What's Microsoft thinking here? We got Windows on our kids' laptops and it's a pain to do anything with every time, just an amalgamation of decades worth of UIs held together with duct tape, looks terrible and performs even worse than it looks. When I'm thinking of the next big upgrade, Windows isn't even on the list of options anymore, and that's not even an ideological statement in any way.
I have been asking myself this question repeatedly for the last few months. Windows 11 offers absolutely nothing of substance over Windows 10 and more often than not manages to be less pleasant to use. The Office 365 eco system is a complete disaster of half implemented ideas, most of which can be described as would be pretty useful if it actually worked as advertised(power automate), wasn't abandoned in a half complete state(loosp), or if they implemented simple feature requests that the userbase is asking for(sharepoint). To top it all off they seem to be working tirelessly to ruin the products that actually work and are in demand, every couple of months they threaten to force users to switch to the 'modern' Outlook despite the fact that it still lacks a lot of features that are the very reason businesses still use Outlook in the first place.
I find I no longer integrate new apps/technology flows into my life because they either won't be supported or will be enshitified/weaponized against me. The future kind of sucks. My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on). Android just broke my phone, I can no longer just say 'hey android, play the news' and have it play headlines from real new organization that I specify. Instead it grabs news from I don't know where and gives me Google Gemini approved summaries (that Google states may or may not be accurate).
Recently I locked into my old Windows computer after not having done so in about a year and noticed a weird brown symbol prominently in the task bar. It was a promotion for world chocolate day...
My kid won't need a laptop for a few more years but i've been using linux and i'm planning on making them use linux. The privacy implications and learning potential could be worth it from an early age.
I have done this, and in many ways it has been one of the best parenting decisions I've made. My oldest is a better CLI user now than most engineers I work with, and it came almost entirely from him exploring the system and getting excited about all the cool things he can do. It also made it super easy for me to teach him more self-service things, everything from looking at system logs to see why the xbox controller or even the USB keyboard isn't working, to learning how the software stack is assembled.
For my other kids that don't care about that sort of stuff, even they have become very capable computer users. It's been easy for them to learn Windows and ChromeOS at school. I already see the same pattern of diving deeper developing with my youngest too.
One of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a parent is seeing the hacker spirit still very much alive.
Make sure they have at least a passing familiarity with Windows and it's apps because like it or not Windows is still the default in the school and working world so they'll have to work with that stuff to some degree. Otherwise go for it.
Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.
Purely anecdata, but my kids only use Linux at home and hadn't used anything else until they got (Windows and ChromeOS) computers at school, and they were able to get going quite easily. Honestly I think learning to use a mouse and keyboard is the hardest part since most of these kids grew up using tablets and phones as their first "computers."
Office compatibility still kind of sucks. It's very usable, but still quite a few papercuts. In my kids case though, Google Docs pretty much solves that problem so it's largely been a non-issue.
anecdote time: I have a Desktop and Laptop running Win11. Over the last month I noticed that when typing in notepad.exe, IT DROPS ABOUT 5% OF CHARACTERS TYPED!!!! On both my computers. How on earth Microsoft could F-Up Notepad (of all things) so badly that it fails at the ONE THING it's supposed to do, I have no idea. At the same time, I notice there is now Copilot integrated with Notepad.... coincidence?
Microsoft has spent the past two decades repositioning Windows from a flagship operating system into primarily a delivery vehicle for cloud services, subscriptions, and integrated apps. They are just not interested in providing the user with an OS anymore. For them it's a necessary evil nothing more.
Simply put the economics are behind a locked down click and drool style operating system with a manufacture controlled store that takes 30% of all gross.
The faster we can kill the Apple and Google store monopolies the faster we'll go back to having operating systems/phones that we can at least do something with.
We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.
I miss usable operating systems that don't feel like they were built for cavemen while people who know how to use them get to click more and more "Additional properties" buttons/links to get to actual useful settings.
They're also currently nakedly taking bribes from hardware manufacturers to force upgrades to Windows 11, creating a wave of completely unnecessary hardware purchases. I'm trying to figure out how to help a nontechnical parent run a bypass install to avoid throwing a perfectly fine laptop in the garbage.
It's so necessary to the functioning of Windows 11 that it can be bypassed and Windows 11 works fine. Sure...
We get Copilot at work. From what I can see the Copilot app is just the Copilot web interface in its own container and webview, though I've not gone poking at it.
Considering the web page in a browser can easily eat >5gb RAM just to display a single conversation (it's honestly mind boggling; how can something use 5gb of memory and a noticeable amount of CPU just to display relatively little and lightly formatted text?), having it self-contained makes killing it to reclaim memory easy.
For those of you wanting to get more angry, the "menu key" on my new Thinkpad has the default action of Copilot and the Copilot logo printed on it. On the other hand, he Ctrl key is finally in the -r-i-g-h-t- left place at least...
Web app is faster, has more features, easier to use. Copilot key is useless, it took me a while to figure out how to get it to open the M365 app, instead of the corporate blocked personal one, and then I used it zero times. Never think to use it and I found it has no practical purpose, except Microsoft marketing.
Interesting. It prompted me to install the microsoft store version which, when launched manually is identical to the web version. As the keyboard key brought up a web window telling me to install it, I assumed it just launched that.
I've tried the google sheets 'gemini' integration. And it is honestly not usable at all. It hallucinates much more than if I just download the data as CSV, upload to the actual gemini, and then ask the question.
It was so (comically) bad that I ended up sharing a lot of screenshots on my process trying to make it work with my team just for entertainment value lol.
One time I asked it to do a diff between "col A" and "col B" and it started telling me it was a "goddess of light" blabla. I'm assuming because the random values in col A and col B completely polluted it's context window so it spewed nonsense back.
EDIT: I know the article is about the MSFT counterpart products. I've not used those with Copilot so can't speak to their quality.
Going on a tangent from a tangent, I think that the 2*12h clock is a horrible idea that should have been rejected from the start, and the Product Manager who proposed it 3 thousand years ago should have been immediately put into the dungeons and fed only once a day at 12PM. Anyway, now we know better and there's no good excuse not to use a 24h clock as the default across all systems.
Do you have any other small examples of stuff I could try out to test-drive the Gemini integration for Google Sheets? My colleague tried it out to get it to make a chart, but it ended up failing at the task. It was hard for me to evaluate it though because it seems like when you use Gemini inside of Sheets, there's no way to share the conversation. That's horrifying, especially if it is responding back with delusions of grandeur.
I didn't really have any success with it. It just failed in different ways, usually small issues (like it only has context on the current sheet, so working with multiple sheets is an instance no-no).
But the goddess hallucination was the wildest and funniest one.
I hear constantly how in-demand this shit supposedly is and then every time I look around a corner LLMs are being stuffed into every damn thing and I'm left wondering how much of this alleged "engagement" is just because LLMs are in fucking everything now and it's impossible to run a lot of mainstream software without a few calls going to one or another of them.
I have never, ever, in my entire life, seen a tech work so hard to be everywhere while simultaneously not being very useful.
