Microsoft has been pushing hard for its users to sign into Windows with a Microsoft Account. The newest Windows 11 installer removed the easy bypass to the requirement that you make an account or login with your existing account. If you didn’t install Windows 11 without a Microsoft Account and now want to stop sending the company your data, you can still switch to a local account after the fact. Microsoft even had instructions on how to do this on its official support website - or at least it used to…
I appreciate all of the privacy and ethics-associated reasons why it is preferable to start a Windows 11 installation with a local account, but if I could just add one more…
When you use a Microsoft account to do so, the operating system still requires a fucking username for the name of your user directory (because a local account must be created regardless, yes,) and all it has to go on is the email address you used to set up your Microsoft account.
A few years ago when I first installed Windows 11 on my home PC, the email address still associated with my primary account was
ihadtopee@gmail.com.So, what do you think my user account folder was named? You’d probably assume it’d be
ihadtopee, right?No. Through whatever process they set up to decide upon this, Windows 11 came up with
ihadt.Perhaps it makes me a superficial person, but that shit bugs me far more than anything else about the whole thing.