Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online.
Linux is this way, guys.
This alone is enough for me, to consider Windows a bad choise.
I’ve said that line so many times.
For me its that and the other 20 reasons. :)
Only 20?
It’s a list of general bullet points, each with 100-1000 sub-items…
I would note that every single time I’ve tried to reactivate windows after a mobo or CPU upgrade, it has failed.
I guess it’s supposed to work better if you sign into your Microsoft account ever, which I don’t, because I see literally no reason they would need me to expect to advance spyware and adware.
The phone activation is the only thing that has worked. Good thing I’ve been dual booting a Ubuntu fork for the past six months. I guess after my next hardware upgrade I’ll be Linux only.
Who wants a computer which might not work after an upgrade and not because there’s an actual problem but because a corporation says no? It’s more stress and more work out of nowhere. Corporations should never be allowed to brick devices, but since they are, I choose “not corporation” as my permanent fix. It’s a good move!
I‘ll stay with 10 until I figured out Bitwig.
What’s your current DAW of choice? If it’s Ableton, Bitwig should be a breeze to figure out.
Also aside from that, most DAWs and VSTs work great in WINE.
Yes it’s Ableton, will try it out.
I think Bitwig was made by former Ableton employees, so it has a very similar workflow. It’s by far my favorite DAW, although nowadays, I’m trying to use Zrythm since I want to use as much open source software as possible.
Bitwig on Linux is amazing and was the final thing which let me ditch Windows for good after years of using Linux for everything else.
You won’t regret it!
This is the dumbest decision for one reason alone: some laptops and desktops that lack updated drivers cannot connect to the internet.
It literally happened to me with a lenovo laptop, where I had to find a way to bypass the internet requirement or else I’d have a $800 paperweight.
If I didn’t need Windows for a specific reason I’d be on Linux, believe me. But this decision is ridiculous.
I don’t see how this particular thing is an issue. You don’t need to activate Windows during the setup. You can skip activation, update the driver, and then activate windows afterwards
I think the real problem is setting up Windows without a Microsoft account?
that wouldn’t work without tinkering anyways with the latest windows 11 versions
or use your phone or any other device to get the activation key.
Activation scripts can be put onto a USB drive, so if nothing else, there’s always a way to keep using the hardware you paid for (assuming you want to stay hostage to these fucks)
Remember when you activated software with a key on the back of the CD case?
FCKGW?
How did you get MY key?!
Your key‽ That’s MY key!
Our key comrades.
I remember key generators… :)
Never had any luck with those to say the least…
I think today, maybe they dont work. But I was using them in the 90s and 2000s, they were great and had music and graphics and everything, coded in pure assembly. :)
I remember awesome multi keygens for groups of titles by one publisher. Good times 😁.
those had the BEST music for some reason.
I never used the one on the CD case, I just used all ones. Or 123451234512345, etc. for Windows 98.
Dear Microsoft,
Could you please squeeze your users a little harder yet.
We’re eager for the year of the linux desktop.
Microslop*
microsoft kills official
was gettin excited there
This garbage makes me so glad I switched to Linux Mint. Gaming has been just fine. Sure there have been a few hurdles, but they were well-worth spending time on as Microsoft continues this foolishness.
I’ve been perfectly happy on Mint since switching over a year ago. The few games I play run just fine (FO4, FOLON, Portal, and such), and the other apps work too, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, Blender, etc.
In spite of the recent post about which Linux distro to recommend, and seeing many no longer recommend Mint, I’ll stick with Mint. It just works.
+1 for running Mint.
Tried Pop_OS and the audio drivers were hot garbage. Went to Mint and it worked fine.
To all Linux users. Help out the new ones, explain calmly and make them feel welcome so that they can contribute back later too.
Couldn’t you theoretically download an ISO for an older version of Win 11, install that offline without an account, then update it to the latest version?
Well…here’s the thing. Step 1 of your plan is to install windows 11.
In the words of Manny Calavera:
“I don’t really want to do that…”
I’ve installed a more recent version of Win11 without network and local account was still working. I also recently found that the IoT Enterprise version cuts out Copilot AND the Windows store in the base install. So IoT + Massgrave ftw.
Probably. I think the update will ask for your account at some point though (I don’t really use windows though, so you probably want a second opinion on that).
I believe they get weird about local accounts on recent versions of 11, even ones that already existed. I’m not going to verify, but yeah I think the point is they’re moving towards them basically not existing.
If something is beneficial to the side with more negotiating power and is practical to do, it happens.
