FYI: You can still install Win11 with a local account. When prompted for your account, hit Shift+F10 to get a terminal, then enter

start ms-cxh:localonly

and a window will pop up where you can create a local account and continue with the installation.

Yep, it's all insane. And before the "switch to Linux" replies: yes, I am using Linux, but Friends&Family still rely on Windows software. The big elephant in the room is of course Office, and I mean the REAL Office, not the MickeyMouse version that runs in the browser. No, LibreOffice will not do, neither will running Office in a Windows VM, nor running a 20year old Office version in Wine.

> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.

That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.

I had a similar issue earlier this year with my laptop. I use my own laptop for work and created a dedicated account (a Standard account, not Admin) for my work stuff. I signed in with our EntraID/Office365/Azure credentials. Worked fine for about a month. Then we added 2FA to everything and resetted passwords company wide (via our 3rd party IT "partner"). Half the the staff's email/outlook got cooked really good and but my machine in particular, one morning I turned it on and I could no longer log into windows. Not even with my local-only Admin account. Not with the Standard/Microsoft account that has hijacked MY system.

I had to reinstall windows completely and lost about 2 days total + couple of days worth of code/work, nevermind my own data.

About a month after that something else broke my dev tools again and I switched to Fedora/KDE (as all my dev tools works fine there too). It's been fairly smooth sailing since then. Install updates frequently, my system is so nice fine tuned to my needs it's awesome. I'm not a linux noob but the first time a linux install lasted more than 6 months for me without breaking itself. Also run multiple user accounts on it to seperate home/work life. Fully encrypted, fingerprint reader works, webcam/mic works. Haven't had the urge to install windows again on this machine, nor another linux distro.

The past few years I’ve been hearing crazy stories of workarounds and scripts to deal with all these new features in Windows. Isn’t that what was preventing people from using Linux? Replacing utilman.exe with cmd.exe is not something a normal user would ever do.

Protect yourself, use a local account. Windows 11 does not allow this but Rufus will help when you create your Windows installation media. And obviously never enter your Microsoft account credentials into any Microsoft app until you're certain it won't be linked to your local account.

If you buy a Samsung phone, after initial setup (be sure to Opt-out of all the extra ToS), install all the google equivalent app (calc, calendar, contacts, phone, etc) enable developer mode and remove all the samsung variants via adb. Takes an hour but well worth it. Some packages/apps can only be removed via adb. On a brand new samsung, there are three Meta/facebook packages installed in android as hidden even if you have Facebook app uninstalled. Most of the samsung bloat, including One Drive can be properly removed like this. Phone runs silky smooth & battery lasts longer too after this process. My phone has very little left of samsung, but I do unfortunately have to use google's apps, which works great for what it is.

Don't try to remove the Samsung Gallery, as it will break the camera.

Don't remove all the Knox packages, as they will break NFC/Wallet apps.

You can remove all the AR/VR Emoji shit, half of them use the internet...

You can remove the "Weather" package. This is supposedly a widget.. right.

You can remove Hiya spyware package."spam call detection" straight from china .

You can remove netflix, youtube, instagram, snapchat, spotify, microsoft apps and other preinstalls this way too (instead of just disabling some of them). You can always install from the store again if needed.

I hate what modern tech/software ecosystem has become.

This kind of shit used to be explicitly tested against. Get a Windows 7 install, fill up all but the last few bytes on the main HDD, it'll work fine, you'll be able to login and delete stuff.

Completely saturate memory, RAM full, swap full, the OS will still work. It'll be slow and messy, but you'll be able to navigate around enough to get shit ton.

Heck I suspect these scenarios would work even on Windows 10.

What kind of laughable tests doesn't even bother with the most obvious edge cases of "disk full"?

That isn't an uncommon scenario, quite the opposite, it is a very common scenario.

Time to migrate to Linux.

> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account.

Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege level interactive user account :) https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747

This garbage and more is the reason I did my Framework 12's installation of Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15) using this `unattend.xml` generator to disable internet requirement, disable mandatory Microsoft Account, disable intrusive spyware, disable disable disable: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

Sucks to have such an adversarial relationship with my own computer though. One shouldn't have to Know All The Tricks to avoid this shit.

Well that absolutely didn’t go the direction I thought it would.

Atteibuted to Ian Fleming: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

So um how many dark patterns was that ?

This is absurd