L I N U X
1000 percent. I did this for myself a year ago and haven’t looked back.
I did 6 months back to linux mint. The experience is smooth
Seems an alternative, easier method was found: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/an-even-better-microsoft-account-bypass-for-windows-11-has-already-been-discovered
Relevant part:
But fret not, as a new, perhaps better bypass has already been discovered that still uses the command prompt (which you can open with Shift + F10) and makes skipping the Microsoft Account sign-in step a total breeze.
Discovered by user @witherornot1337 on X, typing “start ms-cxh:localonly” into the command prompt during the Windows 11 setup experience will allow you to create a local account directly without needing to skip connecting to the internet first.
Shit like that has to be a leak, idk how else you’d just pull that out of one’s ass.
“The bypass uses a CXH (cloud experience host) URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) string during the OOBE to invoke the hidden local account setup screen.” this had to be data mined or something yeah.
More and more people just need to switch to Linux and grow the userbase so more and more proprietary software create Linux builds just like how Maya and Davinci Resolve are available for Linux. If your computer is a web browser, you should be on Linux. Firefox, Chrome, Edge are all on Linux
If you’re a casual photo editor, Darktable. A casual photo editor can probably be well served with GIMP or Krita. If you’re a web browser and digital painter Krita. If you edit videos, Davinci Resolve and Kdenlive. Office - OnlyOffice, Libre office, WPS Office
Or you can always pay for Wine and help it develop. Usually popular applications work well.
So happy that I switched to linux. Microsoft has been one of the main forces of enshitification of the world. Fuck em. I cant play a bunch of games with my friends anymore, and I have to learn a few new CAD programs, which is like 10 thousand hours of work that I am flushing down the toilet. Worth it.
Noooooo!!! You can’t just force us to use a Microsoft account!!! You have to allow us to use the bypasserino!!! Noooooooo!!!
I will just have to sign it up to a domain then add a local user using the command prompt. Still a lot more trouble than installing it should be but I will not give in to this garbage push to make everyone have a microsoft account. I disable the store and all of it on every PC I install.
NRO
Doesn’t that remind anyone of this other NRO? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
(Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office#/media/File:NROL_39_vector_logo.svg)
It’s asinine to require me to be connected to the internet to use my computer. My work laptop was absolutely useless without the internet. There’s supposed to be a pin/password thing that lets you bypass this, but it would work maybe 30% of the time.
I also don’t get why I have to give Microsoft my name and an email address for my video game machine. (I get steam and proton yada yada, but I’m often playing anything that you can barely get to work on its native system - has anyone actually got EYE : Divine Cybermancy to run for more than ten minutes?)
Windows XP and 7 hit the mark I think. XP let you take it apart in beautiful ways, and had all kinds of wonderful eccentricities - which is also the problem, because XP was insecure af. Windows 7 got right what they figured out by Vista Service Pack 2 as far as security. Less aesthetics, less access to the internals, but also probably “better” for a normie.
The rule is supposedly that every other one is good or something. Maybe 12 will be good?
Just one more reason to skip Windows 11…
every passing day i feel increasingly gratified to have switched my previously win11 laptop to linux mint. aside from the sheer principle of microsoft being ass, i also fucking despise all of windows’ AI bullshit. Fuck copilot for eternity.
Just be sure to check support before buying any newish laptop. I really like my ASUS Duo Pro 2024, but ASUS adamantly refuses to lift a finger for proper Linux support for special features. Even the audio chipset which is standard somehow doesn’t work with default kernels due to something they’ve done. Dual screen can be made to work with some scripting-fu, but the keyboard’s multimedia keys just don’t work at all.
Vote with your wallets and be noisy to those brands who don’t support Linux well. Let them know if lack of Linux support was why you didn’t buy.
Tbf Asus has been dogshit for at least a decade at this point.
This is purely anecdotal but my last pc build was ASUS mobo and its absolute shit tier. I promised myself never to spend another dime on anything ASUS ever again.
