Using Windows with a local account is a very weird experience. On the one hand, most of the adware and other nonsense is turned off. On the other hand, virtually nothing seems to have been tested against local accounts.

If I want to update my controller firmware, for example, I have to use the Xbox Accessories app, and it will try to open one or two Microsoft login windows on basically every click. They seem to take about 10 seconds to appear and load, during which time the app seems stuck. It actually works fine with a local account, but you're going to see about a dozen, slow-to-load login prompts, accompanying every step of getting your controller firmware updated. It's an insane experience. I can't imagine it's intentional, I assume the app is just desperately trying to connect to some Xbox overlay which presumes a Microsoft account and was never tested without one.

It just seems like it's part and parcel of Windows' generally abysmal software quality.

I don't know what "working on it" really means. Isn't Scott's job a sort of Azure/Windows developer relations gig? podcasts and speaking slots and Build demos. How is he working on it in any meaningful sense?

Not a knock on the guy, but it seems that fixing windows is way out of his wheelhouse and so the tweet has no value to me as a marker of any kind of tangible progress

There is always the one App which isnt available elsewhere that prevents migration. I’ve been a full time Amiga user, BeOS user, OSX, user, currently I multiboot with Win11, Linux Mint and Haiku nightly, and Windows 11 still gets 99% screen time due to the one App. All other apps I use daily are cross platform.

For everyone its a different App. For me, Visual Studio 2022 and its world class visual debugger that inspects my complex vectors. Sadly, nothing similar (Xcode slow, QtCreator slow, etc).

I do enjoy Haiku the most, but cannot be as effecient when developing embedded libraries. I professionally develop cross platform libs, developed on Win11 but deployed on Linux embedded. Irony.

I expect this will be still buried down within sub-screens of OOBE. MS won't let this go so easily. They already captured enough users with MS accounts and such users won't simply be logged out and given local offline accounts.

For such users nothing will change and they'll be still exposed to all darkpatterns and shenanigans. This "kind" move is just for power-users.

Assuming of course this will actually happens and Hanselman won't be told "no".

For those of us not on X, is there some context, ie. the Tweet he's replying to?

it’s crazy to me how many times throughout the years these guy have done things which were just awful awful for their users.

then they follow it up with a media blitz “oh, look at how amazing we are, we’re going to work on local accounts”

do awful shit then expect praise when they undo 30% of it.

the guys on a podcast i listen to said it best, (these guys have typically always recommended windows so it held some weight when they discussed this):

> “when i’m on windows it feels like im constantly under attack. whether it’s constant nags for edge, onedrive, online accounts, settings i’ve previously changed turning themselves back on again, recall, copilot, settings buried in registry, etc… only for microsoft to undo them on the next update. i’m constantly on defensive. but with linux i just don’t feel like that.”

they followed up with:

> “linux isn’t perfect, but we can’t ignore that windows just keeps getting worse while linux keeps getting better.

from my perspective it’s just too late, microsoft has done this too many times, i’ve already ordered my parents 2 macbook neos, will be removing my windows partition this weekend from my main desktop to linux. and moving all work and media stuff to my macbook. i’m just done, so tired of feeling exactly how the podcast hosts described, so sick of feeling like i’m constantly on the defensive with windows.

so from my perspective, no microsoft, i will not give you applause for “look at us! we’re working on local only accounts.” you yanked them away, you made them nearly impossible. you actively patched the methods we were using, now you want applause?

Working on something that already existed for decades?

It's already possible (with domain join, customized bootable installs or esoteric workarounds) but non-obvious due to deliberate UI changes/regressions.

I suppose this just hints at the possibility someone may be advocating for it to be made again a clear choice during install but it's a vague response.

With every passing headline, Windows sounds less and less like an Operating System, and more like a hobbyists revival project for a dead game I’ve never heard of

What the hell is going on at Microsoft?

Did Microsoft intentionally make NVMe slow for consumers, or was this a recent accident? It feels so user hostile to stick us with the decade and a half old really bad NVME-as-SCSI translation layer stack. And it seemed like the new stack was working well for users, only for Microsoft to take it away again. Why are you making your core experience so much worse, Microsoft? https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-bloc...

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