Without unofficial bypasses of MS online account requirements you would not come to a point where activation is a concern. No internet access is not enough of a reason for MS let you use your device.
My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password. Before the upgrade from Windows 10, it only took three. Teams, of course, takes another five minutes to become functional. Meanwhile I have a 13 year old low end Asus laptop at home that boots to a fully usable Linux desktop in well under a minute.
It’s been this way for over a decade. The year of the Linux desktop was 2009; the world is only just catching up.
> My work computer takes a full five minutes to become usable on the first login after a cold boot, and that’s not even counting the time from boot to entering my password.
Yeah, that’s a misconfigured system. I bet you can fuck up Linux enough to get a similar experience.
I’ve always been using Windows and the only time I ever had to wait that long was around the Win98 times on slow hardware.
After login, I can instantly use everything on Win 11, and the only delay is a bunch of apps starting (that I chose to start on boot).
I bet stuff like Crowdstrike has a major influence into this. I used my work computer before and after Crowdstrike and the difference in boot time and general behavior is huge.
Open source hardware is such a fascinating concept, I had thought of such examples but I always assumed they would be the case of risc-v chips, I wonder how it's an arm chip
I always thought that one day we will get completely open source risc-v chips that if another company wants, they can create in their own chip-making process (I imagine it to be beyond extremely difficult but still it opens up a pathway)
what's the progress of risc-v nowadays?
Also Can you please link me other such projects like this, it would be good to have a bookmark/list of all such projects too
> I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
There is OpenWISP: Leveraging Linux OpenWrt, OpenWISP is an open-source solution for efficient IT network deployment, monitoring & management.
240V AC and 5V DC manage to live close in a charger without problems. Problems with quality does not depend on voltage.
I love the concept of PoE with one exception that it requires constant 1W or similar load to work even if it is not needed for low power device.
> 240V AC and 5V DC manage to live close in a charger without problems.
I mean, yes and no. My laptop case is at 78VAC to ground right now. It gives the tingles. I don't use my laptop much while plugged in. They all skimp on making proper 3-pronged chargers these days. My desktop has a grounded case and doesn't have this issue.
My phone, when plugged into wall AC, the touch screen stops working because the whole phone is at an elevated potential and it messes up the capacitive sensing.
> * A microsoft account is only needed for Windows 11 Home. A "semi-power user" is hopefully not using that edition of Windows...
Both Home and Pro require Microsoft account to install and start using. Then you can create local only users in both editions and delete user joined to Microsoft account. This is standard operation even in OEM installs.
Pro does not. We only use Pro and Enterprise, and Pro certainly does not actually require a Microsoft account (as of last week, anyways). The options given do make it appear to be required, but it is not.
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).