I got it cause it had good reviews. Asus ROG strix. I should have stuck with my gut and gone MSI or Gigabyte.
MSI have dropped AMD as a GPU partner as of this generation (funnily enough - also the same generation they had proven to be their highest selling!), and their next generation of PSUs have dropped PCIe 6+2 for whatever the current HPV12 implementation is, so they’re in my shit-list too.
Gigabyte’s warranty support has been ass in the past (at least in my region), and their 3000-series GPUs were prone to overheating due to poor quality thermal pads. Oh, and their PSUs were sub-par and prone to exploding!
I think ASRock is the only ‘Tier 1’ brand (that I’m aware of) without massive controversies in the past few years?
ASrock is ASUS. I don’t trust their quality. They are on the same level to me as Razer products. The lowest of the low in quality assurance.
I remembered reading somewhere that ASRock started off as ASUS ‘budget’ brand - but had since been spun off into its own entity.
I thought that meant that they were sold off, and were a completely separate company now - but it looks I was wrong, they’re still a subsidiary. 🙁
I think I’ll just go to RadioShack and solder my own board. Every company is shit these days. 😔
ASRock is my go-to now. Funnily enough they split off of ASUS a while ago. One continually got better, and the other worse.
Edit: I was wrong about that last part. I thought they had split off, but apparently they are a subsidiary. Well, either way, they seem better.
I tried setting up a dual boot Mint next to my Win 11 last night. Just so I can experiment with getting all the (replacement) programs of my Win 11 install to work on there… froze during install and was busy for hours getting my boot files for Win 11 back.
I’m not a technical genius or anything and now I’m scared to try again. I assume it’s way easier if I would just rip the bandaid off and do it in one go. Sadly too much relies on me still being able to use the computer close to the way I could before. Ah well. Another day, another chance to nuke the boot files.
Dual boot with Windows is terrible because of how fastboot messes with the drive partitions. If you want to dual boot you will have to turn off Windows fastboot.
Thanks, I’ll look into that!
Clone your drive first and then no matter what happens you have a quick click to restore. I’ve run dual boots on multiple distros for years and you learn a whole lot when things go wrong.
Good call. I have 2 hard dives and really thought that if I didn’t touch the win 11 drive it couldn’t possibly cause windows issues. Lol. Not making that mistake again.
What programs are causing you concern?
I use a lot of adobe programs, like photoshop, illustrator and Lightroom. The standard MS office stuff and a bunch of games both via steam and the EA AppStore, some of which are windows only. Mind you, I know most if not all should work using wine (or similar) or have good alternatives. But I’d rather try first before nuking windows.
That’s all very reasonable. I certainly encourage caution.
I’ve never really voluntarily used Adobe products, nor the EA store, but I can tell you Linux support for gaming has come a long way, even for “Windows only” games. If you’re unsure about a particular one, a great place to start is protondb.com. I don’t know if they work with EA, but I’ve also heard good things about Lutris and Bubbles.
As you said, there are good alternatives, including Open or LibreOffice. You might benefit from reviewing alternativeto.net, which isn’t specifically Linux focused but has a good chance of giving you options. For example:
https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-lightroom/
Good luck with your experimentation!
Windows 11 seemed to kick and scream relentlessly to make coexisting impossible. So I called its bluff and nuked its stupid ass. It refuses to play nice? OK; It never gets to play again. Fuck windows. I have a separate machine for windows if I really need it.
Good for you! Nuking windows is indeed the end goal. Dual boot for me is a proof of concept as a step on the way.
Yeah, it’s just ridiculous. It doesn’t have to be this way! 🤦🏻♂️
Just one more reason to skip Windows…
FTFY
I like seeing these posts, non issue now that im on linux, need more ppl to swap to help the piracy ecosystem
I’m waiting for things like HDR to work properly on Linux - once it’s as easy to mod and play games on Linux as it is Windows I’ll be making the jump.
