[ray023]

M$ account is not strictly "mandatory" as you claim. There are ways to work around this. I NEVER in my life had an M$ account, I have a GitHub Account, but that is still separate AFAIK. Rufus can mod the ISO for it, and there is another way around it during install. They just want you to use one so they can spy in you better. It's on you to have an OS account to an online service in the first place. Then entire concept is utterly retarded, I do not care who it is M$ or some of the best champions of Open Source and ethical Linux distro, I will not use any fucking account of them to log into my LOCAL PRIVATE OS, it makes ZERO sense and its pathetic how that managed to lure so many morons onto doing this.

I remember first seeing this during a Win install and instantly looked for a way around it, I think they even have removed a workaround to make it even harder for people to work around this BS.