This is the reason to use a VPN. Not to protect your identity, or to watch region-locked content, but to remove the need to blindly trust developers to always use best practice, and/or blindly trust the strangers that you share public networks with.
Out of curiosity, is that W11 Home or Pro? I don’t deal with home at all, I wonder if that’s the difference.
I successfully did it on a brand new Inspiron laptop yesterday morning. I do regular device configs for my organization, and the moment this stops working, I’ll be here to rage about it!
Since they mentioned the workarounds but didn’t explain them, I’m copying my comment from another post a couple of weeks ago.
Lemmy probably isn’t the target audience for this, here’s the steps to bypass the MS account requirement when setting up W11:
Configure your keyboard, but before you select your wifi network press Shift+(Fn)+F10 to open Command Prompt.
Type in the following command and press enter. Your computer will reboot: oobe\bypassnro
After the reboot, configure your keyboard and location settings, and click the option at the bottom of the page to say that you don’t want to connect to the internet
Click the link on the next page to “Continue with limited setup”, then follow the prompts to enter a username and password.
I just tried this, and it looks like it defaulted to Google maps. I’m guilty of having that set as my default at the moment, is that why?