I’ve often wondered what new and innovative ways Microsoft could find to make my computer even less likely to do what I want.
But AI, bro
Bro, remember when VR was all the rage? EVERYTHING was pushing VR, so much so Facebook Meta went all in on it.
Now it's a fucking novelty at best.
I think VR and all these AI assistants are similarly in that they’re in their infancy stages and there’s gonna be a ton of growing pains before they’re useful enough to be common, but someday they will have their place
That’s my thoughts on the matter at least
VR has been explored though, from Google Cardboard to the PSV2 to animating/painting... All of them failing to gain traction or be widely adopted.
It either needs to jump through a lot more hurdles to be more accessible and useful, or it's just gonna be another cool experiment in time like Etch-A-Sketch
VR has been explored though, from Google Cardboard to the PSV2 to animating/painting... All of them failing to gain traction or be widely adopted.
That's only because the cost for a good experience is still out of the realm for most people to justify to even try. Until we are looking at $150 or so for a good experience that doesn't give people headaches or motion sickness issues it will never take off.
The cheap VR systems still give plenty of people issues, and the expensive ones are out of the reach of a normal person living their life day to day.
And for businesses, VR simply has not proven to have a cost benefit worth even the initial capital investment, without even taking into account ongoing IT costs due to damaged equipment.
I'm one of the people who gets nauseated from 3D goggles. I've got a friend who got all the latest stuff, had sensors on the wall, all that and within a minute or so I wanted to puke.
I'm never going to use a vr headset. Not sure what percentage of people are in my boat, but I think that's a pretty significant barrier to adoption
I wouldn’t say never.
The current headsets can make you sick in a variety of ways but since the start of VR, the sick factor has been reduced by roughly half every 5 years or every generation I’ve tried it.
It’s through a combination of higher refresh rates, better tracking, sickness reducers such as limited FOV when moving, or various locomotion techniques for the player.
The largest nausea inducer is giving people a joystick for moving around. But otherwise a 90+hz refresh rate and large FOV solve most issues.
Also, frankly, it takes some getting used to. But once your brain knows what to expect, the sickness goes away pretty quick.
Also I don’t necessarily expect entertainment or games to be the big thing. Many businesses use it for short periods to showcase designs. And VR is walking right now while AR is running.
And for businesses, VR simply has not proven to have a cost benefit worth even the initial capital investment, without even taking into account ongoing IT costs due to damaged equipment.
That's just not true. Companies of all sizes are using VR for onboarding and training with much success and a huge return on investment. There are also a lot of location-based and VR arcades making a nice profit.
VR may never go mainstream, but for businesses there are a lot of use cases for which it is valuable.
What are some companies/industries using it for onboarding/training and how are they applying it? Haven't heard about this.
That's certainly a factor, but I think it has far more to do with availability of content.
I can afford to buy a proper VR setup but I do not see it as a worthwhile investment because practically none of the content available is of interest to me.
It's the equivalent of dropping 2K+ to play mobile games.
Until AAA studios are actively developing for this hardware, I'm not interested...but they won't because barely anyone has the hardware. It's a real chicken and egg scenario.
VR is great, just unfortunate still lacking software. Half Life Alyx and GT7 are amazing experiences unlike anything without VR. Meta’s shit I haven’t tried but on more powerful, Facebook free platforms there’s a lot of great stuff.
It's very obvious that they rushed Copilot. What should have been an assistant like Jarvis in Iron Man, has literally no purpose and can't do anything useful.
an assistant like Jarvis in Iron Man
We should bring back Clippy! –Microsoft exec
If a new Clippy worked like Jarvis, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
well you hit the nail on the head
It's MS, that's why it was rushed. Features make boss happy, bugfixes make boss angy (he has more work). No wonder that huge features get capped at 50% in such a culture.
This might just be the push I need to switch to Linux desktop.
Do it. With proton the last argument for me to use windows is gone (gaming).
Well, it's not GONE. There are still plenty of games that won't run well on Linux, or they won't allow online multiplayer because their anti-cheat software is restricted to Windows. But that number is getting smaller every day.
But there are so very many games that do work. That those that do not, i can easily ignore.
Thats why I specified that, for me, that was enough to switch. I agree that proton isnt there yet and 100% compatibility, and we will probably never get to that. But there are enough games on the market for me to do 90% of my gaming on Linux these days.
Yeah and it's getting closer all the time. I don't think we're that far from a "tipping point" where Windows gets so shitty, and simultaneously Linux gets so good (for gaming specifically) that it would be silly not to switch.
Any day now....
I'm really not convinced that even if linux, at some point, does become a better platform for gaming than windows, that windows users will swap over. Mainstream gamers probably have never installed an OS before, it's intimidating for people.
Ubuntu 23.10 is the first mainstream Linux desktop distro that I think could be good enough for many windows users. Windows really needs to fumble for this to happen though.
Meh. I don't play multiplayer games at all other than FFXIV and that I haven't played in over a year. The only thing that would deter me is some visual novels I play are windows only but I could probably just run them in a virtual machine as they're not demanding.
Games like that just reinforce that a large segment of the gaming population will prioritize Windows, and developers go where the players are. I used to dual boot windows but now run windows as a VM with a VFIO gpu. Works great but it’s annoying to need that for just a few applications.
I'm still on windows because I multibox my main game and the tools to do it don't work, alt tab is a goddamn mess, minimize window on focus loss is a fucking nightmare, and multiple instances of proton just chew up system resources until the game starts lagging so hard I need to quit every client and try again.
it's an edge case but that's quite a lot to deal with when windows just works.
Can you run Adobe software via proton? As soon as that works I'll be on Linux.
Look at your usecase, if it really requires adobe suite, you are out of luck i'm afraid. Perhaps you could research running a VM or wine, but I havent tried any of that myself.
If you conclude that you dont need features exclusive to adobe you might be able to find a foss alternative.
I spent the last ~10 days "playing" with many distros, including testing some current games, and I am literally right now backing up my files and about to reformat my main PC to linux (full drive, no dual). This is after only having experience with copy-paste Raspberry PI guides for my pi-hole.
Don't totally believe "oh it's so easy, nothing to configure" - those people are lying, especially if you've not used Linux before. But several flavors of Ubuntu are quite pleasant, and I appear to have found a home with PopOS. I can't find anything that "doesn't work", and the worst fixes were just quick searches for help. PopOS won due to nvidia compatibility and a nice, snappy desktop. It also was the fastest in overall reformat cycle time. My wife's computer is still Windows, if I do have any microsoft emergencies.
There are some games that just will not work even under proton, or that have functional restrictions. It's way fewer games than it used to be, but it's still not an absolutely perfect solution. I would love to make Linux my gaming OS instead of my "getting shit done" OS like it currently is, I've been advocating for it for a few decades at this point and it's almost there, but it's not to a point yet where I can unreservedly recommend it to gamers. If you aren't a gamer I'd say it's already good enough for anything you need.
How easy was setting up the pi-hole?
It's stupid easy. Flash DietPi to the SD card, select pi hole from the package list, then point your router to the IP for DNS.
Of course, it should be plugged directly into your router, so a zero won't work without an ethernet hat.
It's "easy" - but that is very subjective, depending on how much you've down outside "turning Windows on".
You DO need to make sure your router allows assigning a DNS ip address. Some ISP-supplied units are rather locked down.
I recommend a "kit" from somewhere like CanaKit (amazon has them), to make sure you get the parts you need. It can run on smaller/cheaper kits, but I say get a Pi3 or 4 variant.
Then following the link above, there is great documentation on install. Install "Putty" on windows, which will log into your Pi and allow remote command line, and then the entire process is copy-paste from guides.
After you finish, you may feel "oh that was easy!" - but there's still some stuff to learn and get used to along the way.
Lol, every single Microsoft article has this comment.
About a month ago Windows 11 started forcing ads for apps and services I didn't need. Immediately installed a popular Linux distribution to have some peace of mind. There's every flavor of desktop out there. I picked one for work and games (pop_os). It's out of my way most of the time and it's not trying to sell me anything. I recommend it, specially, if you're someone that doesn't fiddle with settings too much, it just work.
been working on it here. i've just moved my multi-monitor setup at the office over to debian mint, and relegated windows to a crt.
i can't go "all in", as supporting windows desktops "pays the rent", but it'll be "all but one" at home and at the office.
Microsoft may replace the Start button with the Copilot AI in Windows 12
Yeah, they could also replace the start button with a shit emoji. But there's no indication at all anybody wants to do any of that because they're not idiots. You only said that so people visit your shitty website. In fact, not even the quote you reference for your article suggests any plans of replacing the start button whatsoever:
“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”
Fuck clickbait headlines and fuck websites bending any and all content to the SEO voodoo.
lemmy reddit is basically a misleading clickbait megaphone
And everybody's just happy to bitch about whatever the headline suggests without ever checking if it's even true.
And everyone and their grandma is switching to Linux, this time for real
Lemmy communities need to start banning domains that post clickbait garbage like this.
Well in that case I might replace windows 12 with not using windows 12
Im 70% sure I'm replacing wins 11 with Linux already so join us
A few weeks ago when they made the search bar come back after I had told it to go away I switched to Linux. It's weird the small annoyances that add up. It's great so far. With KDE for the desktop environment, you can make it look however you want, including almost identical to any version of windows you want. It's really quite usable, and generally I'm already faster and more comfortable with it than I was with windows.
XP gang
Botnet gang :/
Yeah, don't use old versions of Windows (or any OS really). Upgrade to Win 10/11 or install Linux (or something else that's supported).
