A few days ago, Davuluri shared his excitement about it on his official X handle. He seemed very eager to reveal what the company has in mind at the upcoming Ignite event regarding the agentic OS plans.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and Davuluri, the response has been overwhelmingly negative, so much so that the comments on that X post have now been disabled.
Made me laugh. :)
The best part here is that, when the AI bubble pops, AI will become a dirty word for a while before settling in some, much smaller, feature.
MS is going all gas no brakes on AI and when that bubble pops, their entire ecosystem will be toxic and laughable
In a few years Microsoft will just release Windows 12, with most of these AI features removed. Maybe they’ll do some user friendly tweaks too, but just a few. And most of Windows refugees will come back, praising Microsoft for listening to the community. Meanwhile there’ll be even more spyware and even less user control over the OS, but the vast majority will never notice that. That’s all it takes.
I think you are enormously overestimating their abilities to:
A) reflect on poor management decisions that hurt users. They have increased their company valuation TEN-fold under Satya Nadella over the last 11 years, and his push to cannibalise the hosted-services partners and Gold partners with Azure/365 made them a lot of ground before then. They became the second company ever to reach a valuation of $3T back in 2024. If you think a (globally) handful of unhappy home OS users will cause then to change course - I don’t think so, certainly never been my experience with MS.
B) win back most of the users they have lost to Windows. Why would those users return? They have what they need with their new solutions, and moving to them was a time and education cost that they have now fully paid, they’re invested. They’d have to have something very compelling to bring them back beyond, "hey guys we stopped being shit! ######for now "
I thought Windows 10 was the last ever version of Windows?
Let’s be real, windows 12 will be fully ai integrated
Maybe Windows has just to lose a massive share of the market to break his enshittification circle.
I can’t wait for that whole AI bubble to blow up. Shame it’s most likely not gonna kill Microsoft…
I wonder when the big software players running their stuff on Win are going to complain. For me, I’m tied to Autodesk. If they would make their mind up and start a Linux version or support Proton (I don’t see, why the advancement in the gaming world couldn’t in principle be applied to productivity software) I would be away from MS at work instantly.
Because linux users are haxors that will be pecking at their sortware DRM and create unofficial 3rd party pluings that make users life easier, but give dev teams a headache.
/s
My career is supporting business Linux users, and to be honest I can see why people might be reluctant to take on the Linux users.
“Hey, we implemented a standard partition scheme that allocates almost all our space to /usr and /var, your installer using ‘/opt’ doesn’t give us room to work with” versus “Hey, your software went into /usr/local, but clearly the Linux filesystem standard is for such software to go into /opt”. Good news is that Linux is flexible and sometimes you can point out “you can bind mount /opt to whatever you want” but then some of them will counter “that sounds like too much of a hack, change it the way we want”. Now this example by itself is mostly simple enough, make this facet configurable. But rinse and repeat for just an insane amount of possible choices. Another group at my company supports Linux, but just as a whole virtual machine provided by the company, the user doesn’t get to pick the distribution or even access bash on the thing, because they hate the concept of trying to support linux users.
Extra challenge, supporting an open source project with the Linux community. “I rewrote your database backend to force all reads to be aligned at 16k boundaries because I made a RAID of 4k disks and think 16k alignment would work really well with my storage setup, but ended up cramming up to 16k of garbage into some results and I’m going to complain about the data corruption and you won’t know about my modification until we screen share and you try to trace and see some seeks that don’t make sense”.
Here’s the thing - the same thing that Microsoft is being roasted for saying they’re going to implement is the thing that Apple are being roasted for not having implemented yet. The difference is -rightly or wrongly- people trust Apple in a way that they simply don’t Microsoft.
Apple zealots trust apple. The rest of us don’t give a rat’s ass what Apple does.
Their stance on default privacy and sticking a finger to law enforcement is leagues above both Microsoft and Google/Android. So far at least.
