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.
No. I’m just saying, in case this post gives the impression that many things break if you use a local account. It’s a completely supported setup, and even though software bugs can exist, it’s worked fine for me since forever.
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
What is he known for? Glancing at his github he seems very oriented around windows (which supports your point), but I wouldn't even know what to look for beyond that.
Scott Hanselman is awesome, has a good connections in the dev and cloud folks (Scott Guthrie corner). He has some influence but he cannot shape Windows like that. I think what he says is that he advocates for it but I have zero hope.
I have zero hope, but he MIGHT have the ear of the people making the decisions and he might make a good point how if all of the "family tech support" people get pissed off about account requirements and move to Linux ... they'll start suggesting that to their families too which is kinda bad in the long run.
Even though it's been said many times that MS doesn't give a fuck about personal users, their money comes almost 100% from companies using Windows. Gaming computers etc. are a rounding error.
He is a full time nauseating AI shill. If you happen to listen to his recent appearance on Software Engineering Radio podcast, you may just die of cringe. I had my final straw moment on AI hype during that podcast and my first I wish someone would bully that nerd moment.
I dunno ive been reading his material for 20 years, so I guess my perspective is different? His posts even more than a decade ago have more than demonstrated his competency.
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".
What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway? We meme that LibreOffice is insufficient for replacing Excel because of its horrible UX but does that matter anymore when ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free? Device drivers are getting better and better literally daily and the number of Windows applications unported to Linux matters less and less as MS actively sabotages its own desktop application development tools.
Since this exodus (year of the linux desktop has been promised every year since 1998) has not yet happened, there is likely an actual reason (or several) that people choose to stay on Windows.
I use both, but prefer linux to stay behind the scenes on my servers. Windows has been a solved problem for me for the past couple of decades. Here's a random 100 day uptime screenshot that I found from 2017, https://imgur.com/a/PRp9L50. These days I usually shutdown more often to not waste power, and my NVMe makes bootups instant anyway.
>What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway?
Billions of installed seats, a huge corporate offering, a mature full-spectrum developer ecosystem, instant familiarity for billions, and working drivers for everything (which every vendor builds with their OS in mind).
no stupid "you're using the wrong distro" recommendations to fix issues either...
I'm a LibreOffice user who recently had to use Excel. Most things I was able to figure out, but two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
Second, there was no way to have the row and column of the current cell highlighted. This made it difficult to find where I was - very important not to screw that up on a PCBA BOM.
I've not found any objective UI problem with LibreOffice Calc. It's not perfect, but it is intuitive and feels like the people who wrote it, use it.
> two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
> First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
That is no more a problem than the fact that there is no mnemonic to remind you what "chaos" means in English. Shortcuts are there to be convenient to use, not convenient to describe.
> ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free?
Does this actually work? I'm just thinking of the people who refuse to learn from an in-person demonstration, much less a written description. But maybe enough of that level of incompetence is filtered out by the time you're doing interesting things with spreadsheets...
(Not that I'm opposed to people mass-abandoning Microsoft, just trying to be realistic about my hopes.)
It's always worked for me manually (straight domain replace, rest of the URL untouched), so I believe so. I'd certainly find it handy if it were offered automatically in the top text. :)
Thanx. I tried to use several of these services (because I don't use Twitter/X myself so got context from a Dutch website) but didn't get it to work (was very probably just me). Xcancel is indeed a much better experience.
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?
I'm curious because Mac OS effectively has the same model. You can use local accounts but it's highly discouraged through dark patterns and selected features of the OS don't work correctly.
i didn’t have that issue at all when installing with a local account on my macbook? [0]
but even if i had, like i said it is definitely not just the local account issue. it’s so many things just piled up on top of each other. it’s become aggressive. from the nonstop pestering to use onedrive to edge, to microsoft reverting settings i’ve changed after os updates, to ads on my computer to copilot ridiculousness to recall awfulness and on and on and on. and yes, ms actively removing local accounts.
mspaint now tries to push for a login… yep that’s right, mspaint…
[0] when i setup my MacBook pro last month i didn’t have to sign in to appleid at all. it asked but there was a “setup later” or something and i just skipped right past that. no dark patterns or anything for me.
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
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...
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’ve never used an online account on windows and I’ve never noticed any issues that I could chalk to using a local account.
Did you ever updated your controller firmware from Windows?
No. I’m just saying, in case this post gives the impression that many things break if you use a local account. It’s a completely supported setup, and even though software bugs can exist, it’s worked fine for me since forever.
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
He’s an evangelist. I noticed he has recently been pushing GitHub Copilot CLI… my guess is to help push internal MS people to stop using Claude Code.
Imagine thinking that Scott fucking Hanselman isn't qualified to work on Windows. Jesus dude.
What is he known for? Glancing at his github he seems very oriented around windows (which supports your point), but I wouldn't even know what to look for beyond that.
He is a evangelist for cloud and .NET. he was one of the 5 public faces who moved .NET to open source in 2011 and beyond.
Anything concrete? Because "corporate evangelist" is very low in the ranking of roles I'd trust, and .NET evangelist even less.
So?
Scott Hanselman is awesome, has a good connections in the dev and cloud folks (Scott Guthrie corner). He has some influence but he cannot shape Windows like that. I think what he says is that he advocates for it but I have zero hope.
