Microsoft’s big Windows 11 update drops on September 26 with Copilot AI baked in

They might as well call it Cortana AI

fr tho, MS has been on the digital assistant thing for decades at this point.

“I’m sorry but you didn’t supply a valid answer which means that you want both. I will send a contract killer to your house immediately. Would you like to leave feedback on how I did?”

Bing search is ran instead

"I'm sorry Dave..."

Or make it open when clicking the icon instead of hiding it behind two clicks. Everytime I use Windows, I love KDE more.

AI powered volume switcher?

“a new volume mixer” - please just be an interface change and nothing dramatic 👀

Oof. As if the sound settings weren't already fragmented to all hell.

We heard your feedback and the volume mixer is now controlled exclusively through ChatGPT! Also it's their ChatGPT so you're limited to like 20 commands an hour.

It's been shown off for months. You click the volume speaker and then a second click will get you to a mixer that almost looks like Ear Trumpet. I'll probably stick to Ear Trumpet though since it's just one click

I was like you until windows 10. I opted out of that. It just felt like losing control over my computer. Windows 11 even more so.

I'll be very surprised if AI is actually "baked into" the OS. A client to their cloud AI will be baked in, but that's not the same thing IMO.

(btw powertoys is great, multimonitor support is great too, if they finally fix the task bar I might finally go to Win11)

Much better multi-monitor support

Tell that to the Snipping Tool.

Tl;Dr I hate hate hate windows, but 11 is better than 10 (feature wise) and works good for being windows.

When using windows (at work and only at work), I hate it every day. I actively think "I hate windows". Sometimes multiple times per day. It's not objective at all (even through there are good, objective reasons to hate windows).

BUT: Upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11 is an improvement (If you ignore all spyware and corporate crap shenanigans). Windows became a little less ugly and does some things that you would previously have to hack into it.

Windows terminal is usable, at least compared to other windows terminals. Don't get me wrong, it sucks, but it sucks less than many other things. Powertoys is band aid, but that band aid is still pretty useless.

That new AI crap ware is just garbage that is forced on users. I don't want their crappy "AI" that (in my opinion) highly violates open source licenses (the GPL at least). And I don't get why they do that too, most people don't even code, why would they need that copilot crap ware?

Luckily, I might have the option to ditch windows and install a proper OS, only with the cost of being my own IT department.

Honest question: What about the Monitor improvements? Haven't noticed anything.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn you haven't tried anything else

I’ve been using Linux in various ways since the mid 90s, work has dictated OSX to me for the last decade or so, and I still choose windows as my desktop OS. I use copilot, and it’s great for development, but also great for generating text in a lot of ways. I miss it in my browser when I go to put in a pull request, and I miss it sometimes when explaining blocks of code or giving someone else an outline of how to do something. It doesn’t really lower my need to understand things, but it just speeds up the most mundane parts of the job. If ‘having it in the OS’ means it could fill in those bits, I’d wish even more I could use windows for work.

It’s great as a dev platform with WSL2 a great experience, VS codes built in remote server, native first class hypervisor support (with competent virtual networking). I know IT admins still hate it, and I’m sure a lot of the things that don’t affect me still suck, but they are building a good user experience.

"This time you're going to love Cortana. For reals!"

Every tech company is pulling this stupid bullshit now. Mine is also trying to find any way they can to shoehorn an LLM into their product. It's marketing BS

Hoping they've made it better since

Isn't this exactly how Skynet was created?

That's already available for insiders and can be enabled, meaning it will soon-ish come to the stable versions of Windows 11.

I recommend StartAllBack. Granted no third party apps should be required for such a simple feature, StartAllBack does this and more.

That's the number one reason I stayed on 10. I'm figuring out a swap to Linux - gaming is my only concern. Might just dual boot.

Start11 by Stardock does this and more, its not FOSS, but is cheap (if you go the legal route). There is also Winhawk, which is FOSS, though is a little less intuitive.

