I set up a new laptop with Windows 11. Turns out you can (for the moment) ignore all the hardware requirements that have been discussed.
Because said laptop is Tiger Lake, the Windows 10 installer couldn't find
the SSD and wouldn't recognise any vendor drivers. Which makes installation
a bit problematic. So here's what I did:
Go here:
https://uupdump.net/
which has a tool to build a Windows 11 ISO image (something Microsoft don't offer at the present time). Run it, to generate an ISO of Insider Preview build 22000. I didn't need an Insider account to download it.
This ISO still couldn't find any NVMe drivers on my laptop. So I then
booted the ISO in QEMU - I set it to use UEFI but otherwise kept everything default. That means it models a Pentium 2 motherboard from 1996 (with an
Ice Lake CPU that the machine it was running on had). No TPM. It booted
Win11 just fine.
I installed Windows 11 to a virtual drive in QEMU. When it wanted me to
login to a Microsoft account, the trick is to put in a bogus email and password, which will fail. Then it allows you to create a local
account instead.
On the laptop I booted Ubuntu and use dd to write the virtual drive image to the NVMe drive (which Ubuntu could see happily)
I then rebooted the laptop into Windows 11. Lots of things didn't work
(touch screen, trackpad), but trackpoint and wifi did. So configure wifi
then off to Windows update and a long list of driver updates was available
to download.
Let it do that, reboot, I have a clean functional unactivated Windows 11 install without any cloud account. The laptop does have a TPM, but the
install in QEMU was quite happy to work without it.
The QEMU step was just to work around the foibles of my particular laptop,
but I think you could use this route to install Win11 on a wide range of machines, as it doesn't seem to be too fussy about the hardware it's
installing on.
Theo
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