A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system. Get to the point where Windows prompts for a Microsoft account, then click the "Learn more" hyperlink beneath the text box and the Sign-in options link, and the OOBE skips to prompting for the user's name and eventually a password. Just like it used to do before Microsoft decided that you needed one of its accounts to use the software you thought you'd paid for. "Bob Pony" created a helpful post demonstrating the workaround. We checked it, and it worked exactly as demonstrated in the video. However, we can't imagine Microsoft leaving this in the setup program for long, considering the company's desire to drive users into its preferred online world. Indeed, some components installed with Windows won't work without a Microsoft account, but at least users can choose whether or not to use them. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with workarounds users have found to avoid a Microsoft account in the Windows setup application over the years. In 2025, it snapped shut a popular loophole in the name of keeping users safe and ensuring Windows is stable, secure, and ready to deliver the experience users expect from Microsoft's operating system. It is worth emphasizing that the workaround is only for the Home Edition of Windows 11, so it will be useful when friends or family pick up a new PC and don't want to go through the Microsoft account rigmarole. Windows 11 Pro users, or administrators, obviously have other options and aren't forced down the Microsoft account route, which may hint at why this loophole exists in the first place. It's unclear when Microsoft will close this loophole, and we certainly aren't going to ask it. Until then, Home Edition users can avoid a Microsoft account without resorting to third-party scripts, tools, or instructions. Just use a simple click of the mouse to Learn more. ®

Ubuntu 24.04's likely final scheduled point release barely made it out the door before an installer bug sent its x86-64 desktop image back to the workshop. Meanwhile, October's interim release is approaching. 24.04.5 was released on September 10, but its x86-64 desktop installation image was withdrawn after a bug caused the installer to crash when users selected the extended installation option. Other images and official flavors are unaffected. For the time being, if you try to download the graphical desktop version, the "Noble Numbat" download page is serving the 24.04.4 ISO image instead. The other versions on that page – Server, WSL2 image, and the Netboot version – are not affected. The issue only affects fresh installations: if you already have 24.04 installed, a full system update will result in 24.04.5 in the usual way. Version 24.04.5 is very likely to be the last point release of the 2024 Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu 26.04 is the latest LTS release, but 24.04 remains supported. As we reported when Resolute Raccoon launched in April, it uses Linux kernel 7.0, and that means that a new install of 24.04.5 comes with kernel 7.0 as well. This is part of Canonical's system of LTS Enablement stacks, also called Hardware Enablement or HWE, as we described back when 24.04.3 appeared in August 2025. The same applies if you upgrade an existing copy of 24.04. We upgraded one of our test laptops and it too got the new kernel version automatically. Kernel upgrades depend on which kernel track the installation follows. Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop defaults to HWE, while Server defaults to the original general-availability kernel; some desktops use an OEM kernel instead. HWE updates bring newer kernels and graphics support to an existing LTS release. A successful installation doesn't establish that every device or feature works correctly, or that later updates offer no benefit. As we wrote in January 2025, we have a couple of laptops with onboard Nvidia GPUs that need kernel 5.x to run the Nvidia binary drivers, so we downgraded them to Ubuntu 22.04's original 5.15 kernel. It still works and it's still getting bug fixes from Canonical. Alongside the newer kernel, the release includes a graphics stack based on Mesa 26.2. There's a detailed list of issues and fixes in the 24.04.5 release notes, as well as a list of security fixes in Ubuntu Security Notices. Here comes a stingray! (Ooh-wah, ooh-wah) In other Ubuntu update news, version 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is getting close. At the start of the month, the company announced in-progress development snapshot 3, and the beta is scheduled for September 24. Both a standard x86-64 installation image and a build optimized for processors supporting x86-64-v3 are on the download page. Post-install, it should be possible to switch to the newer-CPU binaries. As the June development roadmap specified, 26.10 is now in feature freeze, but a big one sneaked in right under the wire: it should come with Linux kernel 7.3. Kernel 7.2 came out last month, with the kernel team's new faster AI-assisted development cycle. The following version is already at RC-2 stage and the final version 7.3 should be out right around the same time as Stonking. If necessary, the Stingray may be set free with a pre-release kernel and updated within days. Canonical did promise earlier this year that it was aiming to make Ubuntu interim releases exciting again, and this would certainly qualify. GNOME 51 is nearly a month into its beta cycle and should appear a couple of weeks before Stonking. This release should also finish the process of replacing all the Unix-style core utilities with Rust versions. There should also be a version of the Myna speech-to-text tool, as we mentioned back in June. If you want to see the new look, there's a public Google Drive folder with the new wallpapers available now. ®