the CEO has been conned into the bullshit, and now has "AI" Chiefs of Staff telling him what to do
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-15/microsoft...
"Excellent question!" "Great idea!" "You're so smart!"
you can see how someone can fall into this trap, but normally they're not the one at the top so it's somewhat harmless
if you get someone at the top though... they can enforce their will downwards via KPIs and OKRs
The race to what, pursue more of what users don't want so as to lose even more of them?
Folks could have used those services even if Windows itself wasn't getting clanked, right?
Does that answer your question
Not the case for Azure or Office
MS is going all-in on something the users don't want... surprise! Your OS is going to be involuntarily made all-AI all-the-time. And somehow, this fundamental change isn't even worthy of a rev; it's still "Windows 11" - FWIW.
My favorite part of the article is when they refer to it (apparently accidentally) as MS Widows.
Will AI spare the children as well?
The shortened title has an unnecessary "enormous", but mangles actual meaning.
But this is balanced by the fact that we live in a world where all our software is effectively user hostile -- look for whatever means possible to extract more value from us. This is the society that we live in now.
Folks don't seem to have these problems on macs or their phones.
Yes
The good thing about AI is it offers assistance with old, tractable, problems
When it is everywhere it is an unhelpful annoyance
This seems like a meaningless disagreement - I'm using "capitalism" by its common colloquial definition: As a loose shorthand for "the way we run things here", i.e. as a synonym for the thing you've said.
These are not words that usually leads to user shouting "Yay, finally, what a pleasure this is to use now!". Why even use the word "pervasive" and the term "look at your screen", almost sounds like it's intentional to turn a specific segment of users away.
I feel like we're still discovering how security, privacy and LLMs connect together. Add in a OS-available MCP that has access to your computer and applications, and I feel like it's way too early to integrate it on that level, especially when they at the same time say "security is our top priority".
Pretty much the only things I miss out on are Microsoft Office and Photoshop. Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days with Steam+Proton.
This alone is the last frontier IMO. It's the only reason I still run Win11 on a gaming PC with a big Nvidia. Take that away and their marketshare will tank.
I am, however, obligated to keep a Windows partition around because I do music production. If there are good DAWs that run natively on Linux, almost all plugins won't run on Linux. Everything plugin that runs as standalone or anything similar is guaranteed to not work on Linux.
I am thinking about getting a Mac mini for music production only, seems it's probably the lesser of 2 evils
They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.
Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.
I've tried Kdenlive, but honestly, shotcut met my needs, so I didn't explore it too much: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive
DaVinci Resolve is also available for linux. I've never used it though.
Gamers are only one case that's currently being solved. Devs are already solved (except for iOS). Creatives are a different story entirely.
If anything, Microsoft's decisions are more likely to boost mac sales than they are to create any kind of meaningful normie migration to Linux. Especially if Apple goes through with the rumored low-cost macbook. That thing will sell like hotcakes, and macOS share is already growing as is.
We are many times more likely to see the "Year of the macOS desktop" than we are the "Year of the Linux desktop"
Lets hope they all buy a Mac.
But I prefer Debian Stable, for reasons both pragmatic and on-principle:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...
(Or people can go to a confusing download page: https://www.debian.org/distrib/ )
The nice thing about Linux is that you have max choice. That can pose problems for new users who might be a bit overwhelmed but we shouldn't pretend that Canonical "owns" Linux or that everyone is necessarily going to land there. I recommend Mint when people tell me they're thinking of giving Linux a try. Haven't given Ubuntu a second thought in years.
But damn, they seem to be doing everything they can to drive users away.
I love using my PC, but in the past couple of years it’s become my Steam and emulation box, and for tinkering.
They need to step up.
Really the question is who are they selling windows to and what do they put in it to try and make it an attractive offering. "Selling" might as well be figurative or literal seeing as they've now completely trained retail customers that they don't have to buy an OS even when before piracy was overlooked, and they'd need to be a significantly better offering than linux which is $0 and only getting better at undermining the core offering of 'running windows applications'.
Why do I feel like Neowin is using AI to write its articles?
The AI models that everyone wants to use are cloud based. What is the purpose of AI hardware on users' machine?