It makes me think of the '90s boy band 98 Degrees. They are having to give away tickets to their 2025 reunion tour to fill seats while other groups from that era have no problem selling out arenas at $200+ a pop.
I saw someone on here the other day honestly insisting that people just don't know what they want and need to be shown the new options.
No product in our entire history has been so aggressively pushed into everyone's face. If there's a person alive in modern society who hasn't had 4000 AI apps blasted at them... where are they and how do I achieve this nirvana?
An air-gapped 386, ASUS eee 900hd 901.. are my primary boxen, distained `netbooks' running SUSE 11.1 2008. I've idle 20 ARM rpi's, other 486's. My stack is emacs perl 5.0, gcc, TeX, pari/GP, maxima, and beautiful gpm transporter among tty terminals.
One 386 netbook runs xbuntu w/ firefox to waste hours in the dangerous wild except for HN. It's all a happy arrested-development `Smell of Teen Spirit' nook I continue growing in.
I really get sick of the comparisons to the iPhone and AWS and such.
Those things solved problems. Nobody needed to be convinced an iPhone was a good idea; it was an iPod, a PDA, and a newspaper stuffed into a device the size of a credit card that you carried around with you and worked no matter where you were. That's a GREAT idea. No one needed to be convinced about what made an iPhone (or Android, or even Blackberry) a useful and good thing.
Conversely, AWS made starting web businesses no longer require on premises servers, or really knowing anything about servers. You picked what you needed, and if you needed more at some point, you picked that. You could even dynamically allocate and deallocate servers on an incredibly widely available and robust data-center backend. That's HUGE. Numerous massive companies today may not have ever gotten started if not for AWS and it's now making far more money than Amazon's retail business does, and we know how huge it is because East-1 went down some years back, and a third of the freaking Internet stopped working correctly.
What problem even remotely on this level does an LLM solve?
LLMs can automate some tasks (especially basic coding), but with some major caveats:
- They have rapidly diminishing returns on higher contexts. They are very easy to overload with user information. You can post-train them, but that’s too much into actual computer science to be useful to the average office worker. They can work well as a co-worker assistant in a few cases, but they really can’t replace humans long term.
- LLMs only really work well when given the ability to call on-device tooling. Which, with a cloud system like Copilot, is going to be super tame and underwhelming because of lawsuits and various business deals. Tool calling is only really agnostic when you’re running the model yourself on your own device.
- On the topic of on-device models, there’s also the fact that AI provider companies have been caught evading things like robots.txt and causing so much crawling activity that it effectively becomes a DDoS attack. On-device AI doesn’t solve this totally, but most people likely won’t be pushing their gaming GPUs to the absolute limit 24/7 to constantly hit websites with crawl requests.
And having people complain when you do it lol if they were forcing a new hip version of minesweeper no one would care. But since it's AI garbage being forced on us, we're all mad.
Minesweeper, Solitaire and 3D Space Pinball are remembered fondly because they were entertaining and stayed out of the way. Copilot is the opposite of that. I don't need to see a Copilot prompt to "clean up my data" when I open an Excel file.
There's historical examples too, years ago people were pissed when Apple and U2 force downloaded their newly released album onto everyone's iPhone/Pod, and there's also the reverse where some highly anticipated game release will have servers overwhelmed by demand. It's hard to see any organic desire for AI in the general public, a new model releasing doesn't cause a wave of interest.
I mean, the vast majority of the time, I don't care. The one that actually did make me mad was Apple Messages getting pre-generated replies on every Messages window when you click into the field, which a) I don't want, and b), and this is the irritating part: the little popup thing that shows them so you can click them obstructs the Enter key from sending whatever you have typed. So you constantly have to either hit Escape to dismiss it, or click it away, before you can send what you actually want to send.
It's remarkably fucking annoying and is genuinely one of the worst UX decisions Apple has made in like a decade.
Just constantly repeat 'in-demand' until the dumbest executive at every major company is forcing some LLM product into every part of the operation in order to 'remain competitive'. I've seen first hand how useful AR can be for actually real world work by enhancing a flesh and blood human being's ability to do their job and the best device on the market is still the 6 year old Hololens 2. Microsoft just completely abandoned it in favor of something that most of the time says you the trouble of having to type something into a search bar.
And how are these companies measuring engagement? If they make it easy to accidentally click one of their "AI" buttons, does that count? Like in Clickup they put AI features on basically every single view they could and its incredibly easy to click one of them as their UI slowly loads from all the other third party junk they've added in.
It should be a huge red flag if companies have to force stuff on users.
lol you must be new here. To me this rhymes with web3 (kodak coin), web2 (google circle), and also web1 (pets.com). There will be a lot of failures, but the companies that get established in the space will be eeconomic goliaths.
Yeah that's fair. Many people will just never interact with cryptocurrency and all that at all. I don't. Supposedly BTC is worth $2.2T, which is somewhat of a large number, but it's all funny money from a certain point of view.
I really enjoyed that comment because if you read it in reverse, each subsequent "big thing" has had fewer and fewer goliaths emerge.
In terms of web3, I think you could broadly say Bitcoin (though it was large before web3 so that one's muddy) and Etherium. But even then... given what they are, I'm not sure in what sense these are meant to be Goliaths...? It's alternative payment processors that have incredibly low adoption compared to virtually every other. They're "big" in the sense that they have a lot of traction relative to other crypto, but I still have never used the shit even once and I do not feel I am missing out even slightly.
I've used LLMs FAR more than any crypto, and I still see it largely as a neat way to get out of writing boring code, and a good rubber duck to bounce ideas off of when debugging. I wouldn't pay for it if I had to.
The only thing I know crypto for is being the new and preferred payment method for scammers, and that you used to be able to buy drugs with it but not anymore. And godawful avatar collections, I guess. I wouldn't call that a Goliath myself but. shrug
VR has its gaming niche and thankfully doesn't insist on itself. Apple abandoned it fast and Zuckerberg eventually stopped embarrassing himself by trying to make Metaverse a crypto-powered Epstein island.
I recently bought a mini laptop with an Intel N100 chip that came with W11 pre-installed. My work PC is running some enterprise LTS version of Windows 10, which feels barely any different from Windows from the past 15 years or so.
Imagine my shock when I booted up W11. It felt like Bill Gates' wildest fantasies of vendor lock-in come to life, if the DOJ and EU cases never happened. A non-removable Edge icon on taskbar, Copilot bloat, lock screen widgets showing tabloid nonsense from MSN.com disguised as 'news'. Even the taskbar couldn't be oriented vertically!
Thankfully I was able to install Linux on it (Aurora, based on Fedora) on a separate partition, and wifi, touchscreen, usb and other things work. I hadn't tried Linux at all in over 10 years, and was worried about bricking the machine. With W11 being this bad, it was more than worth it!
- You can opt out (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot > Enable the "Turn off Windows Copilot" policy)
- You won't get it if you're in the EU
- You'll only get it if you have an M365 app installed (not all windows users)
I don’t think it’s clickbait to say that Microsoft is forcing Copilot onto people’s computers just because they let you opt out if you know exactly where to go in the group policy editor, or that they know they can’t get away with pushing their AI service over Windows Update to force adoption in areas that actually bother regulating tech companies. I’m tired of Microsoft pulling bullshit like this and then people say “oh but you can turn it off if you dig through the group policy editor” or “you can opt out if you make this specific registry key”. Maybe I don’t enjoy having an adversarial relationship with my computer.
