Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything

I enjoy windows 10 hugely now that it is out of support. It became way better when microsoft started tormenting the users of win11 instead of win10, and now that windows update doesn't bring new catastrophes and unexpected reboot, the OS is finally not interfering with usage anymore.

> "To avoid the next problem: 'Microsoft locked my data behind bitlocker, and now I can't get it back.' they need to store that key on the MS account."

Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?

One thing I disagree with the article about is that drives should not be encrypted by default. For the vast majority of people an encrypted drive is just data loss lying in wait.

I prefer to use non-encrypted drives so I have the option of popping out the disk and reading it from another system with ease, which also means that I can recover files from drives of otherwise dead systems just as easily. This is a trade off I'm willing to make over losing access to data.

I understand business uses for it, and for that they have an IT team to manage key backup and backups in general. Plus when you're using company equipment it is theirs, not yours.

I ditched Windows in 2022. I'm not going back to Windows unless Microsoft makes an OS for professionals that is stripped down out of the box to show how serious they are. No ads of any kind, no garbage online account features, nothing, just core offline-ready Windows. I bet it would perform drastically better too.

I was in a hurry trying to log into my kid's Minecraft account, wound up clicking something to associate it with the Windows account... now the PC is in restricted mode and I'm having a hard time restoring the previously associated Microsoft account (among other things, have to ask permission to open the browser and approve the requests logging in on my phone)!

Everything online says to use the option to switch to a Windows account but I am pretty sure it is not available anymore.

Windows has reached the point where it deserves only to run in a virtual machine for some needs.

Otherwise leave it behind and move on to Linux, BSD or whatever doesn't require a cloud account to work

I really did not want to change from 7 to 10. I did it begrudgingly partly because "It is the last version of windows".

Well, they were right in one sense. It is the last version of windows I will have. I now have an old box set up with Linux Mint, so I can get familiar with it before switching over all my main PCs

Yet they use it, they do not really care, they even install Windows games that requires kernel level spyware read anti-cheat.

There are Linux distros that are newbie friendly and looks like Windows.

An end user that does not depend on Adobe, if you are still using that for whatever reason, they have no excuse to don't move to Linux distro OS.

I switched to Windows 10 as my main development machine few years ago after 25 years of continuously crashing Linux with an enormous pleasure. FreeBSD, well, there's nothing to crash there, that's the problem with it. Nothing. I didn't know almost anything about this Windows OS so I just started playing some sort of whac-a-mole game with it. I don't know what I did but right now I'm a happy (windows 11) user. I use Hyper-V with great success for driving my Linux and FreeBSD development. I like powershell and the dotnet platform and storage spaces and ntfs and many other. Good technologies, it feels good using. Windows terminal is almost OK. I stay away from crap like WSL and Code. I still use mutt for mail, not Office. And I can just play a game without any problems.

There's no Microsoft creep anywhere inside my daily flow. Actually, as of late, I feel more creep in Linux and FreeBSD than in Windows. Everything just works. Sometimes it tells me it has some updates for me. I let it install them and that's it. I'm back to my game, no weird stuff.

No account problem, no copilots, just my shit and myself and no Irene.

When I read about other users having trouble with it I get pretty sad. I wish I could say "do this and that" but I have no idea how my whac-a-mole game drove me to this happy situation. I must have (de)activated some (attack) vectors by mistake. But I whacamoled it head to end, from bios to wallpaper. I kept hitting and hitting, backuping, restoring, backuping,restoring, until i won. I'm on Windows 11 Pro in testing mode right now. Getting back to a linux desktop as my main? Nah, not right now. I have my i3wm running on a gpu partition inside hyper-v and sometimes I drop to it... I can't do all my arcane linux stuff in windows yet but i'm getting there. For now, I'm enjoying it. Been a while now. I just hope they don't notice me...

Install Windows IoT. It's for internet of things devices and has more strict updating procedures than conventional Windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/product-family...

Functionally it's the same and have heard good things. In any case I will be switching to Linux for my gaming Desktop soon. I will still have Windows for the odd multiplayer game that isn't well supported by Proton.

Lifelong windows user here - gave up last year, switched to macos for laptop & ubuntu for desktop - haven't turned back since

I have used a Windows OS almost every day of my life since 1999 or so. Last December I had a choice and switched to MacOS for work laptop. Since then I seldom use Windows and I don't really regret.

I still use an Xbox almost every day so there's that. In the last couple of weeks there's been some good news coming through for Xbox so we'll see.

