I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.
Can confirm, I ran a server like this at a LAN party once, 90% legitimate players and then a couple who hadn't bought the game. From what I recall they had fun and bought the game later. No auth means someone could put in your name and steal your items, and you probably won't have a (non-default) skin, though I think you can even work around those issues with mods.
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
It isn't if you can afford enough lawyers to make microsoft's legal department blink at the cost of prosecution. If you can't drop $10K+ on a lawyer at the start though I would not put any money on winning.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
I moved to New Zealand from the US recently, and the tech industry here is mostly on .NET and Azure. My coworkers keep looking at me like I'm a moron because I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins and don't know their weird homebrew system to deploy things to our on prem windows servers.
Ignoring anticompetitive behavior, Windows is the only thing that works on most computers and is usable by most people. If you buy a computer, and it's not a MacBook, Windows is the only option.
I'm not convinced this is true in any sense at all anymore. Can you name a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux? I was gonna suggest maybe the surface tablets, but a quick googling suggest even they run it just fine.
20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not like you can install windows on that either, and there are projects with some progress towards running Linux on those too.
I started writing a long rant about my experience with Microsoft accounts, Minecraft and Microsoft Family whatever they call it. Parental controls and stuff. But I think I'll just agree with you. It sucks, it's confusing and is designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Wait, you can't play Minecraft on GNU/Linux anymore? I've bought the things for 10 bucks when it was still an alpha on TIGForum, it's been decade since I played the game but it never required us to be on a proprietary platform then.
I think they just meant that Microsoft owns Minecraft and you need an account with them these days. Java Edition stills runs on GNU/Linux last I checked.
>it's been decade since I played the game
Unfortunately you may have lost access to your account and thus copy of the game if you didn't do the two mandatory time-limited account migrations.
worse than minecraft is minecraft dungeons, there's a bug in the login page that hits the backend more than 100 times if, for some reason, something is incorrect, which will trigger anti-whatevers on your microsoft account, which means you can potentially lose your microsoft account.
I had to, for an hour, go through hoops logging into this microsoft service and update my recovery email so i could log into another service that wanted the recovery email as an auth factor, and even then: it happened again when i wanted to play my character on my switch instead of my PC.
i sincerely doubt i'll pay for minecraft dungeons 2, even though i do like the game, very barebones diablo-feeling.
