> Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri had earlier hinted at such plans already about how the next evolution of OS will make it capable enough to make it "semantically understand you" as Windows will get "more ambient, more pervasive, more multi-modal". Using features like Copilot Vision it will be able to "look at your screen" and do more.
These are not words that usually leads to user shouting "Yay, finally, what a pleasure this is to use now!". Why even use the word "pervasive" and the term "look at your screen", almost sounds like it's intentional to turn a specific segment of users away.
I feel like we're still discovering how security, privacy and LLMs connect together. Add in a OS-available MCP that has access to your computer and applications, and I feel like it's way too early to integrate it on that level, especially when they at the same time say "security is our top priority".
> at the same time say "security is our top priority".
I don't think that's true anymore, and this proves it.
They did the security song and dance for a while because they were under pressure. Now AI is the number one priority over everything else, security be damned.
Security came onto Nadella’s radar in 2024 because Microsoft was compromised quite thoroughly (and avoidably) by the Russian intelligence services that year.
Midnight Blizzard was the turning point after a decade of neglect, that saw a lot of amazing work done by some very talented people during the Trustworthy Computing era (following the Gates memo) being unwound.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but I'm telling you "Security is Microsoft's #1 priority" isn't a novel thing Nadella came up with, Bill Gates been saying that many times too.
Just two examples. I think saying "Security is the most important!" is part of the job description of a Microsoft CEO, since they keep repeating it, yet security keeps being a low priority.
The difference in 2002 is that Gates actually meant it, I know this because I got to see it first hand.
Windows XP SP3 was all about security. Vista introduced massive improvements with things like UAC, ASLR, Bitlocker, secure boot and add-ons like EMET that eventually got rolled into Windows itself. At the same time, there were massive changes in the engineering culture in terms of the secure development lifecycle.
A lot of other, arguably sexier feature work took a back seat to get all of these things across the line.
I remember asking Steve Balmer somewhat before this (late 90s?) "will Microsoft ever prioritize security over new features?". He looked at me like I'd kicked his puppy and said "we would never do that". Culture comes from the top and all that...
I mean, has security been Microsoft's, and specifically Windows', priority... like, ever? They pretty much half-ass it every chance they get, just slapping some popup or something, training their users to completely disregard whatever Windows warns them about.
There’s quite a bit of security related features they baked into Windows. Virtualization based security with code integrity, app guard, device guard credential guard, etc. are all really robust, but it all requires configuration, and some is locked behind enterprise licensing. The entire NT security model is built on security descriptors applied to pretty much every system object and is way more granular than *nix’s User and Group ID access control.
So yeah, for a while at least, Microsoft did prioritize security and did a lot of work to harden windows (or rather, provide the features for corporate IT departments to harden it). The problem is much of it is off by default, or even not available at all, to home users.
Given Microsoft’s attitude and locking this stuff behind enterprise licenses, it’s clear they don’t even view windows as a consumer OS but one that’s designed to be managed at scale by someone else.
Of course they won't admit they screw everything up and that's what exactly made their users run away to competition or towards FOSS alternatives. So there's this toxic marketing positivity clown dance of "plans" happen while they're ignoring once again the criticism and feedback. And frankly, I'm fed up with this - not only in this particular MS case because this ridiculous bs can be seen in the whole corporate world.
I guess now is the best time to switch to Linux. MacOS 26 being super sluggish and looking like a soap bubble game for children. Windows becoming a SkyNet OS. Meanwhile Steam just announced their new hardware on SteamOS, emphasizing that users still own their hardware and can install whatever they want.
Unfortunately the most popular distro (Ubuntu - Canonical) is behaving more and more like Microsoft. I updated to 25.10 last week and it decided to ignore my settings, reset the snap priority and reinstall the snap firefox package, all without my consent. I was fed up when Canonical decided to hijack apt to inject their own proprietary closed-source snap packages, now after having dealt with it again and again after each major upgrade, I just switched to Fedora Gnome a few days ago and I'm not missing anything with Ubuntu.
Debian isn't heading down the best path either with their their policies (keeping the child sex predator on their payroll to do conferences that often times parents bring kids to, forcing the removal of the fortune packafe because it was deemed offensive, openly stating that straight white males shouldn't apply for internship, etc)
I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.
The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.
I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.
Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...
My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).
I'm happy to report that I upgraded my Mint from the previous to the most recent version without any snags. I then discovered I was still on an older kernel version which required a little more research, but went without any difficulties. The second part is admittedly something that not-so technical people will have considerable difficulty in even realizing. But all in all I can say that Mint is a solid, stable, and usable system for experts and novices alike.
Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...
What is unfortunate? You found one alternative was not to your liking, and another right there to take its place. You didn't have to pay for anything. You were not locked in to anything. Now you are not fighting your OS. Seems to be working as it should.
Canonical needs snap in order to distinguish them from all the other Linux distros, so they've gone overboard to make sure that you "need" it.
I think it's horrible that they've taken extreme measures to overtly circumvent their users' desire to run the Firefox distributed through Mozilla's repo.
The following link describes how to overcome the latest version of Canonical's extreme insistence on the snap version of Firefox. It's almost laughable when you see how far they've gone to try to lock you in.
Who are you the people still praising Ubuntu? Where does it come from, this Ubuntu by default thing? Why? I genuinely interested. It was one of my first distros, but that was when they were doing this shipping CD thing. There are countless of distros that are better out of the box, e.g. Fedora. Sincerely, I don’t understand. Who uses Ubuntu these days, and why. Especially on servers, lol. Why not use Debian then?
Privately I'm using Fedora, because that works. But my last two companies are using Ubuntu overall. Maybe because there are so many packages available. It's still far less stable than Fedora. I have to fight stupid Ubuntu bugs every single day. On my Fedora machines it tested OK, so that is my gold standard.
> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.
This alone is the last frontier IMO. It's the only reason I still run Win11 on a gaming PC with a big Nvidia. Take that away and their marketshare will tank.
I wouldn't call it the last frontier. Gaming works well enough for me to not have to worry about.
I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.
I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils
I'm still on macOS for the foreseeable future as long as there's no Lightroom (Classic) or Photoshop on Linux. I'd even settle for CaptureOne or Exposure. DarkTable still isn't there, nor is the UI as easy to work with.
Not to mention other business uses and different fields whose apps are exclusively Windows, not even mac and Windows.
Windows has a captive audience. Yeah, Linux can and will take some, but it'll still be a small piece of the pie, unfortunately. Everyone else has no choice but to put up with the abuse.
> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days
They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.
Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.
I wonder if the solution would be multi-booting. Keep the OS open, but games with anti-cheat would boot out of its own partition, with a secured bootloader, and secured lightweight OS, just enough to load the game..
Until normies start getting fully working GNU/Linux laptops on PC stores, it will be the same migration story since Windows XP days, that gets repeated every single time Microsoft does something folks don't agree with.
They also need tech support. Desktop Linux is in great shape, but most current Desktop Linux users are capable and willing to troubleshoot their own problems.
Yep. And they will ultimately return them or be disappointed when [insert xyz app] doesn't work.
Gamers are only one case that's currently being solved. Devs are already solved (except for iOS). Creatives are a different story entirely.
If anything, Microsoft's decisions are more likely to boost mac sales than they are to create any kind of meaningful normie migration to Linux. Especially if Apple goes through with the rumored low-cost macbook. That thing will sell like hotcakes, and macOS share is already growing as is.
We are many times more likely to see the "Year of the macOS desktop" than we are the "Year of the Linux desktop"
Not every Dev is a UNIX developer, for some reason this misunderstanding keeps being repeated.
Proton is a betting on the wrong horse, until Microsoft decides to put an end to it, in whatever way they feel like it. They own Windows, and are one of the biggest publishers in the industry, when grouping all studios they own.
Apple margins are too much for economies not on the same level as USA.
I do agree with devices being returned, this happened quite often with netbooks.