You are correct… yet it is so sad that a modicum of respect for their clients is held up as if Apple self immolated out of principle… the bar is THAT low
MCP?
They’re calling it the MCP?
Did they do that on purpose, or are they really so small, soft, uncultured, and tone deaf at Microsoft? It’s… Probably the latter, isn’t it…
Tron would like a word.
I don’t see what the big deal is with a Windows that can play chess
Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.
There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.
I wiped my Windows SSD after over half a year of not booting into it at all. I do not miss it, but I do greatly appreciate a larger /home partition spanning an entire 1 TB SSD (for reasons of buying at various times for projects that didn’t need a lot of storage, I have 3 1 TB SSDs lol). Now to figure out how to enlarge the / partition with btrfs.
Btrfs makes it really easy to enlarge a partition. You don’t even have to reboot.
Wouldn’t it be easier to clone your partition to another SSD but have it already be the full SSD size? I remember looking into something like that and cloning looked easier, but I was looking through the windows side, Linux probably has various ways to do it
Sorry for being an idiot, but what is an agentic OS?
Whatever it is, it sounds fucking stupid.
The OS doesnt need to be a focus. the OS is best when you completely forget its existence and can just do things without worry.
Which is why Windows 7 is the best operating system microsoft has, and seemingly will, ever produce.
“Agentic” is the buzzword to distinguish “LLM will tell you how to do it” versus “LLM will just execute the commands it thinks are right”.
Particularly if a process is GUI driven, Agentic is seen as a more theoretically useful approach since a LLM ‘how-to’ would still be tedious to walk through yourself.
Given how LLM usually mis-predicts and doesn’t do what I want, I’m no where near the point where I’d trust “Agentic” approaches. Hypothetically if it could be constrained to a domain where it can’t do anything that can’t trivially be undone, maybe, but given for example a recent VS Code issue where it turned out the “jail” placed around Agentic operations turned out to be ineffective, I’m not thinking too much of such claimed mitigations.
Wild guess:
Log everything the user is doing. Have clippy interface prompt the user to take some work off their hands. Do some web searches, start storing a dossier about the ‘project’. Give the user a rough outline to complete their project based on a trained llm and some web searches. Ask the user if the outline looks good. Ask the user if they’d like some help completing some of the steps. Burning through tokens the whole time, storing telemetry with 100% knowledge of what they user does/wants to do. Selling that exact data to project management software companies and companies that write middleware to do this work. Bind everything together into a virtual notebook where users can return to any content at any step.
This is really just a guess but… I think “agent” in this context means a personalised AI.
Training gen AI models requires huge amounts of resources. Its not practical to train an AI for your personal use.
Creating an agent is something like, taking an existing model, asking it to keep your entire browser history in mind while you ask it to do your homework.
IMO its actually one of the big limitations of gen AI, but somehow the word is supposed to mean the opposite. As in, the current approach has reached a dead end requiring exponentially more resources for less and less improvement. So because we can’t make a model that just knows or learns everything, we have to make agents that know lots about specific things.
Sorry for being an idiot, but what is an agentic OS?
Agentic OS is a buzzword that’s meant to imply that the OS is (or has) an AI agent doing useful things for you in the background without you explicitly asking it to do those things (ie an agent working for you). For an agent to be useful, (they say) it has to know and learn everything it can about you, your life, your friends, activities, contacts, work, and so on.
The tradeoff is pretty extreme though. Everything you do on the PC is watched, analyzed, catalogued, and retained by MIcrosoft (and possibly whoever they choose to share the info with, which is likely every government that asks). The features that do this are generically called client-side scanning and Microsoft has a few specific variants you can read about called Copilot Recall, and Copilot Vision.
Basically, system wide Clippy that is somehow even more annoying.
Look at the positive side, you can cook sausages on your overheating laptop
You mean cooking breakfast on the smoldering corpse of your laptop.
