Neither Home nor Pro really require a MS account. You can skip that during setup (for example with "bypassNRO"). This might change in the future, but as of 25H2 the workarounds still work.
This is the ISO I used, which, according to the MS website[1], is still the latest right now: Win11_25H2_English_x64.iso (SHA256: D141F6030FED50F75E2B03E1EB2E53646C4B21E5386047CB860AF5223F102A32)
I installed it offline in a VM, Home edition, US region. Shift+F10, oobe\bypassnro worked (with a warning/error at some step, but the local account was created fine). I read somewhere that it doesn't work if you connect to the internet during setup (which is always a bad idea IMO).
I tried installing the latest 25H2 (stable iso) and nothing has changed so far. You can still use "bypassNRO" to set it up with a local account, offline. The planned changes will likely only affect the Home edition (Pro/Ent/Edu have more options). Even with Home edition there's a good chance you'll be able to make a local account with an answer file[1][2] or an unofficial tweak.
I think Windows will always be able to work without a MS account, because there are many critical (offline) deployments out there. But they'll probably make it difficult if you're using a "consumer" edition.
That's not a fair take. The only things I noticed that were missing out of the box are the MS Store and some Dolby codecs. Both of those can be installed easily.
I estimate that 95% of people would be fine with Windows 10 21H2 LTSC. The 5% might miss some 3rd party software that requires version 22H2 to run (just because it's the latest, not for any technical reasons).
>The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached.
That sounds like a (graphics driver) bug. It's not something I ever experienced on Windows 10, even when occasionally connecting an additional display set to 150% scaling. I believe you, though, bugs do happen.
>not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
I think his point is that on macOS you pretty much have to use 200%, whereas on Windows it can be any value (though multiples of 25% are recommended).
It wouldn't surprise me, although this is a bog-standard-fare enterprise laptop, a 5 year-old full Intel affair. No dedicated GPU or anything fancy.
But, for a long time, I had weird issues with display output on Windows. It would refuse to output 4k@60Hz without doing a stupid plug-unplug-replug-just-at-the-right-time dance, even though it worked on Linux. It took a good 3 years for that to work reliably.
And, in the beginning, those 5k screens only worked at 4k for some reason. Again, no issue on Linux.
But when any of the above situations happened, the state was actually correctly reported, as in 4k@30 Hz, or the 5k screen running at 4k. That's not the case now, everything says what it should, but the image is not sharp.
That's the only situation where I use Windows with scaling, so don't have any easy way of figuring which component is broken. All I can say is that the hardware itself seems to work fine.
You can hear the fan at full load, especially on the M4 Pro. I really wish Apple went with a larger case and fan for that chip, which would allow quieter cooling.
That might be a recent phenomenon caused by the inevitable heat of the CPU getting closer and closer to its limit? Like explained in this video: https://youtu.be/AOlXmv9EiPo
My Mac Mini M2 never does any noise, even when I run FFMpeg the fans don’t spike. It just gets slightly warmer. Still, unless I’m doing these high CPU bound activities, every time I touch it it’s cold as if it was turned off, which is very different than my previous Intel one that was always either warm or super hot.
So it's not such a good deal after all and it also means that a lot of regular people won't get those updates (because they either don't know how or can't be bothered to make an account).
With 32 GiB of memory it's just too slow. A laptop, to me, is supposed to be a device much like a phone in that I can just flip it open and do what I need to do, suspend is supposed to be that, but if I don't charge my Dell precision every single day it'll just run down to 0 for absolutely no reason.