Linux (with the "traditional" userspace) is a mess on the inside, has always been, and will always be. It blows my mind that there still isn't a universal, easy way to compile binaries that would run on any distro, of any version — something that all other mainstream OSes have solved from day one.
Yes, I know that AppImage and Flatpak are a thing. No, they are not the answer, because they, too, all come with their own issues.
There's a reason that Win32 is currently the stable ABI for Linux (via Wine/Proton).
And you know what? Tbh, I don't see a problem with that. If it keeps improving and eventually expands beyond gaming and can start running some of the stuff that can't currently (modern office, adobe stuff, etc.) then why not? There's decades of windows-only apps that there's just not enough time or talent in the world to re-create for Linux, so might as well put effort into Windows compatibility and just start running Windows apps.
I don't disagree with that, but I feel like ReactOS is more promising in this regard, as it reimplements not only win32 API/ABI, but also the NT kernel with its stable API/ABI, so it would allow using Windows drivers as well. I mean, no translation layer is better than even the best translation layer :)
"MacOS 26 being super sluggish" is the kind of thing I only read here on this website. For me and everybody I know who upgraded to it it's running fine.
Yeah on my M1 it’s running as fast as it ever did. I have experienced a bug on both my personal and work Mac on 26 where the internal screen fails to turn on sometimes when using an external display. Hoping that gets fixed but otherwise I have no issues.
Can confirm, has been flawless for me. I waited until 2 weeks after release to upgrade, possible I avoided some initial friction that way.
The only device I’ve found more sluggish after this recent OS upgrade is my Apple Watch Ultra (gen 1).
Animations when navigating the OS are noticeably sluggish where the previous version was smooth as butter. This degradation has persisted through multiple minor version updates since, so it seems to be permanent.
Disappointing for what is marketed as the most powerful watch in their lineup.
And as linux is becoming more and more a corpo controlled monoculture, the time has never been better to switch to *BSD and illumos where true freedom awaits.
You mean the *NIXes that via their license hold dev freedom (and corporate freedom without the forced source publication) over user freedom (the purpose of the GPL)?
Even my mother of 75 years switched to a Mac. Microsoft does not understand the effect of these stupid decisions.
They also don’t seem to realize that MacOS was the operating system for many demos on the just finished dotnetConf …
If your developers don’t want to use your system how do you expect others to use it…
My parents are both 70+ and I put them on Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) a decade ago, best decision ever. All the frustration from Windows went away overnight. They are simple computer users - browsing (email, search, booking), opening PDFs, offloading photos from a camera and watching them, editing word documents and spreadsheets, everything just works with no friction. I'm so happy they never got to experience Windows 11.
A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.
Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."
What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.
Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%
or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"
Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.
It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
I'm as big a skeptic as anyone, but having it integrated into the OS could be very helpful to a lot of people. I myself will of course run for the hills due to the considerable trade-offs of that decision (always-online, tracking, surveillance, huge attack surface, etc), but I can't dismiss the fact that a lot of people will take the usefulness of the features without considering the cost.
Hey computer, what files did i work on last thursday afternoon? and it'd show me a collage of word, excel emails and cad files I was using. this would be fantastic. If it worked. and didn't require i sell what's left of myself to the computer.
I click Windows 11 "Start" button and under Recommended it has the last 6 files I opened. Click "More", and there's a list of files for the last two weeks with dates, and timestamps for the last week. So they've already got this idea covered.
We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.
Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
Yes it will be helpful when you are an office worker staring at an excel sheet 9 to 5. I've been there and I don't care if it scans my entire PC or whatever, if I can prompt it to click around on my screen to do the thing.
> not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.
Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft
I always find funny that Windows, games consoles, mainframe, micros, and embedded software sprungs into existence via magic pixie dust, as developers only use UNIX.
There's software that exists beyond the web and SaaS.
Windows is still used widely in all sorts of places you'd never expect to see it. POS systems, ATMs, industrial controllers, digital signage/interactive kiosks, SCADA is largely Windows still. You need software for all of that, and it ain't gonna be web apps.
Windows is also still widespread in finance. The backend systems may be Linux or custom FGPA hardware but the front end finance world is ran on Windows (and Excel on Windows). Plenty of trading software is Windows only.
Heck, MS SQL Server is still in the #2 or #3 spot for database marketshare behind Oracle. Granted, it can run on Linux now but I don't many who are yet.
None of it is "sexy" like HN startups and SaaS so it doesn't get the coverage or discussion, but Windows is everywhere and so are Windows developers. You could argue whether or not Windows is/was the right choice for a lot of those (it's probably not), but it's there nonetheless and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
There's a lot of legacy software that is bound to Windows, yes, but as time goes on, the amount of greenfield systems targeting Windows dwindles. From what I've seen, a lot of that software is also being actively containerized so that it can run on Linux systems, because administering legacy Windows systems is a huge pain in the ass. A lot of legacy Windows software is very difficult to containerize, because it gets it's grubby little hands in everything, but it can be done and usually that's the preferred approach.
The people building the many thousands of native Windows apps used by millions of people every day.
CAD/CAM systems. GIS applications. Automatic teller machine software. Public safety dispatch systems. Automotive diagnostic tools. Point of sale systems. List goes on.
While these systems are often written for Windows, there's actually very little reason to do so, and typically you're doing yourself a huge disservice.
Yes you can build a POS system using Windows tech, but you don't really gain much by doing so, other than a whole host of headaches when it comes to deployment and administration.
This is only remotely true for embedded systems, where you ship a fully integrated device, with all its associated peripherals as a turn-key system that does not have to interoperate with anything else.
If you’re in the business of shipping software that needs to run alongside other people’s software on the same machine, it’s a disaster.
Linux userspace backwards compatibility is extremely poor, the “solutions” to this issue (Flatpak, Snap et al) generally create more management problems than they solve. Desktop Linux is already an absolute monster to manage.
Try securely deploying hardware-backed PKI certificates for 802.1x to a fleet of Linux workstations. Takes a couple of minutes on Windows and macOS, but it’s a massive engineering effort on Linux.
We use remote windows VMs when doing windows development from our Macs. Everyone on my team and the adjacent only use MacOS. We do not work on web apps.
OK, the headline got borked into ungrammatical garbage, but that's probably an HN filter thing.
MS is going all-in on something the users don't want... surprise! Your OS is going to be involuntarily made all-AI all-the-time. And somehow, this fundamental change isn't even worthy of a rev; it's still "Windows 11" - FWIW.
My favorite part of the article is when they refer to it (apparently accidentally) as MS Widows.
I can't open an app anywhere anymore without some popup in my way, excitedly telling me I can now use AI to <do what I've always done>, and I have choices of "Use now" or "Ask me later".
It would be wonderful if this were the final blow for Windows as a classic PC operating system and if Linux were to establish itself on the desktop as a more than reasonable, indeed unavoidable, alternative. The problem with AI is that it offers apparent solutions to non-existent problems. How long will big tech continue to back a horse that the general public does not want to ride?
PC manufacturers are bribed to use Windows, as always. Windows has a Soviet problem, it's like an Iron Curtain and most users will never thing of leaving it, if they do it's with kgb tourism agent called WSL. If Windows is a horse your certainly do not ride it, it rides you.
There's sadly whole business and services sector that relies on deals with MS.
My mother mid pandemic placed an order for a hearing aid which is partially supported with money from our healthcare system. Unlike 10-15 years ago nowadays everything is digitalized and done by the Internet - clients are no longer running around the city with paper forms. Sadly that means every personal information, data is exposed to Windows and with W11 it's even less possible to avoid being harvested. Not mention always online browser software used for hearing tests that surely collects on its own.
> The good thing about AI is it offers assistance with old, tractable, problems
That doesn't sound very good. I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or a typo. If the problem is old and tractable, you don't need AI for it. You could use a simpler, more efficient, and more reliable technology.
