I literally did an install of Win 11 this week - trying to stay offline didn't work, trying to enter false details didn't work, couldn't find any other tricks and so had to make yet another account.
Got it installed, added the family as users, tried to login to my young child's freshly minted account. Apart from taking forever, you then have to go through all the "let us copy all your data" and "we're going to advertise to you, so you may as well let us personalise the ads!" and so on ... and you have to do that for every member of the family ... it's an absolutely diabolical time suck.
And of course you can't, for goodness knows what reason, just point at the existing Win10 install to copy all the profiles and settings across.
From what I see the only working method for creating an offline account is during the windows setup when you press shift + F10 which will spawn a command line window where you have to enter "oobe\bypassnro" which will reboot the computer and on the wifi selection screen will give you a "I don't have an internet connection" button
Won't work though if you're Already configured for wifi
If buy a PC with windows 11 pro instead of home, you can also just click other options and choose "Domain join instead." you don't actually have to enter any domain info, etc it'll just have you create a local account.
Won't really help "regular" people since most off-the-shelf, i.e. Best Buy, computers come with Home but if you stick to business lines (ThinkPads, XPS, Latitude, Precision, EliteBook and ProBooks, etc.) you get Pro edition.
At this point I'm not sure why to upgrade to Windows 11? Win10 EOL is 10.2025. And then you can upgrade to Windows 12, which should be good because it's even (98 shit xp good vista shit 7 good 8 shit 10 good 11 shit...)
Got it installed, added the family as users, tried to login to my young child's freshly minted account. Apart from taking forever, you then have to go through all the "let us copy all your data" and "we're going to advertise to you, so you may as well let us personalise the ads!" and so on ... and you have to do that for every member of the family ... it's an absolutely diabolical time suck.
And of course you can't, for goodness knows what reason, just point at the existing Win10 install to copy all the profiles and settings across.
It all sucks.