And if you're like me and hate bourne-like shells (sh, bash, zsh), powershell works on linux and mac and there's also nushell and fish, which have nicer syntax but I've had compatibility issues in the past
This is for you that don't even know what Linux is.
Welcome. Read below:
- download an ISO file from https://manjaro.org/products/download/x86 and choose a desktop to use, Plasma is cute, XFCE4 is mega fast and Gnome is mac-like desktop
- once you got the file, record this ISO to a USB pen drive with Rufus
- reboot your pc and press the key to allow you to choose to boot from the USB
- the usb will boot and Manjaro will open, you can start the install
- once installed, your next reboot will bring Manjaro installed
- start using it, install LibreOffice, video or photo editors, create music, browse the web with Firefox, LibreWolf, degoogled-chromium and you can also use Chrome if you really really want it and other browsers
Configure the programs like email clients and many MANY other programs
Since you already know Windows, you will now learn about computers and you will be the boss of that pc, like updates are when you want it, reboot is when you update and if you really want it
There are many "versions" of Linux, like Manjaro, Ubuntu, Archlinux, Fedora, Red Hat, RockyLinux, AlmaLinux, etc.
Each of those versions will usually also allow you to choose your desktop. Windows has one desktop, here you can choose from Plasma, XFCE, Gnome and many many others. Then each allow you to configure the looks and feel. It is this amazing!
Now that you are the owner, the boss, the administrator of that operating system, you start using it. For the first weeks, save your documents to an external drive or pen, because if you have any problem, you will use the installer USB again and delete everything, so you have a backup of your docs. The programs you can install again.
LunicLynx•1h ago
downrightmike•1h ago
Herring•59m ago
koakuma-chan•58m ago
worik•51m ago
Embedded into the operating system? Will they be helpful there?
IMO there are better ways
koakuma-chan•49m ago
ryanjshaw•37m ago
Integrated AI solves so many real problems, not the least of which is that it’s sanctioned by IT.
thewebguyd•28m ago
This is the big thing that Microsoft understands. For a non-tech company, it's going to be pretty hard to get buy in to pay for ChatGPT enterprise, and then pay for/spend dev or IT resources to integrate it (and develop those integrations) with their already existing Microsoft/SharePoint/Teams stack to make it useful. And then you still don't get the convenient Office app add-ins.
Microsoft bundles this all, integrates it for you, and provides a GUI for governance controls. It's very click-ops focused, which enterprise IT likes, and the bundling means you don't have to sell those with the wallets on buying extra third party tools. Nobody every got fired for buying s/IBM/Microsoft
bdcrazy•44m ago
axus•34m ago
We do have all the News and Weather and other "Suggestions" turned off.
Adding features isn't inherently a bad thing, but we don't believe Microsoft can do it without making the existing features worse.
bostik•32m ago
thewebguyd•32m ago
For the normie/general office worker, even Copilot (the Microsoft 365 for Business version) has been wildly popular where I work. "Copilot, help me prepare for this meeting coming up" and the worker gets a nice little package of all the emails, word docs, spreadsheets, teams/sharepoint convos, etc. related to the meeting.
Imagine: User accidentally deletes file. Instead of opening a help desk ticket, they can ask Copilot "Hey Copilot, I accidentally deleted this excel file, can you get it back?" and the OS integrated AI restores it from volume shadow copy, or from %appdata%
or "Hey copilot, I have a meeting starting. Can you turn on do not disturb, and open my xyz presentation for screen sharing"
Yeah, those things can be done pretty fast manually, or even scripted, but the average office worker doesn't have the computer knowledge to do so. A real functioning version of (to use their buzzword) "agentic" AI integrated in the OS means they don't need the knowledge, just ask the computer to do it for them.
It could be huge, but I have my doubts it'll actually work as well as Microsoft wishes it would.
koakuma-chan•30m ago
thewebguyd•37m ago
Sure. Except once upon a time ago, Microsoft was really big on dogfooding and it definitively was not ok for Microsoft's developers to not use Windows.
Seeing their employees using macs on stage at conferences sends a very clear message "don't bother with Windows. It isn't even good enough for our own staff to use."
What happened to "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"? Ballmer was not a good CEO, but he understood at least that dev & enthusiast mindshare = your product being chosen and recommended elsewhere.
keraf•28m ago
A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
klaussilveira•18m ago
Just works.