And in the non-Windows world - this could all be implemented on Linux in such a way that you, the end user choose if you want it at all, which models you want (including both local and online ones), and what gets what access. Plus all kinds of customizability. I’m sure someone is already working on this too.
big tech doesn’t have a monopoly on linear algebra or calculus.
you can run your own telemetry, analytics, and modeling pipelines with existing toolings and most modern PCs are plenty capable of doing a wide variety of useful things with said data.
these tools are very powerful. algorithmic feeds regularly hijack your dopamine response whether you’re aware of it or not. these organizations colonize your mind. your consent or acknowledgment is not a necessary factor. why should MS, Google, and Meta be the sole masters of these feedback loops?
the old privacy is dead. going into the future people should be pragmatic and actually do something about the current state of our society instead of being whiny do-nothing pissbabies complaining endlessly about things they barely comprehend. the key to breaking our chains is understanding the very tools that oppress us all.
being as tech-illiterate, as philosophically-illiterate as most people are is why we’re in the precarious position we’re in… one where these big tech empires have risen to institutional scales, rivaling nation-states themselves. and that includes the average software developer, sysadmin, IT support, doctor, engineer etc. not even considering genAI or agentic tools - we’re in a new zeitgeist where solving highly-dimensional problems is in extreme demand with very, very few people actually educated enough to do it. we don’t need more experts, those are a dime a dozen. we need renaissance men.
do you people not see what is at stake here?
you’re a boiling frog, all of you, all of us.
one day you will wake up a citizen of meta and purchase your rations with facebook scrip, and you won’t even know it’s happened.
the decisions we all collectively take now over the next 5-10 years determine whether free society survives or if we descend into a new dark age of neo-serfdom and techno-feudalism.
may god have mercy on us all.
We should kill all the big tech CEOs and investors
physical revulsion
As far as I can see MS is planning the agent not to stay in the background as you described but to be an active means to control the operating system and software functions, so that many tasks can be instructed in natural language.
They should call this version of the OS “Doors” then, as it just shows you what doors it wants, and closes it’s door in your face if you don’t stump up your precious data.
It’s some AI crap they try to push on us.
Windows 10 had a better kernel than 7. Unfortunately, that kernel was packaged with the rest of windows 10.
Win 7 sucked too.
Win XP was the beginning of enshitification.
You just have nostalgia.
Agent work can be pretty magical. I’ve been using cursor recently and the fact that it can just execute commands on your PC means you can just tell it to do something and it does. Troubleshooting as it goes
What I see time and time again are people saying “I HAVE TO use Windows at work, but I don’t use it at home”.
So, logically that means Windows is losing market share to Mac and Linux, right?
Well, no. What I see over the past 20 years is that people just stopped buying PCs for personal use.
At this point, it really feels like if you’re over 55, you’re in the minority if you own a PC. If you’re younger than 30, you’re in the minority if you own a PC.
And for 30-55 year olds, it’s simple. You grew up with PCs, so you’re used to them. Everyone else just sees it as “that thing we use at work”
So, no. People dropping microsoft from their own personal lives doesn’t mean they switch to linux. It just means they use their cell phone or tablet to browse the web. Because for most people, thats all a pc is anyways. Just a machine to browse the web on.
Well even with your observation, it could well be losing share to Mac and Linux. The Windows users are more likely to jump ship, and Mac and Linux users tend to stick with the platform more, mainly because it’s not actively working to piss them off. Even if zero jump to Mac or Linux, the share could still shift.
The upside of ‘just a machine to run a browser’ is that it’s easier than ever to live with Linux desktop, since that nagging application or two that keeps you on Windows has likely moved to browser hosted anyway. Downside of course being that it’s much more likely that app extracts a monthly fee from you instead of ‘just buying it’.