Sometimes while traveling I just watch movies on my laptop, I don't even bother to connect to Wi-Fi as there is simply no need. I wonder how Windows 11 would even work without internet, and probably it's not a bad assumption that it will refuse after a while.
Anyway, just wiped W10 out of this laptop and installed KDE (underlying distro doesn't matter that much), it works amazing.
The problem is that I don't really trust a big company to have an agent monitoring me let alone all the phoning home it does, but in an alternative universe, I can see the vision here as creating something that is closer to a starship-type OS from scifi where interactions are increasingly natural. That's interesting, but at the same time, what does it mean when the computer has its own kind of volition and is more loyal to the company than to you?
Computers are too complicated for the average user. So many people have me on speed-dial to fix issues or walk them through stuff. And AI is surprisingly good at this stuff. If someone can simply say "Connect my bluetooth headphones" and the computer does it that's a big deal.
But this is balanced by the fact that we live in a world where all our software is effectively user hostile -- look for whatever means possible to extract more value from us. This is the society that we live in now.
Yeah, if I have an agent in my computer, I want it to work for me, and nobody else. Not the company that sold it to me, not the FBI or CIA, nobody but me. Otherwise it's not my computer.
> I can see the vision here as creating something that is closer to a starship-type OS from scifi where interactions are increasingly natural
Then you're a real optimist. I'm afraid this whole AI technology once settles down will be nothing more than a corporate tool to manipulate populations economic behavior and perception of the world. An antithesis to what for example was seen in Star Trek, and something even worse than HAL9000.
All of Microsoft’s products seem like they are all trying to be everything for everyone. Instead, people want more focus. The entire experience of Windows is a mess. How many terminals does an OS need? Or settings and control panels? Or all the legacy stuff? Just start from scratch and think simple, secure, and fast…. Otherwise you get trapped and bound to endless reasons for doing stuff and no focus and end up with Windows 11.
That would be great, but starting from scratch would take away Windows' core strength: backwards compatibility. There's a lot of legacy out there that depends on all that old cruft being there. There's still critical infrastructure running on Windows XP.
MS could probably just virtualize it or containerize the old parts, but people made a lot of dumb choices back then and windows software got its tendrils into every part of the OS and so weird things can break when you try and containerize it.
Microsoft is repeating their own history. Initially, they integrated the GUI into the OS (Windows). Now they're integrating AI (another application) into their OS too. The result will be an even slower and more bloated OS, with a bigger maintenance burden.
People are also unhappy with Microsoft's approach to privacy, which will get even worse (if that's possible) with integrated AI.
Individuals aren't Microsoft's core customer which is why they don't care. It's the same reason Apple never went after the enterprise. Steve Jobs wanted people to choose the product, not have it chosen for them.
For Microsoft, they don't care. Businesses/IT Departments are the ones choosing and shoving it on everyone else. The users don't have to like it.
For anyone who devs C++ on Windows because they still prefer visual studio over having to manage cmake on Linux, I've found meson to be a much friendlier build system and has really good integration with VSCode.
And if you're like me and hate bourne-like shells (sh, bash, zsh), powershell works on linux and mac and there's also nushell and fish, which have nicer syntax but I've had compatibility issues in the past
It’s Vista 2! I switched to Mac in 2008, and I just did it again a few days ago.
Reality is that almost everything I do is Linux, but Office with its horrific file formats keep it around. Fortunately Visio is nearly dead, 3 to go.
With Vista it was coming from the failed Longhorn project that was supposed to be transformative to windows and longer fixing up winxp than they wanted, but at least vista ended up as plain old windows then win7 was a polished up release. For the direction MS have taken win11 I can't see them turning it around so quickly especially while they're still driving full speed in the direction they think is right.
Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.
Big companies that are still all-in on Microsoft, or basically all Microsoft 365 customers (which is 89% market share).
They already have, and will continue, to make Office features exclusive to Windows, leaving the macOS version of the desktop apps behind, especially as more and more functionality starts to get locked behind Copilot.
They were OS agnostic for a while before the AI craze, and now it seems they want to roll back some of that agnosticism and make sure that M365 shops remain Windows shops instead of M365+macOS shops.
As long as debloat and spyware-removing software such as Win10Privacy continue to exist, I’ll have at least one system still running a pro workstation version of Windows.
But damn, they seem to be doing everything they can to drive users away.
I feel like the stars are all aligned for Linux-on-the-Desktop right now.
- Windows 11 forced-AI integrations and telemetry. Many "old" devices are incompatible
- Windows 10 is officially end-of-life
- MacOS 26 looks and feels like a toy operating system. Performance issues and bugs continue to
pile up and undo the incredible work that Apple hardware teams have done the past decade.
- Omarchy Linux has some substantial hype in the developer world.
- Valve continuing to make Linux a first-class OS for gaming and is pushing forward ease-of-use.
- New hardware from Valve looks to be a great entryway into PC Gaming/Linux for outsiders.
- Framework is becoming more mainstream and has great options at all price points.
The purpose of AI hardware on users' machine is that then MS can hand-wave away any privacy concerns, claiming that anything sensitive is handled on-device.
To stop being used by Windows and use Linux, ask for help with some friend that already use it. This is a great start.
If you don't have anyone that use Linux, you will need to install it and this is the summary of the process for Manjaro Linux:
This is for you that don't even know what Linux is.
- once you got the file, record this ISO to a USB pen drive with Rufus
- reboot your pc and press the key to allow you to choose to boot from the USB
- the usb will boot and Manjaro will open, you can start the install
- once installed, your next reboot will bring Manjaro installed
- start using it, install LibreOffice, video or photo editors, create music, browse the web with Firefox, LibreWolf, degoogled-chromium and you can also use Chrome if you really really want it and other browsers
Configure the programs like email clients and many MANY other programs
Since you already know Windows, you will now learn about computers and you will be the boss of that pc, like updates are when you want it, reboot is when you update and if you really want it
There are many "versions" of Linux, like Manjaro, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Fedora, Red Hat, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, etc.
Each of those versions will usually also allow you to choose your desktop. Windows has one desktop, here you can choose from Plasma, XFCE, Gnome and many many others. Then each allow you to configure the looks and feel. It is this amazing!
Now that you are the owner, the boss, the administrator of that operating system, you start using it. For the first weeks, save your documents to an external drive or pen, because if you have any problem, you will use the installer USB again and delete everything, so you have a backup of your docs. The programs you can install again.
I see my decision to sunset Windows and my upcoming migration to Gentoo Linux is already paying off.
Can't wait until my new hardware arrives.
Also really hope that KDE Plasma and GNOME usage statistics go to the moon and Microsoft really shits their bed this time around. With all these enshittification tactics they really deserve it.
I'm personally not worried, because crap like this doesn't make it into the LSTC editions, the type of Windows that's expected to be reliable and do actual work. That'll do for my multiplayer gaming needs, and for the rest of the functionalities I expect from my PC, they can fuck right off.
You know this might be the final push that the long needed IT-overhaul happens: every employee now needs 2 computers.
One super locked down white list only apps and network connections required to get their work data. email links completely blocked, email files can only be sent to a sandbox
One with immutable sandbox tasks: internet browsing, AI processing (super locked down human chosen only data in, and only outgoing connections are to foundational model, or back to the secure system for long-term-storage/backup)
(basically qubesOS, or more likely cant if microsoft needs its own secure boot and tpm hardware)
This is already best practice for IT admins (even per Microsoft's own guidelines). Privileged Access Workstations. Admins get 2 computers. One privileged, locked down, where all admin tasks are done from, and one general purpose machine for email/office tasks.
Nothing. MS decision makers are fulfilling their duty to maximize profit by utilizing Windows to funnel users towards their most profitable, revenue generating, services of Azure and Office Copilot 365.
It's simple advertising. People have a higher chance to use a product if it is advertised to them. I don't think there is a microsoft app these days that doesn't have a copilot logo visible in it at all times (even Paint).