You might want to take a low at https://bazzite.gg/
It’s what I’m using for my desktop and I’ve been happily gaming ever since.
I started using Bazzite last year and it’s fantastic, but modding seems to be a bit of a headache on it right now. I think Nexus Mod Manager is going to really help that once its got more than Stardew working though.
I’ll check that out thanks!
Lots of the most best tools for desktop Linux are free and open source, so you really don’t need to pirate desktop software. As far as multimedia goes, I generally find it much easier to sail the seas on Linux as opposed to Windows where everything felt hacky and difficult to isolate.
Oh you said multimedia, thats definitely easier if not using something like stremio which is the same level of ease
Lmao if you find an open source tool that competes with houdini, let me know. I found it extremely easy to pirate on windows, it takes a long time to find a crack on linux, if I do, it is usually out of date.
I have only pirated davinci resolve studio on linux and some blender addons, like 25% dont work, while I had a ton of pirated software on windows. (marvelousdesigner, embergen, houdini, davinci openfx addons like redgiant, borisfx syntheyes, touchdesigner, resolume etc.) A lot of stuff that adds up to 1000s of dollars a month for hobby stuff that I use sporadically.
Im not even gonna try to learn music creation again, just assuming ableton and flstudio would both be issues.
Im not even gonna try to learn music creation again, just assuming ableton and flstudio would both be issues.
I understand that more conventional software is proprietary and not released natively for Linux, but it seems unfortunate yo me to let proprietary software stop you from making art. Ive got friends who produce music exclusively on Linux machines using qtractor, which is free and open source, so there’s no need to crack it. I can’t speak for the rest of the tools you mentioned but maybe it would just be worth exploring some of the Foss options to see what you can do with them? I haven’t bothered cracking software since I made the move over to Linux because I just haven’t found any piece of my workflows that actually depends on non-foss software. Turns out tools developed by the communities that use them rather than corporate entities typically turn out to be pretty good.
Everything you’re saying is more a reason to swap back to windows than stick with linux, you ltierally have less options with linux all of the linux options still work on windows
Call it fewer options, I call it curated options. Yeah, I don’t get to install every piece of software I could on windows (though that list is shrinking really fucking fast), but i also don’t want to. I don’t need to put energy into cracking adobe software so they can steal my licensing and farm my data to sell or train their AI on.
I don’t want to use a drill that only works with screws that are officially approved for DeWalt drills, and I don’t want to hack a DeWalt drill to make it work with other screws. I want a drill that fits whatever screw I want. People aren’t switching to Linux because of the vast amount of software available for it, it’s because it’s the option that actually respects us as consumers.
My hardware refresh came up this year. I asked for a MacBook instead of a windows laptop for the first time in my long career. Linux isn’t an option at my org yet.
If you have the money to drop on a Mac it’s definitely better, but there’s a bit more work to get games going. So if you play games elsewhere a Mac is to easy to recommend.
It’s for work only, no gaming. I have a Steam Deck and a Linux desktop for gaming.
My work laptop has W11. It’s…fine. But I don’t have to manage it, so… ¯\(°_o)/¯
I had W11 on my personal gaming PC for a total of 6 months before I got fed up with it. Running W10 until I make sure it’ll run everything I need it to on Linux Mint (LMDE).
We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.
Any windows fanboy cares to explain how this supposedly enhances a user’s security?
The spin on requiring an internet connection being phrased as ‘ensures all users exit setup with internet connectivity’ is amazing too.
Not wanting to seem like a windows fanboi in the slightest, but… I guess they’re saying that if you log in to your windows box using their cloud authentication, then they can better protect your account, force regular password changes, force password complexity requirements… and because they’re in a position to see all auth attempts against that account, they can react to attacks and patterns of attacks… having said that. a lot of those advantages go away if you’re not actually connected to the internet… but then, you also lose timely updates by not being connected… it’s a difficult question… I can see how it could be better for a non computer-savvy user to log in using a microsoft account, but also worse and more frustrating for advanced users who don’t want to touch microsoft’s cloud at all. I guess they made the decision based on what was better for the majority of users. If you’re upset by this, you’re not really their target audience.
