Oh good, the option is still there but it now requires jumping through EVEN MORE hoops than before.
It shouldn’t be a hack to begin with.
None of this is necessary
Shift F10 to bring up the command window, then type:
start ms-chx:localonly
Great tip, hadn’t seen that one before :)
They’ll no doubt be disabling that registry value in the future too. So I don’t see this being a long term fix.
Installing from old media that still has it and then upgrading in place could be an option for future.
Is the account requirement just for home additions? It seems like there’d always need to be at least one way to set up Windows without a MS account for enterprise deployments where it’s not just one individual using a computer.
Or I guess in that instance the account requirement would be satisfied by the user’s corporate account?
You would need to join it to a domain, and a corpo MS account or multiple.
Domain join not an option for Home editions, afaik.
Yeah, but I think MS is fine with Home not being usable in enterprise use cases.
There’s windows 11 lite mod without any bullshit crap from Microsoft, even some windows 11 lite mod has windows 7 ish system requirements
CTT Windows Tools is a good entry to build a lite / custom image. (MicroWin)
Doing this comes with some drawbacks as you really will learn how much bullshit is actually required for some larger commercial applications. (Some components of Edge are required for Fusion 360; XBox Game Bar is required for proper CCD load balancing for AMD CPUs and other various gotchas.)
It’s worth the trouble though as you can construct an image that nukes things like OneDrive and Copilot from the start. It also introduced me to WinGet, which is so much nicer than multiple one-shot updates.
