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Microsoft kills official way to activate windows without internet (www.neowin.net)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.today
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/44849946

Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online.

Linux is this way, guys.

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[–] 5 points 10 months ago (10 children)

20 years ago internet was the main pro-Windows argument, actually. Windows was completely comfortable without the internet, while Linux was barely usable offline without access to online repositories and forums to keep the system working.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    now now, 20 years ago was 2005. cable internet, xDSL and some fiber were around and semi common. distrowatch.com was just starting but plenty of distros had complete ISOs with full environments. source forge, freshmeat and ibiblio were all big on hosting ISOs.

    now in 1996/97 redhat 5.x series had the anaconda installer that installed all components without touching anything Internet related (though it could)

    94 had slackwares release and it was as you say

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    So? Yes, we had CDs with packages.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    point was many flavors of Linux did not need internet for functionality 20 years ago.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Formally? No, they didn't need the Internet. De facto -- you weren't able to actively use it without the Internet.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    whaaat? I don't understand your de facto to argument if it pertains to 2005. I incidicated there were some difficulties in the mid 90s but not mid 00's. Just boot up knoppix CDs? they were very popular at that time and perfectly usable without internet. usermodelinux could run Linux within Linux without network stack as a poor man's docker back then.

    people post about the old QNX bootable floppy that had a browser and desktop environment.

    TL;DR there were tons of usable mediums of *nix 20 years ago that did not require internet connectivity.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)

    I had a winmodem at the time, which of course wasn't supported. 😓

    EDIT: I say "at the time" but I mean late 90s, not 20 years ago.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago*

    I had one up until about 2003 probably. We were out in the country and couldn't get cable or dsl. I remember trying out linux and fighting with the wintel modem and gpu drivers, writing down the errors, rebooting the machine back into windows, going online and researching the errors online, writing down the commands I needed to use to fix it, or downloading the rpm packages (red hat or fedora can't remember which) I might have needed, rebooting, trying again in linux, failing, etc.

    When i finally tried ubuntu on my laptop around 2007, it was amazing that the WiFi and graphics "just worked".

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  • [–] [S] -1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I remember when Linux was a bear to install. While the pro-Linux people were kinda assholes and not cool with helping complete noobs. Things have changed.

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