Obligatory “learn to use your computer and install another OS” post. You’ll probably find that your computer becomes MORE useful, not less.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Most people don't realize how slow Windows is. When you try something else, you realize how much time you have been spending just waiting for Windows to do things. Our computers can be a lot faster than Windows lets them be.
A couple of weeks ago I rebooted into Windows for the first time in well over 8 months, as I needed to use a piece of software I don't have on Linux (it's available, I'm just refusing to pay for it and no alternative method has materialised), and getting anything done was incredibly frustrating.
First everything had to update, and I was forced to log in to a bunch of stuff. My web browser spontaneously vanished, as did Discord. No idea why. Opening Explorer consistently took several seconds because it always decided to poll my external drive before displaying anything, even if I didn't do shit in my external drive.
Explorer being slow applies on my work PC too, and I have to use Windows on that. Every day I wonder how it'd be to put Linux on it.
Nautilus just opens the moment I click on it. Always.
I recently swapped my Dad's Windows computer with my old machine, which I installed Linux on ahead of time.
I told him it was a faster machine - which it was just slightly in the hardware sense, a very minor upgrade. A half-truth to encourage the transition.
But of course, it's running Linux, not Windows.
Next day he phones me up really happy that it's "so much faster than the old machine!"
And it really is a lot faster, but it's not the hardware. It's just not getting bogged down with all the crap Windows constantly does in the background.
Either way, mission accomplished.
No one asked for this.
This seems more like a warning to me.
Today I had to disable Copilot in Notepad.
Notepad.
The shitty word editor that you use to jot down your shitty writing before copypasting it into somewhere else to put actual work into it.
You’re telling me I can’t change the shitty line-spacing in shitty Notepad, but I can get a top-of-the-line corporate LLM to help me with my purposely shitty writing?
#keepnotepadshitty
I love notepad for deleting all formatting so word doesn't take a massive shit when I paste things into it from other documents.
Dear baby jesus. If I weren't a Linux user I'd scream to stop all of this AI stuffing
Then again, I'm a Linux user and I'm just laughing.
Join Linux, come to the dark side, we got cookies
You know it's funny that Microsoft took this feature from Apple from macOS. But here's the thing right? This shit requires a super computer npu to run and meanwhile my 2012 MacBook Pro with a core i5 3rd gen running opencore legacy patcher can just do this stuff in the exact same way. For the features one would actually wanna use this for.
I was actually delighted when Windows 11 added tabs to notepad and explorer, and layers make MSPaint worth using.
But all of these things became buggy messes. Explorer showing ads for OneDrive and inexplicable behavior, On more than one occasion, the address bar would become unusable, and I deeply resent having to use the mouse to do simple tasks.
Now I know that this was prelude to Copilot.
So now I daily drive Debian making me a computer user, not a resource for billionaires to mine.
Damn I thought it was going to be at least useful like a text prompt.
"Search all these files dumped and find me the ones from my old pc, move them all to the same location on the biggest spare partition that isn't the os one, and then organize them into folders by general idea without breaking up the coherency of the directories. And do it without losing the existing modified or created dates. Retain the original organization in an xml doc that you can read, just in case I don't like the organization and want to try again."
Or
"Install all libre stuff and all of the most useful windows tools. Delete, disable, tear out, and block all telemetry from this Windows installation. There must be privacy and zero enshittification on this computer. Go through, file by file, including all hidden and file systems and services, reading through each and every binary, and decompile, rip out any spyware or telemetry, and recompile. You have a week and this system will be disconnected from the internet entirely for the duration. Go."
This is the type of ai that would actually be useful to me. Imagine the power of being able to fully delegate lower level tasks like this.
I feel like AI never has useful features like that, just weird little gimmicks.
possible issues:
- blurred a part of the photo that shouldn't be blurred, data loss
- erased the wrong object, data loss
- deleted large chunks of content in my docs/ppts/spreadsheets I wanted to keep, data loss
This is a really bad idea
letting AI do whatever it wants to your files is not very good...
But if you stick all of your files into OneDrive and turn on version history you can keep trying… /s
If Linux was more compatible with a lot of programs/games there would be absolutely no reason to install windows ever again
I finally switched to full-time Linux last year and I haven't missed anything. The only stuff that doesn't work (and doesn't have a good alternative) are games with invasive anti-cheat that I wanted to boycott anyway.
Most is the anti cheat games are not working on Windows either. They only give you some dubious error message.
Linux is compatible with a lot more than it used to be, and for those stubborn programs, there are usually FOSS alternatives, or emulation/compatibility layers. Hell, my machine runs games faster through Proton on Linux in 1440p than it did natively on Windows in 1080p.
man I'm so glad I'll never use windows again.
Every single story about windows 11 makes me hope I can convince IT to let me migrate my work laptop to linux before October.
I'm a senior IT type. My work laptop is Debian.
We like good pastries, coffee, good booze and feeling appreciated. Go make friends with the senior IT types and the help desk manager. Trust me it's with it.
Don't get me wrong - this is awful and is just another misstep in a long line of missteps by Microsoft.
But I also can't help but chuckle at this. It is so clear that "AI" as it has been developed today is hitting a peak of what it can do. These corporations are desperate to shove it in every product they possibly can to drive sales and valuations to make shareholders wet and yet the only things they ever advertise AI being capable of are crap like summaries, background removal, background insertion, grammar/typo checking, list making, web searching, etc. Most of it being crap that I have never once heard of a person being even remotely interested in... and why would they be? Why would someone want to edit their photos to add a different sky, new people, etc to create memories that never happened?
I disagree. If this is in your system, they're going to use every file on your computer to train their AI. That's my guess.
I'm sure they will. It's Microsoft, so I'd expect nothing less than that.
Article doesn't state this but I assume this is done via Copilot, so anything you use it on goes direct to Microsoft cloud, right?
Some Copilot functions are done locally on some computers with the appropriate NPU chips. But it's Microsoft, so they'll be sending data home either way.
This is a whole new level of data mining, which is why they want it. Now they will scan everything that's open.
If it ran with local model(s), as in, ran on your PC entirely, I would have no problem with this.
I just get happier with each passing month that I don't use windows anymore. The freedom of having my hardware and data no longer serving the corporate interests of the operating system vendor is great.
I am generally opposed to the integration of generative AI in consumer hardware, since it doesn’t have much practical utility at this point.
However, the features described in this article mostly have to do with extracting information from images. This is actually quite useful! For example, macOS allows users to select text and automatically mask objects from images. It’s a feature I use heavily and wish other operating systems had good support for.
However, the features described in this article mostly have to do with extracting information from images.
You said "mostly" and also, I don't want microsoft looking at any of my images without them asking first. They already have deleted images from my computer if I save them in their designated "my pictures" folder. I don't trust them.
Microsoft will have AI tracking everything I do and taking screenshots as well. Just what I have been asking for. /s
They're better make it so the context menu doesn't take 2s to fully load while moving the bottom rows around first.
Bitch, every valid action for a file is in the diving registry, sorted by file type. Why do you need to think about this?