My computer has accumulated some cruft that’s making it hard to manage, and resetting the PC seems like the most straightforward way to deal with it. I already have all my important files saved elsewhere. I also wanted to see if I could kill two birds with one stone and rid myself of the dependence on an MS account. I’ve seen there’s some terminal stuff you can do when installing Windows fresh that bypasses the mandatory account creation, but does that still work when resetting? Especially when resetting from the cloud?
And because someone is going to say “Just use Linux”, believe me, I’d love to, but the user experience sucks for literally anyone who isn’t a software developer and the accessibility has actually gotten worse over the 15 years I’ve tried to use it.
Honestly I have no idea how they keep getting away with adding more and more hurdles for local account creation. Literally no other OS for mobile or PC has this.
I’ve seen anything from devices with a local account automatically enabling bitlocker with no way of recovering if bitlocker trips to devices with an MS account tripping bitlocker only to find out the recovery keys are not saved to the MS account, absolutely bonkers.