In a sci-fi world that sounds nice, the tweet makes it sound like you could get a computer which Captain Picard can ask "Computer, scan all ship systems for information about Spot the cat" and the AI can talk to different systems (Windows apps) and ask it about information relevant to Spot (i.e. which has been tagged with metadata like subject=Spot).
In reality, it's Microsoft. Click this popup now to get 12 months free of 1TB OneDrive, and Copilot 365!
My answers is that Satya Nadella is betting the farm on LLMs/AI and, even if it's a path toward failure, Nadella has built enough credibility from past results that he will allowed to go a long way before the board or investors will start trying to rein him in. This could be Nadella's "let's buy Yahoo" moment.
> At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.
I don't think that's how these decisions are made. Their objective certainly does not have anything to do with happy users. Even if they lose a few (very few probably) Windows users they want to stay relevant in the AI race.
My 70 year old father in law called me to ask how to install Linux after getting a new computer and finding Windows 11 unbearable (he liked Windows 10 fine). Everyone has their tipping point.
Switch to Debian and i3wm and never be bothered again by this type of nonsense. PC = Personal Computer. Make other choices and regain your sovereignty and privacy.
I switched to Mac 20 years ago out of sheer frustration over the total lack of coordination between hardware and software, the frothing at the mouth obsession over excessive backwards compatibility over good design, privacy and security, and hardware that isn't total rainbow blinky light horseshit.
But I try to keep abreast of whats happening on the other side of the fence and I am often recoiling in horror and wondering why the fuck Windows users tolerate any of this.
Windows 11 is not performant, it's sluggish in a lot of places and everything got slower on the same or even better hardware. And I will never not laugh about having two context menus. Windows 8 was way faster even on low-end hardware thanks to DirectUI.
We've been working against the direction of capitalism and human nature for fifty years to achieve the promise of software, in all its theoretical beauty. It was always an uphill battle, but the glimmer of possibility never completely disappeared. In all this time, I never could have guessed that AI would be the thing to finally kill the promise of software.
It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model". Reverse engineering for interoperability should be legal under any circumstances - regardless of whether you have to break encryption to do it. Vendors have way too much control over how end users interact with their products.
It's not just that, current sentiment around the CFAA is that any kind of unsanctioned third-party user agent for anything that isn't the open web is potentially prosecutable. Plus, if the big user platforms decide they don't like some aspect of what you're doing, they will shut down all of your access, and potentially access of others close to you, everywhere, and aggressively prevent you from reestablishing even a baseline of inoffensive participation, at great potential cost to your well-being.
>It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model".
This just seems like a semantic disagreement - I'm using "capitalism" by its common colloquial definition: As a loose shorthand for "the way we run things here", i.e. as a superset of the thing you've said.
> Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri had earlier hinted at such plans already about how the next evolution of OS will make it capable enough to make it "semantically understand you" as Windows will get "more ambient, more pervasive, more multi-modal". Using features like Copilot Vision it will be able to "look at your screen" and do more.
These are not words that usually leads to user shouting "Yay, finally, what a pleasure this is to use now!". Why even use the word "pervasive" and the term "look at your screen", almost sounds like it's intentional to turn a specific segment of users away.
I feel like we're still discovering how security, privacy and LLMs connect together. Add in a OS-available MCP that has access to your computer and applications, and I feel like it's way too early to integrate it on that level, especially when they at the same time say "security is our top priority".
> at the same time say "security is our top priority".
I don't think that's true anymore, and this proves it.
They did the security song and dance for a while because they were under pressure. Now AI is the number one priority over everything else, security be damned.
The security focus mostly ended when Nadella got the top job, well before the AI craze.
I remember Bill Gates (sometime around 2000-2005 maybe?) saying "Security is now the top priority for Microsoft", and in 2024 Satya Nadella said it again (https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/microsoft-ceo-securit...) and just one month ago, a blog post titled "How Microsoft is creating a security-first culture that lasts" (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/10/13/bui...)
I don't think it ever ended, nor that it ever started. But they've been saying this for a while not, for at least two CEOs.
Security came onto Nadella’s radar in 2024 because Microsoft was compromised quite thoroughly (and avoidably) by the Russian intelligence services that year.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2024/01/25/mid...
Midnight Blizzard was the turning point after a decade of neglect, that saw a lot of amazing work done by some very talented people during the Trustworthy Computing era (following the Gates memo) being unwound.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but I'm telling you "Security is Microsoft's #1 priority" isn't a novel thing Nadella came up with, Bill Gates been saying that many times too.
Gates in 2002: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Gates-makes-security... (which mentioned Gates also said to focus on security in 1995 as internet became a new vector)
Gates in 2016: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/gates-security-is-to...
Just two examples. I think saying "Security is the most important!" is part of the job description of a Microsoft CEO, since they keep repeating it, yet security keeps being a low priority.
The difference in 2002 is that Gates actually meant it, I know this because I got to see it first hand.
Windows XP SP3 was all about security. Vista introduced massive improvements with things like UAC, ASLR, Bitlocker, secure boot and add-ons like EMET that eventually got rolled into Windows itself. At the same time, there were massive changes in the engineering culture in terms of the secure development lifecycle.
A lot of other, arguably sexier feature work took a back seat to get all of these things across the line.
I remember asking Steve Balmer somewhat before this (late 90s?) "will Microsoft ever prioritize security over new features?". He looked at me like I'd kicked his puppy and said "we would never do that". Culture comes from the top and all that...
I don’t think security has ever been Microsoft’s top priority.
Before Windows Defender, people were paying small fortunes for anti virus and malware scanner software.
Because there was enough propaganda to make people believe they need kernel-level malware to "combat" real malware.
I mean, has security been Microsoft's, and specifically Windows', priority... like, ever? They pretty much half-ass it every chance they get, just slapping some popup or something, training their users to completely disregard whatever Windows warns them about.
There’s quite a bit of security related features they baked into Windows. Virtualization based security with code integrity, app guard, device guard credential guard, etc. are all really robust, but it all requires configuration, and some is locked behind enterprise licensing. The entire NT security model is built on security descriptors applied to pretty much every system object and is way more granular than *nix’s User and Group ID access control.
So yeah, for a while at least, Microsoft did prioritize security and did a lot of work to harden windows (or rather, provide the features for corporate IT departments to harden it). The problem is much of it is off by default, or even not available at all, to home users.
Given Microsoft’s attitude and locking this stuff behind enterprise licenses, it’s clear they don’t even view windows as a consumer OS but one that’s designed to be managed at scale by someone else.
[dead]
Instead of Office Clippy, your entire OS will be Clippy!
Clippy will generate your OS for you in real time!
Of course they won't admit they screw everything up and that's what exactly made their users run away to competition or towards FOSS alternatives. So there's this toxic marketing positivity clown dance of "plans" happen while they're ignoring once again the criticism and feedback. And frankly, I'm fed up with this - not only in this particular MS case because this ridiculous bs can be seen in the whole corporate world.
> "No way to prevent this" says only OS where this regularly happens.
User locking is their top priority.
I guess now is the best time to switch to Linux. MacOS 26 being super sluggish and looking like a soap bubble game for children. Windows becoming a SkyNet OS. Meanwhile Steam just announced their new hardware on SteamOS, emphasizing that users still own their hardware and can install whatever they want.
Unfortunately the most popular distro (Ubuntu - Canonical) is behaving more and more like Microsoft. I updated to 25.10 last week and it decided to ignore my settings, reset the snap priority and reinstall the snap firefox package, all without my consent. I was fed up when Canonical decided to hijack apt to inject their own proprietary closed-source snap packages, now after having dealt with it again and again after each major upgrade, I just switched to Fedora Gnome a few days ago and I'm not missing anything with Ubuntu.
Corporate ethics-wise, Canonical is vastly better than Microsoft.
But I prefer Debian Stable, for reasons both pragmatic and on-principle:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...
