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

HumanOnEarth announces they will install Linux on all computers going forward

They'll try to make Linux illegal soon.
- Impossible. The cloud will fall. And locking the bootloader of computers won't work.
- Major fear is corruption of the culture. There are corpos and cunts that would benefit from Steam stopping linux suppory which is a major adoption driver. Nvidia is supposedly a more difficult gpu/cpu to use with linux and the current duopoly leans heavily in their favour.
- Not illegal, rather not free. There is an ongoing effort to switch from GPL licencing to more restrictive licensing, allowing corpos to close the source of their distribution. Redhat-IBM is at work. All this camouflaged behind good intentions like rewriting GNU user land and libs in Rust because memory safety.
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.

Use Linux.
Use LibreOffice.
Use LibreWolf or WaterFox.
Free yourselves.

If you're in the US, soon this will be arrestable for enabling terrorism.
- They might as well kill me if they take away my ability to tinker with computers.
  The orange fuck’s vengeance tour for taking away his pedo playtime ain’t making it that far.

This message is brought to you by Microsoft, for Linux Mint, and Linux Mint Debian Edition.

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.
- That's the one i want to try, but i've got too much going on right now to rip that bandaid

Life has been so good with Linux.

Linux is inconvenient at times but so is Microsoft at all times. Atleast you can fix your problems on Linux
- Can you fix mine too?

I can picture the MS execs going "Shit, we still have 1,000,000 Windows users that are not feeding us their data every second, we're not enshitifying fast enough. Step on it".

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
- Companies are locked to Microsoft Office whether we like it or not. Many don't seem willing to contribute to LibreOffice to make it beat out Excel in terms of performance, or to replace PowerBI, or any of the many Add-ins that are specifically written for Excel by Governments, etc.
  We also both know, the moment any country or significantly large business starts talking about replacing Microsoft products, Microsoft is going to take notice and do the absolute bare minimum to save themselves. That's what makes all of this so difficult. At least as a consumer, I'm happy to run Linux and LibreOffice on my hardware, and I'll promote the usage of both to anyone who asks.
  I say the same thing about Cisco Meraki (not Meraki Go). Who likes paying yearly for Cisco network hardware that bricks itself and takes down your network if you forget to pay the licensing? At that point it's not even about having the support contract to get firmware updates and support. It's just a company dragging you by the balls for recurring revenue, after you already paid for the hardware. But companies keep buying that crap because the product makes management of the hardware easy enough to make it seem valuable. I'd much rather buy Ubiquiti UniFi gear.

Microsoft fuck you. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Even though I have a free student subscription, I uninstalled all Microsoft Office last month because the constant ‘do you want to use copilot???’ was infuriating.

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)
- if i have xlookup and sumifs i can process most data i need. can't do any real statistical analysis, but it's just excel and it can prep that data for me.
- Yep, I managed to find a license for 2019 several years aho and have just transferred it to my computers and I've upgraded. No copilot or prompts to upgrade.
  I'm still testdriving libreoffice to try to dump ms entirely but I like having a backup available.
I read that as John Travolta in Battlefield Earth angrily asking Barry Pepper if he wanted to eat a rat.
DO YOU WANT LUNCH?!

I have never been more glad that I made the switch over to Linux.

It is truly shocking how shit Microsoft is under Nadella. It's like 100× worse than Gates or Balmer. Wild.

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.
- The worst is the stranglehold windows has in the professional world. Shit I'm not even an office worker and I have to deal with ads and now AI just working in the shop and using a PC for Outlook, Excel, Word, etc.
  Adobe has been getting really bad too. I shouldn't have to close like 4 different banners, popups, involuntary AI "summary" suggestions every time I open a PDF. The literal only thing I open on adobe is electrical schematics and using acrobat to document changes, etc. I doubt it could summarize drawings exported from AutoCAD and even if it could, why would I even want that? I need to test panels, not have something tell me "this is a schematic"
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.
- Gates's Mom was an IBM executive. He got handed a multi million dollar contract before he was out of undergrad. That's not "from nothing". The man was practically coronated
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...