It wasn’t plausible when Internet connectivity for accounts on local machines wasn’t a given always everywhere.
And it wasn’t that important for them.
Now both have changed enough.
Also I think all stable continuous changes of mass where single person doesn’t change much are predictable, similarly to Asimov’s Foundation (except there it was presented as something a virtuous genius does to help humanity, not quite how life works).
So expecting Microsoft and others to break their dicks is infantile. I think they’ll succeed fully inside their strategic definition, their model, one can say.
Where anything divergent and interesting can happen is the fringes. Like Reticulum, Briar, hobbyist weak hardware, technologies that will emerge occasionally without mass economic pressure. Toys and jokes.
It’s the Reddit and Twitter strategy, and sadly, it works.
Oh absolutely, the strategy has always been to secure the market, make it difficult to leave the service, and jack up the profit. The only thing we can do is recognise it happening and work to make alternatives available, work on our own skillsets instead of relying on their tools.
Which is a shame, but the mask is off as of late, and we can’t do much about that.
Yeah, I bet you could. Good thinking.
When I recently set up my laptop there was an rays command I was able to do to add the option back to use a local account
“What else can we do that’s hostile to our customers?”
The next move will be bringing back Clippy and then a full-screen ad that you have to dismiss every ten seconds.
They did bring back clippy, they just renamed him to Copilot and sold his soul to the devil for “better” functionality.
I moved three Win 10 boxes to linux mint cinnamon this week. Twenty more and I’ll have made good progress on my little nonprofit. But I’m probably at least a decade from being able to go 100% away from windows and Mac’s. Fuck em both.
Good on ya.
It was only a matter of time. Surprised it took this long.
My last Windows will officially be the Win10 IOT I have installed in a Virtual Box, just so I can run a couple of little programs that aren’t available for Linux, and don’t work in Wine.
I had a copy of windows Xp that I used to call to get activated.
The moment I needed Microsoft’s permission to use my computer after installing a graphics card, I made an image of the drive, wiped it and installed a Linux distribution. That was 2008, and I’ve been a very happy computer user since.
I know not everyone can make that switch, but it’s easier than ever before, and Valve has really changed the calculus with Proton. Gaming was the biggest thing holding back Linux adoption (IMO).
I’ve gone back and forth between Linux and Windows as my daily driver- biggest problem for me was and still is lack of Adobe Creative Cloud support/good photo editors. Wound up switching to Mac for work stuff but use a SteamDeck and run Bazzite on a gaming rig hooked up to TV.
Adobe is sadly the only thing that still requires windows.
Fuck Adobe and everyone there, they were the OGs that started the subscription bullshit for software and they had such dominance no business could say no, thus no schools could say no.
And they’ve just been buying up competition since, so no one can challenge them.
Adobe and Oracle are the software equivalent of cancer.
Fuck Adobe and everyone there, they were the OGs that started the subscription bullshit for software….
For home use, sure. For business use in a business that’s regulated, it’s a godsend. No longer do I have to fight with management about why we need to upgrade Adobe Acrobat even though we “just” bought it 5 years ago.
You pay and it stays up to date. No more vulnerabilities that go unpatched because “we just bought the software” (5 years ago and it’s out of support).
All we need for the year of the linux desktop is Adobe, Autodesk and Outlook :)
look fuck microsoft, but - who is trying to activate windows without any internet access at all?
Sorry souls who don’t want to create a MS account if they just need to reimage a PC or only need a local account. Such a blatant attempt at locking folks into their ecosystem. Same as Apple.
this isn’t about microsoft accounts or local PC accounts. this is just about activating the OS which you can do on a provided website (without an account).
Use Pro edition and you aren’t locked into an account.
Yeah. Owning the thing you pay for is a premium feature.
That doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, but that’s apparently how Microsoft rolls, as you noted.
💯 this. Yes, you can still create a local account from the Out of Box Experience with the Pro version when selecting “Domain Join”. But my original statement still stands as this feature had to be added back in after many folks complained. Whereas the Home version has been slowly losing the methods to just make an account and go about your day. Pretty pathetic if you ask me.
FUD. The pro version has always had local account creation during OOBE.
Yes, you can still create a local account from the Out of Box Experience with the Pro version when selecting “Domain Join”. But my original statement still stands as this feature had to be added back in after many folks complained
[Citation needed]
That never happened to me despite deploying hundreds of PCs in the early stages of the initial OS rollout. Even in nondomain systems, creating the local account was trivial, even if you did have to navigate through dark patterns to make you think you didn’t have another option.