Nope
I love this idea. The reason people continue using Windows is because they're used to it. Messing with the Start button is going to piss off even the most patient users. Not to mention it'll be an absolute nightmare for any IT department. Just imagine an army of Karens calling your hotline first thing on Monday morning, yelling at you because you took away the Start button. It'll make Windows 8 look like a huge success.
They already fucked with start menu and search and it's already a problem for IT. I can't find any app I got installed unless I spell it out right, and even then it might work with just 3/8 letters in but no further.
Sometimes I just click through program files cause it's faster.
Back to cluttering the desktop with shortcuts to everything it is then.
sometimes you can't find an application even when you spell it out correctly, hafta go through the apps list to find them.
I feel like things like Classic Shell (or whatever the go-to alternative is nowadays) are just going to make bank from enterprise customers suddenly wanting to make their desktops usable for the average user.
Doubtful. It's hard enough to get programs past our security team and having half malware bundled programs like this won't be an easy task.
Lol, what? There is no malware in classic shell, or start11 or explorer patcher. Wtf are you talking about?
Tell that to dumbass IT "managers" that think a process monitor is a hacking tool.
i remember some game refusing to launch just because i had it installed
Openshell on github. I don't know that it's the same code, but I'm pretty sure the Classic Shell website linked to it.
They tried fucking with it on Windows 8 and that worked out so great.
Which is why this is obviously just a shitty clickbait headline. Have you read the article? Nobody is planning to replace the start button but they could and that's enough for tech "journalism" these days.
No, silly! You use AI to find sponsored ads on Bing! You don't need notepad++ to ＣＯＮＳＵＭＥ
No. Search isn't for finish g what you want anymore.. common misconception.
Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?
“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”
Saying "copilot is like the start button" is not saying "copilot will replace the start button", the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.
This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.
Remember those times when Microsoft said that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, as it will get to a free "Windows-as-a-Service" model? My ass, now
I can't find the words to describe how absolutely fucking disgusted I am with the fact that we don't even have 11 out in full swing and they're talking about selling us 12 after the "10 would be the last" bullshit.
For fucks sake microturd, get your shit together and stop trying to bleed everyone dry... We know literally every other company in the world is doing that, but it doesn't make it right... :/
This rage bait bullshit was debunked a long time ago, they never claimed 10 would be last and there's no official word on 12 being Saas, all of this shit is just mad-boy anger fuel.
They didn't. That was an "evangelist" talking to Devs one time and the media ran with it.
They didn't seem to dissuade anyone of the notion, but they never repeated it officially.
Come, yer tired souls, to the Kingdom of Torvalds.
Start menu is whatever you want it to be
Search works
No ads
No spyware
No drivers to install (except Nvidia)
Fuck Nvidia.
Also:
upgrades don't need forced restarts
major OS versions are, usually, non-breaking
new DE... same as the old DE but may contain new features. Long live the DE!
pretend that you're my late grandma, whom I miss a lot. her favourite pastime at this time of the day was deleting the C:/system32 directory.
I only have one machine that's still running Windows. This would convince me to finally make that zero.
Same bro. Linux gaming is getting better and better every day. That's my last hurdle.
I only have one machine using Windows because I don't want to be "left behind" in the corporate desktop world, but it's on my "left hand monitor" while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won't let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn't run on 11 yet.
If I didn't have to work in the corporate space, I'd quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.
I too, think the Windows start menu is way too responsive and not buggy enough. /s
What are you talking about, it always takes me to the right website when I search for the app I just installed!
It used to be when it was basically just a folder of shortcuts. Since the metro interface the start menu has been getting worse and slower.
I only know of Win 7 and Win 10, never touch 8, 8.1 nor 11. I still use win10 at work and the start menu is very odd. I like to use the win key to summon the menu and search, but the behavior is very inconsistant, sometimes it's fast, sometimes very slow, sometimes I can search, sometimes not, sometimes it gives me the file/app i am looking for, and sometimes it decides to go for bing results. I must admit, I actully never ever navigate the menu itself appart from turning off the laptop. It is a very slow and inefficient design element in my opinon.
Microsoft why are you trying to pull an Elon and destroy your own brand, stop that -- what, after all, has a dedicated keyboard key on Windows keyboards, and has for decades?
They're not. It's just the author's "creativity". There's no indication of plans to change the start button. Still, they could change the start button, which apparently warrants a misleading article people actually discuss.
All the "X company may/could/might" and "X plans on this" news feel like they're just feeling for a reaction from the public to see what they can and can't get away with. If it gets too much push back, they just put it on the shelf and boil the frogs for longer before trying again, like with Google and WEI. It's tiring. Stop being evil you corpo fucks.
"Stop being evil you corpo fucks."
Narrator: this proved to be as possible as empathetic capitalism, that is to say, physically and theoretically impossible.
Ahhhh finally time to give Linux a try
Go with Linux Mint, you won't be disappointed
I'll try it!
My login screen has my 2 monitors flipped and I can't figure out how to fix it. Otherwise, I like it.
First and formost I found this video that might help you out explaining how to set up dual monitor for linux, I have never had two myself but it seems like a good video to get you started
Try the 'display' program preinstalled and see if one of the settings helps you out
You may need to install graphics drivers if you have not already, open the perinstalled 'driver manager' app and see if it detects anything needing done.
make sure your update manager has everything up to date. open the 'update manager' app and see if anything needs done.
If those options fail, open the 'welcome screen' app preinstalled and click on the 'help' section in the left hand side of the app. From there click on the launch button for the IRC chat room. It will open up a program to directly talk with very knowledgeable Linux mint community volunteers who will be more than happy to further help you in real time. Keep in mind depending on time of day or circumstance you may have to wait a little while for someone to be available.
I feel bad that you encountered an issue right away, I hope you have quick success in fixing it.
Thanks for the info!
"Oh, don't tell me what to be disappointed with!"
This could be fine if it didn't immediately send all of your data to the internet.
But as is, fuck that and fuck you Microsoft.
Windows told me I don't have permission to do something. On my computer. As an administrator. Using the command line.
Fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft and their controlling asses, and fuck co-pilot and Open AI for contributing to artificial intelligence not only being closed source and proprietary, but encouraging the United States government to make it literally illegal to do it on the open source field as well.
“….So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot”
What does that mean to me, if I just want to open notepad? How to I express my intent, exactly? Through interpretive dance?
Hello, I would like to use notepad.
Ok, I can open notepad. But have you considered notepad enhanced with AI? It predicts what you want to type for $49.99 a year!
"i would like to write a quick letter in wordpad."
sorry. that application is not available. launching word instead and starting a subscription to microsoft 365. locating credit card information... found. you will be charged $99.99 per year.
** Goes to uninstall the application **
Hello, it looks like you're trying to uninstall Microsoft 365. Your plan has been updated. To keep Microsoft 365 uninstalled you will be charged $149.99 per year, plus a $74.99 uninstallation fee.
Thank you for signing up for Uninstaller 365. Your monthly fee will be $49.99. To cancel write 16 pages of klingon opera and send it to the following address exactly 100 days 16 hours before your requested cancellation minute.
I'm guessing speaking or typing: "note" "pad" "notepad" "how do I write a note?" "Write something down" would all work.
To be fair this would probably be the same speed as me hitting windows key + R and typing "notepad".
This type of information, encourages me to move quickly to a linux distro of choice.
Agreed. I have already been contemplating it. When they finally brick my Windows 10 desktop I will be switching for sure.
encourages me to move quickly to a linux distro of choice.
Fedora, Steam, Bottles.
Fedora/KDE for the quality support and stability of your Linux distro, Steam for, well, Steam, and Bottles for non-Steam games, that still lets you launch those games from inside Steam.
I almost switched around the 2007 to 2010 timeframe but they got a lot better with 7 and PowerShell closed the deal for me.
I'm now working more Linux into my daily usage to get a feel for what I'd need to do if I switch, and start solving those problems now, because if they do go this way, I'm probably going to jump ship. And they've made it even easier since I can still have PowerShell and C# and .NET on Linux now!
And I've been slowly replacing windows with Linux since the arrival of Windows 10.
"It seems you wanted to start an application, let me guess which one you want instead of just letting you proceed with that"
"In the meantime please watch this 15 second candy crush ad while your program starts up. Join windows 12 Premium+ starting 10.99/month today to reduce ads to one per hour"
***ads may be shown more than once per hour if traffic is high.
How many times has Windows tried to kill off the start menu!? I can think of at least three:
Windows 8
Windows 10's funky live tiles thing (by default).
This strange Windows 12 AI junk
Windows 10 didn't have live tiles, that was 8.
Windows 12 is not a product that exists and there are no plans to replace the start button.
You can think of one.
Windows 10 did have tiles at first, but they were corralled into the top of the start menu iirc. And.... Did you not read the article?
they were corralled into the top of the start menu
Sounds like they didn't try to "kill of the start menu", then.
And… Did you not read the article?
I... Did read the article which is why I know it's just got a clickbait headline and there are no plans to replace the start button. Did... you not read the article?
This is FUD. AI integration is a given, but I doubt they would outright axe the start button unless they plan to fundamentally change the Windows UX design language.
If they do, expect it to go the way of Windows 8.0 real fast.
You mean notebook.net isn’t a legitimate news site?!
If they do I'll finally switch to Linux. I tried once and Windows 11 was just simpler, but if they pulled this I'd have no choice.
MS was enshityfying before there was a word for it.
Only thing I use Start button for is to turn off the PC. The search is unusable and all shortcuts are in my task bar anyways.
