“You will own nothing, and you will like it.”
Technology
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Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.
Oh my God, they're bringing back clippy.
That means a whole new market of NFT Clippy Skins can be established.
That fixes the main problem with Clippy, which was not using a blockchain.
"It looks like you're trying to defraud people. Would you like help with that?"
That’s a big nope for me.
Internet goes out? I can still do some amount of work, now I need power and internet to both work to do any work at all.
Not a fan of this and I will not embrace it.
Didn't read the article.
The idea of online only software irritates me. Of course multiplayer games have to work this way. When blizzard and Ubisoft started requiring an active connection for single player games that was just going too far.
Can you imagine sitting at your computer, doing literally anything. The screen goes strait to blue with the windows shutting down screen saying, "Internet disrupted, please contact your provider for support".
Or trying to do any work on the go? This whole idea is just idiotic to me.
They will have to continue to offer some kind of offline option it seems, for people with flaky internet connections.
Never mind flaky internet, what about people that do events?
Things like PowerPoint presentation machines, VJ systems, video servers (for massive multiscreen playback).
You can't go into a field for a festival and expect reliable internet.
You can't go into a theatre and expect reliable internet, especially when 3k+ people turn up.
There are a few systems that run OSX, but Apple's hardware doesn't give you as much control as something like an Nvidia Quadro with sync cards. 99% of the big shows will be ran from Windows OS
I guess that means more people switching to linux, assuming they eventually 100% phase out non-cloud. Not even because "cloud bad" - there will be some of that, but because of the sheer number of people who don't pay for windows, not paying for it isn't an option if they control it completely.
Ya I'd be fully Linux after that. Still too many benefits of having your own hardware.
No thank you.
Also I bet instead of a one-time license you can have the privilege of paying $9.99 a month forever or lose access to all your files. And possibly requiring an internet connection to use your desktop computer?
and I want to move fully off of windows, what a coincidence.
The situation has never been better for comfortably abandoning Windows. Come to Linux, we have penguins
Are we doing the nobody reads the article thing here too? This isn't a replacement for Windows as an operating system, it's a cloud based version of the OS being sold to consumers. They're trying to compete with inexpensive Chromebooks, not take away your PC.
As an occasional sys admin, they've had stuff like this for enterprise forever, it's just self hosted. This is about as surprising as the sun coming up, they've been moving lots of their enterprise tech to consumer subscriptions.
Why would I read the article? I don't want to know the details. I want to be outraged.
Okay but what happens if you don't have a good net connection like at the coffee shop or airports? I swear sometimes people are clueless and just assume you always have good internet when that's not often the case!
Well of course they do. They want to turn an every-few-years OS purchase into a monthly subscription fee, like they did with O365. And eventually they'll drop the ability to install apps except through their store (under the guise of providing "safety" from malicious apps), so that they can collect a commission on the third party software sales market as well.
It's depressing to see. Unfortunately I'm heavily invested in music software which is not available on Linux. If Microsoft actually does this it could get to the point where even a switch to Apple seems better. But Linux is the only satisfactory and viable solution for actually having control of your machine.
WINE and similar tools have gotten really good in the past few years. Valve's Proton compatibility layer is good too, despite being designed for gaming many people are using it to run software which WINE itself struggles with.
It could very well be possible to run your music software with minimal tinkering.
As someone who works in cloud services/ops and has to deal with Microsoft partner relations almost daily, good luck with that.
I don't really want to switch to Linux, Microsoft, please stop pushing me to. I will, but I'd rather not. Ffs.
Give Linux Mint a try. It is very similar to Windows and will make the transition very smooth. Pretty much any windows programs that you want to run you can run in a shell like Wine.
How is this supposed to work in countries that have bandwidth caps, or slow internet connections?
It seems like every company these days wants to move everything to the cloud, but it doesn't mean it's going to happen. While something like this makes sense in some instances (like kiosks or similar maybe?) for the vast majority of use cases this is a non-starter.
Moving “Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud” is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft’s “Modern Life” consumer space, including using “the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.”
Intel and Microsoft have even hinted at Windows 12 in recent months, and Windows chief Panos Panay claimed at CES earlier this year that “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows.” All of this is part of Microsoft’s broad Windows ambition, detailed in its internal presentation, “to enable improved AI-powered services” in Windows.
Words cannot express how much I do not want to participate in this version of the future.
I'm kind of confused...if the plan is to move Windows fully to the cloud, why are they talking to chipmakers about enabling more Windows features in future chip releases? Why would you need processing power for the OS if the OS is fully on the cloud?
Microsoft has a track record of having excellent uptime! /s
I find it somewhat funny that this article came out on the day Microsoft 365 had an outage for most of the day.
I want to move Windows fully to the Recycle Bin.
Good luck to them. I’ve been very much enjoying Fedora since Windows 11 came out.
Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.
Assuming this will use OpenAI API like other Microsoft's AI products, this is going to be expensive to operate. Subsidizing it indefinitely is surely not an option. How would Microsoft monetize it? By charging subscription like GitHub Copilot, or monetizing it somehow using users data they collected? I assume it would be the latter.
Was already considering running Linux on my next machine. That just made it a definite. Is Mintos still the best choice for an everyday desktop?
Without reading the article, this smells a lot like #enshittification
More reasons to switch to Linux and stay there.
Once you're logged into Windows 365 you're technically using their hardware and just streaming the use to your machine. You will have almost no control over your own device because it isn't actually your own device. Your own device has been turned into a television, a device that just plays what another device is displaying.
This is about property and ownership and how Microsoft wants to take those things away from you. They want full control of how you use their operating system, and when they force users to use their software and hardware, they will acheive it.
Just another move toward " you will own nothing and you will be happy". Gotta resist the botnet people, Free software anarchy ftw!
What a terrible fucking idea
Typical loop in this case:
- Oh, M$ is so disgusting, I never gonna switch to the new platform!
In a few months/years
- Well, my apps/hardware are not working, time to switch anyway. Not because it's not working anymore, but because the platform is mature and I actually like it.