I use Windows 11 without an MS account and with Classic Shell. You can hardly tell a difference. I will continue using it. Because I can’t be bothered not to. It also came with my computer (well, W10 did but the upgrade worked painlessly).
The “without an MS account” is the hard part. Don’t you have to basically use a hidden debug feature to actually do that on install in windows 11 ? And then if it’s anything like windows 10, they might trick you into tying the OS to your account if you log into it for visual studio/office/Windows store or whatever, that happened to me on my laptop and it was a major pain in the ass to revert
It’s been some time, but IIRC, I downloaded W11 onto a flashdrive with the MS media creation tool, booted of this drive and did a fresh install over my W10 installation. In this process I wiped my disk. Before that I googled what to do in order to be able to install without an internet connection. This allowed me to complete the installation without an MS account. This procedure might have changed since then. AFAIK there are still some hoops you can jump through in order to get it running without an MS account.
I use Windows 11 without an MS account and with Classic Shell. You can hardly tell a difference. I will continue using it. Because I can’t be bothered not to. It also came with my computer (well, W10 did but the upgrade worked painlessly).
The “without an MS account” is the hard part. Don’t you have to basically use a hidden debug feature to actually do that on install in windows 11 ? And then if it’s anything like windows 10, they might trick you into tying the OS to your account if you log into it for visual studio/office/Windows store or whatever, that happened to me on my laptop and it was a major pain in the ass to revert
It’s been some time, but IIRC, I downloaded W11 onto a flashdrive with the MS media creation tool, booted of this drive and did a fresh install over my W10 installation. In this process I wiped my disk. Before that I googled what to do in order to be able to install without an internet connection. This allowed me to complete the installation without an MS account. This procedure might have changed since then. AFAIK there are still some hoops you can jump through in order to get it running without an MS account.