Hm. So are we all the way there to Win 11 not being installable in fully offline machines, or...? Because niche as that application is, it does sound like the start of a use case for a natively compatible Windows alternative from a third party (say, a FreeWin to go with FreeDOS). I know there are or have been some attempts, but... yeah, long term that seems like it would prompt more focus on something like that.
I suppose it's more likely that compatibility layers in other OSs would get there first and more practically, but still. Maybe it's time to move Windows applications from an ecosystem to a standard.
Not if a game runs with EAC. I'm aware there IS a variant of EAC for Linux, but quite a few games I got and enjoy won't boot up on Linux because they won't implement the EAC variant for it.
I’m sure enterprise editions have to allow it in some capacity. There will always be businesses that will use Windows on machines not exposed to the Internet.
With that said, this is some BS. And MS I don’t want to hear the argument that smartphone vendors do it. They shouldn’t require an account either.