Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
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I'm so happy now that I've finally fully migrated to linux.
What'd you end up on, out of curiosity? I was on Fedora for a couple years, but with the whole Red Hat thing (that I don't fully understand the implications of), I switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed. Still have love for Mint, though, after all these years.
The whole red hat thing (you mean the centos drama?) has no implications whatsoever on fedora, fyi. If you liked it feel free to go back to it.
I'm using endevour os now, though I started on mint a few months ago and loved it. The wife is using mint now and just commented yesterday that it was a very seamless transition from windows. Only problems have been related to nvidia being dumb.
Glad you're enjoying it. I haven't messed with Endevour much myself, as Arch-based stuff is a little more hands on than I want to be, personally, most of the time. I think the switch to Linux is easier than a lot of people think. It really just takes some patience, knowing that it'll be an adjustment, and accepting that you'll need to find alternatives to some apps.
I'm still a Fedora guy, started on Ubuntu years ago, tried arch (loved AUR) and all the Ubuntu derivatives but once I hit fedora it just stuck.
I made the mistake of fucking around and finding out with the AUR on Manjaro (before all the major drama). Broke it - though, it did make it 2 years beforehand, amazingly. But yeah, totally about Fedora. Fedora made me stop distrohopping.
RedHat still pushes their changes upstream whenever possible, and is one of the largest OSS contributors. These changes were to make it harder for companies like Oracle who feed off of RHEL. The same reason you can’t view RH support docs any more, Oracle used to reply to their paid users (running RHEL clones) with copy/paste from the RH docs.
I always thought microsoft allowing HWID activation was a deliberate move to get as many people to use windows and got them enrolled into windows updates, which bolster their market share and allow them to push ads/promotion for their various services to windows start menu. I think microsoft got a lot more to lose from ending HWID activation.
Good thing i switched to linux
How do you know if someone runs Linux? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
Good. Free and Open Source Software should be the standard.
Hopefully I don't need to point you towards the endless list of enshittification for why.
How do you know someone participates in pirating?
Don't worry, they'll tell you.
I also use linux btw
I guess Microsoft didn't like that their support staff cracks Windows with HWID activation using MAS when their infrastructure breaks down for legit licenses.
K38 still works. But yeah just switch to Linux.
Sorry for possibly a stupid question, but what's the point of activating Windows?
I never seriously used Windows, but I have a Windows 7 VM that's not activated, and it works. Just the wallpaper is black. Also most of our school computers don't have activated Windows, yet it seems to work fine, there's just the watermark. And on some it shows the "You may be the victim of..." message. Same seems to be the case for Office 2016 installed on those. Other than the "non-genuine" message, it works.
I guess it's just a personal thing. I personally cannot stand the "Please Activate Windows" watermark and MAS is such an easy tool that it just makes sense to do it. It's not like this announcement kills MAS, you can still use the other activation methods
this is even more funny since there are apps that literally target this shit and remove it. Its unregistered, and the watermarks are removed, allowing you to forget the existance you are in. (disclaimer: I didn't do W11, but I doubt they were that good at their job)
In Windows 11 they lock down the customization/personalization options, but you can get around that with some registry edits regardless. So I guess it's pretty straightforward to build a third party tool that replaces the internal customizer.
But... MAS was so nice and easy.
Possibly(?) related official notice https://devicepartner.microsoft.com/en-us/communications/comm-windows-ends-installation-path-for-free-windows-7-8-upgrade
Never spent the time to figure out what KMS actually did but seems like licenses weren't validated when upgrading from 7 -> 8 / 11
Now, you can't perma-crack your new PC with a "real" HWID key, then years later reinstall Windows and keep your "real" license anymore! And you can't upgrade anymore on that new PC either! You have to patch Windows every time!
RIP HWID
By the way you can still use a windows 7 key for windows 11, I just have an old laptop with the OEM sticker on it, works fine on every computer I ever tried. Consider just trying to find one in the trash or just take a photo of one on a computer in public that won't likely get reinstalled.
After reading through the docs on the MAS site, KMS38 still looks pretty robust. I get that it’s not ‘permanent’ but are there any major drawbacks aside from having to re-run MAS after a fresh Windows install?
RIP. We hardly knew ye.
I hope this means we'll finally get activation methods that patch windows itself rather than playing along with their key system. Obviously it can be done since Windows AME has activation Functions completely removed yet it will never try to deactivate itself.
I tried doing a full swap from Windows earlier this year. I do a lot of local game streaming from my gaming pc to my laptop and I had issues getting this working. Didn't have the energy to keep looking for solutions so I just went back to windows. Next time I try I will probably keep my pc on windows and only swap my laptop to Linux. One step at a time.
what is MAS?
Microsoft Activation Scripts
EDIT: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
—-I haven’t used windows in a while, but for curiosity’s sake what are the best ways for registering windows now?—-
edit: i’m bad at reading, muses the relevant line
I should really switch over to Linux full time. I basically have no uses cases that require Windows anymore. Not that this activation patch tipped me over the edge or anything. Microsoft is allowed to fix bugs in their software.
Do it!