Currently for work I’m all Linux, precisely because work was forced to buy Office365 anyway, and the web versions work almost as well as the desktop versions for my purposes (I did have to boot Windows because I had to work on a Presentation and the weird ass “master slide” needed to be edited, and for whatever reason that is not allowed on the web). VSCode natively supports linux (well ‘native’, it’s a browser app disguised as a desktop app), but I would generally prefer Kate anyway (except work is now tracking our Github Copilot usage, and so I have to let Copilot throw suggestions at me to discard in VSCode or else get punished for failing to meet stupid objectives).
PC gamers under 30 would be considered a significant minority compared to other <30yos?
Hmm… I don’t know. 30-50yos are raising kids right now. That’s a whole lot of 0-21orso year olds living in the bracket where people have PCs.
Then you have college students filling the gap, who likely have a laptop at least.
Compared to console and mobile gamers, yes
Definitely not to mac…I use mac and windows at work and Mac is by far the worst OS. It’s so damn locked down it’s obnoxious.
i have a simple question… who the fuck asked for this?
Shareholders
Funny thing is that is not likely. The shareholders of microsoft (and most blue chip companies) have not really asked for anything other then endless profits lately. This endless drive into shit seems to be almost entirely driven by weird sales pitches and executives chasing a sunk cost.
The general idea is that whoever left behind in AI tech will vanish or lose power the next decade. Like Yahoo and other companies during the 2010+. So Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft compete now and they don’t care about users. Their focus is enterprise market and the future domination.
Shareholders of Microsoft push AI.
Competitor Shareholders push AI.
Shareholders of hardware push AI.
Enterprise pushes AI.
“Innovation” is part of profit.
Ha, like 5% of the time. Most of the time its cluster fuck after cluster fuck and visits from the good idea fairies.
Not saying there should not be innovation, but innovation for nothing but to be able to say you are doing innovation is a cancer.
Yes, that’s why I wrote “innovation” and not innovation. I’m not sure if there’s something that better communicates the Dr. Evil air quotes.
Further comments may have been disabled, but a number of them are still up and are highly entertaining:
https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336
The thing is, they all invested so much into Ai now so they have to use it everywhere even when people dont want it… :)
Its going to wreck the reputation of windows even more…
“Linux and Mac are toxic this year”
Wat. Toxic how? Why this year?
They’ve really painted themselves into a corner with their AI investments. It’s starting to look like the total addressable market is a small fraction of what they’d need to break even on their atrociously ill-advised investments into the sector, and now they’re becoming increasingly desperate to shoehorn a technology that nobody wants into everything they can.
Literally everybody who has an inkling of an idea of what’s going on in the AI space knows how this ends, but somehow the board and c-staff at MSFT are not counted amongst the inkling havers. In a few years they’re going to have to write off countless billions that they’ve wasted on this idiocy and nobody will be surprised but them.
You are wrong daikiki. AI is a tech that is going to change everything, it’s the “computers” of this era, they are investing in a technology that will boom. Even if you don’t think it will they will push it, see what google is doing, they rigged up the search results and now you necessarily have to use AI to get good answers, it’s also there by default so you can’t really avoid it.
Apparently when Satya Nadella took over, Steve Ballmer told him “don’t screw up”. In terms of stock price and profits, he absolutely hasn’t. In terms of producing products that consumers might actually want to pay for, he has failed completely and Microsoft has never been in a worse position. But those two things are completely disconnected now so it’s fine.
Why have windows calculator when you can have windows calculator with AI guess what you want to calculate, get it wrong, spy on you, and use that spying to serve you targetted ads all at the same time? #innovation
Why have windows calculator when you can have windows calculator guess what you want to calculate, get it wrong, spy on you, and use that spying to serve you targetted ads all at the same time? #innovation
Ya know, I’m not a linux “supporter” in the traditional sense. I usually find it annoying when people hijack these threads to say they use linux.
But man…even though I don’t have a clue what I’m doing in linux, I’d rather be on linux than windows 11.
We have passed the point where it has to be complicated. If you choose something like Garuda, Bazzite, or Mint, it should be a pretty straightforward switch.
