| I did three installs of Pro this year. Two of them required hacks to force local account creation because the motherboard (Asus) ships with a _literal rootkit_ that injects a wireless driver that Windows itself does not ship with. So you either have to disable that in firmware before first boot to Windows OOBE, or run the BypassNRO cmdlet from a hidden shell to convince it that you do not, in fact, have internet access. I tried to domain join the third device to see what that flow is like. It asks: 1. Personal use / Work or School 2. You are asked to login to Azure AD. You have to click a small (10pt?) link for "Sign-in options." with no indication that will let you join to the domain. 3. Pick "Domain Join instead" 4. It asks you to setup a local account ("Even better, use
an online account" :-) 5. _You finish setup without the device actually being joined to the domain!?_ 6a. You now have to login (click) 6b. and go to the system settings (click) 6c. go to accounts (click, ad for M365), 6d. go to "Connect to work or school" (click), 6e. click another "Connect" button with no indication that
it will join it to a domain,, 6f. Click another small link for "Join this device to a local Active Directory domain" to domain join the PC. So, I'm sorry, but if you think the Pro SKU is better in this regard you are just incorrect. There is no excuse for these dark patterns, this is user-hostile behavior designed to convert you to being recurring SaaS revenue and not retail revenue. As an added bonus I just tried to create a Windows 11 VM in hyper-v to confirm my memory, and _Microsoft Hyper-V_ doesn't even correctly configure itself to allow Windows installation to proceed by default. (Secure Boot enabled, but no vTPM.) It then proceeded to download updates to the installer and reboot without a prompt or any option to skip it. Microsoft _clearly does not give a shit_ about the OOBE if you are not using their cloud services. |