>While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens

Poor people. Surely Microsoft is fixing this by giving them a proper local skip that doesn’t bypass the other critical setup?

Presumably the business/enterprise editions still do?

Enterprise might but Professional sure doesn't.

I just installed a copy of 25H2 on a laptop with a previously saved Professional licence.

You can just choose to create a "work or school account" and then leave the domain name empty.

Thanks!

I wonder how much of this is Microsoft trying to create recurring profits from the base (Home) sku, rather than that they care about local-user installations in any other circumstance.

Interesting, will give that a try next time. I guess I never looked because I had assumed that option made you connect to an existing domain.

I've used that workaround on literally dozens of installations in the last few years :)

Maybe not for the long term; business/enterprise are mostly using domain accounts for non-server systems.

The requiring internet part is particularly egregious, wow.

Because it seems that microsoft could not shitify windows experience anymore.

I like windows, Its a great system specially for being productive, but the godamn start menu using react and edge and the online requirements are a pain in the ass.

Sometimes it just hangs while you click the windows key. All I want is to open notepad++...

I've found the start menu is perfectly responsive if you disable its internet results.

This is the story of Windows since 7 (and even earlier if you used the crappified Windows typically included with hardware): "The default experience is dogshit, but with enough work you can fix it." With every release the work required to make Windows bearable increases.

Microsoft to push pwa outlook as the default client also is terrible. Why would I want a e-amil client that occupies 3 times the memory of the default outlook client?

Sounds like more lies: you can still use autounattend.xml as far as I know. If they broke this it would break almost all the top corporate enterprise stuff

(same reason they still have network printer driver vulnerabilities because they refuse to fix old shit in the name of backward compatibility)

NOTE: I originally left this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497893