Thank you
Y’all is this true:
No one would accidentally enter the special anti-spyware command so they’re screwing the 1% who are privacy hawks without benefiting the 99% who were already dark patterned into online accounts.
That’s what they’re saying - it’s not true, but it is what they’re saying.
then they can better protect your account, force regular password changes, force password complexity requirements…
if that was the goal, they wouldn’t be saying on the password input screen to “choose the most simple password”, and especially they wouldn’t accept that field to be left blank
if you are not logged in, they can’t setup onedrive to automatically steal all pictures and documents of the unsuspecting user, and they can’t setup bitlocker with a cloud key that they could use to lock you out of all your data when they think so.
windows update has zero reasons to not work without an MS account, and actually it does work that way.
It’s double speak.
It’s like when they say “We value your privacy” it really means “Selling your data is worth a lot of money/value to me”.
“User Security” means “We want to secure customers/users for our cloud services by forcing a login to a microsoft account”
My favorite iteration of the first point is “we take your privacy seriously” to “we take your privacy. seriously.”
It increases security ^of the Microsoft share price^
I’ve got my first son or daughter on the way, I’m thinking they might be learning Linux as their first OS
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Uh… what? They only thing they have in common is following the POSIX standard. The moment you step outside of that POSIX lowest common denominator, it becomes abundantly clear just how different they are.
I mean compared to some elements of windows, yeah Linux is more similar to macos. But compared to other elements of macos, Linux is more similar to windows. But to say it’s super similar to either one in particular is kind of missing what makes each of them what they are.
Macos and Linux skills and fluency aren’t significantly more transferable than between Linux and Windows. They’re three pieces of software that ultimately try to do the same thing, but go about it in drastically different ways. There are only so many ways from your house to the grocery store, so some of them are bound to cross.
The only difference I see both try to follow posix macos follows the unix specification linux doesn’t and that’s about it
I just bypass the requirement by installing Linux Mint instead
I did the same on my media center mini PC. Any idea how to check/enable HDR?
The answer is a bit complicated. Linux has a long history with HDR where you would need exact software and hardware, or else no HDR… Just know that it will get easier because the ball has already started to roll in the correct direction.
But the shortest way I can say it now,
If you use Valve’s game mode, (which is possible to get either using steamos, bazzite, chimera OS, nobara, or you can manually set it up. You should be able to get it to work. This should work for windows games that support HDR. AFAIK there are no Linux games yet supporting HDR. It should be possible to get videos playing with HDR also, but that would be an exercise for the reader, or wait until people make it easier.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I currently believe the newest version, of KDE and Gnome are now HDR ready. If I am wrong you might just need the newest beta which will become stable Q2 this year.
Playing videos, I believe the newest version of MPV just got HDR support. With more apps incoming.
Anything that let’s a gamepad or a remote browse your videos? AFAIK not yet, but be patient, as this is all new
If you use Valve’s game mode, (which is possible to get either using steamos, bazzite, chimera OS, nobara, or you can manually set it up. You should be able to get it to work. This should work for windows games that support HDR. AFAIK there are no Linux games yet supporting HDR. It should be possible to get videos playing with HDR also, but that would be an exercise for the reader, or wait until people make it easier.
gamescopeis what you’re going to want to search for if you’re attempting this exercise. I just set gamescope in the launch options for the games where I want HDR.Wayland has had HDR support for around 6 months (using Arch, btw, so YMMV depending on how current your distro is). The issue has been that there is no way for an application to determine if your hardware supports HDR because Wayland doesn’t have color management protocols.