Well, I’ve never done it because it’s not part of my tasks, but for example industrial PCs used for SCADA usually run Windows, and they are never allowed on the internet, so…
Nah, they’re run by the laziest chucklefucks you’ve ever met - they’re plugged right into a broadband modem with no firewall running bog standard teamviewer or RDP awaiting any connection (no filtering) because the people setting up and using these systems have no concept of infosec. They know how to set up their industrial system, plug it into the ‘computer thingy’, and hand it off the the municipal water dude who is a flat earth, anti-fluoride, moon-landing hoax, J6-denialist who knows nothing about technology, but wants to run the town’s water treatment from his cell phone.
(not that I’m jaded by small town dynamics or anything)
Uhm… You and I have had vastly different experiences. Fortunately.
Other side of the same coin: I work for a municipality, and I can’t even connect my phone to the intranet because they use MAC whitelists for the entire network. The only thing non-whitelisted devices can even connect to is the (really shitty) public WiFi. Many cities used to be pretty lax about cybersecurity, but a few high profile attacks have made most of them (at least anything larger than a small town) rethink that stance. Hell, one city a few miles away had a ransomware attack that left their city services entirely unavailable for like three weeks. That was actually studied by lots of the local cities, to see what they can do to prevent similar attacks.
I hope that’s not the only thing they do. MAC addresses are easily spoofed.
We have our clients switch to Linux now. Ignition works well enough and it’s so much cheaper. It has drawbacks compared to wonderware, or the Siemens stack though. But I’ll take those issues over logging into their systems still running on winXP.
That’s what I dream of. But alas, industry moves slowly, and some especially so.
me
Some years ago, I was using an ancient (even then) Dell laptop that I took with me to my grandparents summer camp for two weeks vacation. Northern Vermont, landline phone service only. My dad had sent me Win 7 Ultimate and I installed it sitting on the camp deck. I called in the activation.
Not Windows, but I’ve reinstalled my Mac laptop OSes many times when I’ve swapped out a SSD. Also at camp. I did a full - unsupported no less! - install of Mojave macOS on an ancient MacPro that my aunt and uncle used to run their music and movies on. They had no internet and rented DVDs and ripped their own CDs. Once I showed my Uncle how to edit the track info in iTunes, he was off and running.
I know lots of people - older mostly - with computers that only have internet access on their phones. FFS, my mom only has text on her flip phone, (her phone provider switched over to 4G and they sent her a smartphone of some kind which she could not use, so she sent it back and they got her a 4g enabled flip phone) and I’ll mail her big USB sticks with movies and tv shows on them so she uses her laptop. No internet, no electricity even, unless it’s from their solar panels.
Pretty much anyone off the grid would phone in activation or roll with an OS that doesn’t require it (like macOS and Linux).
I know lots of people - older mostly - with computers that only have internet access on their phones.
exactly. you can use your phone to go to the windows activation site. you don’t need the PC you’re activating to have internet.
Where do you find the Internet on a flip phone?
The 4G one she’s got from her service provider offers some form of limited access. Not sure, maybe the fancy ones have it? My mom will occasionally text me links to news items she’s found.
When i’m saying “Older mostly” am talking about people in their 70’s and 80’s that don’t use their phones for much more than texting and email.
NGL, at 61 I can’t use my phone for much more than that. I just cannot SEE it well enough for it to not be a massive frustrating ordeal.
Just wait until presbyopia strikes. It’s a bitch when the collagen breaks down in the body and the lenses in the eyes start to stiffen. Hit me in my mid 40’s. Fuck.
Owning a summer camp, but ripping CDs?
If you have no internet but want your music as a file, that’s how you go about it.
Indeed! Of all things, uncle turned me on to higher bitrate 320k VBR, highest quality .mp3 rips.
I got his CD collection after he died (his own music was lost as the drive had failed while he was in the nursing home) but before he passed, I took a few weeks and re-ripped everything for him. Gave him a junker MacBook and loaded up it and his iPod with his favorite music.
The last day I saw him - 3 days before he died, he was already seeing people that weren’t there and talking to them, which is part of the dying process I’m told…
I put his iPod on him and played him his favorite artist - Miles Davis and he stopped when the song Générique (go listen to it, it is a beautiful song) came on and he looked at me - SAW me - and smiled and said it was his favorite Miles tune.
