• @[email protected]
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    101 year ago

    So I’m trying to figure out a way to jip Microsoft. We’ve already got a way to activate windows for free, but LTSC images need to be available - because that’s where we get away from Microsoft’s bullshit.

    Unless Microsoft removes access to DISM and gp, we’ll still be able to cut off that “always online” limb.

    • cum
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      71 year ago

      You want to get rid of Microsoft’s BS while still using Microsoft? I think you already know the only answer is Linux.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        In some cases, that’s still not possible for m, although my personal laptop that I use daily runs Fedora Atomic.

        But I also recently reinstalled another laptop with Windows 11, promptly stripped the whole thing of all kinds of apps and services, installed a bunch of audio software, libraries, etc, to prepare a machine to be show worthy.

        When the day comes and Ableton ports Live to Linux proper is when I will forego a bulk of my VST’s, but running it under wine for real-time purposes is not reliable at all - so eh. There’s Bigwig, but I got like years of Max patches that I just can’t live without, and I don’t need just a DAW. In fact, if you ask me to leave Live, I’ll tell you to fly a kite.

        Same issue it’s always been, unfortunately, that vendors do not support the Linux desktop. Go bother the vendors about platform supoort. I do, frequently. In fact, time for another ticket - and this one is going to be political.

        Thanks for the reminder.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      That’s not, wasn’t, and never will be free even if you don’t ritual with your Talisman, the dollar.

      Closed source software isn’t about making money. That’s just a sucker tool to vacuum people that accept shit-worse-than slavery from the dollar.

      Free means to ditch any and all software that some person you don’t gorram know bar one pedophile who stole everyone else’s written software and turned around selling it promising what it does. Even he doesn’t know jack fucking squat about what it really does.

      If you flip that for the trust you gave over the then the news is that you’re an even more gullible sucker and it isn’t a gamble on whether or not the next software cracker will kidnap the rest of your family as well.

      The life of everyone in your family will inevitably become the truth serum regenex for Steve Jobs when they unfreeze his ass. If you think he really is dead then you weren’t paying the fuck attention to his stock market vaccine six months before his ice cube.

  • cheee
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    121 year ago

    For the average user, with maybe a little bit of IT knowledge but doesn’t work in IT, what can we do for ourselves and our families other than go to win 11 eventually?

    • @[email protected]
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      341 year ago

      Unironically, switch to Linux. Mainstream distros like Mint, PopOS or Ubuntu are very friendly for casual users, have GUIs for everything and if something does go wrong, the error messages actually have proper meaning and you’ll find tons of resources online as well as people willing to help.

      Most stuff nowadays runs in a browser anyway, so here there’s no compatibility issues, office is available in Linux through libre office and gaming has come far with steam and proton.

            • darkmogool
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              61 year ago

              Well… That’s shitty behaviour. I’m luckily not on Ubuntu. Thanks for clarification.

        • @[email protected]
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          201 year ago

          I don’t like Canonical either, hence my recommendations for Mint or Pop being listed first. But let’s be real, if someone wants to just get away from windows and wants something that works without having to learn much new, this is good enough.

        • just another dev
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          1 year ago

          On the bright side: If you’re tech-savy enough to form that opinion, you’re probably not the intended audience for this advice.

  • @[email protected]
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    651 year ago

    So, how will this work and comply with laws regarding its use in a medical institution?

    What about its use in a company that has extremely valuable trade secrets that need to be kept that way?

    What about the military?

    Wouldn’t this make for an excellent target to harvest data for hackers?

    I wonder if Win 11 LTSC will leave it out.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      Other than them having some setting only for enterprise users, there’s another question - what has more weight, Microsoft or the law?

      • @[email protected]
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        71 year ago

        what has more weight, Microsoft or the law?

        If law forces them, Big IT will challenge it only to get a few years to mine data and get a few billions. Or outright violate it, because the penalty will be less worth.

