It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11. The folder’s name is automatically generated based on your Microsoft account’s username or email address, something I’ve personally really disliked since I have been using thomholwerda for as long as I can remember.
Last year, they introduced an incredibly obtuse method of setting your own home folder name, but now the company is finally adding it as an optional step during the regular installation process.
Expanding on our work which started rolling to Insiders last fall, you can now choose a custom name for your user folder on the Device Name page when going through Windows setup. This most recent update now makes it easier to choose a custom name. The naming option is available during setup only. If you skip this step, Windows will use the default folder name and continue setup as usual.
↫ Windows Insider Program Team
This means you now have the option of defining your own home folder name, excluding CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³. It’s a very small change, and certainly not something that will turn Windows’ ship around, but at least it’s something that’s being done for users who actually care. It’s also such a small change, such a small addition, that one wonders why it’s taken them this long.
I’m assuming there’s already some incredibly complex and hacky way to change your automatically assigned home folder name by diving deep into the registry, converting your root drive back to FAT16, changing some values in a DLL file through a hex editor, and then converting back to NTFS, but this is clearly a much better way of handling it.
I’ve been using Windows more than 30 years, I’ve never once needed this feature.
As far as I can tell, neither Linux, MacOS, or FreeBSD have it either.
Every one of those make you set your home folder’s name.
Pretty sure they don’t allow spaces in filenames (and thus your home directory), while on Windows those spaces tend to lead to trouble with programming tools.
So very sweet of MicroSlop to “let” me choose a name for my home folder, yet at every update mslop forces their defaults over my mods. Please dont dont say “letting” because it aint its allowing but all features and settings that put their interest in the first seat is forced on every user. To me it sounds like look what we got in this hand to not look at what the other does, I wonder what features were forced on users this time.