Gotta just make an icon on the desktop that dies a full shutdown, full especially because Microsoft basically made that harder to do. Now I just double click an icon and call it a day.
Did you put the application in the start menu during install?
Linux-onlyists have a tendency to not learn how anything works and then blame the "bad workflow" of the OS, so it's kind of difficult to just assume you didn't make a mistake.
yeah, I use my start button all the time to quickly open stuff. Hit start, start typing the program name, hit enter because it shows up immediately as a suggestion. super quick with no need to touch the mouse
I wish I could upvote many times - does anyone do this differently? Does Microsoft think “maybe if we make a useless search with ai instead of bing, people will use it?”
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. They don't dare to touch that button.
Meanwhile in the category of "useless bullshit nobody asked for" we have Microsoft. Again.
I am this close to go all linux, Microsoft. don't tempt me. only thing that make use windows is gaming and that too is slipping away because of steam
Just jump. I went Linux a month ago and never had to go back for gaming. I still have windows installed but I've used it only twice because music plugins are not compatible with Linux.
Once I find a good guitar amp for my needs I can nuke windows entirely.
Are the plugins VST by chance? If so, check out yabridge, you can install the plugins with wine and even supports 32-bit plugins
Have you seen recent benchmarks? Windows games actually run faster on Linux at this point.
The only exception is the small handful of titles with anti-cheat set to to anti-linux.
Have you seen recent benchmarks? Windows games actually run faster on Linux at this point.
On some games. This channel tested 20 of the most popular games last year. Several of the titles didn't run on Linux at all. Windows had an average win on 4K, and Linux had an average win on 1080p. This is much closer than it has been in years, but it's definitely not a clean sweep. As you explain, Linux also have major issues with anti-cheat which is used on some of the most popular games today. From experience, I also can't use my very expensive wheel and peddles because of a lack of drivers. So I can't make the move to Linux completely.
“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”
I like to put down M$ when I can, but I don't think replacing the start button is the exact plan here. I think he's just using it as a comparison.
This isn't going to work whatsoever with people who don't know how to express what they want to do.
Tons of people have just been taught a fixed workflow involving a sequence of buttons with known labels and icons and locations. Lots of people already can't find programs in the start menu even if they know the name (because they don't know how search works and often even will think it's not the same program / will think it won't have the same data because the icon was found in a different place).
How are they suddenly going to talk to an AI about things that the AI don't even have information about? The AI won't know all the nicknames people have, it won't knew how people describe the icons, can't handle all misspellings (they don't even understand phonetics), it won't under people's description of the UX parts, and when programs have 20x start options where people usually follow a guide to pick the right one then the AI won't be able to reliably recognize which one the user intends to open.
Every single company would literally need a team of AI training experts and capture EVERYTHING the employees does with the computers and says about them for a few months to capture all the context it needs.
I like how the copilot button will allow Microsoft to run what it thinks you want to run.
That would be anticompetitive, but Microsoft learned from the last time. (And what it learned was "nothing's going to happen to you so carry on")
I might replace Microsoft with Linux in Windows 12
I had this exact thought. It may actually be "The year of the Linux Desktop."
Only if it's shipping as the default OS on hundreds of millions of new devices, and easy enough that a 65 yo can install their 12 year old copy of TurboTax software on it, while their grandson plays Roblox on it. :P
Gotta be usable by the lowest common denominator before the return window at a rural BestBuy is up.
I've just done exactly that, now dual booted with Linux mint, once I iron out the (specifically my) kinks, win10 will get put in a VM for emergencies.
They won't. They do however want to stay relevant and will float things like this just to create talk about Microsoft and Windows.
You know what's really interesting to talk about?
How fast it was for me to setup Chimeraos on a PC with an Intel GPU and hook it up to my tv and Xbox wireless controller USB dongle.... First boot and I login to Steam and BAM! Grab that controller. Time for couch gaming
Windows is nowhere near that good or easy as a game station for coach gaming.
Time to experiment with Linux again. Still haven't settled on a distro that I liked 100%.
been distrohoping for a long time, tumbleweed kde changed that...
been using it for almost 2 years now.
Tumbleweed KDE is definitely sweet. Can also recommend Fedora.
Shop around with desktop and distro, but remember it's not Windows. If you're looking for it to be Windows, you're never be happy with it. There is Windows things to unlearn.
TBH you don't have to find the perfect distro - just one that is better than the BS Microsoft peddles. And that gets easier and easier.
Well fuck that
Microsoft may replace windows 11 with Linux in my computer
Breaking news: I'ma replace windows with any version of Linux in 12 months
Switched to Manjaro almost a year ago. No regrets and absolutely 0 desire to come back.
After a week in Linux, you just know Windows is trash.
X. Why not now?
Way to increase usage of Linux, good job Microsoft
Building this into the OS is clearly unnecessary, there's obviously another motive here...sweet user behavior data?
UI/UX job replacement. And to get you used to using it so they can charge you for using it later.
They don't need AI to do that.
Remember that businesses are made of people, not clairvoyant cunning machines of profit.
Last year, NFTs were the thing that was going to change everything, and everyone wanted to find ways to bake them into their thing, whatever it was. Fast forward a year and we hear about weird failures, abandoned plans and a slight chatter about the very small handful of uses where the idea makes sense.
Right now, chat and generative AI is the thing.
Project managers at companies were told to find ways to fit the thing into profitable places, and a quick way to do that is to stick into into any place with a textbox and user interaction.
Next year, we're going to see 95% of those ideas disappear, and the remaining will either be where it makes sense, or where the project manager is particularly good at their job.
Yep, we can have AI steal your data and save money by using your hardware to process it for us.
I don't want to go back to Windows 8. Those were... dark times...
I'm here for it as a snobby Linux user. Let's see how much the average windows user is willing to let their experience be degraded before they finally tap out and try an operating system that isn't pure trash
No thank you. Startallisback to the rescue. Ghost spectre to remove whatever bullshit they put in this time.
I'm not against progress, I just prefer my computer to leave the thinking to me.
Or at least leave the thinking on the client side.
They fuckin' do that and I'm out. Haven't run Linux on the desktop since 2009, but it wasn't bad back then and I assume it's only gotten better. Meanwhile Microsoft has continued the enshittification of Windows and if I didn't need it for dev purposes, I'd be more willing to pull the plug. All this "AI" stuff Microsoft keeps adding to everything is going to push me over the edge.
It's gotten a lot better over the past few years.
Oh so much better. I've relegated Windows only programs to a virtual machine. I haven't touched it in a long time but it's there just in case.
Idc, I'm on Linux now. I'd rather buy a Mac than install Windows again at this point (if I ever need to use software that's Windows/Mac only)
Can someone just start making community updates for windows 7 and we can just use that when Unix is not a viable option
Microsoft will come to your house and break your knee caps if someone did that haha
LOL
Oh boy. That thing is the steering wheel of the Windows system.
I mean... Yea. Yea it is. They want to:
Fill the thing with ads
Control the entire user experience
Track everything you do in that experience
Prevent users from accessing any low level system changes
Fill the thing with ads
They're not even being subtle about it:
“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”
Yup on 4. Mess at all with the hostfile and Windows Defende won't stop harassing you about a threat. User autonomy is a threat to Windows.
Windows 12 is already a failure and it hasn't even been formally announced yet. Congrats Microsoft! You've successfully failed for the second time in a row to deliver a windows version that most users actually like even to the slightest bit.
I guess the actual YOTLD will finally arrive after 20 years.
Fourth, fifth if we count 8.1
Everyday I'm happier and happier I have migrated away from Windows.
My work have only just caught up to windows 10.
Assuming they know nothing of EOL or CVE. They better hurry then, only a year or so until 10 security patches go up the wall.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Windows 10 EOL isn't until 2025, so two years left to run.
The biggest pain point of windows 8 (on release) was the missing start button, why would they think a bingilator would work instead?
Don't worry I am sure they will fix all this madness for Windows 9.
From "Windows 10 will be the last windows" to this.
Okay. If 12 is coming out why would anyone go with 11?
Well I'm still using 10 so....
Why not just make 10 louder?
Only if they promise to remove the most pointless keyboard button in the world as well.
The Windows key? I use it constantly.
Windows + Left/Right to dock screens, Windows + E for a quick file explorer, Windows + X for settings and dev options, Windows + P to adjust your second monitor, I'm sure there's other hotkeys as well.
Win+X U U Shutdown
Win+L Lock
Win+V Clipboard history (might need to be enabled but * very useful)
Win+1-9 switch between windows (works well if your apps are pinned to taskbar in specific order)
Use all of these and more
Win+X S U for sleep! I use it every night. My dog even knows when I press it from the pattern and immediately runs to the backdoor for his last potty of the night.
TIL, Thanks
WIN+X has all sorts of useful stuff in it, but switch to Linux tho. You can even still use the button!
I wouldn't call it pointless, having another layer is quite handy. But I would like to see it adopt a more ambiguous name, sure Super or Meta is here but they haven't caught on due to their logo still being plastered on the key.
I'm honestly a bit confused on what is the most pointless button in the world considering the command key is on Mac for why do I need a ctr replacement when ctr is right there the windows equivalent at least has the utility of exiting programs without closing them
switch to linux and the Windows key becomes the Super key, unused in shortcuts by any application and so you can map it to whatever you want. super useful.
I may replace Windows as my daily driver with Linux.
I did. The first couple months were... An experience. But after getting used to all the different ways things work (many of which are, honestly, way better), it's quite, quite nice.
Some of my hardware even works better: the drawing tablet's drivers don't crash and the audio latency is much less!
