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 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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look at the positive side, you can cook sausages on your overheating laptop
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 answer 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Shit like this is why whenever companies say they’re “customer focused” I say they’re full of shit.
No one wants this but M$ has so much investment tied into this that they need to make people want this.
Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Replaced the last Windows computer in the house with CachyOS this morning. Fuck off Microsoft.
last windows install in my house was on my rarely used laptop, windows 10.
As soon as Win10 was end of life I threw linux on it. First time in…god…30 years? Theres not been a windows PC in my house… Ran Windows from 3.11 all the way up to 7 happily (and then my laptop came with Win 10 from factory and, well, thankfully I only had to use it when traveling… )
Main system has mostly been a breeze a breeze for years now, but I built it with Linux in mind and picked AMD parts and such to make the transition easier.
Backlash is actually losing business, what they are really getting is a lot of whining from people who never do anything anyway.
It was the same with Windows 95, XP, then Vista, then 8 and 10 and now 11.
Very few who are used to Windows will abandon it just because it’s becoming a surveillance hellscape of forced updates, advertising and other annoyances.
Microsoft is posting record profits on their way down, just like Intel did 10 years ago.
That said Microsoft is still in a better position, and while Windows may lose relevancy, Microsoft has way more revenue coming from other sources than Intel had without X86.Ill be honest. I never expected to leave windows but here i am doing my homework on Linux.
You say that, yet Mac and Linux grew quite a bit over the past couple years. It’s true, not everyone will drop Windows right after whatever bullshit they announce, but software and platforms are rarely abandonned over night.
Doesn’t matter much what users do. Corporations are nowhere close to ditching Windows.
No way to manage a fleet of Linux or Mac machines. Nothing comes close to the power of Active Directory and a bit of PowerShell.
Funny enough, I guarantee there will be GPOs and PS commandlets that let you disable the AI bullshit.
EDIT: Apparently I’m addressing a crowd who has never managed a fleet. I’ll bow to your expertise.
A buddy of mine works for a fortune 500 company that started giving out MacBooks as the standard hardware this year. Apparently you need to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to run Windows. I was shocked to hear it but Microsoft deserves to be humbled.
I’ve seen a lot of companies that are all mac. And didnt a European government just change to all linux ?
My last company was a software dev and even they were only 70/40 Windows/Mac.
Yes, seems lots of European agencies are moving to FOSS, but more towards open office solutions. Moving to Linux for the OS makes fleet management pure hell. I know LDAP exists, but that doesn’t begin to compare to AD.
I feel like AD is a solution for a problem that Microsoft created.
Please tell us the name of this 110% software dev, so we can avoid it. There is a min amount of math needed here.
Made a typo smartass, and you know it. 70/30.
Now tell us all how smart you really are. Tell us how to manage a fleet of Linux or Mac machines, or even a mixed environment. One reason I passed an interview was with this very question! Go.
I don’t work in the industry anymore, but I did manage a few “fleets” in my day. However I do know that if I made such a typo (on the literal only data point) I would also be poked fun of when I did work in the terrible tech world. And if I lashed out I would be further dragged over the coals as let’s face it, that would be kinda pathetic.
You do know you can use AD with Linux, don’t you?
I would love an explanation of how AD can control Linux machines! Can I reset you Linux password over AD? Can I lock you out of using removable media? How the hell do GPOs work?!
AD isn’t simply authentication, grouping computers and users. LDAP does all that.
Corporations haven’t ditched windows because Active Directory and Group Policy had no equal. Now that Microsoft has slowly pushed everybody to cloud based identity, there’s really nothing stopping you from using something other than AD or even Entra ID
Identity management is only one aspect of AD. Very telling that all these rebuttals are thinking only in terms of what LDAP can handle.
Are you commenting from the year 2007?
I didn’t think I’d care enough to leave Windows but I’ve been on Linux for six? months now.
Welcome to the 1%. 😋
Yes there are some that switch, and also kudos to those who try, even when they find it’s not for them.
I’m just sad that the problems with Windows isn’t enough for more to abandon it? I simply don’t get “normal” people.
As long as windows is installed by default on hardware, it’s hard to move the needle. A huge majority don’t want the headache of switching.
But, that pie is slowly being chipped away as options are available.
Windows will be the default until suddenly it isn’t. Valve is doing amazing at destroying the core of Microsoft’s support. This story would be different if this was a decade ago, but these days most average people do their computing on phones and tablets. The ones sticking to traditional PCs are mostly gamers and now more than ever Linux is a viable alternative to Windows. Vanishingly few games can’t be played perfectly fine on Linux. Once enough gamers are using Linux it will become the default choice, and once it’s the default choice for gamers it will become the default choice for most people, at least the ones not on phones and tablets.
It actually wouldn’t surprise me to learn that most Windows installs nowadays aren’t pre-installs but rather images deployed from a corporate IT department.
In some ways the biggest danger for Windows in the home market isn’t Linux or Mac but the people who decide they’ll just use their phone or tablet for everything. Then again, I’m not sure if Microsoft even cares about the home market.
Thing is, this agentic stuff… if it isn’t aimed at home users, who is it aimed at? Because it’s not compliant with any of the security programs IT departments are required to comply with.