Ungroup icon of multiple instances of one app into separate taskbar items? That's been in insider builds for some time now. (Luckily...)

I keep hearing this complain so I guess it clearly bothers some people but personally to me it never causes any issues nor I see the benefit on ungrouping.

They're not being stubborn, it's coming in this same update and was announced at least 6 months ago

Lol its a trillion dollar company. They make the rules. Its Not the other way around.

They have significant money problems.

Who is "they" here? Microsoft?

I think they're doing just fine financially.

Everybody using usenet.

Memesters, because WinRAR is a negware type of shareware (having an unlimited trial period), which constitutes as being "the good guy".

People using WinRAR. "Why would people use WinRAR?" It has more features than 7zip (password, encryption, profile presets especially).

If you're asking why Microsoft would include it as a format for their extremely basic compression tool built into Explorer... why not, it's one of the top three formats.

Here's the funny thing. Some enterprise sectors will not use W11 until it has some sysadmin reliable way to disable all the telemetry. In my company W11 and Chrome are banned because they cannot be locked down from phoning home, which is a security liability. No way they're going to allow a rogue blackbox LLM running wild in our computers.

They get to spy and keep your Corp data if they add ai, it's a win for MS

Damn, this is actually kinda sad news that the OS will come with a rar app. Makes me finally want to buy a copy on WinRAR for like 15+ years of service.

They didn't remove it. Go down to the bottom and choose More Options.

It's bullshit but they're still there

Old context menu is still there. Need to do a regedit to make it default again.

For the Open Source Nouveau Driver, it's included in Mesa. You may also need the xf86-video-nouveau driver for 2D acceleration on X11 depending on your hardware. For example anything older than NV50 (G80) would likely need it. Newer GPU's have seen better results when falling back onto the modesetting driver.

For the Proprietary Drivers, it depends on the distro; most allow you to install them during the installation of the distro (few do it automatically afaik), using a GUI driver manager/detection tool included in some distros or using your package manager.
\ A distro like fedora however requires extra steps because they're not included in the official repos.

I hope you find this more informative than "install PopOS or X distro" that includes the proprietary drivers on the installation ISO itself.

On Ubuntu it's just an option during installation. So far that's the easiest install I've seen.

OpenSUSE supports a graphical install through their software manager, but I found it caused some issues so I ended up using the command line. That was actually very easy if you're not uncomfortable using a terminal. Their docs were also accurate and easy to follow.

On fedora I followed the official docs but their instructions didn't work, so I had to find some thread on a forum with alternate instructions. It took over an hour to get it working.

For sheer ease of use I would definitely stick to Ubuntu since that's also the only distro Steam officially supports. I've had a good experience with OpenSUSE though so I'm sticking with it.

Depends on the distro you choose, but these days it's nothing too complicated. Either clicking an option for enabling the private driver in the drivers settings, or worse case just running a couple commands to manually add the private driver repo and download the package. You are done in 5 min m

What DAW do you use? I was pretty happy with Bitwig, the only con is that it's not FOSS.

Not NVidia driver-related, but I would recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu since they're both KDE and Ubuntu-based, KDE Neon is made by KDE while Kubuntu is an Ubuntu flavor.

Pick a distro that ships with Nvidia drivers out of the box. My personal recommendation is Pop OS.

If you're set on Nvidia, I recommend Pop OS or Nobara. Pop has a separate image that preinstalls Nvidia drivers. Nobara has a built in tool to download and install Nvidia drivers on first launch. Of the two, I'd probably go with Nobara (I've been using it for a year or so, love it) because not only does it have that tool, it also has an official KDE version, which it sounds like you'd prefer. You could install KDE with Pop, but I've done that before, and it creates a bloated nightmare of conflicting apps.

You've been able to open zips in windows for a long time. This is for formats like .rar and .7z

to further force people into signing-in to an online microsoft account just to use their damn pc, probably.

Downvote = "it's not illegal to copy portions of your code using complicated algebra so I will ignore your software license. Also, fuck you for objecting" ?