[jwoglom]

> We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.

"enhancing security and user experience" -- what a ridiculous, bold-faced lie. Bravo Microsoft.

[glenstein]

Well, it's bald-faced lie but I wouldn't disagree that it's bold.

The idea that you need to confirm you're connected to the internet and that creating a Microsoft account is merely for that purpose is preposterous on its face.

Not that I was ever a regular on windows, but I think I've at least found there to be a necessity to be on windows for certain desirable games or for PC apps. So I've always kind of recognized a necessity, but I do think I can't imagine myself ever intentionally signing up for this. The Linux-based gaming experience is now so advanced, and there's nothing I truly need on Windows. I know it's a cliche indulge in a kind of performative version of a goodbye cruel world post so I don't want to go that far, because I think I would considered the contract to have been broken a while ago, but I don't think I have ever considered myself forever away from Windows, perhaps until just now.

[WD-42]

I'm with you. The very few games I play work great on Linux. As a professional dev, there's absolutely no reason to choose Windows (or any OS, for that matter) over Desktop Linux at this point.

I'm convinced Windows is mainly for people that buy computers at Best Buy and corporate IT that are unfortunately funneled into the ecosystem (hats off salute to all you).

[z3ratul163071]

What a time to be alive. I used to be certain Linux will always be crap for the desktop. And here I am now typing this on Wayland KDE :)

[glenstein]

And to be fair, I would say the success for Linux in this case is increasingly approximating what we have come to understand as an optimal desktop experience without screwing anything up rather than outcompeting by necessarily achieving a noticeably higher standard.

I personally would say Linux does desktops objectively better both in the higher standard but also in the not screwing up sense but I am willing to accept that it might be a little bit opinionated about that and for some people it amounts to too much customization.

[technofiend]

My gaming PC has four NVME slots. Currently it hosts Windows 10 and Fedora, but since a new update was released it's also about to host SteamOS. When W 10 support ends later this year, I'll use Windows 11 ARM in a VM on my MacBook and that'll be that.

The only thing I really needed Windows for was gaming, tax preparation and running Scrivener. You can get native versions of Taxcut and Scrivener for MacOS and SteamOS is good enough for me 99% of the time. If I really must play something that's Windows-only there's always GeForce Now which has the added benefit of only tying a Windows instance to my Steam account and no other online identities.

Sayonara, Windows.

[decide1000]

I switched to 100% linux (PopOs, Suse) and the only app I really miss is Scrivener.

[technofiend]

A mac mini is cheap if it's worth in investing in a platform to buy an app ala buying an Apple II to run Visicalc.

[decide1000]

I don't want to run a closed source OS anymore.

[Numerlor]

I'm a dev using Windows, tried Linux multiple times for a couple of months and it always felt like it was getting in my way in daily usage.

Dev experience is usually at worst the same as Linux when you use wsl as you don't really need more than the terminal

[WD-42]

If all you need is the terminal than windows is definitely getting in your way, WSL is a worse experience. Plus you still have to put up with candy crush in your start menu, Cortana annoying the hell out of you, and the taskbar giving you unwanted updates on the latest news from the Kardashians.

[Numerlor]

I don't have any of that in Windows. I'm not using the home version but the preinstalled apps can be removed in a minute, I think cortana has been deprecated for a while now, and the only unwanted thing I've seen on the taskbar has been the weather that I've hidden with two clicks.

For wsl, it's just a normal VM that's integrated with Windows. Maybe it'd get in the way of I did development that needed to work closer with the hardware, but I don't at the time

[remram]

You can remove them in a minute, but they'll come back. ChatGPT will pop in there when Microsoft adds it. You will get a full-screen blue "get windows ready" wizard every few days to "remind" you to log in. OneDrive will reappear on your desktop.

You can still choose most things, but they will keep asking and twist your arm as much as possible.

[sho_hn]

OK, I'm coming from Linux, but I have to say my experience has been the opposite.

I have a semi-complex app I've decided to port to Windows (it's so far on Linux and MacOS and configures/debugs/tests servo motors on serial and CAN busses), and after a couple of days I've been unable to make any sane workflow work without installing three seperate half-assed copies of Linux userspace (Git for Windows w/ its bash install, cygwin and wsl2) and choco on top to install more Linux/Unix-originated stuff. It's a lot like MacOS and needing to fiddle with homebrew, except worse and you need four of them.

