Comment by ZeroConcerns
3 months ago
So, yeah, this whole thing is a bit silly, and also discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45497384 (and possibly elsewhere).
My TL;DR: a. Get a Microsoft 365 subscription, so you can set up Entra ID and avoid the 'consumer' account nonsense; b. It would sure be nice if the EU DMA would also be applied to this obviously monopolistic situation; c. Do, however, note that there are exactly zero Linux distros that even come close to offering comparable functionality...
How is a forced Microsoft business cloud account better than a forced Microsoft personal cloud account, really?
(Just for the reference, joining the computer to a non-cloud AD does _not_ remove the requirement for a Microsoft account during installation)
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Hello ad hominem. (I am not angry. You seem to be very much into telling people “Get well soon”, though.)
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Comparable to what? To Windows 11?
Yeah, sure. I'm getting heavily downvoted here, and that's fine, but truth of the matter is that nothing gets even close to Windows 11 when it comes to Enterprise-ish deployments, and failure to acknowledge that is why possibly-better alternatives are losing.
Source: I'm sort-of the IT manager for several around-50-employees businesses. All of these offer a choice of Windows, Mac or Linux laptops, because that's what needed to attract quality employees these days.
For Windows, it's really simple. Order HP or Lenovo without an OS, put on the Windows 11 Enterprise image, and send it on along with the Entra credentials. User powers the machine up, selects 'for work', enters the AD credentials and gets a working desktop with AV, firewalling, Office and so on.
MacOS? Slightly more involved story: we need to provide instructions on how to successfully navigate the forced Apple sign-in story, then download some dependencies to get to the point where the Windows users already were.
Linux? Oh, boy... Even when standardizing on something like Ubuntu LTS, basic compliance and policy enforcement is a huge pain. As in: hours and hours of support. I've evaluated several supposedly-solutions for this, and, ehm, no...
And: to be perfectly clear: I'm wide-open to suggestions for something better! If you can offer Ubuntu LTS, (or, well, anything) but with AV, firewalling and basic policy enforcement that can be remotely attested, I'm all ears!
We are not talking about enterprise.
We're talking about individual users, people who buy a computer for their kids or for themselves.
Fancy hosted domain and entra setups and enterprise activations are not relevant to this discussion.
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