Similar experience here. The first month was rough as I got everything installed and configured. But it's been pretty solid in the 4 months since then. I am glad I switched.
I switched around 2 years ago after using different distros on and off for a few years on an old laptop, and I've never been happier with my computing experience.
One thing I will say is you will have to find replacements for some of your favourite applications, but I've found that pretty much every alternative has been better. And if you need suggestions just ask the community or you can DM me.
Also just pick Mint or if you really have to Ubuntu(though I would definitely pick mint) as a first distro as that will give you the best out of the box experience and a beginner friendly community( unlike Arch's which I daily drive).
Then switch if you want a different distro( and I would suggest trying it out in a VM), just don't get a distro hopping addiction😆.
I see lots of love for Linux in the comments which is awesome, but is there anyone considering making a hackintosh out of their machine? Is that a good route to go these days?
Considering that you probably have like 4 years of support max (until they end support for internet intel macs) I don't think it's a good choice
It's probably be more of a pain now than ever, since Apple is now using their own proprietary chips.
Nope
All I care about with the start button is the search function. If this didn't fuck with that, sure.
Hell maybe the search function will actually be working as intended. Don't show me shit from the websearch before you make sure there's no software with that name on the system!
I disabled that realy quickly...
If I wanted to search the Web I would use a browser.
I can only recomment that, it speeds up search a lot and it now actualy works as one would expect
I used to do that periodically, but it kept getting reset, so now, it’s just iseless
Really? It hasn't been reset for me once, I wonder why I'm not affected.
You could just make a backup of the registry key and install it again in a few clicks .
Up next, windows 13 is cloud-based only, thus requiring constant internet connection
Whoops. The Navy just went Linux.
Let's be real, the Navy continued to stick with Windows XP...
I don't think this will happen. What they want is for PCs to be like phones, a closed system where you are pretty much locked into installing anything you want on your PC(and thus anything you buy as well) from their exclusive app store. The cloud thing just extra expense for no real benefit to them. However if there's an opportunity to push one drive you can be sure they will. And MS has been trying to move in this direction since windows 8.
The "cloud thing" ensures that every person using the system is a subscription-paying customer. You don't see the benefit in that?
I still remeber installing a third-party start menu on Windows 8 because fuck the Metro.
Stardock? I've been installing stardock on every windows computer since xp, I'm on Linux now, but if I ever end up back on windows, it will be back.
I started on Win8 and have never stopped. Currently using Startallback on windows 11 for my wife. It works so much better.
The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”
So it’s like search on iOS. Not always what I want but if it makes windows search useful then maybe it won’t be so bad.
Seriously, I almost never navigate the menu anymore. I hit the windows key on my keyboard and start type the app name, or setting I want to change, then hit enter when the autocomplete is right. Gmail came along with labels replacing folders, then iTunes and iPhoto organizing your media by its metadata. I would hate going back to having to organize folders and menus again.
yeah they didn't say they were removing the start menu, they just said the new feature will be as central to the user experience. and predictably every reply is "lol STUPID MICRO$HIT"
people really want something to be mad about
And what if I don't agree to their privacy policy? Are they really handing over that crucial part of windows to 3rd parties if we don't want our habits tracked?
Wow. I was just taking a break from an ethics assignment whether Copilot is ethical to use while developing code, and then I see this post.
I believe Copilot is mostly ethical to use in development, as a tool. This is just Microsoft trying to force Copilot into a place where it wasn't meant to be and will lead to so much wasted electricity.
It's like taking the MVP in Baseball and forcing him to play Tennis and expecting good results against Tennis pros. Stop shoehorning good AI tools into the wrong places that are better equipped using different tools.
Copilot is not ethical because it allows you to use source code that is not legal to use under certain license types
But then how will the poor execs push a new shiny thing on to people
Gross
Seems like there's a need for someone to create tools that strip the latest windows release down to a minimal install, convert all of the smart features back into db menus, standardize the locations of options, and give you opt-in features instead of opt-out.
To have a logical settings layout, perform well, be stable
Be fully and easily compatible with most mainstream programs and games without having to screw around too much.
Give me back windows 7, add dx12 support, update the back end with any kernel and scheduler updates, call it windows gamer edition. Then fuck off out of my life Microsoft.
Nobody wants to “use an operating system” we want to run programs and do it efficiently, i feel the vast majority of changes Microsoft has made since windows 7 ended has been to the detriment of that.
I can only hope that now with Vulcan becoming more popular and the rise of steam os on the steam deck that we will start to see native Linux aaa games being a thing.
Install Linux, get rid of microshit crap
SkyNet OS v1.2
So glad I'm using Linux for my gaming needs.
Edit: typed the below is a response to someone else's comment, but I thought it would also be good for me to say in here, to elaborate on my initial comment.
--
Fedora/KDE, Steam, Bottles.
Fedora for the quality support and stability of your Linux distro, Steam for, well, Steam, and Bottles for non-Steam games, that still lets you launch those games from inside Steam.
is this an out of season April fools joke?
Ugh. I really, really don't want an Apple. And I've got stuff that simply will not run in Linux. (Would very much like to switch fully over to Linux again...)
You sound so much like me with the, "again."
I think the second time is the charm with jumping to Linux.
I think something to remember is that a lot of people forget is that you can run an unsupported version of windows as long as the devs of your required software support it.
And sure there is the whole security scare, but I'd say while there are risks, as a Linux user you know a lot more about avoiding dodgy links and whatnot then most people so you're at a much lower risk.
So if you run a VM and use something like atlasOS to get a nicer windows 10 experience you can use that for years to come.
Just curious - what stuff?
Dual boot for just that thing?
Two main things are Lightroom and Maschine.
I know about Darktable. And lots of others. The photo editing application is the easy part - lots of options. The lightroom secret sauce is fully integrated workflow with mobile and desktop. I am content to pay money for this as it deserves to cost money. However, Adobe does not play nicely with Linux. For this use case, I could likely dual boot (or virtual box).
Music production is a challenge though. Dual booting isn't an option as it's my main use case. Maschine (the HW) doesn't run on Linux. Yes, I know someone a few years ago wrote a partially functional driver for a previous incarnation of the HW, that works in midi mode, but that's not how I use it. Paid good money for it - not keen on burning it.
I even considered running it in a box (assuming can pass through the usb), but as I started to tally up the dependencies, I would come close to having to put it all on the vbox, ending up with a setup that could only be appreciated by the most zealous Rube Goldberg afficionado...
On the software side, I can likely get wrappers to run a lot of it, but it's an ongoing dice roll. The DAW is easy (Reaper). But I have a bunch of stuff I use constantly that I paid for and I don't want the OS to work against me. (And I want to be able to hold the vendors' feet to the feet when things don't work properly - I've had support concerns (for legit bugs) that fell on deaf ears when I said I use Reaper, which was not officially supported by a certain vendor. How much luck would I have with Linux?
Then there's the audio interface. Yes - it'll probably run. But it's certainly not supported.
Unless vendors actually start supporting Linux (flatpaks/snappaks/whatever would be just dandy), running Linux remains an obstacle, not a solution. However, they won't start supporting until user base grows. Chicken. Egg. Ugh.
It's most unfortunate - I definitely try to kick tires on it to see if it's feasible every few years, but I continue to hit a wall.
In the meantime, I, and, I hope others will keep pressure up on vendors whenever possible.
Edit - spent a few hours last night trying to get plugins to work on Linux/reaper. Yabridge. Couldn't get a single one to work. Tried Vital. Linux version crashes - the recommended solution seems to be to run it under the windows version under Yabridge! I haven't even got to trying my more heavily used stuff! I know most, not all (and some stuff that used to run will no more as wine doesn't support some of the new features in Windows), of these things have solutions, but
I sincerely take pleasure in getting things to run in Linux. I really do. But sometimes the effort becomes about trying to get what you need to work to work, rather than actually doing the work you needed to do in the first place!
Microsoft: Not enough people are using our snazzy AI we spent a lot of time and money developing. Whatever should we do?
Also Microsoft: Force the users to use it!
Good luck, because last time they tried to replace the Start menu with a new UI went so well..
Good riddance, Windows.
The more of a PITA windows is, the more willing I, and everyone, will be to deal with Linux. Lol.
The more people that use Linux, the better it will get! It's win win!
They've never had any respect for their users intelligence. Microsoft and Adobe both. They are absolutely convinced people are too stupid to figure things out without multiple popup boxes that require confirmation to close. They will build windows with the stupidest human being alive in mind and drive away users that don't have the patience to be talked down to every moment.
What's next, Android like Launcher?
And screw you for trying to open loose files! >! /s !<
When I have to use windows, I mostly use an application called to open Apps.
So I really don't miss the start button much.
I’ve often wondered what new and innovative ways Microsoft could find to make my computer even less likely to do what I want.
But AI, bro
Bro, remember when VR was all the rage? EVERYTHING was pushing VR, so much so
FacebookMeta went all in on it.Now it's a fucking novelty at best.
I think VR and all these AI assistants are similarly in that they’re in their infancy stages and there’s gonna be a ton of growing pains before they’re useful enough to be common, but someday they will have their place
That’s my thoughts on the matter at least
VR has been explored though, from Google Cardboard to the PSV2 to animating/painting... All of them failing to gain traction or be widely adopted.
It either needs to jump through a lot more hurdles to be more accessible and useful, or it's just gonna be another cool experiment in time like Etch-A-Sketch
That's only because the cost for a good experience is still out of the realm for most people to justify to even try. Until we are looking at $150 or so for a good experience that doesn't give people headaches or motion sickness issues it will never take off.