Let me give you an example: I have a serial device connected to an SBC mini computer that I want to interface with from my dev PC, so I want to proxy that serial port over tcp to Windows and make it available as a COM port. On Linux this is trivial to do using socat, or ser2net+socat.

On Windows, plenty of similar tools exist. Usually you need two of them, one to make a virtual pair of COM ports, and another one to pipe a TCP socket connection into one end of the pair. So far, so good.

Except all of the utilities, drivers, etc. I've tried have just plain not worked, and I've tried a good half dozen. Often their last version is from somewhere in the 2007-2012 time frame, and something no longer works on Windows 11. I think a lot of devs of tools like this just nope'd out when Microsoft started enforcing signing and pushed the Store model harder, and moved to Linux or Mac.

In the end I had to write my own thing for the COM pair and run socat in cygwin.

And I've jumped through a few hoops like this.

I'm sure if all you do is need a place to run npm from and the rest of your stuff is all in the browser, the OS barely matters. But for native dev, Windows feels dead and barren, and fully reliant on the Linux ecosystem to be productive at this point. It's where all the reliable and well-maintained stuff comes from, whereas Windows-native tools are a ghost town of abandoned, frequently closed-source binaries.

The many years Windows couldn't make their minds up between the managed code .NET stack and native C/C++ APIs, and one was incomplete while the other bitrotted away, have really taken their toll, I think.

[gorjusborg]

I honestly have the opposite experience. I am guessing upu either develop on the .net platform or games.

Unix-likes are far more productive environments for what I do.

[Numerlor]

I'm mostly doing server code in Python nowadays.

From what I remember only the c/++ toolchains were a problem on windows but the couple of times I needed them they were either managed by some other build process and ran fine or I could just compile and run in wsl

[anal_reactor]

1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it.

2. Once a month I have a task of checking 100k images for duplicates. Strangely, the only app that actually works is VisiPics from 2013. It does something smarter than just binary comparison, it works very fast. I guess I'll be running a Windows VM forever just for this one app, unless someone explains to me the algorithm it uses, so that I could write a more modern replacement.

[glenstein]

>1. MS Office doesn't work on Linux, and for many people it's a hard requirement that they specifically need it.

Office 365 is web-based and Linux accesses the web. If you're deep enough in the weeds that your survival hinges on desktop only features that can only be accessed from Windows then you're in a use case that can be resolved by getting a laptop for that purpose or being furnished one by your work.

And while your use case is fascinatingly specific, my understanding is that the paradigm there is what might be called visual hashing or perceptual hashing, which is more than mere file size comparison, but kind of hashing a more generalized notion of image similarity.

You may already know this, but from checking with chatgpt, there's something called DupeGuru which appears to be cross-platform. And also, it looks like there's some powerful Python and Perl libraries. Again, I'm sure your use case has some specific wrinkles to it, and you may very well know all of that already, so those might not help. But I suppose the interesting thing here is that the more idiosyncratic a use case is, the more closely it approximates things solved by programming languages which puts you back in the paradigm where Linux is not merely usable but I would argue the friendliest option.

[anal_reactor]

Could you point me to some more information about "visual hashing"? I'm a bit tired of "try this tool because it worked for my set of 100 pictures", but if I could read an explanation why given tool/library does what I want, that would be fantastic. The biggest issue of my use case is the sheer number of files.

[glenstein]

Right, you're looking for things that work at the scale of 100k separate files or so. Moreover you seem pretty used to getting bad recommendations, and I know the feeling. Important caveat is that all I know about these are what I've chatgpt'd about them.

There's the aforementioned DupeGuru program which is cross platform and wields a handful of algorithms. Then there's aHash (average hash), dHash (difference hash) , and pHash (perceptual hash). They each make assumptions about which subset of image data is important, pull it out, compare it, and are meant to do it quickly and at large scales. They are all accessible from within Pythons' imagehash library and require getting your hands dirty with python. My understanding is that Dupeguru uses its own custom perceptual hashing methods.

