To The Surprise Of Absolutely No One Who Has Been Paying Attention
Microsoft really wants you to use a Microsoft Account to activate your Windows 11 install and has been steadily working to hide any mention of setting up a local account instead. They tout the seamless experience you can get, when any and everything you plug into your machine is automatically sucked up to the cloud by OneDrive. They can also ensure to charge you for every subscription you might have with Microsoft no matter which machine you log into, and of course they can monitor your usage.
The instructions to switch from a Microsoft Account to a local account used to be posted in an online guide, but it has recently disappeared from the site. While you can still just head to Settings -> Accounts -> Your info and switch over to a local account, if you didn’t already know this then you will have a hard time figuring it out.
If you are setting up a new machine and want a local account for login, your best bet is to make sure your machine cannot talk to the internet while you are installing Windows. It will whine and complain, but will have no choice but to let you create a local account. Once you’ve done so you can then connect to the Internet and see if you can finish setting up before someone leverages a vulnerability on your fresh system.
Meanwhile, publishers won a court case to strip a half million books from the Internet Archive, which you can read about below.
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