Its worth understanding that microsoft, like most companies, is rapidly rebranding most of their existing stuff as "AI". A couple weeks (months?) back at work we managed to convince the boss that maybe it wasn't a good idea to put all of our sensitive internal data into Teams and convinced him to turn off copilot. Literally minutes later he lost his shit because auto-transcripts no longer worked and IT turned it back on.

But that is what we are seeing with a LOT of companies. ANYTHING that can be sold as "AI" is getting re-branded as it. So it makes perfect sense that MS will rebrand it as "installing copilot AI" rather than "not removing clippy".

That said: MS have also been ahead of the curve on adding even more bullshit and spyware to everything they do so... have you heard the good word about Linux? Libre Office gets personal users most of the way there (and if they worked on their documentation, all the way there. I STILL don't fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc...). And for business/power use, the browser/cloud based solutions are probably what you want anyway since none of that data should live on your laptop/desktop and should instead live in the company approved data store.

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.
- we should trust them that they don't extract data from these enterprise subscription products.
  LMAO of course they use that data for their AI training, now and forever (or maybe until the collapse of Usa as we know it), and they won't even ask anymore.
  I guess there is at least one person who should be fired urgently: the one who said that they don't do that.
I STILL don't fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc...
Have you tried with asking Copi...OUCH!!!! /s
- Funny enough, I actually have tried with chatgpt. The problem is the same one with all these LLM based tools: Training data.
  And if you actually google this yourself, the vast majority of what you find are people not understanding what is being asked or referencing a REALLY REALLY old UI (possibly dating to the open or even star days). And the LLMs are effectively scraping that so you get the equivalent of "This was already answered HERE. Closing duplicate question" response.
  (I usually DO end up figuring it out after a bit of deep diving when I really care but I go through so much FUD in the process that I inevitably forget a month or two later).
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
- Even better, click on the first cell (A1) if your headers are at the top, and then click on the filter button. Done.

I dare them to do it on my Pop OS! computers! I don't even run a windows VM anymore.

It feels liberating! No more Stockholm syndrome ✌️

Yes because that went so well for teams.

Which version lol. Teams? Teams new? Teams classic? Personal teams?
- Linc for Business? Skype for Business? OneDrive? SharePoint?
  Literally no one on earth, from the admins to the users, likes fucking anything Microsoft does anymore.
  Can we please please please tell them to fuck all the way off?
  Just because it wasn’t planned doesn’t mean they can’t be obsolete.

Krunklom announces he's going to keep using Linux and to kiss his fucking asshole, gently, and delicately, after Krunklom has taken a shit, Microsoft.

Wow if only anyone saw this coming

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.

Yeah, I've dumped all mikroshite from my devices for FOSS software. Only my work laptop has it and I never do anything personal with that. Libre Office, Thunderbird, Notesnook. Also considering Obsidian and Joplin.

Which one is the Excel replacement and how does it compare? We all know companies buy office mostly just for excel...
- LibreOffice Calc. I think it still has some performance issues vs Excel with extremely large files, and it can only do 1024 columns. Also LibreOffice Basic can do a lot of what VBA could but the syntax is different and I don’t think it integrates well with the rest of the system like VBA’s COM integration (as unsafe as that was)
  If you aren’t pushing Excel to its absolute limits then it’s more than enough.
Obsidian is sadly not FOSS, but aside of that, it's amazing (and entirely user-supported, not relying on VC profit-seeking).

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

I may finally pull the plug on my full conversion to Linux this or next year. I already dual-boot and have been a single inconvenience away from kicking Windows Spyware Edition to the curb, anyways.

*conversion
- Thanks!
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".

fuck no. I am not installing their SaaS bullshit. I have old editions for a reason.

I was dual booting for a bit on two computers but didn't get too far away from Windows.

Finally reinstalled only Ubuntu on my laptop. I use my laptop until I need something on Windows then figure out how to do it on Ubuntu.