(Or people can go to a confusing download page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/ )
Debian isn't heading down the best path either with their their policies (keeping the child sex predator on their payroll to do conferences that often times parents bring kids to, forcing the removal of the fortune packafe because it was deemed offensive, openly stating that straight white males shouldn't apply for internship, etc)
The Amazon Lens was pretty bad ethically.
> Canonical is vastly better than Microsoft.
However Canonical apologised, and removed it.
Microsoft doubled down, adding more adverts.
Just BSD and chill
I switched to Mint (Mate) around 2012 or so because of radical UI changes made by Canonical. At the time, the "mobile revolution" was the big industry trend. Windows 8 had come out which was designed for touch screens (and people hated it) ... and Canonical released a new default desktop environment (I think it was Unity? Memory is fuzzy). It was shocking to me and when I complained about it, a friend recommended Mint.
The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.
I went from Ubuntu to Mint around the same time on my laptop. I took my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora. A later laptop followed it, because I was tired of the little differences.
Ubuntu is completely off my radar too. So many dumb things that often lasted a few releases. Like ads for their cloud services, Unity for a while, window controls on the left for a while...
My biggest problem with Mint was that upgrading the OS became a hassle if I put it off for too long (which I started doing after a not-so-smooth upgrade experience, one release).
I'm happy to report that I upgraded my Mint from the previous to the most recent version without any snags. I then discovered I was still on an older kernel version which required a little more research, but went without any difficulties. The second part is admittedly something that not-so technical people will have considerable difficulty in even realizing. But all in all I can say that Mint is a solid, stable, and usable system for experts and novices alike.
Curious your experience with Mint Debian Edition. I currently use Debian Stable as my workstation & local server - I considered Mint, but since it was Ubuntu, I held off...
What is unfortunate? You found one alternative was not to your liking, and another right there to take its place. You didn't have to pay for anything. You were not locked in to anything. Now you are not fighting your OS. Seems to be working as it should.
Some people like Ubuntu but I don't because of so many reasons. If rather use Debian.
Same for Fedora that I don't like also. I prefer to use RockyLinux or AlmaLinux if you really need a RHEL compatible system.
There are other options, most of them based on Debian or Ubuntu.
My desktop choice is ArchLinux with Plasma or XFCE4. No snaps, no crap.
My servers choice is RockyLinux 8 or 10.
Ubuntu was always like this. Use Debian.
Ubuntu was like this since 2009, use Pardus (which is based on Debian and follows roughly the same release process as Ubuntu, but no snaps).
Perhaps SteamOS will take up the mantle.
Or distros taking cues from it like Bazzite.
Debian, Mint, Fedora...
Canonical needs snap in order to distinguish them from all the other Linux distros, so they've gone overboard to make sure that you "need" it.
I think it's horrible that they've taken extreme measures to overtly circumvent their users' desire to run the Firefox distributed through Mozilla's repo.
The following link describes how to overcome the latest version of Canonical's extreme insistence on the snap version of Firefox. It's almost laughable when you see how far they've gone to try to lock you in.
https://gist.github.com/jfeilbach/78d0ef94190fb07dee9ebfc340...
Mint is love, Mint is life.
Who are you the people still praising Ubuntu? Where does it come from, this Ubuntu by default thing? Why? I genuinely interested. It was one of my first distros, but that was when they were doing this shipping CD thing. There are countless of distros that are better out of the box, e.g. Fedora. Sincerely, I don’t understand. Who uses Ubuntu these days, and why. Especially on servers, lol. Why not use Debian then?
Privately I'm using Fedora, because that works. But my last two companies are using Ubuntu overall. Maybe because there are so many packages available. It's still far less stable than Fedora. I have to fight stupid Ubuntu bugs every single day. On my Fedora machines it tested OK, so that is my gold standard.
I’ve been using Linux distros daily for >10years now, and I only get more confident that I made the right choice.
Pretty much the only things I miss out on are Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.
> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.
This alone is the last frontier IMO. It's the only reason I still run Win11 on a gaming PC with a big Nvidia. Take that away and their marketshare will tank.
I wouldn't call it the last frontier. Gaming works well enough for me to not have to worry about.
I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.
I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils
Which VSTs you had problems with? Have you tried LinVst?
Last frontier for gamers.
I'm still on macOS for the foreseeable future as long as there's no Lightroom (Classic) or Photoshop on Linux. I'd even settle for CaptureOne or Exposure. DarkTable still isn't there, nor is the UI as easy to work with.
Not to mention other business uses and different fields whose apps are exclusively Windows, not even mac and Windows.
Windows has a captive audience. Yeah, Linux can and will take some, but it'll still be a small piece of the pie, unfortunately. Everyone else has no choice but to put up with the abuse.
> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days
They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.
Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.
I wonder if the solution would be multi-booting. Keep the OS open, but games with anti-cheat would boot out of its own partition, with a secured bootloader, and secured lightweight OS, just enough to load the game..
Is there any video production software that runs on Linux well nowadays?
I've used Shotcut, it's simple and easy: https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut
I've tried Kdenlive, but honestly, shotcut met my needs, so I didn't explore it too much: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive
DaVinci Resolve is also available for linux. I've never used it though.
All the Davinci software runs well and I consider it class leading in its category of software.
Design, sound production and cad are all lacking strong alternatives on Linux.
https://reaper.fm has a Linux build.
Kdenlive isnt bad
Until normies start getting fully working GNU/Linux laptops on PC stores, it will be the same migration story since Windows XP days, that gets repeated every single time Microsoft does something folks don't agree with.
They also need tech support. Desktop Linux is in great shape, but most current Desktop Linux users are capable and willing to troubleshoot their own problems.
Yep. And they will ultimately return them or be disappointed when [insert xyz app] doesn't work.
Gamers are only one case that's currently being solved. Devs are already solved (except for iOS). Creatives are a different story entirely.
If anything, Microsoft's decisions are more likely to boost mac sales than they are to create any kind of meaningful normie migration to Linux. Especially if Apple goes through with the rumored low-cost macbook. That thing will sell like hotcakes, and macOS share is already growing as is.
We are many times more likely to see the "Year of the macOS desktop" than we are the "Year of the Linux desktop"
Not every Dev is a UNIX developer, for some reason this misunderstanding keeps being repeated.
Proton is a betting on the wrong horse, until Microsoft decides to put an end to it, in whatever way they feel like it. They own Windows, and are one of the biggest publishers in the industry, when grouping all studios they own.
Apple margins are too much for economies not on the same level as USA.
I do agree with devices being returned, this happened quite often with netbooks.
Chromebooks seem to be fairly successful, despite [insert xyz app] not working on them.
We don't want a bunch of entitled ex-windows users shitting up our forums thank you very much.
Lets hope they all buy a Mac.
Unfortunately not everyone can afford Apple margins outside a few selected tier 1 economies.
I apologize but weren't we all one of those normies when we first started using Linux or any other computer?
Linux (with the "traditional" userspace) is a mess on the inside, has always been, and will always be. It blows my mind that there still isn't a universal, easy way to compile binaries that would run on any distro, of any version — something that all other mainstream OSes have solved from day one.
Yes, I know that AppImage and Flatpak are a thing. No, they are not the answer, because they, too, all come with their own issues.
There's a reason that Win32 is currently the stable ABI for Linux (via Wine/Proton).
And you know what? Tbh, I don't see a problem with that. If it keeps improving and eventually expands beyond gaming and can start running some of the stuff that can't currently (modern office, adobe stuff, etc.) then why not? There's decades of windows-only apps that there's just not enough time or talent in the world to re-create for Linux, so might as well put effort into Windows compatibility and just start running Windows apps.
I don't disagree with that, but I feel like ReactOS is more promising in this regard, as it reimplements not only win32 API/ABI, but also the NT kernel with its stable API/ABI, so it would allow using Windows drivers as well. I mean, no translation layer is better than even the best translation layer :)
"MacOS 26 being super sluggish" is the kind of thing I only read here on this website. For me and everybody I know who upgraded to it it's running fine.