Microsoft is constantly trying to push the envelope to see what they can get away with. Anyone defending this kind of crap hasn't been paying attention for the last 20 friggin years
It's "your computer" but it's "their OS". Go ahead and switch to Linux but the "systemd / snap packages / telementry etc. is being forced on my distro" complaints is exactly the same "adversarial relationship with my computer"(sic).
If you want things exactly your way, there's the Gentoo route if you don't mind supporting it yourself.
I’ve been playing around with Fedora KDE more lately and it’s made me realize how vertically integrated Windows is. Like there’s all these edge cases (too many to list) that Windows has taken care of years ago, whereas on Linux you’re usually downloading some 3rd party app that feels rough when installed. Or it’s something the kernel expects a driver to implement, but Windows handles it natively in Microsoft’s code.
When you think of it in a supply chain sense, Linux is one giant outsourcing operation and a whole bunch of “not my problem” project management styles.
That's strange, because in my time using Fedora it was far and away the most vertically integrated Linux distro I've ever used.
It had the fewest Linux-typical papercuts, it was well-documented, and most importantly required the least amount of system tinkering I've ever done on Linux, allowing me to use my operating system to actually operate my system. It wasn't as turnkey as macOS, wasn't as compatible as Windows, and wasn't as "tinker" friendly as other distros, but it _worked_.
Then again, I was using the default GNOME spin, and I also try to meet OS's in the middle instead of brazenly insisting on my way or the highway. But it _is_ used as a base for RHEL, so it's not like Fedora is a typical stone soup distro either.
This is my experience too, I distrohopped for about 2-3 years, and then when I found fedora it just clicked. I've been using it exclusively ever since. It was my first experience with vanilla GNOME and like you I wanted to meet the OS in the middle. The stability while still having reasonably up-to-date packages is so pleasant and everything felt like it was part of a whole in a way that my prior experimentation with arch and its derivatives and the different ubuntu skins didn't fully achive.
I've migrated to Fedora KDE recently after having used Windows since childhood. Honestly it's not that bad. I mean, it's not good either - there are lots of random bugs or strange UI decisions - but all in all, it's not bad. I wouldn't install it on my mom's machine, but any tech-savvy person can use Fedora KDE with relative comfort. As in, the rough edges are there, but you won't hurt yourself if you know how to hold it.
Most don't know anything about it. Those who jump in to defend it constantly will keep calling anti-systemd people names even after it has a hard dependency on an IBM AI.
Yes, thanks for confirming what I wrote... Uh, wait a moment, what? Most Linux users know nothing about systemd? Are we talking about the same Linux, the OS whose main users are developers and sysadmins?
> even after it has a hard dependency on an IBM AI
What are you on about? Nothing of the sort has happened.
I feel like one could imagine some hypothetical Linux distro that works out of the box, has some baseline level of coherency and polish without you having to get your hands dirty, and also hasn’t been enshittified.
I have no idea what distro fits the bill the best, but surely it’s not like the only two options are: “be treated with no respect as the user” and “sink all of your time into into fixing things up”
Like how Linux Mint doesn’t force snaps on you like Ubuntu does. Probably not it, but one step of many in the right direction. Plain Debian is probably pretty close.
> I would swear I removed copilot from a Dell laptop I just purchased for my father, and it came back after a major update. I could be wrong.
I've had feature-update crapware get reinstalled twice, some reinsallations happen only after a reboot and/or 5-10min delay. So upgrade, clean. Reboot, clean again. Reboot, wait 10 min, clean again.
This during the last year and for dozens of machines.
OneDrive is a love/hate relationship for me. Yeah, it’s invasive. But it’s private [1], secure, and cheap (relatively) file storage. And very few of its competitors integrate into Windows Explorer in the way OneDrive does (even though the APIs are all there for everyone to use).
[1] OneDrive privacy confirmed by my own consumer complaint to the Washington State Office of the Attorney General over ambiguities related to AI training and general privacy in Microsoft’s documentation. Both my complaint and Microsoft’s official response are subject to public record and can be legally actionable in the future.
I'm dreaming of a day to come where all people on earth get a bare minimum of freedom to install, remove and disable whatever piece of software on their devices. As a non-EU citizen, I have to confess I'm having some jealous feeling of European citizens because they have a superior authority fighting big companies on behalf of them.
You may benefit from a non-socialist economy. I pay my best engineer 60k€, so 39.9 after tax, total cost 90k€ for me, and he couldn’t find an MD (the dedicated family doctor - so he has to pay any doctor with a 15€ surplus).
In exchange, we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€ and we don’t have Copilot on our computer. We don’t have the translation on Airpods, and we have to click all cookie banners.
>we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€
Now do broadway in New York. Hell, do off-broadway in new york and it's either barely the same price or even more expensive. Are you sarcastically making the opposite point, I can't tell.
It’s not you can opt-out, it‘s you have to opt-out. Imagine every software vendor would install its software as a opt-out. MS abuses its power over the OS
I miss those innocent days in the early 2000's when Microsoft was still evil but the internet's non-ubiquity meant they couldn't realistically expect to force this kind of thing on their users.
Reality is really in a bad place when kids who grew up listening to Franz Ferdinand are nostalgic for Windows Vista. It's like a Slovenian nostalgic for Tito.
If you find yourself needing to install Windows 11 for some reason (I'm doing my best to avoid it), you can try this to create a stripped-down Windows 11 installer with most of the crap removed:
I had resisted upgrading to Windows 11 and was just on the cusp of doing it, but now I will never, ever upgrade. I don't care about security aspect of Windows 10 anymore. I don't trust Microsoft. They had a few good years after Nadella joined where they were doing decent things but now they have resumed their monopolistic behavior and shoving things down our throats like Recall and this shit and I'm done with it. I'll switch to MacOS before I upgrade to Windows 11.
If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on, then I too will switch to that before Win11. I can't believe MS removed functionality in Win11 that is part of the daily workflows of so many users, and just said "GFY, we're never putting it back!"
If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on...
MacOS already does that. You're not going to drag a video file to the spreadsheet app icon with much success, but if the app knows how to handle it then it will work. I can't imagine using an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality.
Yep you can drag a file onto the doc on an app icon to have the app in question open the file (assuming it was meant to run that file).
I gotta say, I'm not a Windows user anymore, but it would drive me nuts if I couldn't do that.
Finder (the MacOS version of File Explorer on Windows) is an app you commonly interact with every day for several minutes. If it doesn't work well that's hours of your life you spend fighting the system instead of getting things done.
Those are the kinds of things that made me move away from Windows 10 years ago.
Isn't it the same for pretty much any system nowadays? Some just since the issue by not shutting down, just some sort of sleep. I cannot power off my car, it only goes to sleep.