The cheap VR systems still give plenty of people issues, and the expensive ones are out of the reach of a normal person living their life day to day.
And for businesses, VR simply has not proven to have a cost benefit worth even the initial capital investment, without even taking into account ongoing IT costs due to damaged equipment.
I'm one of the people who gets nauseated from 3D goggles. I've got a friend who got all the latest stuff, had sensors on the wall, all that and within a minute or so I wanted to puke.
I'm never going to use a vr headset. Not sure what percentage of people are in my boat, but I think that's a pretty significant barrier to adoption
I wouldn’t say never.
The current headsets can make you sick in a variety of ways but since the start of VR, the sick factor has been reduced by roughly half every 5 years or every generation I’ve tried it.
It’s through a combination of higher refresh rates, better tracking, sickness reducers such as limited FOV when moving, or various locomotion techniques for the player.
The largest nausea inducer is giving people a joystick for moving around. But otherwise a 90+hz refresh rate and large FOV solve most issues.
Also, frankly, it takes some getting used to. But once your brain knows what to expect, the sickness goes away pretty quick.
Also I don’t necessarily expect entertainment or games to be the big thing. Many businesses use it for short periods to showcase designs. And VR is walking right now while AR is running.
That's just not true. Companies of all sizes are using VR for onboarding and training with much success and a huge return on investment. There are also a lot of location-based and VR arcades making a nice profit.
VR may never go mainstream, but for businesses there are a lot of use cases for which it is valuable.
What are some companies/industries using it for onboarding/training and how are they applying it? Haven't heard about this.
That's certainly a factor, but I think it has far more to do with availability of content.
I can afford to buy a proper VR setup but I do not see it as a worthwhile investment because practically none of the content available is of interest to me.
It's the equivalent of dropping 2K+ to play mobile games.
Until AAA studios are actively developing for this hardware, I'm not interested...but they won't because barely anyone has the hardware. It's a real chicken and egg scenario.
It's still to expensive and cumbersome for most people I think. That's certainly my perception.
Remember paint 3d?
VR is great, just unfortunate still lacking software. Half Life Alyx and GT7 are amazing experiences unlike anything without VR. Meta’s shit I haven’t tried but on more powerful, Facebook free platforms there’s a lot of great stuff.
Remeber when 3D was all the rage? 3D monitors 3D tvs, every fucking movie was in 3D. And....now it's a novelty at best.
I would pay more at a theatre to not watch it in 3D
Right? I mean... movies are too expensive to see in theaters now... but I would too if I had the money.
It's very obvious that they rushed Copilot. What should have been an assistant like Jarvis in Iron Man, has literally no purpose and can't do anything useful.
We should bring back Clippy! –Microsoft exec
If a new Clippy worked like Jarvis, I'd take it in a heartbeat.
well you hit the nail on the head
It's MS, that's why it was rushed. Features make boss happy, bugfixes make boss angy (he has more work). No wonder that huge features get capped at 50% in such a culture.
Watch your mouth or Clippy is coming back...
This might just be the push I need to switch to Linux desktop.
Do it. With proton the last argument for me to use windows is gone (gaming).
Well, it's not GONE. There are still plenty of games that won't run well on Linux, or they won't allow online multiplayer because their anti-cheat software is restricted to Windows. But that number is getting smaller every day.
But there are so very many games that do work. That those that do not, i can easily ignore.
Thats why I specified that, for me, that was enough to switch. I agree that proton isnt there yet and 100% compatibility, and we will probably never get to that. But there are enough games on the market for me to do 90% of my gaming on Linux these days.
Yeah and it's getting closer all the time. I don't think we're that far from a "tipping point" where Windows gets so shitty, and simultaneously Linux gets so good (for gaming specifically) that it would be silly not to switch.
Any day now....
I'm really not convinced that even if linux, at some point, does become a better platform for gaming than windows, that windows users will swap over. Mainstream gamers probably have never installed an OS before, it's intimidating for people.
Ubuntu 23.10 is the first mainstream Linux desktop distro that I think could be good enough for many windows users. Windows really needs to fumble for this to happen though.
INCOMING (artillery barrage with different distros). Unfortunately I have a bad feeling that chrome OS will win the Linux wars
Meh. I don't play multiplayer games at all other than FFXIV and that I haven't played in over a year. The only thing that would deter me is some visual novels I play are windows only but I could probably just run them in a virtual machine as they're not demanding.
Games like that just reinforce that a large segment of the gaming population will prioritize Windows, and developers go where the players are. I used to dual boot windows but now run windows as a VM with a VFIO gpu. Works great but it’s annoying to need that for just a few applications.
I'm still on windows because I multibox my main game and the tools to do it don't work, alt tab is a goddamn mess, minimize window on focus loss is a fucking nightmare, and multiple instances of proton just chew up system resources until the game starts lagging so hard I need to quit every client and try again.
it's an edge case but that's quite a lot to deal with when windows just works.
Can you run Adobe software via proton? As soon as that works I'll be on Linux.
Look at your usecase, if it really requires adobe suite, you are out of luck i'm afraid. Perhaps you could research running a VM or wine, but I havent tried any of that myself.
If you conclude that you dont need features exclusive to adobe you might be able to find a foss alternative.
[5 years later]
"it wasn't"
Do it.
Dooooooittttttt!
I spent the last ~10 days "playing" with many distros, including testing some current games, and I am literally right now backing up my files and about to reformat my main PC to linux (full drive, no dual). This is after only having experience with copy-paste Raspberry PI guides for my pi-hole.
Don't totally believe "oh it's so easy, nothing to configure" - those people are lying, especially if you've not used Linux before. But several flavors of Ubuntu are quite pleasant, and I appear to have found a home with PopOS. I can't find anything that "doesn't work", and the worst fixes were just quick searches for help. PopOS won due to nvidia compatibility and a nice, snappy desktop. It also was the fastest in overall reformat cycle time. My wife's computer is still Windows, if I do have any microsoft emergencies.
There are some games that just will not work even under proton, or that have functional restrictions. It's way fewer games than it used to be, but it's still not an absolutely perfect solution. I would love to make Linux my gaming OS instead of my "getting shit done" OS like it currently is, I've been advocating for it for a few decades at this point and it's almost there, but it's not to a point yet where I can unreservedly recommend it to gamers. If you aren't a gamer I'd say it's already good enough for anything you need.
How easy was setting up the pi-hole?
It's stupid easy. Flash DietPi to the SD card, select pi hole from the package list, then point your router to the IP for DNS.
Of course, it should be plugged directly into your router, so a zero won't work without an ethernet hat.
https://docs.pi-hole.net/
It's "easy" - but that is very subjective, depending on how much you've down outside "turning Windows on". You DO need to make sure your router allows assigning a DNS ip address. Some ISP-supplied units are rather locked down.
I recommend a "kit" from somewhere like CanaKit (amazon has them), to make sure you get the parts you need. It can run on smaller/cheaper kits, but I say get a Pi3 or 4 variant.
Then following the link above, there is great documentation on install. Install "Putty" on windows, which will log into your Pi and allow remote command line, and then the entire process is copy-paste from guides.
After you finish, you may feel "oh that was easy!" - but there's still some stuff to learn and get used to along the way.
Lol, every single Microsoft article has this comment.
About a month ago Windows 11 started forcing ads for apps and services I didn't need. Immediately installed a popular Linux distribution to have some peace of mind. There's every flavor of desktop out there. I picked one for work and games (pop_os). It's out of my way most of the time and it's not trying to sell me anything. I recommend it, specially, if you're someone that doesn't fiddle with settings too much, it just work.
been working on it here. i've just moved my multi-monitor setup at the office over to debian mint, and relegated windows to a crt.
i can't go "all in", as supporting windows desktops "pays the rent", but it'll be "all but one" at home and at the office.
Yeah, they could also replace the start button with a shit emoji. But there's no indication at all anybody wants to do any of that because they're not idiots. You only said that so people visit your shitty website. In fact, not even the quote you reference for your article suggests any plans of replacing the start button whatsoever:
Fuck clickbait headlines and fuck websites bending any and all content to the SEO voodoo.
lemmy reddit is basically a misleading clickbait megaphone
And everybody's just happy to bitch about whatever the headline suggests without ever checking if it's even true.
And everyone and their grandma is switching to Linux, this time for real
Lemmy communities need to start banning domains that post clickbait garbage like this.
Well in that case I might replace windows 12 with not using windows 12
Im 70% sure I'm replacing wins 11 with Linux already so join us
A few weeks ago when they made the search bar come back after I had told it to go away I switched to Linux. It's weird the small annoyances that add up. It's great so far. With KDE for the desktop environment, you can make it look however you want, including almost identical to any version of windows you want. It's really quite usable, and generally I'm already faster and more comfortable with it than I was with windows.
XP gang
Botnet gang :/
Yeah, don't use old versions of Windows (or any OS really). Upgrade to Win 10/11 or install Linux (or something else that's supported).
Nope
I love this idea. The reason people continue using Windows is because they're used to it. Messing with the Start button is going to piss off even the most patient users. Not to mention it'll be an absolute nightmare for any IT department. Just imagine an army of Karens calling your hotline first thing on Monday morning, yelling at you because you took away the Start button. It'll make Windows 8 look like a huge success.
They already fucked with start menu and search and it's already a problem for IT. I can't find any app I got installed unless I spell it out right, and even then it might work with just 3/8 letters in but no further.
Sometimes I just click through program files cause it's faster.