The Wayland color management protocols are done and are targeted for the next major release of Wayland (in a month or two, roughly). In the meantime, in applications that supports it (like mpv if you want to watch movies) you can launch it with
ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1to let it know that your setup can use HDR. Once the protocols are released you won’t need to do this.You can edit/create a .desktop file for HDR mpv like so:
Exec=ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 mpv --player-operation-mode=pseudo-gui --vo=gpu-next --target-colorspace-hint --gpu-api=vulkan --gpu-context=waylandvk -- %UHere’s a link to the topic on the Arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
TL;DR: Official support in a few months. But this is Linux, so you can get things sooner if you want to tinker.
You’ll want to not use cinnamon for HDR, cinnamon is not going to get it for a very long time, KDE is a much more up to date environment and it works mostly out of the box on the most recent versions. Although I don’t think those patches have made it to mint yet.
HDR is kinda complicated right now.
As it stands, it’s only available on the Plasma and Gnome desktop environments.
The HDR stack on Linux has went through a lot of change recently, and much of the stack has only just been finalised/standardised. It’ll take a while to mature, and to arrive on distros like Mint.
What is hdr and why do people care about it? Seems like another doly atmos that is just made to sell expensive hardware and invent a solution looking for a problem.
Simplest explanation is HDR enables more color bits per pixel so you have much higher contrast in bright and dark images. It’s pretty much essential if you are using OLED panels as these can turn off pixels for a realistic/not washed out black.
Interesting, thanks. I just assumed monitors themselves handle that same way as monochrome monitors manage to display the same content as shitty gaming monitors and art monitors with huger rgb coverage.
The command (C:\Windows\System32\)
OOBE\bypassnro(.cmd) one types into the command prompt (after opening it with Shift+F10) for the bypass is the location of a batch file they will be removing (the parenthesized parts are optional, implied by the command interpreter, and so is any capitalization). You can still do whatever it’s doing (adding a registry key and restarting) by typing the command manually or providing a copy of the file on a USB drive. After a restart, the OS will check for the registry key AND lack of internet connection to provide the local account option.For the record, the contents of the file are
@echo off reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f shutdown /r /t 0The first line is optional, and so is the third if you’re OK with restarting manually. If creating the file on Unix-based systems, make sure the newline sequence is CRLF (DOS/Windows standard).
Obligatory shoutout to literally any Linux distro, which does not need this workaround, and is usually easier to install and set up than debloating a fresh Windows 11 install.
Rufus has an option to auto add this for you when building a bootable drive. Works great.
Still using Rufus? Ventoy is the way of the future. One USB, hundreds of ISOs.
Edit: Seems I was unaware of some potential risks with the binary blobs pre-built in Ventoy. No threat has been found, but there are supply-chain concerns. It appears there is a fork where someone is cleaning up the build process.
I might be OOTL but wasn’t there some concerns with the developer or something? I thought I heard something but I forgot what
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1buhnrs/is_ventoy_safe_in_light_of_xzliblzma_scare/
It’s basically a security nightmare.
Oh geez…
Until they remove checking that reg key from all versions other than maybe enterprise. If they decide that running windows requires an MS online account, they can keep bumping up the difficulty of running it without whenever they want.
They are keeping around so many deprecated features for internal use and whatnot, I would be surprised if they did remove this registry check.
Until Windows 12 is released, you can always use an old ISO and then update to the newest version.
Thank you! I’ve bookmarked this for next time I have a Windows reinstall! Hoping it still works then…
This will be the year of the Linux desktop.
Funny u say that, I’ve switched! 🐧
One of us!
I personally know three, myself included, who are switching right now.
If Microsoft keeps fucking up at every turn, it seems like at some point the only thing that’ll keep them afloat is workplace/education investments in their environment. Seems like they’re even losing their grip on being the default OS preinstalled on non-apple PC hardware and the advantage that provided.
bypassw11.exe
deletemicrosoft.exe