Yeah on my M1 it’s running as fast as it ever did. I have experienced a bug on both my personal and work Mac on 26 where the internal screen fails to turn on sometimes when using an external display. Hoping that gets fixed but otherwise I have no issues.
It was painfully slow if you were using Electron crap for a few weeks, due to an Electron bug. This may have coloured peoples' impressions.
Can confirm, has been flawless for me. I waited until 2 weeks after release to upgrade, possible I avoided some initial friction that way.
The only device I’ve found more sluggish after this recent OS upgrade is my Apple Watch Ultra (gen 1).
Animations when navigating the OS are noticeably sluggish where the previous version was smooth as butter. This degradation has persisted through multiple minor version updates since, so it seems to be permanent.
Disappointing for what is marketed as the most powerful watch in their lineup.
m4 and m4 pro here, runs like butter
IIRC, MacOS 26 sluggishness is a problem with Electron, not a mistake on Apple’s part.
Surely 2026 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
And as linux is becoming more and more a corpo controlled monoculture, the time has never been better to switch to *BSD and illumos where true freedom awaits.
You mean the *NIXes that via their license hold dev freedom (and corporate freedom without the forced source publication) over user freedom (the purpose of the GPL)?
I switched 3 weeks ago. (First Ubuntu now the badly named POP!_OS), and couldn't be happier.
Fast, a slight learning curve(took me a weekend), and I'm back gaming and coding regularly.
Even my mother of 75 years switched to a Mac. Microsoft does not understand the effect of these stupid decisions. They also don’t seem to realize that MacOS was the operating system for many demos on the just finished dotnetConf … If your developers don’t want to use your system how do you expect others to use it…
My parents are both 70+ and I put them on Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) a decade ago, best decision ever. All the frustration from Windows went away overnight. They are simple computer users - browsing (email, search, booking), opening PDFs, offloading photos from a camera and watching them, editing word documents and spreadsheets, everything just works with no friction. I'm so happy they never got to experience Windows 11.
A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
Same experience here. Couple with one of the Redmond themes, and all of a sudden everything looks similar: https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Redmond-Themes
Just works.
I think they know and this is a hail mary. Windows market share has been gradually eroding. They don't intend to go quietly.
It's ok that developers don't use Windows. Developers can use macOS. Windows is for office workers where AI features can be helpful.
> It's ok that developers don't use Windows.
Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.
Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."
What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
> AI features can be helpful.
Embedded into the operating system? Will they be helpful there?
IMO there are better ways
Yes, if it works (and that's a big if).
For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.
Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%
or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"
Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.
It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
That actually sounds very cool and exciting. If Microsoft is reading this—we should talk! My email address is in my bio.
I'm as big a skeptic as anyone, but having it integrated into the OS could be very helpful to a lot of people. I myself will of course run for the hills due to the considerable trade-offs of that decision (always-online, tracking, surveillance, huge attack surface, etc), but I can't dismiss the fact that a lot of people will take the usefulness of the features without considering the cost.
Hey computer, what files did i work on last thursday afternoon? and it'd show me a collage of word, excel emails and cad files I was using. this would be fantastic. If it worked. and didn't require i sell what's left of myself to the computer.
I click Windows 11 "Start" button and under Recommended it has the last 6 files I opened. Click "More", and there's a list of files for the last two weeks with dates, and timestamps for the last week. So they've already got this idea covered.
We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.
Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
That sounds like a useful feature. Thanks.
alas my new work laptop is still on win 10.
WinFS and Longhorn are back on the wishlist, apparently. But this time you're getting a really fat thin client OS and non-deterministic execution.
Yes it will be helpful when you are an office worker staring at an excel sheet 9 to 5. I've been there and I don't care if it scans my entire PC or whatever, if I can prompt it to click around on my screen to do the thing.
Vast majority of HN does not seem to understand just how powerful the modern Microsoft stack is for office workers.
Integrated AI solves so many real problems, not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
> not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.
Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft
I always find funny that Windows, games consoles, mainframe, micros, and embedded software sprungs into existence via magic pixie dust, as developers only use UNIX.
> Developers can use macOS.
Developers building things like web apps can use macOS.
Developers developing for Windows, or who need Windows-only toolchains cannot.
Who's developing for Windows? Microsoft themselves are turning things that would naturally have been native into web views instead.
Is that a rhetorical question?
There's software that exists beyond the web and SaaS.
Windows is still used widely in all sorts of places you'd never expect to see it. POS systems, ATMs, industrial controllers, digital signage/interactive kiosks, SCADA is largely Windows still. You need software for all of that, and it ain't gonna be web apps.
Windows is also still widespread in finance. The backend systems may be Linux or custom FGPA hardware but the front end finance world is ran on Windows (and Excel on Windows). Plenty of trading software is Windows only.
Heck, MS SQL Server is still in the #2 or #3 spot for database marketshare behind Oracle. Granted, it can run on Linux now but I don't many who are yet.
None of it is "sexy" like HN startups and SaaS so it doesn't get the coverage or discussion, but Windows is everywhere and so are Windows developers. You could argue whether or not Windows is/was the right choice for a lot of those (it's probably not), but it's there nonetheless and probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
There's a lot of legacy software that is bound to Windows, yes, but as time goes on, the amount of greenfield systems targeting Windows dwindles. From what I've seen, a lot of that software is also being actively containerized so that it can run on Linux systems, because administering legacy Windows systems is a huge pain in the ass. A lot of legacy Windows software is very difficult to containerize, because it gets it's grubby little hands in everything, but it can be done and usually that's the preferred approach.
The people building the many thousands of native Windows apps used by millions of people every day.
CAD/CAM systems. GIS applications. Automatic teller machine software. Public safety dispatch systems. Automotive diagnostic tools. Point of sale systems. List goes on.
While these systems are often written for Windows, there's actually very little reason to do so, and typically you're doing yourself a huge disservice.
Yes you can build a POS system using Windows tech, but you don't really gain much by doing so, other than a whole host of headaches when it comes to deployment and administration.
This is only remotely true for embedded systems, where you ship a fully integrated device, with all its associated peripherals as a turn-key system that does not have to interoperate with anything else.
If you’re in the business of shipping software that needs to run alongside other people’s software on the same machine, it’s a disaster.
Linux userspace backwards compatibility is extremely poor, the “solutions” to this issue (Flatpak, Snap et al) generally create more management problems than they solve. Desktop Linux is already an absolute monster to manage.
Try securely deploying hardware-backed PKI certificates for 802.1x to a fleet of Linux workstations. Takes a couple of minutes on Windows and macOS, but it’s a massive engineering effort on Linux.
We use remote windows VMs when doing windows development from our Macs. Everyone on my team and the adjacent only use MacOS. We do not work on web apps.
Doing the needful...
OK, the headline got borked into ungrammatical garbage, but that's probably an HN filter thing.
MS is going all-in on something the users don't want... surprise! Your OS is going to be involuntarily made all-AI all-the-time. And somehow, this fundamental change isn't even worthy of a rev; it's still "Windows 11" - FWIW.
My favorite part of the article is when they refer to it (apparently accidentally) as MS Widows.
I can't open an app anywhere anymore without some popup in my way, excitedly telling me I can now use AI to <do what I've always done>, and I have choices of "Use now" or "Ask me later".
If anyone's taking requests for the filter, removing adjectives or adverbs preferentially would be better if possible.
The shortened title has an unnecessary "enormous", but mangles actual meaning.
> “How about making widows fast?”
Will AI spare the children as well?
It would be wonderful if this were the final blow for Windows as a classic PC operating system and if Linux were to establish itself on the desktop as a more than reasonable, indeed unavoidable, alternative. The problem with AI is that it offers apparent solutions to non-existent problems. How long will big tech continue to back a horse that the general public does not want to ride?