Back to cluttering the desktop with shortcuts to everything it is then.
sometimes you can't find an application even when you spell it out correctly, hafta go through the apps list to find them.
I feel like things like Classic Shell (or whatever the go-to alternative is nowadays) are just going to make bank from enterprise customers suddenly wanting to make their desktops usable for the average user.
Doubtful. It's hard enough to get programs past our security team and having half malware bundled programs like this won't be an easy task.
Lol, what? There is no malware in classic shell, or start11 or explorer patcher. Wtf are you talking about?
Tell that to dumbass IT "managers" that think a process monitor is a hacking tool.
i remember some game refusing to launch just because i had it installed
Openshell on github. I don't know that it's the same code, but I'm pretty sure the Classic Shell website linked to it.
They tried fucking with it on Windows 8 and that worked out so great.
Which is why this is obviously just a shitty clickbait headline. Have you read the article? Nobody is planning to replace the start button but they could and that's enough for tech "journalism" these days.
So now I can use an AI to find notepad++ on bing?
No, silly! You use AI to find sponsored ads on Bing! You don't need notepad++ to ＣＯＮＳＵＭＥ
No. Search isn't for finish g what you want anymore.. common misconception.
Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?
Saying "copilot is like the start button" is not saying "copilot will replace the start button", the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.
This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.
Remember those times when Microsoft said that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, as it will get to a free "Windows-as-a-Service" model? My ass, now
I can't find the words to describe how absolutely fucking disgusted I am with the fact that we don't even have 11 out in full swing and they're talking about selling us 12 after the "10 would be the last" bullshit.
For fucks sake microturd, get your shit together and stop trying to bleed everyone dry... We know literally every other company in the world is doing that, but it doesn't make it right... :/
This rage bait bullshit was debunked a long time ago, they never claimed 10 would be last and there's no official word on 12 being Saas, all of this shit is just mad-boy anger fuel.
You make it sound like it's not rocket surgery /s
They didn't. That was an "evangelist" talking to Devs one time and the media ran with it.
They didn't seem to dissuade anyone of the notion, but they never repeated it officially.
But it fits my narrative so I will believe in it
-Lemmy/Reddit 2.0
This post needs to be somehow tagged as misleading. Too many people are going to accept the headline at face value.
Given Microsoft's track record, it's also not hard to believe, which makes it even worse
Come, yer tired souls, to the Kingdom of Torvalds.
Fuck Nvidia.
Also:
upgrades don't need forced restarts
major OS versions are, usually, non-breaking
new DE... same as the old DE but may contain new features. Long live the DE!
pretend that you're my late grandma, whom I miss a lot. her favourite pastime at this time of the day was deleting the C:/system32 directory.
I only have one machine that's still running Windows. This would convince me to finally make that zero.
Same bro. Linux gaming is getting better and better every day. That's my last hurdle.
I only have one machine using Windows because I don't want to be "left behind" in the corporate desktop world, but it's on my "left hand monitor" while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won't let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn't run on 11 yet.
If I didn't have to work in the corporate space, I'd quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.
I too, think the Windows start menu is way too responsive and not buggy enough. /s
What are you talking about, it always takes me to the right website when I search for the app I just installed!
It used to be when it was basically just a folder of shortcuts. Since the metro interface the start menu has been getting worse and slower.
I only know of Win 7 and Win 10, never touch 8, 8.1 nor 11. I still use win10 at work and the start menu is very odd. I like to use the win key to summon the menu and search, but the behavior is very inconsistant, sometimes it's fast, sometimes very slow, sometimes I can search, sometimes not, sometimes it gives me the file/app i am looking for, and sometimes it decides to go for bing results. I must admit, I actully never ever navigate the menu itself appart from turning off the laptop. It is a very slow and inefficient design element in my opinon.
Windows 10 is my last windows. When i upgrade my destop i'm going Mint
Why not come join us now?
Linux is my daily driver. I used to struggle with it but it’s on point these days. Proton takes care of 90% of the gaming issues.
I can’t imagine ever going back to windows, I really can’t.
Do games work on proton on release day, or does it take work by the community or someone to get new games working?
I’ve had good experience with it, just make sure to use proton experimental if it’s a new release.
I mean, i only ever use my current desktop for games. My laptop where i do basically everything else is already running mint.
Im waiting for something like silverblue and flatpaks to mature before moving.
projectbluefin.io takes silverblue and adds many of the things that you were likely to be waiting for. It did for me.
Mint is great.
I really like it with the Maté DE.
But trying to make cloud filesystems work is a pain in the ass
Insync takes care of that. I even use Insync on Windows PC's as it's better than native cloud syncing apps from the likes of Google and Microsoft.
Hope I can ride the 10 wave as long as I rode XP.
Every day we stray closer to Linux.
I use arch btw
Microsoft why are you trying to pull an Elon and destroy your own brand, stop that -- what, after all, has a dedicated keyboard key on Windows keyboards, and has for decades?
They're not. It's just the author's "creativity". There's no indication of plans to change the start button. Still, they could change the start button, which apparently warrants a misleading article people actually discuss.
All the "X company may/could/might" and "X plans on this" news feel like they're just feeling for a reaction from the public to see what they can and can't get away with. If it gets too much push back, they just put it on the shelf and boil the frogs for longer before trying again, like with Google and WEI. It's tiring. Stop being evil you corpo fucks.
"Stop being evil you corpo fucks."
Narrator: this proved to be as possible as empathetic capitalism, that is to say, physically and theoretically impossible.
Ahhhh finally time to give Linux a try
Go with Linux Mint, you won't be disappointed
I'll try it!
My login screen has my 2 monitors flipped and I can't figure out how to fix it. Otherwise, I like it.
First and formost I found this video that might help you out explaining how to set up dual monitor for linux, I have never had two myself but it seems like a good video to get you started
Try the 'display' program preinstalled and see if one of the settings helps you out
You may need to install graphics drivers if you have not already, open the perinstalled 'driver manager' app and see if it detects anything needing done.
make sure your update manager has everything up to date. open the 'update manager' app and see if anything needs done.
browse through a little of the documentation for xrandr command and see if something rings a bell.
If those options fail, open the 'welcome screen' app preinstalled and click on the 'help' section in the left hand side of the app. From there click on the launch button for the IRC chat room. It will open up a program to directly talk with very knowledgeable Linux mint community volunteers who will be more than happy to further help you in real time. Keep in mind depending on time of day or circumstance you may have to wait a little while for someone to be available.
I feel bad that you encountered an issue right away, I hope you have quick success in fixing it.
Thanks for the info!
"Oh, don't tell me what to be disappointed with!"
This could be fine if it didn't immediately send all of your data to the internet.
But as is, fuck that and fuck you Microsoft.
Windows told me I don't have permission to do something. On my computer. As an administrator. Using the command line.
Fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft and their controlling asses, and fuck co-pilot and Open AI for contributing to artificial intelligence not only being closed source and proprietary, but encouraging the United States government to make it literally illegal to do it on the open source field as well.
“….So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot”
What does that mean to me, if I just want to open notepad? How to I express my intent, exactly? Through interpretive dance?
Hello, I would like to use notepad.
Ok, I can open notepad. But have you considered notepad enhanced with AI? It predicts what you want to type for $49.99 a year!
"i would like to write a quick letter in wordpad."
sorry. that application is not available. launching word instead and starting a subscription to microsoft 365.
locating credit card information...
found. you will be charged $99.99 per year.
** Goes to uninstall the application **
Hello, it looks like you're trying to uninstall Microsoft 365. Your plan has been updated. To keep Microsoft 365 uninstalled you will be charged $149.99 per year, plus a $74.99 uninstallation fee.
Thank you for signing up for Uninstaller 365. Your monthly fee will be $49.99. To cancel write 16 pages of klingon opera and send it to the following address exactly 100 days 16 hours before your requested cancellation minute.
I'm guessing speaking or typing: "note" "pad" "notepad" "how do I write a note?" "Write something down" would all work.
To be fair this would probably be the same speed as me hitting windows key + R and typing "notepad".
This type of information, encourages me to move quickly to a linux distro of choice.
Agreed. I have already been contemplating it. When they finally brick my Windows 10 desktop I will be switching for sure.
Fedora, Steam, Bottles.
Fedora/KDE for the quality support and stability of your Linux distro, Steam for, well, Steam, and Bottles for non-Steam games, that still lets you launch those games from inside Steam.
I almost switched around the 2007 to 2010 timeframe but they got a lot better with 7 and PowerShell closed the deal for me.
I'm now working more Linux into my daily usage to get a feel for what I'd need to do if I switch, and start solving those problems now, because if they do go this way, I'm probably going to jump ship. And they've made it even easier since I can still have PowerShell and C# and .NET on Linux now!
And I've been slowly replacing windows with Linux since the arrival of Windows 10.
"It seems you wanted to start an application, let me guess which one you want instead of just letting you proceed with that"
"In the meantime please watch this 15 second candy crush ad while your program starts up. Join windows 12 Premium+ starting 10.99/month today to reduce ads to one per hour"
***ads may be shown more than once per hour if traffic is high.
How many times has Windows tried to kill off the start menu!? I can think of at least three:
Windows 10 didn't have live tiles, that was 8.
Windows 12 is not a product that exists and there are no plans to replace the start button.
You can think of one.
Windows 10 did have tiles at first, but they were corralled into the top of the start menu iirc. And.... Did you not read the article?
Sounds like they didn't try to "kill of the start menu", then.
I... Did read the article which is why I know it's just got a clickbait headline and there are no plans to replace the start button. Did... you not read the article?