I wish it was the same for me. Nucleus coop is windows only and so many mods work only there,so I still need windows for gaming. I'm with you though ,I wish I could completely swap
We recently replaced my wife's aging Windows PC with a Mac Mini, which eliminated the last Windows machine in our household. It feels good to be free of it, and our Macs handle World of Warcraft – the only game either of us play – without any problems.
If you want a more curated experience that takes a lot of the rough edges off Linux: https://bazzite.gg
Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on
I just run Debian Trixie with almost no problems. I build the kernels I use off the upstream release cycle (so, 6.17-rc6 right now). I build with LLVM Full LTO, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I want to find bugs in it :)
For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.
Thankfully I don't want and will never want any games that infect my systems with "anti-cheat" malware so I see the lack of support for it as a feature.
consoles are already a 2nd class platform and that works for a lot of people.
I suppose a new 2nd class platform will make consoles a third class platform
My parents specifically need MS Office. LibreOffice won't do the job for them, because they deal with a lot of documents sent to them by other people, and also they're used to the interface.
I disabled all Windows updates last October because 24H2 absolutely tanked performance of games. Various reports around the internet claim that its still a problem. So no more updates for me, of any kind.
I once wrote a blog post called “Never update anything” about how updates suck, but even so I would just deal with it, because you probably want the security fixes.
More than them, they should adore companies whose updates come with unwanted features and fresh new bugs that lead to this behavior. I have never been afraid of Debian stable / Fedora updates but I am always weary of Windows and Android updates.
To any microsoft workers: is this stuff really getting zero pushback internally? It is clear power users don’t want it and that is sort of who copilot is pitched towards vs the masses.
What makes you think the Windows group gives a shit about what some random in DevTools thinks about their product? There's probably all kinds of internal pushback, but I would question how much straw polling is being done.
My work PC has the app, because but like Onedrive and NewOutlook, the Windows app has fewer features, more bugs, and is more difficult to use that the Web app. At this rate Linux with Microsoft Web apps will have superior feature set than their 'Native' Windows apps.
I installed Linux - Debian 13 with the Gnome desktop - on a few machines which used to only run Windows. These machines are used by non-technical family members aged 14 to 50. When starting the machine they get the choice between booting either Debian or Windows with files on the older Windows installs being available from within the Linux sessions.
I recently checked which system was used most and was surprised to see that this ended up being Debian, on some machines Windows was not even started after I explained the workings of the machines. Linux has been 'ready for the desktop' for decades now while Microsoft is doing its best to make Windows less and less suitable for general-purpose desktop use. Even their former strongholds have withered, especially gaming is now better done on Linux than on recent Windows iterations. I suspect they know this and are trying to reap the last remaining fruit before the plantation succumbs to the self-inflicted disease since I see no other explanation for their clearly user-hostile actions.
I agree that Linux has been fine for Desktop use for most people for some while. With two caveats, the user doesn't want to install random AAA competitive multiplayer games, and the user doesn't have to administer the system themselves.
What's Microsoft thinking here? We got Windows on our kids' laptops and it's a pain to do anything with every time, just an amalgamation of decades worth of UIs held together with duct tape, looks terrible and performs even worse than it looks. When I'm thinking of the next big upgrade, Windows isn't even on the list of options anymore, and that's not even an ideological statement in any way.
I have been asking myself this question repeatedly for the last few months. Windows 11 offers absolutely nothing of substance over Windows 10 and more often than not manages to be less pleasant to use. The Office 365 eco system is a complete disaster of half implemented ideas, most of which can be described as would be pretty useful if it actually worked as advertised(power automate), wasn't abandoned in a half complete state(loosp), or if they implemented simple feature requests that the userbase is asking for(sharepoint). To top it all off they seem to be working tirelessly to ruin the products that actually work and are in demand, every couple of months they threaten to force users to switch to the 'modern' Outlook despite the fact that it still lacks a lot of features that are the very reason businesses still use Outlook in the first place.
Windows 11 has round corners.
Someone wanted to make it kid-safe. Except they didn't notice that they are designing a software UI and not a wooden cupboard.
I find I no longer integrate new apps/technology flows into my life because they either won't be supported or will be enshitified/weaponized against me. The future kind of sucks. My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on). Android just broke my phone, I can no longer just say 'hey android, play the news' and have it play headlines from real new organization that I specify. Instead it grabs news from I don't know where and gives me Google Gemini approved summaries (that Google states may or may not be accurate).
Recently I locked into my old Windows computer after not having done so in about a year and noticed a weird brown symbol prominently in the task bar. It was a promotion for world chocolate day...
Windows exists to perpetuate the next promotion cycle of people working inside of Windows.
My kid won't need a laptop for a few more years but i've been using linux and i'm planning on making them use linux. The privacy implications and learning potential could be worth it from an early age.
I have done this, and in many ways it has been one of the best parenting decisions I've made. My oldest is a better CLI user now than most engineers I work with, and it came almost entirely from him exploring the system and getting excited about all the cool things he can do. It also made it super easy for me to teach him more self-service things, everything from looking at system logs to see why the xbox controller or even the USB keyboard isn't working, to learning how the software stack is assembled.
For my other kids that don't care about that sort of stuff, even they have become very capable computer users. It's been easy for them to learn Windows and ChromeOS at school. I already see the same pattern of diving deeper developing with my youngest too.
One of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a parent is seeing the hacker spirit still very much alive.
Make sure they have at least a passing familiarity with Windows and it's apps because like it or not Windows is still the default in the school and working world so they'll have to work with that stuff to some degree. Otherwise go for it.
Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.
As a long term *nix user(FreeBSD and Linux) forced to use Windows for work,
I observe that every few years Windows is completely changed. It’s a total hodgepodge of decades of crap. That’s the only thing you need to know.
Purely anecdata, but my kids only use Linux at home and hadn't used anything else until they got (Windows and ChromeOS) computers at school, and they were able to get going quite easily. Honestly I think learning to use a mouse and keyboard is the hardest part since most of these kids grew up using tablets and phones as their first "computers."
Office compatibility still kind of sucks. It's very usable, but still quite a few papercuts. In my kids case though, Google Docs pretty much solves that problem so it's largely been a non-issue.
anecdote time: I have a Desktop and Laptop running Win11. Over the last month I noticed that when typing in notepad.exe, IT DROPS ABOUT 5% OF CHARACTERS TYPED!!!! On both my computers. How on earth Microsoft could F-Up Notepad (of all things) so badly that it fails at the ONE THING it's supposed to do, I have no idea. At the same time, I notice there is now Copilot integrated with Notepad.... coincidence?
Microsoft has spent the past two decades repositioning Windows from a flagship operating system into primarily a delivery vehicle for cloud services, subscriptions, and integrated apps. They are just not interested in providing the user with an OS anymore. For them it's a necessary evil nothing more.
Simply put the economics are behind a locked down click and drool style operating system with a manufacture controlled store that takes 30% of all gross.
The faster we can kill the Apple and Google store monopolies the faster we'll go back to having operating systems/phones that we can at least do something with.
We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.