PC manufacturers are bribed to use Windows, as always. Windows has a Soviet problem, it's like an Iron Curtain and most users will never thing of leaving it, if they do it's with kgb tourism agent called WSL. If Windows is a horse your certainly do not ride it, it rides you.
There's sadly whole business and services sector that relies on deals with MS.
My mother mid pandemic placed an order for a hearing aid which is partially supported with money from our healthcare system. Unlike 10-15 years ago nowadays everything is digitalized and done by the Internet - clients are no longer running around the city with paper forms. Sadly that means every personal information, data is exposed to Windows and with W11 it's even less possible to avoid being harvested. Not mention always online browser software used for hearing tests that surely collects on its own.
> The problem with AI is that it offers apparent solutions to non-existent problems
Yes
The good thing about AI is it offers assistance with old, tractable, problems
When it is everywhere it is an unhelpful annoyance
> The good thing about AI is it offers assistance with old, tractable, problems
That doesn't sound very good. I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or a typo. If the problem is old and tractable, you don't need AI for it. You could use a simpler, more efficient, and more reliable technology.
Good point!
"old, tractable" and hard problems.
Routine things.
Only in my dreams.
Sometimes while traveling I just watch movies on my laptop, I don't even bother to connect to Wi-Fi as there is simply no need. I wonder how Windows 11 would even work without internet, and probably it's not a bad assumption that it will refuse after a while.
Anyway, just wiped W10 out of this laptop and installed KDE (underlying distro doesn't matter that much), it works amazing.
Agentic will be the worst word invented in the last 100 years of humanity.
I love the subtle double meaning of "the last 100 years of humanity". Kudos!
> "How about making widows fast ? Not agentic" said one user clearly hoping Windows acted and felt faster than it now does.
Why do I feel like Neowin is using AI to write its articles?
That particular sentence gave me the exact same feeling.
The problem is that I don't really trust a big company to have an agent monitoring me let alone all the phoning home it does, but in an alternative universe, I can see the vision here as creating something that is closer to a starship-type OS from scifi where interactions are increasingly natural. That's interesting, but at the same time, what does it mean when the computer has its own kind of volition and is more loyal to the company than to you?
Computers are too complicated for the average user. So many people have me on speed-dial to fix issues or walk them through stuff. And AI is surprisingly good at this stuff. If someone can simply say "Connect my bluetooth headphones" and the computer does it that's a big deal.
But this is balanced by the fact that we live in a world where all our software is effectively user hostile -- look for whatever means possible to extract more value from us. This is the society that we live in now.
I think the "my computer is too complicated" is mostly a Windows issue. I don't think I can pair a bluetooth headset on Windows 10!
Folks don't seem to have these problems on macs or their phones.
To be fair, Windows runs on an infinite combination of devices and Airpods only work fully on Apple devices.
Yeah, if I have an agent in my computer, I want it to work for me, and nobody else. Not the company that sold it to me, not the FBI or CIA, nobody but me. Otherwise it's not my computer.
> I can see the vision here as creating something that is closer to a starship-type OS from scifi where interactions are increasingly natural
Then you're a real optimist. I'm afraid this whole AI technology once settles down will be nothing more than a corporate tool to manipulate populations economic behavior and perception of the world. An antithesis to what for example was seen in Star Trek, and something even worse than HAL9000.
All of Microsoft’s products seem like they are all trying to be everything for everyone. Instead, people want more focus. The entire experience of Windows is a mess. How many terminals does an OS need? Or settings and control panels? Or all the legacy stuff? Just start from scratch and think simple, secure, and fast…. Otherwise you get trapped and bound to endless reasons for doing stuff and no focus and end up with Windows 11.
That would be great, but starting from scratch would take away Windows' core strength: backwards compatibility. There's a lot of legacy out there that depends on all that old cruft being there. There's still critical infrastructure running on Windows XP.
MS could probably just virtualize it or containerize the old parts, but people made a lot of dumb choices back then and windows software got its tendrils into every part of the OS and so weird things can break when you try and containerize it.
Microsoft is repeating their own history. Initially, they integrated the GUI into the OS (Windows). Now they're integrating AI (another application) into their OS too. The result will be an even slower and more bloated OS, with a bigger maintenance burden.
People are also unhappy with Microsoft's approach to privacy, which will get even worse (if that's possible) with integrated AI.
They need to out product people in charge. Humans buy products that delight them.
I love using my PC, but in the past couple of years it’s become my Steam and emulation box, and for tinkering.
They need to step up.
> Humans buy products that delight them.
Individuals aren't Microsoft's core customer which is why they don't care. It's the same reason Apple never went after the enterprise. Steve Jobs wanted people to choose the product, not have it chosen for them.
For Microsoft, they don't care. Businesses/IT Departments are the ones choosing and shoving it on everyone else. The users don't have to like it.
For anyone who devs C++ on Windows because they still prefer visual studio over having to manage cmake on Linux, I've found meson to be a much friendlier build system and has really good integration with VSCode.
And if you're like me and hate bourne-like shells (sh, bash, zsh), powershell works on linux and mac and there's also nushell and fish, which have nicer syntax but I've had compatibility issues in the past
Gives me hope for more desktop Linux adoption :-D
I'm thinking that Valve's new SteamBox will help this tremendously.
You meant GabeCube
I have got to say, I rolled the dice on that headline before I read the link.
Heads, windows was going to ditch all the ads and tracking, any other number and it was going full AI.
Needless to say, not surprised when a number came up..
It’s Vista 2! I switched to Mac in 2008, and I just did it again a few days ago. Reality is that almost everything I do is Linux, but Office with its horrific file formats keep it around. Fortunately Visio is nearly dead, 3 to go.
With Vista it was coming from the failed Longhorn project that was supposed to be transformative to windows and longer fixing up winxp than they wanted, but at least vista ended up as plain old windows then win7 was a polished up release. For the direction MS have taken win11 I can't see them turning it around so quickly especially while they're still driving full speed in the direction they think is right.
Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.
> who are they selling windows to
Big companies that are still all-in on Microsoft, or basically all Microsoft 365 customers (which is 89% market share).
They already have, and will continue, to make Office features exclusive to Windows, leaving the macOS version of the desktop apps behind, especially as more and more functionality starts to get locked behind Copilot.
They were OS agnostic for a while before the AI craze, and now it seems they want to roll back some of that agnosticism and make sure that M365 shops remain Windows shops instead of M365+macOS shops.
As long as debloat and spyware-removing software such as Win10Privacy continue to exist, I’ll have at least one system still running a pro workstation version of Windows.
But damn, they seem to be doing everything they can to drive users away.
I feel like the stars are all aligned for Linux-on-the-Desktop right now.
>Windows itself is about to change in a really big way such that it already requires AI-specific hardware
The AI models that everyone wants to use are cloud based. What is the purpose of AI hardware on users' machine?
The purpose of AI hardware on users' machine is that then MS can hand-wave away any privacy concerns, claiming that anything sensitive is handled on-device.
Local processing of privacy-sensitive data, that is: personal files and what is shown on screen. Just think about Recall.
It’s obvious that build in ai powered rpa like features are important to add to the platform.
To stop being used by Windows and use Linux, ask for help with some friend that already use it. This is a great start. If you don't have anyone that use Linux, you will need to install it and this is the summary of the process for Manjaro Linux:
This is for you that don't even know what Linux is.
Welcome. Read below:
- download an ISO file from https://manjaro.org/products/download/x86 and choose a desktop to use, Plasma is cute, XFCE4 is mega fast and Gnome is mac-like desktop
- once you got the file, record this ISO to a USB pen drive with Rufus
- reboot your pc and press the key to allow you to choose to boot from the USB
- the usb will boot and Manjaro will open, you can start the install
- once installed, your next reboot will bring Manjaro installed
- start using it, install LibreOffice, video or photo editors, create music, browse the web with Firefox, LibreWolf, degoogled-chromium and you can also use Chrome if you really really want it and other browsers
Configure the programs like email clients and many MANY other programs
Since you already know Windows, you will now learn about computers and you will be the boss of that pc, like updates are when you want it, reboot is when you update and if you really want it
There are many "versions" of Linux, like Manjaro, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Fedora, Red Hat, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, etc.
