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.
Unix most definitively allows you to name your home folder to whatever you want (within character convention) if you know what you are doing.
Yeah, every Linux distro I can recall installing within the last few years (and I’ve set up a lot of VMs lately), as well as macOS, has asked for a full name and a username, with the username being assigned as the name for the folder.
Same for me.
Worst case, you can use mklink to create an alias.
Login: joeuser
default user directory: /home/joeuser
/etc/passwd entry: joeuser:x:1000:1000::/home/joeuser:/bin/bash
as admin:
cd /home
mv joeuser someothername
vi /etc/passwd change
from: joeuser:x:1000:1000::/home/joeuser:/bin/bash
to: joeuser:x:1000:1000::/home/someothername:/bin/bash
New parameters:
Login: joeuser
user directory: /home/someothername
/etc/passwd entry: joeuser:x:1000:1000::/home/someothername:/bin/bash
Note that some distro’s allow you to set the directory name at the time the user ID is created.
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.
I’m transgender. I started using a different name last year, and wanted to change the folder name. Had to unlock the Administrator account, rename the folder, then fix it everywhere in the register. Ran into all kinds of trouble with software that uses alternative ways of hard storing paths to within my home folder for years.
It was not difficult, but it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing either.
I’m surprised by the stability of your Windows setup. :))))) I’d have expected your Windows installation to have expired at some point during your process of starting to use your new name, giving you an opportunity to change it.
I have a Windows setup that sees very little stress: browser, notepad++, flight simulator and hyper-v. Nothing else is installed. And yet it has started falling apart I have no idea why… Even just a very long period of patching seems to put it in a vulnerable state.
Don’t worry, it stopped booting altogether 2 months ago.
Just not because of the username change.
>I’m transgender
so why aren’t you using Arch or NixOS yet?
Am I missing a very obvious and funny joke here? I don’t get it.
My Steam Deck is running SteamOS, which is based on arch, btw.
Its just a bit of light joke that many trans people, transwomen in particular, that are the sort of nerd that browse tech sites so often use Arch or Nix. I personally dont have numbers to back it up but will say the 2 transwomen i have personally known that used Linux did use Arch
I wouldn’t even mind the default naming scheme if it actually used the entire left-hand side of my email address instead of the first 5 characters out of…6. It’s just one more letter!
I’ve never understood why they decided to make 5 the cutoff anyway. I could understand clipping it to the max length of a username. I could understand clipping it to 8 for historical reasons. But 5? It makes no sense.