Install size has gone up, its sluggish on my surface pro 7, its constantly wanting to grab my attention to put towards their other products, windows 10 was bad as it seemed to be ms’s first iteration of their now billboard, but at least I could offline install, make a local account and mostly be left alone. And windows 11 is aweful for its kiddy gloves.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.
Install size has gone up, its sluggish on my surface pro 7, its constantly wanting to grab my attention to put towards their other products, windows 10 was bad as it seemed to be ms’s first iteration of their now billboard, but at least I could offline install, make a local account and mostly be left alone. And windows 11 is aweful for its kiddy gloves.
While I get why they want to do all online accounts, no. Just no.
Ironically, for business users, online accounts are basically the way the industry is moving. Some integration with Azure active directory (now known as “Entra ID” - a useless rebranding of the exact same product), you can connect systems using someone’s email, and it can tightly integrate with your work email account on Microsoft 365, and everything just kind of fits together.
This prevents admins from having to go and do prep/setup on each system and/or maintain a library of system images with all the standard settings for the organization, since connecting with AAD/Entra can also enroll the device into Intune and those policies are just as powerful, if not more powerful than what you can do with images and prep; just now is entirely automatic.
For home users, it’s less about the convenience of system management and more data harvesting of their clients. The irony is that a lot of the business versions still have an option to bypass the online account (usually by selecting an option that you will be joining a classic domain).
So business has the option and largely, business is moving away from it, and home users don’t, but that’s something that a large number of home users want.
The only thought I have on it is that: bitlocker is enabled by default on many newer versions of Windows, by signing in with your M$ account to the PC, those bitlocker keys are backed up. If you don’t use an online account, it’s up to you to back then up, and users either don’t do that, or do it in such a way that it’s ineffective, like saving the recovery key to the very drive that needs that key to unlock it in the event of a problem.
I’ve seen more than one person fall victim to their own lack of knowledge and understanding when bitlocker is enabled, and Windows update screws their boot sequence to the point where they need to do a recovery, which requires the recovery key, which they do not have. It basically makes all of their data inaccessible, and gigabytes of data, just from the people I’ve known affected by this, has already been lost as a result.