We chatted for a few minutes more and he fell asleep and I told him I loved him and gave him a kiss and left for work. Passed away the day after the Eclipse in 2024.
Best gift I got was that jazz library from him.
Grandparents owned the summer camp.
Grandfather was a union electrician for over 40 years. Retired in 1994. Made fantastic coin and bought the camp in the mid-70’s, for less than $20k. Landlines only that far north into Vermont. Grandparents were both in their late 70’s early 80’s when the internet took off, so it meant nothing to them. Both were gone of old age by 2020.
Aunt was the black sheep of the family and her husband - the uncle - were old alcoholic hippies that lived hand to mouth. Welfare recipients with drug and alcohol problems who both died - one of alcohol fueled dementia (Koursakoff’s Disease) and the other of sepsis (bone infection in the foot) from unmanaged diabetes - at the start of 2024.
Your point is?
„Ripping“ meant something else to me, and the tech fell out of fashion before I could know better.
Ah, yeah. Times and terms change.
I still will pick up old CD’s at thrift stores and flea markets fr a few bucks and rip them to my computer system.
I have a monstrous music library. (don’t even get me going on the vinyl LPs I’ve got)
Had a friend give me a used service drive from a computer repair shop and it had a customer’s backup music library on it as large as my own at the time. 80+ GB of stuff.
Incorporated that in a heartbeat.
For years I did repairs and drive replacements for the kids in the neighborhood and often they’d be more than happy to let me duplicate their music libraries. I didn’t charge a lot so it was a win/win situation.
That and finding a shocking amount of music on dumpster dive laptops… esp machines from the 2008 - 2012 era.
Know a family (fairly well off) that sold a summer home a few years back and they moved on a ton of stereo equipment and one was a crazy big Sony CD changer that had a carousel of 100 disks in it… Guess what was still filled with CD’s?
Granted it’s “grandma” music, and lots of stuff like Burt Bacharach and Barbara Streisand, but some of that is actually really good, solid songwriting. Not my favorite kind of music, but given the AI slop online now, it makes it easy to hear how shitty that is.
What, if I may ask, does „Ripping“ mean to you?
Am always interested in different takes on words.
People who live in third world countries like the US who don’t have Internet at home/internet isn’t available to them because it’s not profitable for the company providing for that area.
And before you say phone, you have to have service to receive or make a phone call. There are places in this country that don’t have either.
Me.
10s of nerds on a Linux forum who definitely were messing with Windows 🙄
You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking “who is trying to use Windows without any Internet access at all?”
Which is definitely some people/situations. It’s not the standard user-centric use case that Microsoft expects, but it does exist.
no, that’s not the question. you can still use windows without internet access, you just need some other device to get to the activation website. like a phone or another computer.
I’m not, but unless I call the phone support I can’t get my windows to activate.
And with that any chance I’ll ever buy a Microsoft product ever again.
I’d switch off windows but most of the games I play won’t work on Linux due to “anti cheat”.
Gta, bf6, rainbow 6, cod, none of these run because the game studios hate giving linix users anything and its not worth their time.
Most of them are made by horrible companies we shouldn’t be supporting anyways.
Not judging, just curious.
What games are those? In the last 12 months I tried 151 games on Linux. All of them worked, only 6 required tinkering.
The fact they mentioned “anti cheat”, it’s going to be your modern online multiplayer games. It’s going to be games like Fortnite, PUBG, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
I would still like to know which and why. Usually there are alternatives out even for those multiplayer games. Example -> all the Valve Games / Blizards Games are good too ;)
sadly most online mp games have kernel-level anti-cheat that doesn’t run on linux
i can’t agree with this general statement. i guess it’s important to understand that a lot of the multiplayer games you wanna currently play have some kind of protection which makes it currently not suitable to run on linux.
just to give a different view mp games which currently seem to work ( checked protondb ):
- Eldenring Nightreign
- Dark and Darker (used to work)
- Helldivers & Helldivers 2
- Arc Raiders
- Counter Strike
- Overwatch
- DOOM in very different versions
- Quake Live
- Hunt Showdown 1896
- Dead by Daylight
- Warframewith all respect for the games you currently love so much, please don’t make general statements.
A personal advice i want to give: Only change to linux if you are also willing to change yourself and adapt. Linux is not Windows like, Mac OS is not Windows , like a Playstation is not a XBOX or a Switch.
i know a lot of the mp games i play have an anti-cheat that doesn’t support linux, i’m blaming the AC devs here, not linux.
as for my general statement, i used this handy little website: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
note how i said most mp games w anti-cheat can’t run on linux. i think 59% qualifies as ‘most’.
i’m rlly not sure why you’re so defensive here ngl, i love linux. i use linux on one of my pcs for development, i’m not attacking linux in any way.
