It is amazing to live in a world where pointing out that a feature is a trainwreck is “shilling for corporations”.

That’s the part I just don’t get. Why you guys need people to be in denial or toeing a certain line, facts be damned. It’s not enough to be critical, people have to be critical at all times, of all things in the exact way everybody else is.

The account crap is not a valid counterexample. Windows 11 (Home, at least) was always explicitly presented as requiring an account. The methods to install without it were always an usupported workaround. It does suck that they went the Apple path and traded up-front price for data mining, I would absolutely prefer the alternative on principle, even if I was already logging in on Win10 for work reasons. If there was a natively compatible Windows alternative without this requirement I’d default to that. My Windows installs have most of the related features disabled, where I can do that. I just recently got to a place where I can disable OneDrive now and I am incredibly happy about it, since we’re talking about it.

But it’s not a slippery slope, it’s them gradually closing the unsupported loophole that was keeping some people from flipping out about it as it becomes clearer that vas majority of user are, in fact, logging in with a MS account.

This is a datamining feature that is immediately unpopular and they are actively backtracking on it. There is clear precedent for this exact same functionality and it didn’t go that way. That’s not shilling, that’s just how reality worked last time this happened. Literally this. The same feature implemented in a very similar way.

Again, there is plenty of legitimate stuff to complain about here. A lot of it is terrible even after the changes to opt-in and security. You don’t need to make up a fictional future scenario where they un-fix the stuff they are fixing. You can dislike the fixed version for actual, good reasons without having to sound like a weird online cultist.