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. :)
I hate how tech companies just constantly want to change everything.
Just give me something usable that I can get shit done with and fuck off. I don’t want your changes and updates and new feature.
That’s one thing I love about FOSS, that the only stakeholders are the devs and the users. The goal is to make software that’s good at what it does.
When it comes to any tech company’s product, you not only have all the stakeholders that corrupt the end product, but you have giant teams of marketers, designers, engineers, and managers that need to constantly justify their existence and or be efficiently utilized at all times.
Honestly it’s like lesser version of enshittification, the tendency of commercial products to always be changing things.
While this is true, designers are constatnly beholden to management (much like programmers are), so while designers would love to create a nice looking usable application, they end up having to go with the mockups that management requested which are of course a worse experience for the end-user.
It’s really sad.
In FOSS world, this is only as true for the subset of developers (including both programmers and designers) that are contributing code as their job duties. Additionally that effect is only prominent in projects that are dominated by one organization. Both those things do happen, but there’s also numerous exceptions, too.
Some developers are paid to write unrelated proprietary code and the developer also contributes to open source on their free time. Some projects have so many corporate contributors that none of them can single-handedly direct the development.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t referencing the FOSS world with my comment. I was responding to the tech company’s part.
My comment was specifically about designers working for companies, with management forcing them to design things in a way that they would rather not.
It’s kind of less about designers having to justify their existence (although, yes, there are far more often entire re-designs that seem like nothing else about this) and more about them being forced to create designs that management want, rather than what end-users want.
That’s what my comment was about.
I mean, then you’re describing bog-standard capitalistic exploitation, and it’s not exclusive to designers.
Sure yeah, my comment originally mentioned designers and developers, but I was too tired to remember that in my follow-up comment.
It’s hard to be extremely detailed and also remember every single detail of what I was mentioning as well.
They have to because the capitalist imperative of infinite, progressive growth forces them to constantly seek out additional speculative avenues for profit. The potential for a valuable product (stock) is more valuable than a good product and is cheaper to produce than a good product.
It is important to note that you are also a product in a surveillance capitalist state thaf commodifies every second of your day. The speculative value on more profitable avenues to source and sell your data has more speculative value than anything your patronage would generate.
Excel 97 was perfect. Now I can barely find the shit I actually need to use because of all the “features” they’ve added to justify their jobs.
Yeah, at least fix the bugs first.
Windows has had a bug that’s driven me mad since before Windows 10 and it doesn’t seem they have any intentention to fix it.
When I try to rename files, I always click somewhere in the text of the name or highlight a specific portion, and then 90% of the time RIGHT before I start typing to add or change the name, it randomly highlights the entire thing so the whole text gets replaced instead of the one section I wanted to change.
INFURIATING and it’s been years that it’s happened, between two different versions of Windows!
There’s also another 2 or 3 other bugs that are just as infuriating but I don’t imagine will ever be fixed or changed because why the fuck would microsoft care.
And it’ll work half good in English but be completely crap in any other language.
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
Stock market had dropped very much this week so maybe its happening.
Corporate suicide is so fun to watch when you’re not stuck using their products.
Year of Linux once again!
Honestly, we’re getting there. More and more people are asking and trying to learn. But we are a ways off from going to best buy and buying a framework laptop lol.
I think the worst two things about this are the impact on the environment and the data collection. If you’ve ever used chatgpt, have you ever asked it to divulge what it knows about you? 🫠
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 "
Just like we saw with xp/vista/7, then 7/8/10. MS has a track record of good OS, gamble/shitty OS, slightly improved OS.
I thought Windows 10 was the last ever version of Windows?
It’s the last for me! And many others as well it seems.
They got the punctuation all mixed up. Instead of ‘Windows 10 will be the last ever version! No more major upgrades!’ it was meant to read ‘Windows 10 will be the last ever version? No! More major upgrades!’
Unfortunate mistake
People that have been windows users for years that have been recently taking steps to remove windows from their lives aren’t going back when they remove AI (also, doubt that is ever happening). They’re pissed off, and if they manage to get their stuff working in Linux there’s absolutely no reason to switch back.
Let’s be real, windows 12 will be fully ai integrated
Microsoft Blog
The new Windows update adds Pat the Mouse, an AI-powered feature that predicts what you want to click on, and automatically does that for you.
The latest Windows update automatically writes the words you will not want to interpret C++ is an interpreted noodle is good.</p>
The latest the Window update removes the toggles for AI features, as we believe the AI is the future. The keyboards and mouse were truly innovative invention, but now belongs to the pasts times.
Noodle is a noodle is a noodle is a beheaded flying chicken with caps written in ALL-CAPS.
Maybe Windows must just 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…
Too big to fail 😔
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.
I don’t think most of them will.
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They will use enterprise editions internally, where their IT team will have much more control over behaviors they don’t like at the group policy level than home users do.
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The executives at the big software conglomerates have the same AI boners that Microsoft does. They’ll be looking for ways to integrate new Windows features and use them as selling points for their own products.
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They don’t care about the privacy nightmare Windows has become because they implement and benefit from the same telemetry and data collection practices with their customers.
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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.
At this point if you don’t want a custom built or Linux PC, I see apple as the corporate gold standard. Windows is a glued together heap of slow trash for a while now. So many bugs, removed features, and lots of other crap. Macos just works, it’s a lot cleaner and more integrated.
Corporations need centralized governance that active directory provides.
Their stance on default privacy and sticking a finger to law enforcement is leagues above both Microsoft and Google/Android. So far at least.
and sticking a finger to law enforcement
No. They are just doing it differently - they have proprietary p2p networks and such doing obscure shit. They are similar to Telegram in that. Good to their users as much as they need that to maintain balance of interests.
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
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.
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
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.
Good idea. Haven’t booted mine in years either.
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.
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.
physical revulsion
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
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.
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.
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
