Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

Microsoft is making Windows into the Nigerian Prince of operating systems. Classically, Nigerian Prince scams are so obvious that they weed out all the people smart enough to avoid being swindled, leaving the easy pickings to be plucked without much effort.

Windows is the same. By Microsoft removing all bypass measures that make it tolerable, their remaining user base will just end up being people who don't care about security and privacy, people who won't complain about being inundated with ads, AI, and bingware, people who have no idea that a modern operating system should be fast, customizable, and open. That 90% customer base is easy to fleece with 10% effort, so why bother with the 10% base that will require 90% effort?

Microsoft could have made Windows:

able to run on any hardware

free for basic usage, paid for commercial usage

lightweight, simple, stripped of all cruft and extras

consistent in it's UI and cleaned up from 40 years of inconsistencies

But they didn't - so people are looking for alternatives.

I put up with so much Windows crap over the years, and Windows 11 was the final straw. It’s not even the gaming OS anymore as Linux feels snappier and more stable for running games.

This is not good to hear, at my work we have the production technicians activate the occasional Windows 7 PC via the phone. We do it this way as these are specialized embedded PC’s that won’t connect to the internet. Flippant comments to “just use Linux” are not understanding the realities of keeping 20yr old software in the medical, offshore drilling, etc industries.

I wonder what's their endgame. I mean, if it keeps getting worse, at some point they will really bleed users.

Even if for now the stats (e.g. steam hardware survey), show only a slight increase in Linux users (and a lot of them could be dual booting)

How did we get here from W2K? It's hard to think of a time when you could use software without internet connection or a phone line.

How about requiring a ms account to activate?

Have they closed the double install trick?

1. Install once with ms account and activate.

2. Reinstall offline with local account.

3. It will be activated when you go back online.

I suspect the remote server remember your computer hardware generated guid

The problem isn't just that new installs will require this, but if you are on Windows 11, there are a hundred accidental ways to create a Microsoft account. Sometimes it's disguised as an update, or a sneaky notification. Sometimes it's onedrive, or you are trying to login via Edge. It reminds me of how Google was trying to trick us all into getting a Google+ account.

MS: "One way or another, you are creating an account so help me God."

This is the reason Windows is essentially free.

I believe once( this is an urban legend) a manufacturer in a middle income country considered going with Linux to save money and Microsoft flew out a sales rep next day to put a stop to it.

Microsoft likes it when you get a "deal" and buy a pro key for 10$. Whatever, you'll subscribe to half a dozen Microwave services ideally paying them 30$ to 40$ a month forever.

The last thing they want is you to try Linux.

However, I had the joy of watching multiple Linux desktop environments crash when I switched to my Bluetooth headphones.

Cinnamon and Budgie both crashed. No one knows why. I had to switch to Mate and then spend another 20 minutes trying to get it look ok.

No typical user wants to deal with this. They'd assume Linux doesn't work and move on.

I never thought it would happen, but now I use Linux about 95% of the time. These days, I rarely touch Windows. It feels like Microsoft’s higher-ups never found a clear direction for the OS, focusing more on saturating the market than on maintaining quality. :(

FWIW, as a former NTSE, I abandoned Windows in the late '90s when, within a 2 year period they:

- Embedded IE making multi-version browser testing an absolute PITA

- Rolled out WGA and screwed up bulk-licensing and multi-tier/versioned licensing for cluster operations and emerging mobile hardware

- Allowed arbitrary code to be embedded in the registry

I think Windows has improved as a basic OS tremendously in the past decade, with things like WSL, winget, terminal, storage spaces, fancyzones and such. The components of perhaps the best general purpose OS available right now are there, but they are buried behind a crappy car-salesman tabloid-press upsell circus that is frankly unbearable to some users.

What I don't get is why MS refuses to let you pay to avoid the circus - It's like a streaming service that only has the ad-financed tier!

I get that the people who care are a minority, but charging that minority a high purchase price for a just-the-os version of windows seems like easy money and would let them dodge all the badwill by presenting a choice.

Right now the official option is simply "suffer the circus or leave". It should at least be amended with "or pay".

I used to work at Microsoft in the Windows team (XP/2003/Longhorn/Vista/7).

The product today doesn’t feel like the product I worked on; I feel no connection to it, and every time I think that there’s nothing they could do to make me dislike it any more, Microsoft has another “hey, hold my beer and watch this” moment.

The problem with the old Microsoft this that it was run by engineers who didn’t understand user experience. The problem now is that it’s run by MBAs who dont care about users, just licenses.

i recently upgraded a computer. windows 10 deactivated itself due to the hardware change. i tried everything i could to reactivate. microsoft support told me my only solution was to buy a new license. microsoft treats its customer with contempt.

we should all come together and collectively kill the idea of using a windows based operating system unless they get their stuff together and give us an AI free, bloat free, single page with 10000 settings configurable for privacy and security and a promise of updating only once a month with full opt out

People should switch to Linux. I started using Fedora on Cosmic and it is great!

Mint is very similar to Windows UI

Kills ONE official way to activate Win11/10 without internet. There's still KMS and other methods... Article title is slightly misleading.

Sure, it sucks about the phone activation thing, but frankly... STOP USING WINDOWS ALREADY.

So, how airgapped systems are supposed to get activated from now on?

I wonder if Microsoft will ever turn ship with Windows, or will it all be a decline until it is no longer needed.

