There are no failures for Linux Desktop; this can never be the meaning. I say this with humor in mind.

Requiring me to have a cloud account to format my machine (mac) and requiring me to have a cloud account on only pre-authorized hardware (Windows 11), only to open up Notepad and see they slapped AI inside of it; now that is quite comparable to me slapping Linux on it.

Just sayin'

You don’t need any kind of account to erase a Mac.