And although it seems like you need something more specific, the very very lazy choice is md5 sum comparison which is super fast but is only testing whether files are identical copies.

[0xdeafbeef]

Have you tried https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka?

[anal_reactor]

1. Can it detect duplicates that have different resolution and compression?

2. Does it work in linear time, or square?

[WD-42]

You could try running it with wine.

[hatthew]

I do all my development work on linux. I have a self-hosted linux server. I used ubuntu as my main desktop computer OS for a full year, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, games that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on linux, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on windows. Saying that you can game on linux is like saying you can host a web server on windows. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.

[Propelloni]

I have to do all my corporate work on Windows. I have a self-hosted Windows server. I used Windows as my main work computer OS for three years, and in that time I struggled with compatibility issues, applications that wouldn't run as well as people said they would, driver update issues, necessary tools that simply don't exist on Windows, and various configuration failures that simply don't exist on Linux. Saying that you can work on Windows is like saying you can play games on Linux. Sure, it's technically possible, and for some things it works smoothly. But 99% of resources on the web assume that you're on the normal OS, and as soon as you try to do anything even slightly outside of the basics, you're going to run into trouble.

Granted, I'm using Linux for 25 years now, so I may be biased. Things that are easy on Linux are often incredibly hard on Windows, if they are possible at all. Things that used to be hard on Linux, e.g. installing, gaming, are now easy. Things that used to be easy on Windows, e.g. typing into the start menu search box, installing, are now hard.

[simoncion]

As someone who grew up with DOS, and later Windows 3.1 through 98, I can confidently say that Windows continues to become an ever-worse shitshow.

I'm so glad that I made Linux my daily-driver OS decades ago and (these days) only boot into Windows when I want to play games that have good HDR support. Valve has done so much good, effective work towards getting games (both major and minor) to work well on Linux. I hope whoever replaces Gabe N. and the other core management is at least as ethical, driven, and farsighted as the current folks running the show are.

[hatthew]

I'm not sure what your point is? Coding works well on linux, games work well on windows. Neither works as well on the other.

[Propelloni]

I think I'm lampooning the hyperbole. Both, Linux and Windows, have their own issues, and some shared issues, but none are making one or the other unusable or even hard to use. I, for one, am more comfortable with the issues Linux throws up than with those Windows throws up, which I often find vexing, but I guess that's habituation. It's important to realize your own biases, isn't it?

[glenstein]

What you're describing sounds like the Linux gaming experience of 4-5 years ago. Steam and Proton have been complete game changers though, bringing the normal gaming experience with thousands (tens of thousands?) of games to Linux. It's not like it used to be.

[hatthew]

There are a lot of games that work well on linux. Maybe even most games! But there are also many games that do not work on linux. It's not fun to tell my friends "hey I'll be sitting this one out, let me know when we move on to another game"

[glenstein]

Again I have to stress how behind the times this take is. I recommend you check out the Steam Deck and the Proton project. It's something like 20,000 compatible games at this point.

If you're really missing something, then great, get a console to go with your Linux desktop or laptop setup. Still no need for Windows.

[simoncion]

> ...driver update issues...

Are these nVidia drivers? If so, there's your problem. nVidia on Linux has always been a shitshow of varying degrees (and based on my investigation over the years, I've found that the majority of the problems people say they have with xorg are problems that go away when you use AMD or Intel hardware).

Anyway, Steam works great for me on Linux, and I don't use the various cheating tools that are popular in online FPS games, so E_NO_REPRO, WORKSFORME.

[hatthew]

In my experience, there were no linux drivers that work as well as the first-party drivers on windows

[simoncion]

If you're talking about out-of-tree drivers (which are generally ones that you download and install separately... the Nvidia closed-source driver is one such example), then I can believe that.

If you're talking about in-tree drivers (which will be the overwhelming majority of drivers running on the system [0]), well, pull the other one, kid.

[0] Unless you've done the thing some folks coming from Windows get confused and do, which is go searching for and installing drivers that you don't need, because they don't know that the good ones are already packed in.

[WD-42]

I mean the steam deck is proof you can game on Linux. I hate to say it, but it sounds like you might just need to try harder.

