this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Good thing I am no longer on it. Going forward if I ever get a new laptop I am going to setup linux mint (or another distro) on it right away, thus activating it without it. Being connected to the internet in the first place.
Btw for anonymity it is critical. While it will never make it anonymous, they want you to connect to the internet for your activation so they can register your device and the ID you used to sign up for it.
By bypassing all that they won't immediately know who owned it through whatever machine IDs computers have on them.
There's probably enough redundancy in such possibilities to track you not to care about this particular thing technically .
It's just an insult to the user and they are assholes, dealing with assholes is a bad sign similar to black cats crossing your path. Don't deal with assholes.
No need to explain this technically, you might think it's better, but you are implicitly supporting the idea that without hard proof it's fine that they are doing all those weird things. It's not, you don't have to prove anything. They are assholes, don't deal with them, don't keep taking insults. Simple.
That's why I said 'they won't immediately know' I never said they will never know or never have that information. The way how the system works today is that the best thing that can be done is try to be noise in the system than anonymous.
Wouldn't doing anything harder than usual be a flag about you then?