Just last week I installed Windows 11 by downloading the ISO from Microsoft and creating a bootable USB stick with Rufus [1]. Rufus has options to make the Windows installer skip the Microsoft account login. Worked great!

There are reasons to install Windows. For one, I had to install it for my wife, and making her switch to another OS she isn’t used to would be quite a hassle. I also use it at work, and I need to run Visual Studio.

But I have the Pro version, and, AFAIK, there is a stark contrast between Pro and Home. Even though there is a push in Europe to make software Linux-compatible, there are still many, many companies and government institutions fully entrenched in the Microsoft world. Going Linux-only just for the sake of it sometimes does not make much sense business-wise.

[1] https://github.com/pbatard/rufus

This may get buried here, but there is one important distinction missing from all these articles.

Win 11 Pro allows you to enable local login, and disable all the intrusive microsoft stuff. Ive been on win 11 for the past 5 years and don't even remember my microsoft password at this point. IIRC you still have to set one up when you first install, but then once you switch to local login, any time you open up a microsoft app it makes you login in the app.

Its not a "good" solution, but given that Win11+WSL2 pretty much lets you run any software out there, its worth while doing.

If only Windows users fully understood why M/S wants you to create an account, people would leave en-masse.

The ID along with their telemetry, M/S can map you to what you do and from where. That pretty much makes their builtin disk encryption useless.

I'm doing more and more on Linux Mint these days, but there are a few niche things that still only work good on Windows.

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IOT is great tbh.. Install it without internet and you dont need a MS account at all.

I think it is fair to encrypt the user hard drive since the majority of users are unaware that they're even leaking secrets and PII when e.g., they sell a laptop without wiping the disk first.

But I think it is also fair if the user was opening a CMD during install just to type `oobe /bypassnro` the user is advanced enough to understand the risks of not encrypting the hard drive (it is really easy to activate the BitLocker afterwards anyway, and for example in my case instead of storing the secret key in Microsoft I decided to store it in my password manager). So I really don't buy the excuses of this article.

Also WTH Microsoft, why it is so easy to reset the TPM key during e.g., a bios update and lose access to all your TPM keys (so you need to type your BitLocker key again). It should be a requirement from Microsoft laptops that the TPM contents are never lost unless the user explicitly asks for it.

There's a similar thing with Google accounts and Android, amirite? I've avoided having a Google account but it hasn't always been easy.

> "I don't need tips, I just want Microsoft to change it,"

They won't change it unless you give them a reason.

Switch to macOS or Linux. That will give them a reason.

And what are you going to do about it, Windows 11 users?

It does make me wonder why people keep running this OS...

This stuff drives me nuts. Chrome on desktop is another abhorrent example of this. Every time I log in to a Google account within the browser, it nags me to link the account to the browser itself. One time my partner clicked the popup that asks to link the account by accident (this is very easy to do and probably Google's intention) and it hijacked all of my bookmarks. When I logged out of the account, everything was gone. I looked into Firefox and Edge, but they have the same profile crap. I don't need or want to log in to my browser!

I've hit my limit with Microsoft, too. I'm going to start moving my PCs over to Linux. The last time I installed Linux on a personal device was in high school, almost two decades ago, and it took quite a bit of work to get everything running properly. I've heard that compatibility issues are much less prevalent now. If things to smoothly, I may even convert my main gaming and work PC, although I'll have to look more thoroughly into whether all my Steam games will be playable.

I don't know what the disconnect is. I'm running Windows 11 Arm right now on the best laptop I've ever owned -- an Asus Zenbook A16 with OLED screen and 48 GB of RAM (all for $1699).

It's super fast -- it beats a 2026 Macbook Pro rendering Blender "Classroom".

I have a Microsoft account, I don't know what the big deal is. I follow the happy path. It's nice to have settings (and I can control which ones) sync across machines. I pay for a Office365 subscription.

I don't see ads popping up anywhere. I did disable about a dozen things (those silly icons in the search bar, syncing desktop icons across machines, etc) all through exposed UI switches, no "hacks" or undocumented registry tweaks.

I've watched coworkers go through all sorts of contortions, and downloading hacked binaries from sketchy sites, just to avoid creating the local account and I'm not sure why. I use my name and info on my longstanding Microsoft account, but you can just as easily call one "mymaxasus_11111", and be done with it.