[int_19h]

It depends a lot on what you play. E.g. multiplayer stuff that requires online anti-cheat rarely works well.

[soraminazuki]

Yeah, not only are they lying about their intentions, but they are also absurdly wrong from a technical standpoint too. How in the world can an online account provide more security than a local one? Online has way, way much more attack surface. It's not even close.

Online is more about convenience than security. Though with Windows, it looks more like convenience for M$ and not for its users.

[dhx]

Windows 11 24H2 enabled BitLocker full disk encryption by default for all new installations (including OEM) after a user has logged in with a Microsoft Account.[1] By default the BitLocker "recovery key" (everything one needs to decrypt a BitLocker device) is surrendered to Microsoft (uploaded automatically for storage with the associated Microsoft Account). This situation is similar to the Clipper chip[2] or Ki key programmed into mobile phone SIM cards during manufacture[3] where a user does not control the key for its full lifetime and has little to no assurance of who else may have a copy of the key.

Recall when Microsoft lost control of a Microsoft Account OpenID token signing key a year and a half ago?[4] I can't find a reference to confirm if attackers could have obtained BitLocker recovery keys by logging into any Microsoft Accounts with an OpenID token signed with the compromised key, but a reasonable assumption would surely lean towards "almost certainly". After this attack, Microsoft still had not conclusively determined 10 months later how the key was compromised, and no further news appears to be published since then.[5]

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip#Key_escrow

[3] https://nickvsnetworking.com/transport-keys-a4-k4-keys-in-ep...

[4] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec...

[5] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sti...

[colordrops]

It's standard practice for corporations to lie about their motivations for decisions. Why is this acceptable?

[bigstrat2003]

It's not. But not all unacceptable things are illegal. And just as immoral people will do legal-but immoral things, immoral corporations will do the same.

[zozbot234]

What they're doing might actually be illegal under antitrust law, since it's effectively 'tying' a market-dominant desktop OS to provision of online services. If they are genuinely determined to get rid of the existing workarounds, there might be grounds for a formal complaint on that basis.

[imglorp]

So there's three revenue streams, all of which are incompatible with offline usage: locking and upsell on cloud services, exfiltrating and selling your data, and showing you ads.

In an ideal world, that would be a triple decker antitrust problem!

[bigstrat2003]

Fair enough, but I really meant that it's not illegal (far as I know) to lie about their motivation for doing this. It may well be illegal to do it in the first place.

[cmiles74]

It's dumb on every angle. How many people are going to these lengths to avoid an MS account? Even if they suck it up and stick with Windows, will this really convert them into MS Store app buys or whatever? I doubt it.

They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.

[colordrops]

Maybe governmenral apparatuses are pushing them to add this so they can track more people, especially the types that don't want to be tracked.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

governmenral apparatuses use Windows mostly. So they are making it easier for the enemy governments to hack them.

[anal_reactor]

Because it's how the entire society functions. There's an entire class of lies that are not only accepted, but actually expected. Case in point: imagine saying "Hi, how are you?" and someone replying "I hate living like this".

[colordrops]

I always answer that question honestly. Doesn't seem to get me into trouble. Often breaks the ice.

[sunshowers]

It is standard practice to stretch the truth to a breaking point. In this case, Microsoft could argue that a connected account leads to a better experience. It also (more tenuously) argue that it leads to better security, in terms of protection against ransomware via OneDrive backups.

I hate this practice.

[AlecSchueler]

The only way to limit it would be with regulations and regulations are a bit taboo.

[p0w3n3d]

Can't it be added again by users? Cmd does not sound like a complicated piece of binary code

[vbezhenar]

This script just added single key to the registry and rebooted the machine (restarting the installer). The underlying functionality which allowed to use local user, if registry key was present, was coded into the installer itself.

So if they just removed that 2-line bat file, it's not a big problem. You still can add that entry to the registry, just with more complicated command.

Here's its code:

    @echo off
    reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
    shutdown /r /t 0

[gigel82]

It's probably safe to assume that they'll remove the BypassNRO functionality altogether from Setup, not just the script that enables it.

[skinner927]

Hopefully they use it for internal automated testing and will always need it in there.