    • SGG
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      231 year ago

      Microsoft will release a GPO or MEM setting that works 20 percent of the time to turn off the constant AI data mining, only available to enterprise SKUs.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      Military would be fine, because they don’t tend to update very frequently, if at all. If it works, that’s the way it will stay, and the recent controversy wouldn’t exactly encourage them to do so.

      What about its use in a company that has extremely valuable trade secrets that need to be kept that way?

      Same way the LLM debacle has currently gone, where people will just throw sensitive information into it with abandon. At least one major tech company has penalised workers for doing that with ChatGPT.

      If there’s a group policy to turn it off, maybe, but Microsoft might just not have one, or it’ll need to be disabled every update.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        Honestly it’s still strange to me that the us dod doesn’t have their own in house operating system

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          The hard part in doing that is making it compatible with everything. It’s not useful if it can’t run everything.

  • Ragdoll X
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    1 year ago

    Honestly I’m already not a big fan of Windows 10 so if Microsoft tries to force me to download Windows 11 with all these nonsense AI features that spy on you I’m just gonna switch to Linux

    • TipRing
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      71 year ago

      I switched last week. It was pretty easy with only a few small issues.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        Same! It was actually a pretty big surprise that Mint worked flawlessly out of the box on my crappy pre-built PC. Everything’s working great including the printer! I’m seriously impressed.

    • @[email protected]
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      171 year ago

      I switched in November. I have no regrets. I rarely run into issues, and having the control to make decisions over my own computer is superb.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        having the control to make decisions over my own computer is superb

        I find it really sad that it has come so far that feelings like these exist. That should be a matter of course. Instead, it has become a special feature.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    71 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    It’s an open secret that Microsoft is gearing up to supercharge Windows 11 this summer with next-gen AI capabilities that will enable the OS to be context aware across any apps and interfaces, as well as remember everything you do on your PC to enhance user productivity and search.

    These new capabilities are set to ship as part of a new app internally called “AI Explorer,” which I’m told will be unveiled during Microsoft’s special Windows event on May 20.

    The feature is also said to be exclusive to devices powered by Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X series chips, at least at first, as Intel and AMD play catchup in the NPU race.

    AI Explorer is able to do more than just remember the things you do on your computer, it’s also able to analyze what’s currently on-screen and provide contextual suggestions and tasks based on what it can see.

    This capability is called Screen Understanding, and I’m told one of the big selling points of AI Explorer is that it’s supposed to work across any app, with no developer input required.

    The existence of Rewind.ai proves that this is a concept that can be done, and Microsoft is essentially building its own version into Windows 11 that offloads the resources required for such a feature onto NPUs to keep the load away from the CPU.


    The original article contains 1,076 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    151 year ago

    The Eye

    (It knows you, it sees all that you do) (You cant hide) (…) (You thought so much about whether or not you Could, that you didn’t think about if you should) (quite a scary thing) (to be so fully Known) (I hope that there is going to be a way to disable that)

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    If I’m reading this correctly this runs locally and will requirean NPU, so would not be present or working without AI dedicated hardware?

    It honestly sounds useful and I would be a little excited to use it, but I imagine Microsoft will collect the data in some way which would be bad as it pretty much records your screen all the time (I somehow doubt all the info the AI collects will be actually stored locally)?

    Hopefuly one day there will be a point when a similar software will be developed that runs 100% locally, storing the data locally and have no internet connectivity and just be a useful tool.

    Good news is that unless you have Qualcomm CPU (or one with integrated NPU in the long run) you are safe from it for now

    • LiveLM
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      71 year ago

      Yeah you just about summed up my thoughts about the feature.
      It sounds like it could be genuinely useful, but I could never trust Microsoft to do it right, no matter how much they insist it’s local only.

  • @[email protected]
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    151 year ago

    Honestly I think windows is so fucked in terms of market share and it seems like they are kind of just pre-emptively ceding the battle to linux intentionally or not.