This is FUD. AI integration is a given, but I doubt they would outright axe the start button unless they plan to fundamentally change the Windows UX design language.
If they do, expect it to go the way of Windows 8.0 real fast.
You mean notebook.net isn’t a legitimate news site?!
If they do I'll finally switch to Linux. I tried once and Windows 11 was just simpler, but if they pulled this I'd have no choice.
“Replace the start button”
For those who don't know: Windows 8.0 did this.
8.1 came out a few months later
MS was enshityfying before there was a word for it.
Only thing I use Start button for is to turn off the PC. The search is unusable and all shortcuts are in my task bar anyways.
Gotta just make an icon on the desktop that dies a full shutdown, full especially because Microsoft basically made that harder to do. Now I just double click an icon and call it a day.
Did you put the application in the start menu during install?
Linux-onlyists have a tendency to not learn how anything works and then blame the "bad workflow" of the OS, so it's kind of difficult to just assume you didn't make a mistake.
yeah, I use my start button all the time to quickly open stuff. Hit start, start typing the program name, hit enter because it shows up immediately as a suggestion. super quick with no need to touch the mouse
I wish I could upvote many times - does anyone do this differently? Does Microsoft think “maybe if we make a useless search with ai instead of bing, people will use it?”
Because that went well a couple of times lol
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. They don't dare to touch that button.
Meanwhile in the category of "useless bullshit nobody asked for" we have Microsoft. Again.
I am this close to go all linux, Microsoft. don't tempt me. only thing that make use windows is gaming and that too is slipping away because of steam
Just jump. I went Linux a month ago and never had to go back for gaming. I still have windows installed but I've used it only twice because music plugins are not compatible with Linux. Once I find a good guitar amp for my needs I can nuke windows entirely.
Are the plugins VST by chance? If so, check out yabridge, you can install the plugins with wine and even supports 32-bit plugins
Have you seen recent benchmarks? Windows games actually run faster on Linux at this point.
The only exception is the small handful of titles with anti-cheat set to to anti-linux.
On some games. This channel tested 20 of the most popular games last year. Several of the titles didn't run on Linux at all. Windows had an average win on 4K, and Linux had an average win on 1080p. This is much closer than it has been in years, but it's definitely not a clean sweep. As you explain, Linux also have major issues with anti-cheat which is used on some of the most popular games today. From experience, I also can't use my very expensive wheel and peddles because of a lack of drivers. So I can't make the move to Linux completely.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This channel tested 20 of the most popular games last year.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The issue isn't benchmarks the issue is many popular titles won't run on PC without windows. Even wine isn't perfect.
laughs in Proton
dont tempt him, he's on the edge!
I like to put down M$ when I can, but I don't think replacing the start button is the exact plan here. I think he's just using it as a comparison.
This isn't going to work whatsoever with people who don't know how to express what they want to do.
Tons of people have just been taught a fixed workflow involving a sequence of buttons with known labels and icons and locations. Lots of people already can't find programs in the start menu even if they know the name (because they don't know how search works and often even will think it's not the same program / will think it won't have the same data because the icon was found in a different place).
How are they suddenly going to talk to an AI about things that the AI don't even have information about? The AI won't know all the nicknames people have, it won't knew how people describe the icons, can't handle all misspellings (they don't even understand phonetics), it won't under people's description of the UX parts, and when programs have 20x start options where people usually follow a guide to pick the right one then the AI won't be able to reliably recognize which one the user intends to open.
Every single company would literally need a team of AI training experts and capture EVERYTHING the employees does with the computers and says about them for a few months to capture all the context it needs.
I like how the copilot button will allow Microsoft to run what it thinks you want to run.
That would be anticompetitive, but Microsoft learned from the last time. (And what it learned was "nothing's going to happen to you so carry on")
I might replace Microsoft with Linux in Windows 12
I had this exact thought. It may actually be "The year of the Linux Desktop."
Only if it's shipping as the default OS on hundreds of millions of new devices, and easy enough that a 65 yo can install their 12 year old copy of TurboTax software on it, while their grandson plays Roblox on it. :P
Gotta be usable by the lowest common denominator before the return window at a rural BestBuy is up.
I've just done exactly that, now dual booted with Linux mint, once I iron out the (specifically my) kinks, win10 will get put in a VM for emergencies.
They won't. They do however want to stay relevant and will float things like this just to create talk about Microsoft and Windows.
You know what's really interesting to talk about? How fast it was for me to setup Chimeraos on a PC with an Intel GPU and hook it up to my tv and Xbox wireless controller USB dongle.... First boot and I login to Steam and BAM! Grab that controller. Time for couch gaming
Windows is nowhere near that good or easy as a game station for coach gaming.
Time to experiment with Linux again. Still haven't settled on a distro that I liked 100%.
been distrohoping for a long time, tumbleweed kde changed that...
been using it for almost 2 years now.
Tumbleweed KDE is definitely sweet. Can also recommend Fedora.
Shop around with desktop and distro, but remember it's not Windows. If you're looking for it to be Windows, you're never be happy with it. There is Windows things to unlearn.
TBH you don't have to find the perfect distro - just one that is better than the BS Microsoft peddles. And that gets easier and easier.
Well fuck that
Microsoft may replace windows 11 with Linux in my computer
Breaking news: I'ma replace windows with any version of Linux in 12 months
Switched to Manjaro almost a year ago. No regrets and absolutely 0 desire to come back. After a week in Linux, you just know Windows is trash.
X. Why not now?
Way to increase usage of Linux, good job Microsoft
Building this into the OS is clearly unnecessary, there's obviously another motive here...sweet user behavior data?
UI/UX job replacement. And to get you used to using it so they can charge you for using it later.
They don't need AI to do that.
Remember that businesses are made of people, not clairvoyant cunning machines of profit.
Last year, NFTs were the thing that was going to change everything, and everyone wanted to find ways to bake them into their thing, whatever it was. Fast forward a year and we hear about weird failures, abandoned plans and a slight chatter about the very small handful of uses where the idea makes sense.
Right now, chat and generative AI is the thing.
Project managers at companies were told to find ways to fit the thing into profitable places, and a quick way to do that is to stick into into any place with a textbox and user interaction.
Next year, we're going to see 95% of those ideas disappear, and the remaining will either be where it makes sense, or where the project manager is particularly good at their job.
Yep, we can have AI steal your data and save money by using your hardware to process it for us.
I don't want to go back to Windows 8. Those were... dark times...
I'm here for it as a snobby Linux user. Let's see how much the average windows user is willing to let their experience be degraded before they finally tap out and try an operating system that isn't pure trash
No thank you. Startallisback to the rescue. Ghost spectre to remove whatever bullshit they put in this time.
I'm not against progress, I just prefer my computer to leave the thinking to me.
Or at least leave the thinking on the client side.
classic shell ui also
They fuckin' do that and I'm out. Haven't run Linux on the desktop since 2009, but it wasn't bad back then and I assume it's only gotten better. Meanwhile Microsoft has continued the enshittification of Windows and if I didn't need it for dev purposes, I'd be more willing to pull the plug. All this "AI" stuff Microsoft keeps adding to everything is going to push me over the edge.
It's gotten a lot better over the past few years.
Oh so much better. I've relegated Windows only programs to a virtual machine. I haven't touched it in a long time but it's there just in case.
Idc, I'm on Linux now. I'd rather buy a Mac than install Windows again at this point (if I ever need to use software that's Windows/Mac only)
Can someone just start making community updates for windows 7 and we can just use that when Unix is not a viable option
Microsoft will come to your house and break your knee caps if someone did that haha
LOL
Oh boy. That thing is the steering wheel of the Windows system.
I mean... Yea. Yea it is. They want to:
They're not even being subtle about it:
Yup on 4. Mess at all with the hostfile and Windows Defende won't stop harassing you about a threat. User autonomy is a threat to Windows.
Windows 12 is already a failure and it hasn't even been formally announced yet. Congrats Microsoft! You've successfully failed for the second time in a row to deliver a windows version that most users actually like even to the slightest bit.
I guess the actual YOTLD will finally arrive after 20 years.
Fourth, fifth if we count 8.1
Everyday I'm happier and happier I have migrated away from Windows.
My work have only just caught up to windows 10.
Assuming they know nothing of EOL or CVE. They better hurry then, only a year or so until 10 security patches go up the wall.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Windows 10 EOL isn't until 2025, so two years left to run.
Oct 2025. Yeh that's not long in business.
The biggest pain point of windows 8 (on release) was the missing start button, why would they think a bingilator would work instead?
Don't worry I am sure they will fix all this madness for Windows 9.
From "Windows 10 will be the last windows" to this.
Okay. If 12 is coming out why would anyone go with 11?
Well I'm still using 10 so....
Why not just make 10 louder?
Only if they promise to remove the most pointless keyboard button in the world as well.
The Windows key? I use it constantly.
Windows + Left/Right to dock screens, Windows + E for a quick file explorer, Windows + X for settings and dev options, Windows + P to adjust your second monitor, I'm sure there's other hotkeys as well.
Use all of these and more
Win+X S U for sleep! I use it every night. My dog even knows when I press it from the pattern and immediately runs to the backdoor for his last potty of the night.
TIL, Thanks
WIN+X has all sorts of useful stuff in it, but switch to Linux tho. You can even still use the button!
I wouldn't call it pointless, having another layer is quite handy. But I would like to see it adopt a more ambiguous name, sure Super or Meta is here but they haven't caught on due to their logo still being plastered on the key.