I’ve held out a while but this is just getting ridiculous. I’m taking the leap.
As I use my home machine mainly for gaming, which version is best for me?
If you want a locked down PC you can’t break, and to install all your software using a GUI, choose Bazzite. If you feel comfortable on the terminal, use CachyOS.
And contrary to windows, it’s learn once, use forever.
Except all those times where you learnt how to do something when you set it up years ago, and haven’t touched it since because it just bloody works. Then when you need to upgrade to a new machine you have to learn it all again.
Been using Linux for thirty years and it still happens.
You would have known it better under windows as it would have bacame obsolete or just stopped working every other 6 months, needing your attention 😁
I’m on ZorinOS, which I’m told is very similar to Mint.
It’s similar in that it has an application launcher at the bottom, a windows-like start menu, and aims to be simple.
Zorin has a modern UI where Mint is more windows-7-ish. They don’t have the same file explorer, settings app, app store, generally the core apps are different.
Look they’re quite different, it’s hard to make a full comparison, just run a Mint .iso in gnome-boxes if you’re curious.
Zorin is working out really well for me, esp on my older machines with slower processors and less RAM that choke a little on fuller distros. I enjoy the KDE Plasma distros, for example, but they’re a little too heavy for my older boxes and I was getting a lot of video stutter and unexplained shutdows, etc. I don’t get that with Zorin or Mint. For me Mint works just as well as Zorin and picks up all my hardware just as handily, it just feels a little basic for what I’m used to. But Zorin hits just right in every direction for my needs. It’s a good distro for Windows noobs, that’s for sure.
I still get freezes. Then when I try to power off and power back on, it won’t boot. Then a day or two will go by, and it boots.
Just for clarity, when you say it won’t boot, where in the boot process does it fail? Do you get as far as loading the BIOS, do you get a little way into the OS and then it crashes, or does it just not start at all?
I ask because depending on how far it gets into the boot process, you may not be looking at a software problem at all. Generally speaking, you have to get past the BIOS and into the bootloader before assuming the problem has to do with your choice of OS.
It’s OK, you’re on Lemmy, we all use Linux here so you’re among friends (or bitter enemies if your distro of choice is Ubuntu)
A good low (basically zero) risk way to start is to flash an image of say Ubuntu onto a flash drive. They’re usually bootable. So you can boot into Linux right off the flash drive.
This obvious takes a performance hit compared to actually installing it, but it’ll let you confirm that it actually works on your hardware.
And IIRC you xan choose to just keep it (so install it) right from there.
You can also load it up, and then do wild stuff and install, upgrade things (which will disappear ofc.).
That USB boot is crazy cool if you think about it IMO.
The way I see it, they think GenAI is the new portal to information, the way search has been for the last 25-30 years. They want to control that portal, because it’s worth trillions over time.
This is why they’re cramming it into everything and worrying about use cases later. It’s a land grab.
That kinda makes sense. Thank you for sharing your optics.
I heard that phrase “optics” for the first time in the TV show Succession. Is it something that ordinary people use or just wealthy people?
It’s mainly used by people who work in public relations or robotics
Or politics or really any field where the perception of actions are as, or more, important than reality.
It has been glorious watching Microsoft do this, they deserve this dead end and much worse honestly.
I mean… I don’t know I guess it gives me hope how incompetent the people at the top of Microsoft truly seem to be?
What do you mean people don’t want machine learning chatbots spewing out bullshit in every facet of their lives and technology use?
We really need to get rid of the “AI” buzzword and refer to machine learning chatbots as what they are.
Parrots with a stolen dictionary.
But they made Google dance, right? Maybe that’s all Satya Nadella needed out of it.
Cant write off something that isnt even in the books…
I have some aging hardware (approaching 10 year old desktop PC) and I switched to Linux. I have to still use Windows at work but none of my personal computers are Windows anymore.
Microsoft can go kick rocks.
Same here!
Same here!