I think those of us who cared have already left-- for me Mac and Linux (2 laptops). Everyone else is a hostage now; tough luck

If MS isn't going to fix this, I'm not going to use Windows 11 again. https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-03-12/i-ll-probably-never-...

I was forced to switch to Windows 11 despite promising myself that I would never do this.

WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I INCREASE THE WIDTH OF THE TASKBAR? I have a 30" monitor, I can afford to have 3 or 4 rows of windows in my task bar. But I can't, not because it's technically feasible but because a human at Microsoft that believes they are more important than their customers made a decision to remove that option because they think they know better.

Whoever you are, I hate you.

Yes it’s hard to see Microsoft become what feels to me a shell of what it once was. Back in the day I got MCP certification and MCSA certification for server 2008/2003.

I managed fleets of windows devices and felt Windows and PC’s were efficient and had a good balance of an operating system and schema that is powerful and effective.

With windows 11.. it’s like an all time low emerged. Where I am just fighting against a platform trying a variety of gimmicks designed to extra rents and push tools that are not really all that useful or polished.

Windows 11 feels bloated and just feels like a struggle.

For me it really is the time of Linux. Whether it be a workstation, a server or even a simple kiosk… Linux just seems to embrace the ethos of what windows has left behind.

I recently set up a new gaming PC, made from cannibalised parts of other machines. I installed Windows 11 as there was no point starting on an older OS (and Bazzite etc really struggled with the nvidia GPU so Linux was a non-starter even though I love my Steam Deck and Proton).

The one saving grace for all of this was Win11Debloat[0]. I cannot recommend this set of configuration changes etc more highly. It kills _almost_ everything that irked me about 11. Use at your own risk, but it's now part of my standard install practice.

[0] https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

I hope more people boycott products that require making an account to use. Most developers who would care about this sort of thing seem to draw the line at requiring a subscription, but IMO requiring an account is just as bad. There are cases where you do need an account for syncing data or whatever, but I don't see why I need an account for a fitness tracker, just show me the stats on the watch itself. Worst example of this is phones requiring an account to let you install apps, how did we let them get away with this?

I've been a daily windows user since 1998. I'm a geek. So, of course, I experimented with other operating systems. I've had Mac OS X laptops since 2006 (off and on), but I always had a main windows desktop. In 2018, I installed Manjaro XFCE on my laptop and forced myself to learn Linux and use the system. Now, I still have a windows desktop, but my laptop and my server run Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and I go weeks without ever powering-on my windows box. It's really great!

Without the MS account, it is _much_ harder to sell OneDrive, Copilot, Office365-whatever subscriptions etc to their users.

I get it. I get that they need to upsell their customers OR their product would be more expensive. I'd be happy to pay that premium though, and I'm not going to buy any of those additional things.

But let's not pretend that this is purely an evil or thoughtless design choice that isn't economic in Nature. Windows has a cost and that cost gets subsidized by all the people who buy additional services.

I'm tired of needing an Apple account to use my hardware.

they also force you to give a recovery account. i’m thinking microsoft’s hands are tied in this matter, it might be the government forcing a kyc strategy

Don't MacOS users all have apple.com accounts? I hear no complains though.

BTW, where do I create an account to for my Linux?

while i understand the sentiment to switch out, i find one thing quite intriguing. the same crowd (read the website title) is happy to create workarounds to make their workflow adapt to the new os. however, very minimal mention of the various efforts to bypass and disable annoyances m$ is throwing at us. even the article mentions the OOBE as a major point.

personally have been able to use windows without ever logging in since windows 8.1. the iot (embedded) version is the path of least resistance for most. it even contains old paint and calculator from windows 7! might be a skill issue, but i've found it easier to debloat once than to figure out fractional scaling in linux.

godspeed for anyone still using windows in 2026

i’m happy on mac even with its ux regressions, and my ubuntu workstation.

Just install Ubuntu already (if it supports the apps you need, most of which probably have web versions) and be done with it. Ubuntu 26.04 had a significantly better install experience than Windows 11.

A couple of years ago Microsoft bought the SwiftKey keyboard app (for iOS). Recently the other shoe dropped: they introduced a requirement to be logged in "for data backup", you get a banner on top of the keyboard that cannot be permanently turned off.

I am so tired of this relentless user-hostile push for accounts, logins and pervasive tracking.

I'm still on 10. Basically don't care about the security risks. I will be forced to do something once new games won't work with 10.

I just made a crappy Microsoft account that I don't check or tie to anything. I'm sure it will backfire at some point.