Microsoft announces it will automatically install the Copilot AI app alongside desktop versions of 365 products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint this October

They'll try to make Linux illegal soon.

The best thing to do is to convert you closest family and friends. If you're "the computer guy" the chances are you need to support their shitty computers anyway, so you might as well support an OS which is easier to maintain.

If you're in the US, soon this will be arrestable for enabling terrorism.

And Bazzite, and Fedora, and OpenSUSE.

I found Linux Mint Cinnamon edition to be an incredibly easy transition. Just make sure you disable secure boot and use the drive format that the installer recommends.

Linux is inconvenient at times but so is Microsoft at all times. Atleast you can fix your problems on Linux

Honestly it's probably an upgrade for O365 but people won't want to hear that. It's cloud based shit being integrated with a cloud based graphics cards being able to search and assist with that functionality. If we don't want our shit on a cloud, we shouldn't use O365. Copilot isn't changing much. Their software took its course, just move to libre office and if there is a big enough market, someone will fill the gap if they don't have the features they need from libre, but I don't know of any I need.

*This is mostly pointed at enterprise

Do you want to use copilot???

To be fair, I use excel (2019, not 365) frequently and I'm never prompted for anything. I had to jerry rig the installation so only excel installed and not the full suite of products, but other than that it's been clean and perfect. Sure, I'm missing some features from 365, but one of those missing features is copilot. Everything else is perfect (and I need data sources and some other functions that aren't in Calc which is why I still use it)

I read that as John Travolta in Battlefield Earth angrily asking Barry Pepper if he wanted to eat a rat.

DO YOU WANT LUNCH?!

What's really wild is that people put up with this shit.
For me the straw that broke the camel's back was finding out that system32 is owned by the installer user and I'd have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make any changes there.
And here people are like: "Sure, show me ads in the OS I bought." While the apologists go: "You can disable those in the registry."
I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO!

The moment I have to wrestle the OS for control over my computer it ceases to be useful and becomes a burden.

Balmer and Gates worked their way up, especially Gates from basically nothing. They understood mostly what their customers wanted. But Nadella only understands short term revenue. Not the longtime customers.

Microsoft was always bad. But now that they've saturated the market, they need shadier and shittier gimmicks to keep justifying their inflated stock price.

Now they're trying to sell businesses on AI as a full replacement for worker headcount. It's a bald faced lie. But with enough money spent on marketing and gimmicks like this...

Hear me out. I work in fintech. Medium size company. Super duper strict compliance and security. Although not as strict as what I've seen and heard of from big data and military contractors. Still. Experian for example mandated us that as a third party API data processor everyone that even goes near their raw credit score data be in an audited room that has a camera pointing at them at all times and a camera be pointed at their computer screens at all times as well. That's right, not on-device recording, but CCTV. The alternatíve was that we don't see their data at all. So we opted to encrypt all data from them at all times instead. At rest, in transit, doesn't matter. No visibility of it to us at all, except for the final numeric score you see on your credit reports and nothing else. And this is just one vendor we adhere to. There's tons of PII running through us. You get the ghist.

Come AI, suddenly our slack has an AI channel, we have a director of AI(?), and then a whole department. And of course the AI-assisted tools proliferate and QA and engineering are both mandated to perform more after laying off 30% of our devs. And every product manager's demo is talking about AI.

Meanwhile security said that no more Ubuntu and Fedora imaged laptops are allowed on our VPN. Windows 11 and the occasional Mac only.

Highly confidential business meetings are held with gong or other AI assist tools recording and summarizing everything. Code is being written with agentic AI. Internal-only docs are smoothed over with gpt. And all this with the notion that we should trust them that they don't extract data from these enterprise subscription products.

My only hope is that there's still some semblance of sanity left in this company because they have recently fired someone that proclaimed themselves being MAGA.

I STILL don't fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc...

Have you tried with asking Copi...OUCH!!!! /s

I STILL don’t fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc

I'm assuming you are referring to column filters and/or keeping the first row at the top of the screen:

• Filter: Select Header Row > Data > Auto Filter
• Row Freeze: View > Freeze Cells > Freeze First Row

Which version lol. Teams? Teams new? Teams classic? Personal teams?

I know right. Haven’t used Microsoft since 2013 and I’m discouraging every employee who is used to their products to not install them on work computers. A lot of people resist learning OSS but being in the management I do my bit for avoiding what I may claim to be unconsented malware on our systems.

*conversion

Just get it done and don't look back

So if Microshaft is going to install these products automatically with my copy of Windows, the tools are free to use, right?

That's sort of the joke of it all. Microsoft needs to tell their investors "We sold AI to 100 million new users!" to justify these bloated investments in OpenAI.

So instead of selling it as DLC, they just shave off a chunk of the 365 subscriptions and say "that was people paying for AI".

Which one is the Excel replacement and how does it compare? We all know companies buy office mostly just for excel...

Obsidian is sadly not FOSS, but aside of that, it's amazing (and entirely user-supported, not relying on VC profit-seeking).

this is the way

I have to use Windows at work. Happily, the Windows 2000 version of notepad is a standalone exe.

At home, my system runs Debian, which is so much simpler.

I miss npp so much on linux. Kate is pretty good though, but need to tinker with it quite a bit to make it fit my workflow. But it's also really hard to search for solutions, because just searching the Web for "Kate" brings a lot of noise. I wonder why they've never thought of it.

Also, I figure that long time linux users probably solve for what I experience as pain points completely differently. Like for example they use vim a lot instead.

It's absolutely everywhere. Have you checked fricking Notepad recently? (I do like the other improvements to it though, tangent)
I don't care on my work PC, not my data, but it's concerning how little control or oversight we're given as users (approx. none).

Happy Birthday.

For people who can spare $100-$200, I recommend buying an old ThinkPad or Dell business class laptop off eBay. Install Windows, update it, and stick it in your closet.

Because yes, sometimes you just need a Windows machine. VMs will cover most one off Windows requirements, but nothing beats a bare metal install.

Obviously this is not a solution for gaming, just the odd piece of Windows only software you need to run, or hardware you need to interface with that doesn't have Linux drivers.

testing my printer when something prints funny

I use it for making materials for special education usages. Word processor almost never.

I'd wait for sales of your games instead. I tried one fitgirl release on EndeavourOS I had from my Windows days (which ran perfectly on there) recently. Tried with Bottles and Lutris and the latter worked eventually but the performance was subpar and it was quite a hassle to get it to run as I had to try many proton versions with a lot of restarts and black screens. Steam and Heroic games run fine though.

Podcast that van help: https://surveillancereport.tech/

Tldr, an iPhone is okay and has decent default out of the box, but going with grapheneos is the best move.

You can use a degoogled phone. Poxel phones can ise graphene os. Other but not all phones can use lineage os. And murena makes a phone that can use their e os

What?

Notepad is on there. It's just shit now. Saves automatically, reopens your last notepads, has copilot crap. FFS. I usually used notepad as a scratch pad to dump shit temporarily.

Today I opened it on a client's computer and they had 18 sage files or something automatically open back up. Problem was they were temporary files for doing bank transfer or whatever.

Notepad barked about the file kissing for each one. I killed it from task manager and had to use word. 🤮

The problem is absolutely copilot. Microsoft is basically force installing spyware.

That happened months ago, they simply used a little slight-of-hand to hide it.