I miss usable operating systems that don't feel like they were built for cavemen while people who know how to use them get to click more and more "Additional properties" buttons/links to get to actual useful settings.
Install Linux, they would come out wiser and perhaps even learn how to code.
Windows should be considered mental health hazard.
I completely agree with your latter point after being a windows dev on and off since windows 3.0. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster.
They're also currently nakedly taking bribes from hardware manufacturers to force upgrades to Windows 11, creating a wave of completely unnecessary hardware purchases. I'm trying to figure out how to help a nontechnical parent run a bypass install to avoid throwing a perfectly fine laptop in the garbage.
It's so necessary to the functioning of Windows 11 that it can be bypassed and Windows 11 works fine. Sure...
Thinking? Plan?
Only thing going on is maximising capital extraction from the moat they created. End users no longer matter as long as the numbers keep going up.
> What's Microsoft thinking here?
An upsell and way to justify their 3 trillion marketcap
We get Copilot at work. From what I can see the Copilot app is just the Copilot web interface in its own container and webview, though I've not gone poking at it.
Considering the web page in a browser can easily eat >5gb RAM just to display a single conversation (it's honestly mind boggling; how can something use 5gb of memory and a noticeable amount of CPU just to display relatively little and lightly formatted text?), having it self-contained makes killing it to reclaim memory easy.
For those of you wanting to get more angry, the "menu key" on my new Thinkpad has the default action of Copilot and the Copilot logo printed on it. On the other hand, he Ctrl key is finally in the -r-i-g-h-t- left place at least...
Brother, I feel you on the thinkpad Ctrl key. I cannot understand how someone thought that was an acceptable idea.
at least it has forever been swappable with fn
Web app is faster, has more features, easier to use. Copilot key is useless, it took me a while to figure out how to get it to open the M365 app, instead of the corporate blocked personal one, and then I used it zero times. Never think to use it and I found it has no practical purpose, except Microsoft marketing.
Interesting. It prompted me to install the microsoft store version which, when launched manually is identical to the web version. As the keyboard key brought up a web window telling me to install it, I assumed it just launched that.
This is a great sign that uptake is low and someone needs a good Q4 on their performance figures for bonus season.
I've tried the google sheets 'gemini' integration. And it is honestly not usable at all. It hallucinates much more than if I just download the data as CSV, upload to the actual gemini, and then ask the question.
It was so (comically) bad that I ended up sharing a lot of screenshots on my process trying to make it work with my team just for entertainment value lol.
One time I asked it to do a diff between "col A" and "col B" and it started telling me it was a "goddess of light" blabla. I'm assuming because the random values in col A and col B completely polluted it's context window so it spewed nonsense back.
EDIT: I know the article is about the MSFT counterpart products. I've not used those with Copilot so can't speak to their quality.
I got an email from a client about a meeting at 2PM on Gmail. Their AI automatically added an 2AM slot to my calendar and it cannot even be removed
Going on a tangent from a tangent, I think that the 2*12h clock is a horrible idea that should have been rejected from the start, and the Product Manager who proposed it 3 thousand years ago should have been immediately put into the dungeons and fed only once a day at 12PM. Anyway, now we know better and there's no good excuse not to use a 24h clock as the default across all systems.
Do you have any other small examples of stuff I could try out to test-drive the Gemini integration for Google Sheets? My colleague tried it out to get it to make a chart, but it ended up failing at the task. It was hard for me to evaluate it though because it seems like when you use Gemini inside of Sheets, there's no way to share the conversation. That's horrifying, especially if it is responding back with delusions of grandeur.
I didn't really have any success with it. It just failed in different ways, usually small issues (like it only has context on the current sheet, so working with multiple sheets is an instance no-no).
But the goddess hallucination was the wildest and funniest one.
> it started telling me it was a "goddess of light" blabla
The dimensional merge is real! Did it also start talking about how it's a Hyperdimension Neptunia CPU?
I feel like I'm missing a reference haha :D
It's a reference to Chris-Chan lore which, to be fair, has become incomprehensibly deep.
I hear constantly how in-demand this shit supposedly is and then every time I look around a corner LLMs are being stuffed into every damn thing and I'm left wondering how much of this alleged "engagement" is just because LLMs are in fucking everything now and it's impossible to run a lot of mainstream software without a few calls going to one or another of them.
I have never, ever, in my entire life, seen a tech work so hard to be everywhere while simultaneously not being very useful.
It makes me think of the '90s boy band 98 Degrees. They are having to give away tickets to their 2025 reunion tour to fill seats while other groups from that era have no problem selling out arenas at $200+ a pop.
I saw someone on here the other day honestly insisting that people just don't know what they want and need to be shown the new options.
No product in our entire history has been so aggressively pushed into everyone's face. If there's a person alive in modern society who hasn't had 4000 AI apps blasted at them... where are they and how do I achieve this nirvana?
An air-gapped 386, ASUS eee 900hd 901.. are my primary boxen, distained `netbooks' running SUSE 11.1 2008. I've idle 20 ARM rpi's, other 486's. My stack is emacs perl 5.0, gcc, TeX, pari/GP, maxima, and beautiful gpm transporter among tty terminals.
One 386 netbook runs xbuntu w/ firefox to waste hours in the dangerous wild except for HN. It's all a happy arrested-development `Smell of Teen Spirit' nook I continue growing in.
I really get sick of the comparisons to the iPhone and AWS and such.
Those things solved problems. Nobody needed to be convinced an iPhone was a good idea; it was an iPod, a PDA, and a newspaper stuffed into a device the size of a credit card that you carried around with you and worked no matter where you were. That's a GREAT idea. No one needed to be convinced about what made an iPhone (or Android, or even Blackberry) a useful and good thing.
Conversely, AWS made starting web businesses no longer require on premises servers, or really knowing anything about servers. You picked what you needed, and if you needed more at some point, you picked that. You could even dynamically allocate and deallocate servers on an incredibly widely available and robust data-center backend. That's HUGE. Numerous massive companies today may not have ever gotten started if not for AWS and it's now making far more money than Amazon's retail business does, and we know how huge it is because East-1 went down some years back, and a third of the freaking Internet stopped working correctly.
What problem even remotely on this level does an LLM solve?
LLMs can automate some tasks (especially basic coding), but with some major caveats:
- They have rapidly diminishing returns on higher contexts. They are very easy to overload with user information. You can post-train them, but that’s too much into actual computer science to be useful to the average office worker. They can work well as a co-worker assistant in a few cases, but they really can’t replace humans long term.
- LLMs only really work well when given the ability to call on-device tooling. Which, with a cloud system like Copilot, is going to be super tame and underwhelming because of lawsuits and various business deals. Tool calling is only really agnostic when you’re running the model yourself on your own device.
- On the topic of on-device models, there’s also the fact that AI provider companies have been caught evading things like robots.txt and causing so much crawling activity that it effectively becomes a DDoS attack. On-device AI doesn’t solve this totally, but most people likely won’t be pushing their gaming GPUs to the absolute limit 24/7 to constantly hit websites with crawl requests.
>> What problem even remotely on this level does an LLM solve?
