Mint, eOS or similar for $5 .. in a web app world, linux + firefox is probably invisible to the average user.