    Yeah people have been waiting for years for linux to eat windows for lunch and it hasn’t happened yet but I am convinced that linux becoming massively more practical and easy to use for gaming (Steam deck being a good catalyst) in the last couple of years has pushed things past a tipping point. Gaming might not make up the outsized chunk of desktop usage, but gaming is where people experiment, try new things, learn software inside and out and it is where people are most inspired to contribute and build and polish out the annoying little details of complex systems.

    Yeah Microsoft will have its walled moats around entire sectors of business indefinitely into the future, and that probably is where most of the consistent money is, but I think Microsoft shitting the bed with Windows 11 so hard is creating the rosiest forecast for the future of Linux desktops I have ever seen in my life.

    These twin factors converging has got me bullish af on Linux in the near to mid term.

    Let’s fuckinnn gooooooo

    • @[email protected]OP
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      1 year ago

      The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.

      Until then I’m using a pirated version of Win11Pro and wondering how this AI will work with pirated copies.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        The day Linux says all video games are compatible with their OS is the day I finally switch from Windows for good.

        I mean Wine and steamOS’s Proton are that though? Sure compatibility isn’t perfect but the vast majority of games I have tried worked all the way from current AAA games to games like Steel Panthers WinspWW2, a DOS game from the 90s that barely functions on a modern windows computer but yet runs perfect on my Deck. Because the deck is using a virtual environment to emulate a windows OS it actually arguably creates a more stable platform to run windows software than windows itself running the program normally.

        Pretty much the only obstacle left is stupid super invasive anticheat/spyware software that doesn’t bother to cover Linux in competitive multiplayer games.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          Kernel-level anticheat and DRM are killer features, like it or not. People don’t care how invasive they are, they want to play League of Duty. If Linux can’t do that then it’s not good enough yet as far as they are concerned.

          Meanwhile the only thing keeping me from switching to Garuda on my desktop is that the GPU is wonky and misbehaves even worse under Linux than it does under Windows. Screw competitive online games.

          • @[email protected]
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            71 year ago

            Then Linux may win over Windows for gaming, but games might lose to tinkering for me. Cause no way in hell I’m installing a kernel-mode trojan consciously.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 year ago

            If Linux can’t do that then it’s not good enough yet as far as they are concerned.

            Linux can do that, see The Finals, Halo Infinite, Apex Legends or any number of other games. It’s just the anticheat companies are sketchy and often uninterested in doing even a little bit of work to add Linux support.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 year ago

              True, but getting someone to switch to Linux is a hard sell already. Any compatibility issues are seen as the OS’s fault, not as the game company being lazy.

              • @[email protected]
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                31 year ago

                Getting someone to switch anything major in the workflow/toolset of their lives is nearly impossible most of the time, it is process highly likely to cause headaches and only provide counterbalancing benefits down the road once the painful learning curve of acclimation is overcome.

                However, in the same token there are plenty of Linux distributions that have perfectly understandable desktop UIs that many Mac or Windows users wouldn’t event notice wasn’t windows. Especially with Windows changing shit every 5 seconds and stuffing useless crap into menus everywhere, I think it isn’t a stretch to say the UI of many Linux distributions is more user friendly than Windows and in many cases Mac.

                The real problem is the moment someone has to fuck around with headaches with drivers for basic computer functionality like Bluetooth or other hardware. If that stuff is generally covered pretty well then most people aren’t going to give a shit.

                At this point Linux is like making coffee with a French press, people who aren’t coffee nerds think using a French press is way more complicated than using some stupid keurig machine with completely unclear buttons and a camera inside just to check you are using brand name keurig cups that you have to fool by slipping in an old k-cup lid from keurig over the top of the off-brand one….

                …peoplenwho do know coffee well on the other hand shake their heads confused when people jump through 1000 hoops to use other coffee brewing methods when a French press conceptually and mechanically is only one step away from just literally dumping your coffee grounds in hot water and then drinking it.