I'm honestly a bit confused on what is the most pointless button in the world considering the command key is on Mac for why do I need a ctr replacement when ctr is right there the windows equivalent at least has the utility of exiting programs without closing them
switch to linux and the Windows key becomes the Super key, unused in shortcuts by any application and so you can map it to whatever you want. super useful.
I may replace Windows as my daily driver with Linux.
I did. The first couple months were... An experience. But after getting used to all the different ways things work (many of which are, honestly, way better), it's quite, quite nice.
Some of my hardware even works better: the drawing tablet's drivers don't crash and the audio latency is much less!
Similar experience here. The first month was rough as I got everything installed and configured. But it's been pretty solid in the 4 months since then. I am glad I switched.
I switched around 2 years ago after using different distros on and off for a few years on an old laptop, and I've never been happier with my computing experience.
One thing I will say is you will have to find replacements for some of your favourite applications, but I've found that pretty much every alternative has been better. And if you need suggestions just ask the community or you can DM me.
Also just pick Mint or if you really have to Ubuntu(though I would definitely pick mint) as a first distro as that will give you the best out of the box experience and a beginner friendly community( unlike Arch's which I daily drive).
Then switch if you want a different distro( and I would suggest trying it out in a VM), just don't get a distro hopping addiction😆.
This is the worst timeline.
W8 vibes.
Lmfao! They think I'm going to buy another windows OS?
I see lots of love for Linux in the comments which is awesome, but is there anyone considering making a hackintosh out of their machine? Is that a good route to go these days?
Considering that you probably have like 4 years of support max (until they end support for internet intel macs) I don't think it's a good choice
It's probably be more of a pain now than ever, since Apple is now using their own proprietary chips.
Nope
All I care about with the start button is the search function. If this didn't fuck with that, sure.
Hell maybe the search function will actually be working as intended. Don't show me shit from the websearch before you make sure there's no software with that name on the system!
I disabled that realy quickly... If I wanted to search the Web I would use a browser. I can only recomment that, it speeds up search a lot and it now actualy works as one would expect
I used to do that periodically, but it kept getting reset, so now, it’s just iseless
Really? It hasn't been reset for me once, I wonder why I'm not affected.
You could just make a backup of the registry key and install it again in a few clicks .
Oh that is so annoying, trying to open something and you bing search it.
Also the search having to load is a balls, it used not do that on Windows 7.
Up next, windows 13 is cloud-based only, thus requiring constant internet connection
Whoops. The Navy just went Linux.
Let's be real, the Navy continued to stick with Windows XP...
I don't think this will happen. What they want is for PCs to be like phones, a closed system where you are pretty much locked into installing anything you want on your PC(and thus anything you buy as well) from their exclusive app store. The cloud thing just extra expense for no real benefit to them. However if there's an opportunity to push one drive you can be sure they will. And MS has been trying to move in this direction since windows 8.
The "cloud thing" ensures that every person using the system is a subscription-paying customer. You don't see the benefit in that?
I still remeber installing a third-party start menu on Windows 8 because fuck the Metro.
Stardock? I've been installing stardock on every windows computer since xp, I'm on Linux now, but if I ever end up back on windows, it will be back.
I started on Win8 and have never stopped. Currently using Startallback on windows 11 for my wife. It works so much better.
So it’s like search on iOS. Not always what I want but if it makes windows search useful then maybe it won’t be so bad.
Seriously, I almost never navigate the menu anymore. I hit the windows key on my keyboard and start type the app name, or setting I want to change, then hit enter when the autocomplete is right. Gmail came along with labels replacing folders, then iTunes and iPhoto organizing your media by its metadata. I would hate going back to having to organize folders and menus again.
yeah they didn't say they were removing the start menu, they just said the new feature will be as central to the user experience. and predictably every reply is "lol STUPID MICRO$HIT"
people really want something to be mad about
And what if I don't agree to their privacy policy? Are they really handing over that crucial part of windows to 3rd parties if we don't want our habits tracked?
Kill it with fire!
Wow. I was just taking a break from an ethics assignment whether Copilot is ethical to use while developing code, and then I see this post.
I believe Copilot is mostly ethical to use in development, as a tool. This is just Microsoft trying to force Copilot into a place where it wasn't meant to be and will lead to so much wasted electricity.
It's like taking the MVP in Baseball and forcing him to play Tennis and expecting good results against Tennis pros. Stop shoehorning good AI tools into the wrong places that are better equipped using different tools.
Copilot is not ethical because it allows you to use source code that is not legal to use under certain license types
But then how will the poor execs push a new shiny thing on to people
Gross
Seems like there's a need for someone to create tools that strip the latest windows release down to a minimal install, convert all of the smart features back into db menus, standardize the locations of options, and give you opt-in features instead of opt-out.
I just want my operating system:
To have a logical settings layout, perform well, be stable
Be fully and easily compatible with most mainstream programs and games without having to screw around too much.
Give me back windows 7, add dx12 support, update the back end with any kernel and scheduler updates, call it windows gamer edition. Then fuck off out of my life Microsoft.
Nobody wants to “use an operating system” we want to run programs and do it efficiently, i feel the vast majority of changes Microsoft has made since windows 7 ended has been to the detriment of that.
I can only hope that now with Vulcan becoming more popular and the rise of steam os on the steam deck that we will start to see native Linux aaa games being a thing.
Install Linux, get rid of microshit crap
SkyNet OS v1.2
So glad I'm using Linux for my gaming needs.
Edit: typed the below is a response to someone else's comment, but I thought it would also be good for me to say in here, to elaborate on my initial comment.
--
Fedora/KDE, Steam, Bottles.
Fedora for the quality support and stability of your Linux distro, Steam for, well, Steam, and Bottles for non-Steam games, that still lets you launch those games from inside Steam.
is this an out of season April fools joke?
Ugh. I really, really don't want an Apple. And I've got stuff that simply will not run in Linux. (Would very much like to switch fully over to Linux again...)
You sound so much like me with the, "again."
I think the second time is the charm with jumping to Linux.
I think something to remember is that a lot of people forget is that you can run an unsupported version of windows as long as the devs of your required software support it.
And sure there is the whole security scare, but I'd say while there are risks, as a Linux user you know a lot more about avoiding dodgy links and whatnot then most people so you're at a much lower risk.
So if you run a VM and use something like atlasOS to get a nicer windows 10 experience you can use that for years to come.
Just curious - what stuff?
Dual boot for just that thing?
Two main things are Lightroom and Maschine.
I know about Darktable. And lots of others. The photo editing application is the easy part - lots of options. The lightroom secret sauce is fully integrated workflow with mobile and desktop. I am content to pay money for this as it deserves to cost money. However, Adobe does not play nicely with Linux. For this use case, I could likely dual boot (or virtual box).
Music production is a challenge though. Dual booting isn't an option as it's my main use case. Maschine (the HW) doesn't run on Linux. Yes, I know someone a few years ago wrote a partially functional driver for a previous incarnation of the HW, that works in midi mode, but that's not how I use it. Paid good money for it - not keen on burning it.
I even considered running it in a box (assuming can pass through the usb), but as I started to tally up the dependencies, I would come close to having to put it all on the vbox, ending up with a setup that could only be appreciated by the most zealous Rube Goldberg afficionado...
On the software side, I can likely get wrappers to run a lot of it, but it's an ongoing dice roll. The DAW is easy (Reaper). But I have a bunch of stuff I use constantly that I paid for and I don't want the OS to work against me. (And I want to be able to hold the vendors' feet to the feet when things don't work properly - I've had support concerns (for legit bugs) that fell on deaf ears when I said I use Reaper, which was not officially supported by a certain vendor. How much luck would I have with Linux?
Then there's the audio interface. Yes - it'll probably run. But it's certainly not supported.
Unless vendors actually start supporting Linux (flatpaks/snappaks/whatever would be just dandy), running Linux remains an obstacle, not a solution. However, they won't start supporting until user base grows. Chicken. Egg. Ugh.
It's most unfortunate - I definitely try to kick tires on it to see if it's feasible every few years, but I continue to hit a wall.
In the meantime, I, and, I hope others will keep pressure up on vendors whenever possible.
Edit - spent a few hours last night trying to get plugins to work on Linux/reaper. Yabridge. Couldn't get a single one to work. Tried Vital. Linux version crashes - the recommended solution seems to be to run it under the windows version under Yabridge! I haven't even got to trying my more heavily used stuff! I know most, not all (and some stuff that used to run will no more as wine doesn't support some of the new features in Windows), of these things have solutions, but
I sincerely take pleasure in getting things to run in Linux. I really do. But sometimes the effort becomes about trying to get what you need to work to work, rather than actually doing the work you needed to do in the first place!
I will keep trying periodically.
Microsoft: Not enough people are using our snazzy AI we spent a lot of time and money developing. Whatever should we do?
Also Microsoft: Force the users to use it!
Good luck, because last time they tried to replace the Start menu with a new UI went so well..
Good riddance, Windows.
The more of a PITA windows is, the more willing I, and everyone, will be to deal with Linux. Lol.
The more people that use Linux, the better it will get! It's win win!
I hadn't thought about it that way. Thank you!
Yikes!!
They've never had any respect for their users intelligence. Microsoft and Adobe both. They are absolutely convinced people are too stupid to figure things out without multiple popup boxes that require confirmation to close. They will build windows with the stupidest human being alive in mind and drive away users that don't have the patience to be talked down to every moment.
What's next, Android like Launcher? And screw you for trying to open loose files! >! /s !<
When I have to use windows, I mostly use an application called
to open Apps.
So I really don't miss the start button much.
Rip windows, another victim of AI
And with that, I'm out