“We set out to solve one of the most common frustrations we hear — finding and changing settings on your PC — using the power of AI agents,” Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Tuesday. “An agent uses on-device AI to understand your intent and with your permission, automate and execute tasks.”
The biggest frustration is not me changing settings.
The biggest frustration is windows changing back those settings whenever it feels like it.
This is just doubling down on the “greatest frustration”
This is why I got my 70 year old mother on a frameworks laptop running pop OS. It looks like a Mac and she thinks its pretty. Switching cost is over hyped. Fuck big tech
Couldn’t make a proper settings menu and AI is dumb as rocks…… - + - = - -? Shoot control panel is better than this combo.
Surely there would be no way scammers or hackers would take advantage of this with some crafty prompts that somehow get feed into the agent…
WTF! Just keep it!
You know that friend who wants to sell you his laptop but keeps showing you know it works instead of letting you try it? That Microsoft. So I say fuck them, just keep the fucking thing if they love it so much that they can’t let me use it the way I want to use it -> Linux.
Holy shit.
Your ux SUCKS SO MUCH, that instead of making it not shitty…
You developed AI for it?
Are you fucking kidding me
How inept are these developers
They broke alt tab.
That’s how fucking inept they are
You brought back an old, old memory of reading a Dave Barry novel about computers. In it, he describes going to a Microsoft convention in which they introduced, IIRC, Windows 95; while describing the taskbar, they apparently touted “no more alt+tab!”
Microsoft Windows be like
**bangs chest** **glass panel of case explodes**
I set up my pc as dual boot a few weeks back. Opened up windows yesterday, for the first time in a while, to export a few settings from thunderbird. Took about half an hour to get it started. Felt like popping round to the house of an abusive ex to pick up the last of my things.
Ah Christ. We’ve collectively regressed so much in computer knowledge that people can’t even find a settings menu? Even I have trouble believing that one.
The problem that i cant find the setting, or it’s in a different app or intentionally cant be changed easily. I want to limit my battery to charge only when below 30%; but i cant do that in battery or power settings. I want to disable some “feature” where windows randomly adds a new keybord layout to windows, but this is not a setting but seems to be a bug. I want to completely disable usb- or lan-wakeup, but despite changing settings in the device manager my desktop is sometimes turned on in the morning after i set it to hibernate the night before. I dont want one-drive or cloud, but this is also not a setting but a design decision by the MS marketing department to make money with their half-baked cloud solutions.
Well, there’s the small issue of Windows now having control panel the settings app and some shitty third thing sprinkled in there somewhere. There are some things that should have settings but don’t. You can no longer simply disable Windows update on your own, because Microsoft has decided they know best.
kinda fair considering windows has like 20 control panels that should all do the same thing but at the end of the day you still need to use regedit.
Finding settings in Windows is pretty hard
The last time finding settings in Windows was straight forward was Windows 95. Since the stupid dumbed down ‘settings’ app was vomited upon us, it has been nearly impossible to find the thing you know is there but has now been renamed and moved, and isn’t even indexed in the settings app search bar.
The registry never has and never will be simple nor usable. Windows is rotten to the core.
Have you tried to configure gnome beyond what is offered in its GUI ?
The reasoning I moved from Windows to Linux was this right here.
If I’m going to be fighting with Windows anyway, because of the registry giving me issues, then the drawback of “but Linux hard! You have to configure things!” was moot.
No, I’m a happy i3wm user.
Because I’ve tried to get GNOME to do what I wanted. (Also it was too slow on the machines I was using at the time).
And that’s besides the point: on linux you can just use a good DE without messing with much – KDE, cinnamon, etc…
Just to be the devil’s advocate here: There are way more settings now than back then. That interface wouldn’t cut it either.
The problem isn’t the new coat of paint - it’s more that Microsoft keeps painting half the building then starting over for the new OS. It’s frustrating that the key to finding a setting is knowing when it was developed to know which UI you need to be digging through.