Translation problem. Google Translate does job poorly, if you compare with chatgpt. Especially if there are mix of languages in input.
Basic search of common, Wikipedia-level knowledge, to explain something. LLM is good at it.
> Nobody needed to be convinced an iPhone was a good idea
It still took a couple of years, though.
Of course in hindsight its rather obvious. But there were other smartphones and they were (on paper at least) superior in quite a few ways.
> It still took a couple of years, though.
I mean was that because of the iPhone as a concept or because it debuted as an exclusive on the worst cell carrier in the United States lol
Nothing says "this product is useful and people want it" quite like having to force it onto users' computers.
And having people complain when you do it lol if they were forcing a new hip version of minesweeper no one would care. But since it's AI garbage being forced on us, we're all mad.
Minesweeper, Solitaire and 3D Space Pinball are remembered fondly because they were entertaining and stayed out of the way. Copilot is the opposite of that. I don't need to see a Copilot prompt to "clean up my data" when I open an Excel file.
There's historical examples too, years ago people were pissed when Apple and U2 force downloaded their newly released album onto everyone's iPhone/Pod, and there's also the reverse where some highly anticipated game release will have servers overwhelmed by demand. It's hard to see any organic desire for AI in the general public, a new model releasing doesn't cause a wave of interest.
I mean, the vast majority of the time, I don't care. The one that actually did make me mad was Apple Messages getting pre-generated replies on every Messages window when you click into the field, which a) I don't want, and b), and this is the irritating part: the little popup thing that shows them so you can click them obstructs the Enter key from sending whatever you have typed. So you constantly have to either hit Escape to dismiss it, or click it away, before you can send what you actually want to send.
It's remarkably fucking annoying and is genuinely one of the worst UX decisions Apple has made in like a decade.
Wow, that sounds awful! The one that keeps bothering me is the Google AI Mode popup. Every time I google anything.
Just constantly repeat 'in-demand' until the dumbest executive at every major company is forcing some LLM product into every part of the operation in order to 'remain competitive'. I've seen first hand how useful AR can be for actually real world work by enhancing a flesh and blood human being's ability to do their job and the best device on the market is still the 6 year old Hololens 2. Microsoft just completely abandoned it in favor of something that most of the time says you the trouble of having to type something into a search bar.
And how are these companies measuring engagement? If they make it easy to accidentally click one of their "AI" buttons, does that count? Like in Clickup they put AI features on basically every single view they could and its incredibly easy to click one of them as their UI slowly loads from all the other third party junk they've added in.
It should be a huge red flag if companies have to force stuff on users.
lol you must be new here. To me this rhymes with web3 (kodak coin), web2 (google circle), and also web1 (pets.com). There will be a lot of failures, but the companies that get established in the space will be eeconomic goliaths.
what are the goliaths from web3?
I feel like that one still hasn't really worked out, and I do occasionally use Bitcoin to buy things
Yeah that's fair. Many people will just never interact with cryptocurrency and all that at all. I don't. Supposedly BTC is worth $2.2T, which is somewhat of a large number, but it's all funny money from a certain point of view.
It's very funny to hear this because a few years ago the concept was "everyone will be using this" and that hype was supporting the price
I really enjoyed that comment because if you read it in reverse, each subsequent "big thing" has had fewer and fewer goliaths emerge.
In terms of web3, I think you could broadly say Bitcoin (though it was large before web3 so that one's muddy) and Etherium. But even then... given what they are, I'm not sure in what sense these are meant to be Goliaths...? It's alternative payment processors that have incredibly low adoption compared to virtually every other. They're "big" in the sense that they have a lot of traction relative to other crypto, but I still have never used the shit even once and I do not feel I am missing out even slightly.
I've used LLMs FAR more than any crypto, and I still see it largely as a neat way to get out of writing boring code, and a good rubber duck to bounce ideas off of when debugging. I wouldn't pay for it if I had to.
The only thing I know crypto for is being the new and preferred payment method for scammers, and that you used to be able to buy drugs with it but not anymore. And godawful avatar collections, I guess. I wouldn't call that a Goliath myself but. shrug
You forgot about VR headsets.
VR has its gaming niche and thankfully doesn't insist on itself. Apple abandoned it fast and Zuckerberg eventually stopped embarrassing himself by trying to make Metaverse a crypto-powered Epstein island.
[dead]
Q2 you mean? Would be pretty easy to look at their fiscal year before speculating something that makes no sense.
The point is still perfectly valid. What's the use in being pedantic and rude?
I recently bought a mini laptop with an Intel N100 chip that came with W11 pre-installed. My work PC is running some enterprise LTS version of Windows 10, which feels barely any different from Windows from the past 15 years or so.
Imagine my shock when I booted up W11. It felt like Bill Gates' wildest fantasies of vendor lock-in come to life, if the DOJ and EU cases never happened. A non-removable Edge icon on taskbar, Copilot bloat, lock screen widgets showing tabloid nonsense from MSN.com disguised as 'news'. Even the taskbar couldn't be oriented vertically!
Thankfully I was able to install Linux on it (Aurora, based on Fedora) on a separate partition, and wifi, touchscreen, usb and other things work. I hadn't tried Linux at all in over 10 years, and was worried about bricking the machine. With W11 being this bad, it was more than worth it!
Less clickbait coverage from ghacks: Copilot App will install automatically on Windows for many users, but there are exceptions https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/15/copilot-app-will-install-a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249782)
Notably:
- You can opt out (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot > Enable the "Turn off Windows Copilot" policy)
- You won't get it if you're in the EU
- You'll only get it if you have an M365 app installed (not all windows users)
I don’t think it’s clickbait to say that Microsoft is forcing Copilot onto people’s computers just because they let you opt out if you know exactly where to go in the group policy editor, or that they know they can’t get away with pushing their AI service over Windows Update to force adoption in areas that actually bother regulating tech companies. I’m tired of Microsoft pulling bullshit like this and then people say “oh but you can turn it off if you dig through the group policy editor” or “you can opt out if you make this specific registry key”. Maybe I don’t enjoy having an adversarial relationship with my computer.
Microsoft is constantly trying to push the envelope to see what they can get away with. Anyone defending this kind of crap hasn't been paying attention for the last 20 friggin years
It's "your computer" but it's "their OS". Go ahead and switch to Linux but the "systemd / snap packages / telementry etc. is being forced on my distro" complaints is exactly the same "adversarial relationship with my computer"(sic).
If you want things exactly your way, there's the Gentoo route if you don't mind supporting it yourself.
I’ve been playing around with Fedora KDE more lately and it’s made me realize how vertically integrated Windows is. Like there’s all these edge cases (too many to list) that Windows has taken care of years ago, whereas on Linux you’re usually downloading some 3rd party app that feels rough when installed. Or it’s something the kernel expects a driver to implement, but Windows handles it natively in Microsoft’s code.
When you think of it in a supply chain sense, Linux is one giant outsourcing operation and a whole bunch of “not my problem” project management styles.
That's strange, because in my time using Fedora it was far and away the most vertically integrated Linux distro I've ever used.