Each of those versions will usually also allow you to choose your desktop. Windows has one desktop, here you can choose from Plasma, XFCE, Gnome and many many others. Then each allow you to configure the looks and feel. It is this amazing!
Now that you are the owner, the boss, the administrator of that operating system, you start using it. For the first weeks, save your documents to an external drive or pen, because if you have any problem, you will use the installer USB again and delete everything, so you have a backup of your docs. The programs you can install again.
I've tried many Linux distros and Manjaro is the only one that completely fail to install.
I installed Manjaro on many diferent hardware and virtual machines. Just because you can't install it does not mean it is not good for other people.
Problably the problem is your hardware. I have installed Fedora and Windows and it did not install, because of reasons.
So what was the problem? Can you install it again?
Im hopeful that the current crop of Linux PCs (hey steamos!) might finally kill windows.
I'm not picturing a large company running on SteamOS just yet. I doubt even Valve does.
Microsoft Bob 2: Confirmed
Bob 3. Bob 2 lives in the Virtual Reality Portal
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42678822
So is this a "how do we de-commoditize the OS" thing?
The Return of Clippy.
I see my decision to sunset Windows and my upcoming migration to Gentoo Linux is already paying off.
Can't wait until my new hardware arrives.
Also really hope that KDE Plasma and GNOME usage statistics go to the moon and Microsoft really shits their bed this time around. With all these enshittification tactics they really deserve it.
Everyday is a good day to switch to Linux.
I'm personally not worried, because crap like this doesn't make it into the LSTC editions, the type of Windows that's expected to be reliable and do actual work. That'll do for my multiplayer gaming needs, and for the rest of the functionalities I expect from my PC, they can fuck right off.
Key words: more bloat incoming
Enshittification doesn't just happen to products!!
Who TF thought this was a good idea?
Deliver a first class, lean operating system and then layer user space enhancements as requested.
Are they trying to make Linux desktop happen?
I'd encourage people to consider Chromebooks but I'm not sure Google deserves any more praise.
You know this might be the final push that the long needed IT-overhaul happens: every employee now needs 2 computers.
One super locked down white list only apps and network connections required to get their work data. email links completely blocked, email files can only be sent to a sandbox
One with immutable sandbox tasks: internet browsing, AI processing (super locked down human chosen only data in, and only outgoing connections are to foundational model, or back to the secure system for long-term-storage/backup)
(basically qubesOS, or more likely cant if microsoft needs its own secure boot and tpm hardware)
This is already best practice for IT admins (even per Microsoft's own guidelines). Privileged Access Workstations. Admins get 2 computers. One privileged, locked down, where all admin tasks are done from, and one general purpose machine for email/office tasks.
WTF is wrong with Microsoft? No one is asking for this.
Nothing. MS decision makers are fulfilling their duty to maximize profit by utilizing Windows to funnel users towards their most profitable, revenue generating, services of Azure and Office Copilot 365.
How do these changes help to funnel users towards Azure and Office Copilot 365?
Folks could have used those services even if Windows itself wasn't getting clanked, right?
It's simple advertising. People have a higher chance to use a product if it is advertised to them. I don't think there is a microsoft app these days that doesn't have a copilot logo visible in it at all times (even Paint).
That's like asking how installing a default browser helps boost that browsers market share.
Does that answer your question
No, because of course I want to use a browser, so I will download one if there isn't a default.
Not the case for Azure or Office
Despite what non lawyers may have told you, corporations are not legally obliged to chase short term profit at the expense of everything else!
In a sci-fi world that sounds nice, the tweet makes it sound like you could get a computer which Captain Picard can ask "Computer, scan all ship systems for information about Spot the cat" and the AI can talk to different systems (Windows apps) and ask it about information relevant to Spot (i.e. which has been tagged with metadata like subject=Spot).
In reality, it's Microsoft. Click this popup now to get 12 months free of 1TB OneDrive, and Copilot 365!
My answers is that Satya Nadella is betting the farm on LLMs/AI and, even if it's a path toward failure, Nadella has built enough credibility from past results that he will allowed to go a long way before the board or investors will start trying to rein him in. This could be Nadella's "let's buy Yahoo" moment.
Microsoft is the world's first AI controlled company
the CEO has been conned into the bullshit, and now has "AI" Chiefs of Staff telling him what to do
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
"Excellent question!" "Great idea!" "You're so smart!"
you can see how someone can fall into this trap, but normally they're not the one at the top so it's somewhat harmless
if you get someone at the top though... they can enforce their will downwards via KPIs and OKRs
.... Oh, wow, I assumed you were _joking_, but:
> At the office, he relies on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in Outlook and Teams and toggles among at least 10 custom agents from Copilot Studio. He views them as his AI chiefs of staff, delegating meeting prep, research and other tasks to the bots.
I don't think that's how these decisions are made. Their objective certainly does not have anything to do with happy users. Even if they lose a few (very few probably) Windows users they want to stay relevant in the AI race.
> stay relevant in the AI race
The race to what, pursue more of what users don't want so as to lose even more of them?
The race to talk more about AI at the quarterly earnings call.
No joke, this to me seems to be all that executives care about now.
My 70 year old father in law called me to ask how to install Linux after getting a new computer and finding Windows 11 unbearable (he liked Windows 10 fine). Everyone has their tipping point.
If people only got what they were asking for we would still be doing everything on paper, not computers.
Name just one accountant asking to do things on paper. I'll wait.
Its a bit late but I worked building point of sale systems when things were getting computerized. Many people wanted to keep their paper books.
Switch to Debian and i3wm and never be bothered again by this type of nonsense. PC = Personal Computer. Make other choices and regain your sovereignty and privacy.
I switched to Mac 20 years ago out of sheer frustration over the total lack of coordination between hardware and software, the frothing at the mouth obsession over excessive backwards compatibility over good design, privacy and security, and hardware that isn't total rainbow blinky light horseshit.
But I try to keep abreast of whats happening on the other side of the fence and I am often recoiling in horror and wondering why the fuck Windows users tolerate any of this.
If it wasn’t for the forced cloud integration, forced AI and other user-hostile behaviour, Windows 11 would actually be quite a nice OS.
It’s performant, easy to manage at scale, a lot of the UX weirdness from Windows 8-10 has been cleaned up, and tools like WSL are well integrated.
Windows 11 is not performant, it's sluggish in a lot of places and everything got slower on the same or even better hardware. And I will never not laugh about having two context menus. Windows 8 was way faster even on low-end hardware thanks to DirectUI.
Never upgrading from Windows 10 to another Windows. To a nice Linux distro next probably
We've been working against the direction of capitalism and human nature for fifty years to achieve the promise of software, in all its theoretical beauty. It was always an uphill battle, but the glimmer of possibility never completely disappeared. In all this time, I never could have guessed that AI would be the thing to finally kill the promise of software.
It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model". Reverse engineering for interoperability should be legal under any circumstances - regardless of whether you have to break encryption to do it. Vendors have way too much control over how end users interact with their products.
It's not just that, current sentiment around the CFAA is that any kind of unsanctioned third-party user agent for anything that isn't the open web is potentially prosecutable. Plus, if the big user platforms decide they don't like some aspect of what you're doing, they will shut down all of your access, and potentially access of others close to you, everywhere, and aggressively prevent you from reestablishing even a baseline of inoffensive participation, at great potential cost to your well-being.
>It's not capitalism, it's too-strong IP laws and "contempt of business model".
This just seems like a semantic disagreement - I'm using "capitalism" by its common colloquial definition: As a loose shorthand for "the way we run things here", i.e. as a superset of the thing you've said.