Even on 11 hit winkey+r then type in CONTROL
Not convinced the number matter as much if settings are indexed and thus searchable, which they probably are now otherwise the “AI” wouldn’t be able to access them. So… just more convolutions for the end user?
You know that windows 10 still has the original control panel hidden deep in there.
Why do that
“Hey Copilot. Delete yourself, Recall and all other bloatware from my system. Thank you.”
Copilot: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
“Hey Dave, I installed CandyCrush and the LinkedIn App for windows during the latest update!”
While the precise words were different, I otherwise had this exact exchange with Gemini.
I actually like the ability for a local AI to help with this in theory. I don’t think it’s an excuse for unintuitive UIs though.
I appreciate the sentiment - in fact it’s been fun watching AI being integrated into home assistant by end users and being given full control, lots of incredibly interesting times.
But not all AI is the same. Somehow I expect that Microsoft’s implementation will make it ridiculously easy to opt-in to Microsoft services and relaxed privacy settings, but will leave opting out as an exercise left to the user.
Wow, a take that isn’t just “AI bad?” Wild.
Yeah I thought it was weird that it couldn’t do this in windows in the first place when you had to click a button to allow the AI to change your computer from light to dark mode or something. It was right 99% of the time in my brief testing, and just include an undo button in case it isn’t.
All of that said, I’m glad to be on Linux where there isn’t any AI built into my OS, but I’m also not the target audience for needing an AI to change my settings for me.
I agree but with Microsoft you know an air-gapped ‘AI agent’ is never going to happen.
Glad to be using Linux on all my computers
Easy way to automatically set settings that are convenient for them and disguise it as AI being AI
Worse - easy way to set the settings then gaslight the user to say they asked for it that way.
How much you wanna bet that it makes those changes in a way that is generally indistinguishable from as if it was done by the user’s own credentials? (Except save perhaps in recall’s own logs)
I dumped Windows about 18 months ago, before their recall and copilot BS. There are many Linux distros out there. They are free and there is almost nothing you can do with Windows that can’t be done on Linux. These days, most games for Windows can be played on Linux using Proton and Wine. There is no reason to keep Windows and plenty of reasons to dump Windows, like not wanting your personal data stolen or monitored by corporations and governments.
They really are trying to drive away their user base huh
No, we’re just not their target market. Most of their users, inexplicably, actually like changes like this.
Yea, but in my experience most people just dont care.
Maybe if you didn’t split settings into that half-baked settings app, then leave control panel in place with the remaining settings, but make control panel increasingly difficult to get to, we wouldn’t need a stupid AI agent to help us change settings.
Yes! I really feel all this copilot bullshit is to hide the fact they released windows 11 broken as fuck and here 2.5 years later it’s still a pile of shit. It’s just fucked. I have to use it daily for work and clients and it’s done nothing but prepare me to install W10 LTSC this summer or move to Linux. Problem with Linux is a have an Nvidia GPU and don’t like having to fuck with that, otherwise Zorin it will be. Windows 11 pushes me everyday to hate it more and more. Seriously. Daily fucking updates for broken shit and shoving AI down our throats. Fuck windows.
I’m dualbooting CachyOS with windows, no issues with my rtx 4070 super.
CachyOS rocks. I settled on it after trying many Linux distros and CachyOS won. All distros had pros and cons CachyOS was easy to update. Easy to install and remove programs without the terminal. Proton and Wine run great on it so most of my Steam and Epic games are playable and all media types play without tinkering. That was an issue with Fedora.
I’ll look into it again this summer. It’s on the list, just not at the moment
I’m in a similar situation, though I’ve already got a dual boot set up so it’s just a matter of only using Windows when I just absolutely have to.
Earlier today, I tried to zip a directory on Windows 11 with the context menu, and it wouldn’t do it! It’s a feature that’s been in Windows forever and is even in Ubuntu, but somehow over at Microsoft they’ve managed to break it. Incredible.
Windows 11 actually released 3.5 years ago!
Oof.
I have an nvidia GPU and it worked out of the box.
I need to look into it more, it’s on my list for this summer
deleted by creator
Ot you can just right click the start menu
