There should be a law against this.
Your average user is going to think something is terribly wrong with their computer just because they didn't sign over their rights to Microsoft.
EDIT: added button descriptions to the alt text, sorry for leaving those out when I posted this last night.
@vkc I agree with you entirely. And I know you already use Linux. (Me, too.) Everyone who isn't a Microsoft executive or stockholder, I think (e. g. @geerlingguy) agrees with you.
@nitpicking @vkc Microsoft has taken dark patterns to a whole new level: black hole patterns!
@geerlingguy Stuff got so dark, even psychological horror writers go "christ that's dark".
@geerlingguy @nitpicking @vkc My personal favorite is needing to hit some magic key combo during setup to open a command prompt so I can execute some weirdly named script that will eventually allow me to continue installation without creating a Microsoft account.
@scott @geerlingguy @vkc Bad news. MS is removing that option in Win12, apparently.
I'm tempted to support #ReactOS, but they don't seem to ever make actual progress.
@nitpicking @geerlingguy @vkc Oh fun. Personally, I'm "MS Free" but I still have to support others that suffer under their oppression.
As for #ReactOS, yeah, it's just "there". I wonder if we couldn't do much better, much faster, by faking it. Minimal Linux OS under a nice UI with WINE/Proton. Some of the emulators that let you play Windows games on Android devices would make for interesting computing environments with their multiple Windows environments and snapshots.
@scott You wouldn't be the first to ask that, and the answer the team gave is "you can do that already, there's like 5 different major beginner friendly distros that all package WINE, there's no point in asking us to pivot since there's nothing we can provide that doesn't already exist". Further binary compatibility would basically require exactly what they're doing anyway.
@nitpicking I mean, they're making pretty good progress with 0.4.15-dev so far, completely reworked the filesystem system so that crashes won't hose the system anymore for instance.
@lepidotos Individual components get reworked, yes. Consider that they've been trying to emulate Windows since XP, and now ... they can almost boot on real hardware most of the time. (I haven't checked their progress in a few months. I sincerely hope it's way better than that now.)
I don't mean that nothing is done. I just mean that nothing practical seems likely to come out of the project.