I have zero hope, but he MIGHT have the ear of the people making the decisions and he might make a good point how if all of the "family tech support" people get pissed off about account requirements and move to Linux ... they'll start suggesting that to their families too which is kinda bad in the long run.
Even though it's been said many times that MS doesn't give a fuck about personal users, their money comes almost 100% from companies using Windows. Gaming computers etc. are a rounding error.
As far as I know, he would be more into application programming, not systems programming (if anything). But I might be wrong.
Mark Russinovich would be a different story, but he seems to be mostly concerned with Azure nowadays.
Qualified and can bend the org are 2 different things. Although he can probably bend the org too!
He is a full time nauseating AI shill. If you happen to listen to his recent appearance on Software Engineering Radio podcast, you may just die of cringe. I had my final straw moment on AI hype during that podcast and my first I wish someone would bully that nerd moment.
I've literally never heard of this man whom you think is so notable his very name would imply his qualification. He's not that noteworthy, dude.
I dunno ive been reading his material for 20 years, so I guess my perspective is different? His posts even more than a decade ago have more than demonstrated his competency.
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".
The current OOBE screen is in javascript. You can open dev console and get local account
WinJS.Application.restart("ms-cxh://LOCALONLY")
What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway? We meme that LibreOffice is insufficient for replacing Excel because of its horrible UX but does that matter anymore when ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free? Device drivers are getting better and better literally daily and the number of Windows applications unported to Linux matters less and less as MS actively sabotages its own desktop application development tools.
Since this exodus (year of the linux desktop has been promised every year since 1998) has not yet happened, there is likely an actual reason (or several) that people choose to stay on Windows.
I use both, but prefer linux to stay behind the scenes on my servers. Windows has been a solved problem for me for the past couple of decades. Here's a random 100 day uptime screenshot that I found from 2017, https://imgur.com/a/PRp9L50. These days I usually shutdown more often to not waste power, and my NVMe makes bootups instant anyway.
>What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway?
Billions of installed seats, a huge corporate offering, a mature full-spectrum developer ecosystem, instant familiarity for billions, and working drivers for everything (which every vendor builds with their OS in mind).
no stupid "you're using the wrong distro" recommendations to fix issues either...
I'm a LibreOffice user who recently had to use Excel. Most things I was able to figure out, but two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
Second, there was no way to have the row and column of the current cell highlighted. This made it difficult to find where I was - very important not to screw that up on a PCBA BOM.
I've not found any objective UI problem with LibreOffice Calc. It's not perfect, but it is intuitive and feels like the people who wrote it, use it.
> two things really stood out as problematic with Excel.
> First, the keyboard shortcuts have no mnemonic. It's just random letters. No way to actually remember them.
That is no more a problem than the fact that there is no mnemonic to remind you what "chaos" means in English. Shortcuts are there to be convenient to use, not convenient to describe.
> ChatGPT can guide you through any scenario in seconds for free?
Does this actually work? I'm just thinking of the people who refuse to learn from an in-person demonstration, much less a written description. But maybe enough of that level of incompetence is filtered out by the time you're doing interesting things with spreadsheets...
(Not that I'm opposed to people mass-abandoning Microsoft, just trying to be realistic about my hopes.)
> What moat does MS still have to prevent an exodus to Linux anyway?
There are no enthusiastic Windows users constantly telling you how much superior it is, and how easy it is to write your own drivers in 2026.
Claude Code or OpenAI Codex can even write working device drivers for your hardware these days. https://vladimir.varank.in/notes/2026/02/freebsd-brcmfmac/
For those of us not on X, is there some context, ie. the Tweet he's replying to?
To access any tweet without being on X, replace x.com with xcancel.com
To save folks the typing: https://xcancel.com/shanselman/status/2035110958314745891
Thanks, I've put that in the toptext.
If we did that automatically, would the resulting links all be readable?
It's always worked for me manually (straight domain replace, rest of the URL untouched), so I believe so. I'd certainly find it handy if it were offered automatically in the top text. :)
Thanx. I tried to use several of these services (because I don't use Twitter/X myself so got context from a Dutch website) but didn't get it to work (was very probably just me). Xcancel is indeed a much better experience.
xcancel.com seems to work at least as well as any other still-maintained nitter instance. Here's a list:
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
Also, I'm curious: why do x posts get displayed as Twitter?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339390
Probably at some point we'll relent.
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?
I'm curious because Mac OS effectively has the same model. You can use local accounts but it's highly discouraged through dark patterns and selected features of the OS don't work correctly.
i didn’t have that issue at all when installing with a local account on my macbook? [0]
but even if i had, like i said it is definitely not just the local account issue. it’s so many things just piled up on top of each other. it’s become aggressive. from the nonstop pestering to use onedrive to edge, to microsoft reverting settings i’ve changed after os updates, to ads on my computer to copilot ridiculousness to recall awfulness and on and on and on. and yes, ms actively removing local accounts.
mspaint now tries to push for a login… yep that’s right, mspaint…
[0] when i setup my MacBook pro last month i didn’t have to sign in to appleid at all. it asked but there was a “setup later” or something and i just skipped right past that. no dark patterns or anything for me.
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?
Same as always I guess? Good cop, bad cop. They seem to go through this cycle every decade or so.
The old guard is no longer around, and Microsoft has also become tainted by techno bros.
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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