this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
384 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

78705 readers
4189 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago (2 children)

There's an easier way. Switch to Linux. It's good now, and only going to get better with more adoption.

[–] Atropos@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago

I would love to, but unfortunately our work requires windows due to the software packages we use. And no, I really don't want to run a virtual machine for CAD.

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Difficult for most businesses.

[–] bytesonbike@discuss.online 8 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

People don't realize how difficult it is.

Not only do you have to do a lot of feature replacement (getting off of teams and using zulip and jitsi. Getting off of outlook and using Zimbra. Using next cloud over whatever the hell Microsoft's version is)...

You also have to deal with all the Microsoft chucklefuck IT people who never touched a command line before. The push back I had in previous companies is lazy IT folks who don't want to learn anything their Microsoft certification didn't teach them.

[–] ghen@sh.itjust.works 3 points 18 hours ago

Not to mention that windows domains fail gracefully. You can still format and reinstall if you want but most problems can be cleaned up as you limp along rather than taking the whole company down with a single server failure

[–] naticus@lemmy.world 3 points 22 hours ago

Yep. Already did at home and I still need Windows at work. I may get to that point eventually but not there yet myself. When it's time for a hardware refresh for me, I think I'll push for Linux and see if I can work on ways to roll it out elsewhere too. I really need to find a way to manage it in a similar way to Group Policy, but haven't looked into it too much yet.

[–] kieron115@startrek.website 8 points 20 hours ago

"If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs."If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs.

so.. they arent allowing admins to uninstall it. they're letting admins ask their users very nicely to not reinstall it.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Business has spoken, consumers have spoken. No one wants AI right now. Large companies trying to out compete each other on LLM is stupid. Time for the bubble to pop before more people get hurt.

[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 2 points 13 hours ago

No one wants AI right now.

I don't know why anyone would ever want "AI" on their workstation let alone in a production environment. Its like a calculator that works 94% of the time, useless and distracting. Or like a bowl of candy where only one is poison, why would you want that?

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 27 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 3 points 20 hours ago

Feels like accident forgiveness from insurance, right

[–] FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

You can uninstall Copilot yourself with O&O ShutUp.

[–] aliser@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago

FYI: as a user, you are already allowed to uninstall Windows and switch to Linux

I thought they renamed their entire product line to "Copilot" by now, didn't they?

Uninstalling it at this point would leave absolutely nothing left!

[–] LifeLikeLady@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Viceversa@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

But you can!

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 140 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

May allow

The benevolence! Your own computer can do whatever you want it to.. if MS agrees to it.

[–] kadu@scribe.disroot.org 61 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Our luck was that personal computers existed before phones. The fact computing is open is a miracle.

Microsoft would love to only sell computers with locked bootloaders, enforced DRM, locked down stores. Imagine having to jailbreak your desktop.

[–] kshade@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

That was a big concern when TPMs first started appearing. I'm glad that that didn't go the way it might've. Yet.

[–] Fetus@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

[–] wuffah@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

People call me paranoid, but after my dad’s MS Surface spontaneously encrypted itself and lost the recovery keys, my belief is that what you described is the goal they are working towards.

Apple already does all of this along with client side scanning and MS is falling over itself to implement the same ecosystem.

[–] kevin2107@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

damn Microsoft is asking for lindom

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 117 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"Allow"

Fuck you, Microsoft. You and Apple have lost millions of users to Linux, and I'm here for it.

[–] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

You are not spending tens of millions annually and thus Microsoft doesn't give a shit about you. They literally would not piss on you if you were on fire.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I mean, they already lost the war to Linux on infrastructure, those are billions they never made. It's not unlikely for them to lose the desktop as well.

[–] kchr@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not really. Almost every Windows-based organization over a certain number of employees will use some shape or form of Active Directory (whether on-prem or in Azure) and most likely also Office 365, which is corporate/enterprise infrastrucure that is really hard to migrate away from once you built your IT and processes around it.

All the license fees for just retaining access to and being able to onboard new employees in that infrastructure is a huge portion of the budget for these organizations.

They just gave up the war on competing with UNIX/Linux on the non-enterprise production infrastructure side, since there were no money to be made there.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Infrastructure meaning servers

[–] kchr@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I know what you mean, but it's not what you said. :-)

Just wanted to point out that they still have monopoly on the enterprise side of organization infrastructure, which is huge - the number of companies running production systems on self-hosted Linux infrastructure are orders of magnitude fewer than those that don't, even if the number of Windows servers in total might be fewer.

Microsoft gets paid per employee, per application suite and per cloud service (if Azure is involved for the AD) - not only per server. They were very early on the recurring subscription model almost every SaaS provider is leaning into nowadays, even for on-prem stuff.

[–] Damage@feddit.it 1 points 1 day ago

I think pretty much everyone here knows that

[–] sepi@piefed.social 14 points 1 day ago

Yes we already know. No need to sell it to us more. We love it.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

That's not really the point though. I'm not even talking about end users. Government agencies, corporate backend services, customer service agencies and more are all abandoning Windows for Linux partially because Win11 is a horrible product, but also because the requirements just keep growing which is stupid.

Microsoft's response to this is the above, which they were STAUNCHLY opposed to previously because they need to try and force AI down users throats to justify the money they have pissed away on it. They're shoehorning Copilot bullshit into every product line they have now, and it's WILDLY unpopular and unnecessary. If this is the best they can do to address it, they'll continue to hemorrhage users.

When more state agencies in the US start switching, they'll release some "Windows Lite" bullshit, but it will too late because the commitments needed for these organizations to bother switching is massive. They'll be losing licenses for an entire generation of Windows at the very least.

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

I still have a some sway at work regarding tech stuff, and I know roughly half of my team feels at least half a strongly as I do about how shitty Microsoft is. there are a couple programs for which we need to use Windows, but I could see us at least exploring how to not use windows anymore. It's just too difficult to do our goddamn jobs

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] goatinspace@feddit.org 25 points 1 day ago
[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

IT admins should already know how to do it without Macroslop‘s permission.

[–] MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago

IT admin here, we certainly do know how to do it, and already have. It's an appx package, and it's really not difficult to remove.

[–] Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 32 points 1 day ago

Oh they'll "allow" it, how's this go fuck yourself and keep your shitty AI crap to yourself since you fucking love it so much.

[–] OshagHennessey@lemmy.world 34 points 1 day ago

may

admins

Fuck Microsoft

[–] RalfWausE@feddit.org 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My computer, my rules... and if I want a piece of software out it will move out.

[–] coolmojo@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It used to be "My Computer", now it is "This PC".

[–] RalfWausE@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

Oh... right...

[–] itisileclerk@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Anyway, "Copilot" in my native language is "The bastard".

[–] statelesz@slrpnk.net 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You know what Microsoft doesn't have to allow you? Install Linux on your own device!

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 4 points 23 hours ago

There have been devices that forbid disabling SecureBoot or enrolling your own keys, and only boot loaders that microsoft signed are allowed to boot.

Further, I've seen systems that have a setting to not allow the non-microsoft stuff to boot, even if signed by the usual secureboot authority. So there may be a device out there hard set to only allow microsoft software to boot.

load more comments
view more: next ›