Got Syncthing running on both computers early this week to replace Box. Still need to see if I can run it on my NAS. Then need to get Back blaze sorted out.

this is the way

I've converted my whole family to LibreOffice. fuck MS

Isn't it already bundle with Windows 11? Article doesn't say what's the difference.

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).
- Might I suggest Notepads (yea with an s) instead? It's a 3rd party app that's similar to how Notepad works. The dev actually started work on it back when Notepad was pretty basic and has pretty much all of the new Notepad improvements and no AI nonsense way before Microsoft started revamping Notepad.

Laughs in LibreOffice

They are also inserting AI shit into Notepad too.

Like, good luck getting me off from LibreOffice and Notepad++ assholes.

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.
- I used (g)Vim on windows back when I used that
- Take a look at Notepadqq or Notepad Next.

Moved to Linux (popos on desktop, mint on ancient laptop). Been fine. Don't miss windows. Play games and browse the web without issue.

I will immediately uninstall it. AI is a MAJOR hindrance to what I use MS Office for.

My birthday is next week and for it, I'll be moving to openSUSE on my gaming rig and server. I'm both nervous and excited! If only I could get them to let me do that at work!

Happy Birthday.
- Haha, thanks!

How many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man?

Meh. Any word processor or spreadsheet works for me, as long as I don't get pestered.

I have only one computer left running Windows and it’s getting the axe this month. While I’ve used Linux for many years as my primary OS, there are unfortunately some things that just don’t work well under Linux still.

I’m a sucker for bleeding edge graphics and I have a feeling this is where it will affect me the most. I’ve not had luck in the past with the most fancy features working, so it’ll probably be a bit of a learning curve to get used to no longer having that access.

All that being said, every other part of the experience will be an improvement, so I’m not that upset about it.

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.
- Yeah I got a t480s and I love it. I got Linux and Windows dual booting on it. It's a solid feeling laptop with the best laptop keyboard I've used. If willing to splurge more could get a newer ThinkPad with a Ryzen CPU, but t480s is enough for me.
- 50 dollar Thinkpad is in my closet to use razer drivers so I can edit the onboard memory of my mice once in a blue moon.
  Since editing anything beyond the side buttons on Linux is literally impossible.
  Finding a mouse with mouse wheel tilt, three side buttons and two extra top buttons that's also fully mappable AND not some piece of actual fucking shit super light mouse is more or less impossible.
  Fuck this trend of light ass mice.

Oh no!

Anyway...

I don't have any of this shit installed, could copilot already be on my windows 11?

Gross

Thank God I'm out of there.

Jesus Fucking Christ. Why would anyone who wants to write a simple letter or some other basic stuff in Word (which is what most of home users do) want any of this crap?

Happy card making!.... What do you guys use word for at home other than training Microsoft's AI?

testing my printer when something prints funny
I use it for making materials for special education usages. Word processor almost never.

They are really going balls to the wall with this AI crap, huh?

Okay okay linux this and that but what am I supposed to do for phone security and browsing (unrelated to microsoft). Please help me, nerds 🙏

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.
- Well graphene OS I have been told isn't the best, and saw an article earlier about people who are now being targeted in Spain for having a pixel and arrested so it won't be long before that spreads. I'm hoping to find something else but we need mass support so it isn't targeted while it not being a large corporation
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
- Okay so as someone in the U.S. that wants phone calls, texts, and apps of my choosing, what can I use. Because I have to assume every Google pixel will be targeted if they have already started in Spain. Trump's a one upper

That's enough for me to quit my last two dual boot rigs. Guess I'll have to figure out how to get over binging 12 fitgirl release.quickly only to realize they all sucked anyway

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.

I wonder if this applies to those of us with the non Ai version.

I was using a work computer yesterday and I wanted to copy some lines of text to use again later. So i tried to open Notepad, it wasn't installed on this machine. I had to open word instead. I thought Notepad came as standard?

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. 🤮

You'll be able to disable it, like anything else.

The problem isn’t co-pilot. Co-pilot is reasonably useful if you’re careful.

The problem is that it will almost certainly cost extra.

And that’s fucking terrible.

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.