I've been running openSUSE tumbleweed myself for years, and recommend Linux to like-minded power users. OP is preaching to the choir.

How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.

What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.

Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers in the foot with this BS.

Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?

AFAICT this doesn't affect activating via a KMS server (incl. KMS emulators like vlmcsd), correct?

The negativity in this thread is amusing. I can’t take HN seriously anymore, you guys crack me up with your flimsy outrage and dramatic monologues.

I’ll be upgrading to Win 11 and activating it with an internet connection. And I won’t think twice about it.

I've been a windows user my whole life, only interacting with Linux servers remotely via shell. I've become quite familiar with command line Linux, but never used a graphical operating system.

My next PC will be Linux.

This is just so bizarre. Like 90% of the people wouldn't even know you COULD activate without an MS account and the remainder will just use Rufus to bypass restrictions. So what is MS actually "fixing"?

Phones with propietary spyware and bloatware and with the root user locked. Desktop OSes with enforced updates overriding your settings and choices, up to the point to reinstall back the same adware.

I still can't get over that when I go to the "Accounts" screen of Windows 11 control panel there's no option to add a new local account.

Windows activation has been a game of CTF for me since the early 2000s. I've got more than enough resources to pay for a Win11 license many times over. But I refuse to. Part is something approximating "I've already paid the windows tax 30+ times" but it's more than this. The UX regression from the XP era is shocking when you put things side by side.

I happily paid $500 for a perpetual VS2026 license just a few days ago, but I'll continue to use things like massgrave for windows no matter how big my cash pile grows. I know it's the same company, but it's really not about the money. It's about sending some kind of a message regarding software quality.

If you could give me an experience identical to VS on Linux I would move in an instant. But it simply doesn't exist. It's frankly not even close after all these years. VSCode is like the IDE "we have at home". Linux is a great target for many things now (e.g., steam deck), but using it as my daily driver development platform is still a non-starter.

I know it's possible to make anything work on Linux, but that's not a very compelling argument for me anymore. It's got to work well. The experience can't suck ass. Even the steam deck was a herky jerky OOBE with WiFi/networking woes and 5-6 reboots to get it going. That's with Gabe Newell ~in charge using billions of dollars to make it go smoothly. I don't have access to those kinds of resources so I figure why even try. I've already thrown ~5k hours into the Linux hole over my lifetime. I don't think it's an investment that has paid off very well for me. Linus himself has acknowledged that the win32 ABI is the most stable and well designed he's ever seen. Why wouldn't I follow his advice?

If windows is anything like navigating Azure and other developer platforms of Microsoft, I don’t want it. How is that a multi trillion dollar company?

Finding more modern ways to be lame and making it easier for folks to either pirate (use shady activation methods) or move to other platforms.

It's a bit wild that I can't use Windows 10 on my new hardware because manufacturers didn't bother to make the drivers. With how much peiple hate Win11 it seems like a rushed move.

One was laptop sound driver, the other was wifi motherboard driver.

I wonder how PC gaming is going to look in few years with Nvidia slashing GPU supply, RAM manufacturing going down the ai drain and Windows becomming even less attractive than it used to be.

Maybe next AAA stuff will start to target ARM and natively ARM OSes?

I have a windows laptop (and a mac) for work. The windows laptop gets turned on, connected to my limited guest network, only when work yells at me that it hasn't had its security patches recently and in the extremely rare times I need it to do a full build (I'm trying to get our build process away from windows specific. I got the parts I work on away at least). I used MS DOS v2.0. I knew every setting inside and out and had all the tricks down through windows XP. I grudgingly used it up until 5 years ago when I couldn't take MS destroying the OS and user experience any more. Since I switched I have never looked back. Not once have I thought 'Gee, I wish I had a windows box'. Even for gaming. Especially for 'productivity' apps like word and the like. MS used to be THE OS for developers. You built apps for windows because the best tools to build apps were there and the best experience developing was there. Now I have no idea who they are building an OS for other than corporations. It is painful. It is bloated. It is invasive. It isn't intuitive. It can't be trusted. Every time I see windows I cringe and am thankful there are actual alternatives. Good luck MS. You are only being used by people that have to or don't understand they have another option. Lock-in is their only advantage.

The only way this epidemic of Microsoft would end if a Linux company has a monetary incentive to serve customers.

My mother doesn't need to worry about typing `chmod` into her android mobile terminal.

Add it to the list. I won't install another Windows machine, after more than two decades of Windows at home.

I guess mildly privacy concious gamer was not one of target their demographics.

I love how people keep saying it’ll be the year of linux desktop with this news. While Windows, keeps thriving in the desktop market. Because one, most computer users want simplicity. Two, pc manufacturers bundle Windows because of reason one. Three, they want a familiar interface. Four, windows license is also bundled in pre-built PC and laptops. Five, even if someone were to build a PC themselves, because microsoft know people pirate windows so much, they actually allow people to use windows without activating! What feature they lose without license? Personalization. That’s it! And six, ordinary people never watch/read tech related channels/websites to begin with knowing what linux even is! Despite i’m a linux user (in the past, now on servers) myself, i won’t say “it’s the year of linux desktop.” Because people refuse to learn new things. Oh my god. *sigh.

does this affect massgrave.dev?

> For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh

God these companies are insufferable.

(as a person whose "year of the Linux desktop" was literally 30 frickin' years ago) Oh no! Anyway...

Microsoft really wants to alienate users.

Kills one way. They engineered activation as a hydra. There's several other options remaining.