It had the fewest Linux-typical papercuts, it was well-documented, and most importantly required the least amount of system tinkering I've ever done on Linux, allowing me to use my operating system to actually operate my system. It wasn't as turnkey as macOS, wasn't as compatible as Windows, and wasn't as "tinker" friendly as other distros, but it _worked_.
Then again, I was using the default GNOME spin, and I also try to meet OS's in the middle instead of brazenly insisting on my way or the highway. But it _is_ used as a base for RHEL, so it's not like Fedora is a typical stone soup distro either.
This is my experience too, I distrohopped for about 2-3 years, and then when I found fedora it just clicked. I've been using it exclusively ever since. It was my first experience with vanilla GNOME and like you I wanted to meet the OS in the middle. The stability while still having reasonably up-to-date packages is so pleasant and everything felt like it was part of a whole in a way that my prior experimentation with arch and its derivatives and the different ubuntu skins didn't fully achive.
I've migrated to Fedora KDE recently after having used Windows since childhood. Honestly it's not that bad. I mean, it's not good either - there are lots of random bugs or strange UI decisions - but all in all, it's not bad. I wouldn't install it on my mom's machine, but any tech-savvy person can use Fedora KDE with relative comfort. As in, the rough edges are there, but you won't hurt yourself if you know how to hold it.
Most Linux users don't have an adversarial relationship with systemd.
Most don't know anything about it. Those who jump in to defend it constantly will keep calling anti-systemd people names even after it has a hard dependency on an IBM AI.
> Most don't know anything about it.
Yes, thanks for confirming what I wrote... Uh, wait a moment, what? Most Linux users know nothing about systemd? Are we talking about the same Linux, the OS whose main users are developers and sysadmins?
> even after it has a hard dependency on an IBM AI
What are you on about? Nothing of the sort has happened.
I feel like one could imagine some hypothetical Linux distro that works out of the box, has some baseline level of coherency and polish without you having to get your hands dirty, and also hasn’t been enshittified.
I have no idea what distro fits the bill the best, but surely it’s not like the only two options are: “be treated with no respect as the user” and “sink all of your time into into fixing things up”
Like how Linux Mint doesn’t force snaps on you like Ubuntu does. Probably not it, but one step of many in the right direction. Plain Debian is probably pretty close.
Zorin fits this bill, IMO. I install it for all kinds of non-tech folks and they all seem to be fine with it.
It's only "your" computer insofar that you're the only person using it.
Well, assuming your AV software is updated and active.
Quick correction: You won't get it if you're in the EEA, which the EU is a subset of.
Sincerely, a Norwegian guy who thinks the difference is important.
A clean windows install these days comes with those apps. It is there by default.
I would swear I removed copilot from a Dell laptop I just purchased for my father, and it came back after a major update. I could be wrong.
> I would swear I removed copilot from a Dell laptop I just purchased for my father, and it came back after a major update. I could be wrong.
I've had feature-update crapware get reinstalled twice, some reinsallations happen only after a reboot and/or 5-10min delay. So upgrade, clean. Reboot, clean again. Reboot, wait 10 min, clean again.
This during the last year and for dozens of machines.
OneDrive is very persistent. Every major upgrade seems like.
Didn't they get hauled in front of congress for stuff like this back in the 90's?
I feel like they are playing with fire. Once anti-trust comes back into vogue, this is going to be big trouble for them.
OneDrive is a love/hate relationship for me. Yeah, it’s invasive. But it’s private [1], secure, and cheap (relatively) file storage. And very few of its competitors integrate into Windows Explorer in the way OneDrive does (even though the APIs are all there for everyone to use).
[1] OneDrive privacy confirmed by my own consumer complaint to the Washington State Office of the Attorney General over ambiguities related to AI training and general privacy in Microsoft’s documentation. Both my complaint and Microsoft’s official response are subject to public record and can be legally actionable in the future.
I'd love to read more about it - I have privacy concerns about ever giving anything personal over to Microsoft. Can you link those?
> You won't get it if you're in the EU
I'm dreaming of a day to come where all people on earth get a bare minimum of freedom to install, remove and disable whatever piece of software on their devices. As a non-EU citizen, I have to confess I'm having some jealous feeling of European citizens because they have a superior authority fighting big companies on behalf of them.
You may benefit from a non-socialist economy. I pay my best engineer 60k€, so 39.9 after tax, total cost 90k€ for me, and he couldn’t find an MD (the dedicated family doctor - so he has to pay any doctor with a 15€ surplus).
In exchange, we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€ and we don’t have Copilot on our computer. We don’t have the translation on Airpods, and we have to click all cookie banners.
If I had a visa for the USA, I’d be there.
> he has to pay any doctor with a 15€ surplus
That's the fee charged for giving you aspirin in a US hospital. I can't imagine why you think his US medical access would be better.
>we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€
Now do broadway in New York. Hell, do off-broadway in new york and it's either barely the same price or even more expensive. Are you sarcastically making the opposite point, I can't tell.
>he has to pay any doctor with a 15€ surplus
Which is less than the co-pay you pay on good US insurance.
>I pay my best engineer 60k€
Why don't you pay them more?
That setting is under User Configuration on my Win11 Pro PC, so look in both.
4 levels of nesting is pretty low compared to the average windows setting
It’s not you can opt-out, it‘s you have to opt-out. Imagine every software vendor would install its software as a opt-out. MS abuses its power over the OS
"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must."
I miss those innocent days in the early 2000's when Microsoft was still evil but the internet's non-ubiquity meant they couldn't realistically expect to force this kind of thing on their users.
Reality is really in a bad place when kids who grew up listening to Franz Ferdinand are nostalgic for Windows Vista. It's like a Slovenian nostalgic for Tito.
A man climbs the mountain to seek wisdom from the old sage. He bows and says:
-- In October, Microsoft will force Microsoft 365 Copilot upon us all.
The sage furrows his brow, strokes his beard, and replies:
-- Tell me then... what the hell is Microsoft 365? A calendar?
At some point I'm sure they'll force Microsoft Recall on everyone. But they'll do so piecemeal so there's less outrage.
If you find yourself needing to install Windows 11 for some reason (I'm doing my best to avoid it), you can try this to create a stripped-down Windows 11 installer with most of the crap removed:
https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2025/09/06/tiny11-builder-sep...
How many monthly “active” users is that?
Must be time to trick the market again. “Look guys, AI demand is still growing!”
I had resisted upgrading to Windows 11 and was just on the cusp of doing it, but now I will never, ever upgrade. I don't care about security aspect of Windows 10 anymore. I don't trust Microsoft. They had a few good years after Nadella joined where they were doing decent things but now they have resumed their monopolistic behavior and shoving things down our throats like Recall and this shit and I'm done with it. I'll switch to MacOS before I upgrade to Windows 11.
> They had a few good years after Nadella joined
I'd say Windows went to shit entirely because of Nadella. "Mobile first, cloud first, fuck the rest"
If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on, then I too will switch to that before Win11. I can't believe MS removed functionality in Win11 that is part of the daily workflows of so many users, and just said "GFY, we're never putting it back!"
If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on...
