[irishcoffee]

The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.

It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.

[GeneralMaximus]

I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.

My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".

I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.

I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.

I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?

[bavell]

> I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue.

5ish years back I used to have a PCI passthrough via OVMF [0] setup for my GPU and my windows VM (Arch host) so I could game on windows.

Then I realized Proton/wine had gotten good enough to play all my games (I don't play AAA competitive shooters) and I dropped the VM and never looked back.

I would encourage everyone to give Steam/Proton on Linux a shot if you haven't recently and see if you're able to drop windows for good. These days, I don't even look at compatibility - 95% of games work OOTB and the other 5% work by changing the proton version (i.e. proton-ge). YMMV of course but I've been much happier without windows on my system.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

[irishcoffee]

Yes, just a username.

“ To create an offline (local) account during Windows 11 setup, disconnect from the internet, then use the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO in the command prompt (Shift+F10) to enable a "I don't have internet" ”

This is what I do. I have heard this has been patched out. My work gives me an MSDN account, and so far I’ve been able to still do this. When this goes away forever and I lose all my ISO’s/access to ISO’s that allow this, I’ll be done with windows forever.

[steve1977]

My account email is info@<domain-name>.com.

I feel you.

And what I do is create a local account and then add the Microsoft account to it after creation.

[II2II]

> It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts.

I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.

If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.

[dmd]

What are you suggesting here? Everyone who runs linux should log in and run everything as root all the time?

[irishcoffee]

No, I guess I didn’t explain it, though I thought I had. Don’t ask me to turn on location settings, don’t ask me to connect my email/online accounts, during a gui install. I can turn those on myself if I want to. Someone else up-thread pointed out that this probably exists to help windows uses transition over to a Linux install in a way that feels more familiar, and that makes sense. I don’t like it, but I can accept that.

I’ll still grumble when I see that screen though.

[dmd]

Oh. I thought you were talking about making a user account.

I've never seen anything like that on any linux install I've ever done. But then I've been pretty much Debian-only since I started using Linux over 30 years ago.

[irishcoffee]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW7Z892bsG4

At about 1:15.

[cwel]

You also attributed this to "Linux", instead of whatever guided installer/desktop environment you chose. I have never encountered the screens you are lamenting.

[irishcoffee]

That's fair, its mostly "mainstream" distros. Here is an example:

https://d3t0tbmlie281e.cloudfront.net/igi/framework/q6Yb16Bq...

Linux was too broad a term.

[ThrowawayB7]

The funny thing is I actually had Windows 11 reliably black-screen on me after creating a local account. On a recent Surface Pro device, no less.

I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.