Sure, there are alternatives for the games I listed, but if all your friends are playing any of the games I listed, you don’t have many options for Linux outside of something like Shadow or GeForce Now, which admittedly is a pretty solid option for online-only games if you live near their servers.
You must not play most of the top 5 fps games then lol.
Literally everything a “normal” gamer plays is not supported on linux.
Normal gamers don’t just play FPS lol
That’s obviously not true
Obviously how? Who is a “normal” gamer?
Well it seems like you think only someone with your interests is. However, by any objective measure more people play FPS competitive games than any variety except sports games.
Objectively Roblox is on par, and has previously beaten steam: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/sim/roblox-had-more-concurrent-players-than-the-entirety-of-steam-over-the-weekend-as-it-reeled-in-over-45-million-users/
There is no PC game that has as many concurrent online players as the top game on roblox at any point.
You’re objectively wrong.
Yeahh they do. 90% of kids with a ps5 wanna play bf6 and pubg etc type games. And if a normie even thinks of gamer they think of fortnite bf and cod.
We’re talking about Windows vs Linux, not consoles. A normie will think of roblox, which blows all consoles as well as steam/EPIC/etc out of the water.
True
I recently found a neat list of games that don’t work due to Anti-Cheat:
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
So it’s probably one of the ~700 games.
Awesome find.
Looking at the first 4 pages, you’d have to pay me to play the “denied” games.
I’m not missing a damn thing. :D
Not the original commenter, but for me it’s Arc Raiders. I’m a fan of extraction shooters and have been messing with the idea of fully switching to Linux and ditching microslop completely, aaaaaaand then Arc Raiders was released
i’m a linux gamer and can personally confirm arc raiders works on my machine 👍
Arc Raiders
Arc Raiders has Platinum status on Linux, meaning it works extremely well under Linux. What problem are you having with it?
I’ve come to terms with the fact that i just won’t play those games. There are just too many wonderful games out there that do run perfectly well under linux. Does help that most of my gaming buddies think the same. Definitely a challenge when your entire friend group is hooked in those kinda games
@ClydapusGotwald @1984
Can you give some more inside of what you game and specially why ?Not the original commenter, but my current ones are, EAs WRC it doesn’t work on Linux and the clubs feature is used by a couple of communities and is a great way to have current rallies.
Raceroom is not great on Linux, very crashy. But it can work at least.
I am also deep into Le Mans Ultimate, which just added EAC, and Devs have said they will not support linux. Currently it still works, but I am expecting that to end sometime soon.
For my hobby there isn’t really alternatives, iRacing doesn’t work, AC Rally is just too early and doesn’t have anything outside of leaderboards (and that doesn’t even have friend filtering). In terms of Sim racing there isn’t much that works really well on Linux and can’t exactly get the same experience in other games, like a 24hr race with driver swaps, ranked racing with multi class.
thanks for the answer. i remember there was a scene for sim racing at one point, but i am completly out of this one. Maybe @gamingonlinux has some ideas about racing.
There are certainly options, but they are older or just not fully fleshed out for sim racing, Hardware has gotten pretty well supported now. And games like Le Mans Ultimate had their on proton fork to get it working. But If you want big races you are very limited software wise, you kinda only really have iRacing or LMU. And They both devs have been unsupportive of linux, although LMU does still currently work.
In terms of sims that do work, Automobilista 2, Raceroom, Assetto Corsa, AC Rally, AC Evo, AC Competizione, BeamNG.Drive, Dirt Rally 2.0 and i think Live for Speed.
There are options that are fun, but AC Evo is rough, AC Rally is great but you can tell it is Early Access. And honestly nothing on that list ticks the same boxes as iRacing or LMU for racing.
Outside of that though, I could absolutely switch away from windows. Nothing else I play or am looking forward to getting to play will have issues running
I run rfactor 2 on Linux. Might be an option for a more causal sim racer. It’s funny because I know other racing sims are more popular but my local VR racing sim location mainly runs rfactor 2 as well.
It runs on Linux, not sure if VR works with Linux though. I suspect the Steam frame may change that
Then enjoy windows (unfortunately). You have no other option unless you buy those games again on a Xbox or PlayStation console.