MacOS already does that. You're not going to drag a video file to the spreadsheet app icon with much success, but if the app knows how to handle it then it will work. I can't imagine using an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality.
Yep you can drag a file onto the doc on an app icon to have the app in question open the file (assuming it was meant to run that file).
I gotta say, I'm not a Windows user anymore, but it would drive me nuts if I couldn't do that.
Finder (the MacOS version of File Explorer on Windows) is an app you commonly interact with every day for several minutes. If it doesn't work well that's hours of your life you spend fighting the system instead of getting things done.
Those are the kinds of things that made me move away from Windows 10 years ago.
Life is too short to use Windows...
You know it's great software when they shove it down your throat instead of making you pay extra for it.
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
https://libquotes.com/howard-h-aiken/quote/lbz3l3x
Sure, maybe, but Anthropic and OpenAI are selling theirs.
I would love to see a chart of how long it takes windows to load by year.
It power on instantly, and now it’s minutes.
Bloat bloat bloat.
Isn't it the same for pretty much any system nowadays? Some just since the issue by not shutting down, just some sort of sleep. I cannot power off my car, it only goes to sleep.
Besides Excel, CAD/CAM programs and maybe games? Is there really a reason to use windows?
Now that Steam has Proton, my only remaining need for windows has evaporated. Good riddance.
I wish it was the same for me. Nucleus coop is windows only and so many mods work only there,so I still need windows for gaming. I'm with you though ,I wish I could completely swap
We recently replaced my wife's aging Windows PC with a Mac Mini, which eliminated the last Windows machine in our household. It feels good to be free of it, and our Macs handle World of Warcraft – the only game either of us play – without any problems.
What Linux distro would you recommend to be able to run Proton to play windows games but also for day to day light (mostly browser) use, SteamOS?
If you want a more curated experience that takes a lot of the rough edges off Linux: https://bazzite.gg
Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on
Debian works fine with Proton for me. I think it is not very picky.
I just run Debian Trixie with almost no problems. I build the kernels I use off the upstream release cycle (so, 6.17-rc6 right now). I build with LLVM Full LTO, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I want to find bugs in it :)
For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.
SteamOS is arch based so some variant of that makes a lot of sense if you're not going for steamos directly
Kubuntu works fine for me. Got cyberpunk to run on it very well, i havent had a game not work so far, but i don't play online shooters.
Kubuntu is Debian but i don't think that has caused any issues.
Since i got the deck i don't really use the PC for gaming much though.
This is all purely my anecdotal opinion.
Proton's good-ish. But if you want to play a lot of AAA games it's a non-starter especially if they have invasive kernel anti-cheat.
Thankfully I don't want and will never want any games that infect my systems with "anti-cheat" malware so I see the lack of support for it as a feature.
Okay, but realize a lot of people do. Until there's parity there it will be a 2nd class platform.
consoles are already a 2nd class platform and that works for a lot of people. I suppose a new 2nd class platform will make consoles a third class platform
I tend to play indie games, but I've never had anti-cheat problems. Everything happily runs on 6.17-rc5 right now.
Microsoft needs to provide their own anti-cheat hooks and block any kernel-level mods entirely.
AAA games are overproduced crap that compensate with aggressive marketing.
Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
playing any game with an invasive kernel anti-cheat is a non-starter on its own.
no game is worth that.
Clearly many people disagree with you given the popularity of games with invasive anti-cheat.
Why would you willingly install games with invasive kernel anti-cheat? That's unacceptable both on Linux or Windows.
What would you suggest to my kids that game with their friends and want to play Rocket League or Fortnite?
I only let my children play SuperTuxKart, and read them OSS licenses when i tuck them in at night.
A console?
Saying “no.”
Because people want to play fun games with their friends and sometimes playing games with kernel anti-cheat is a requirement?
My parents specifically need MS Office. LibreOffice won't do the job for them, because they deal with a lot of documents sent to them by other people, and also they're used to the interface.
Think Steam proton will support GTA VI? I doubt it since it still doesn't support GTA V online
I keep shutting the stupid thing off.
Huh. I have a force install of GNU/Linux on my Windows machine scheduled for October as well. That's a weird coincidence.
Meanwhile I am still getting charged for the app even though it is part of my subscription.
They're slipping it past you. Nobody is forcing you to install the update. Nuance.
I disabled all Windows updates last October because 24H2 absolutely tanked performance of games. Various reports around the internet claim that its still a problem. So no more updates for me, of any kind.
I once wrote a blog post called “Never update anything” about how updates suck, but even so I would just deal with it, because you probably want the security fixes.
About 30 critical RCEs since oct 24, botnet operators adore you
More than them, they should adore companies whose updates come with unwanted features and fresh new bugs that lead to this behavior. I have never been afraid of Debian stable / Fedora updates but I am always weary of Windows and Android updates.
Tell that to my windows 7 unpatched for about 20 years now. Those botnets are collecting devices with default passwords.
Na, someone probably already p0wn3d your box and is installing updates in the background so they don't lose control of it.
That's not "your" windows 7 but a community computer used to host cp
To any microsoft workers: is this stuff really getting zero pushback internally? It is clear power users don’t want it and that is sort of who copilot is pitched towards vs the masses.
Last time MS cared about power users was in Windows 7.
What makes you think the Windows group gives a shit about what some random in DevTools thinks about their product? There's probably all kinds of internal pushback, but I would question how much straw polling is being done.
My work PC has the app, because but like Onedrive and NewOutlook, the Windows app has fewer features, more bugs, and is more difficult to use that the Web app. At this rate Linux with Microsoft Web apps will have superior feature set than their 'Native' Windows apps.
If they are uninstallable why is this such a big deal? Isn’t there some popular powershell script around they removes all the stuff?
There's something exhausting about having to fight against a tool that's constantly trying to undermine your intentions.
Flyoobe can remove it, but if you have updates enabled either in windows update or in the Microsoft Store app they come back over and over again.
I'll include the link because it does help:
https://github.com/builtbybel/Flyoobe/releases
OMG, the bloody marxist Europeans AGAIN limiting the freedom of choice and free speech of American mega-corps!!1ONEohenee
:)
The harder they squeeze...
I installed Linux - Debian 13 with the Gnome desktop - on a few machines which used to only run Windows. These machines are used by non-technical family members aged 14 to 50. When starting the machine they get the choice between booting either Debian or Windows with files on the older Windows installs being available from within the Linux sessions.
I recently checked which system was used most and was surprised to see that this ended up being Debian, on some machines Windows was not even started after I explained the workings of the machines. Linux has been 'ready for the desktop' for decades now while Microsoft is doing its best to make Windows less and less suitable for general-purpose desktop use. Even their former strongholds have withered, especially gaming is now better done on Linux than on recent Windows iterations. I suspect they know this and are trying to reap the last remaining fruit before the plantation succumbs to the self-inflicted disease since I see no other explanation for their clearly user-hostile actions.
I agree that Linux has been fine for Desktop use for most people for some while. With two caveats, the user doesn't want to install random AAA competitive multiplayer games, and the user doesn't have to administer the system themselves.