Microsoft to force install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in October
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
An upsell and way to justify their 3 trillion marketcap
Only thing going on is maximising capital extraction from the moat they created. End users no longer matter as long as the numbers keep going up.
The faster we can kill the Apple and Google store monopolies the faster we'll go back to having operating systems/phones that we can at least do something with.
We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.
Thankfully there is a fair number of Linux-first companies now, so I'm not that worried. It's a real business case now. Years ago there were none, you couldn't even buy a laptop without Windows.
In corporate, no manager cares about the operating system their employees use. Unless there's a significant drop in productivity by using Windows, no one will bother with the cost of switching to another OS.
In the private sector, most people buy their computers straight off the shelf, i.e. with Windows. Here at HN, we're tech enthusiasts, but out there those who know what "Debian with GNOME" means are very few, and the rest will at most complain a little about how Windows has become, but then they'll just continue to use it.
Windows should be considered mental health hazard.
It's so necessary to the functioning of Windows 11 that it can be bypassed and Windows 11 works fine. Sure...
Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.
I observe that every few years Windows is completely changed. It’s a total hodgepodge of decades of crap. That’s the only thing you need to know.
Office compatibility still kind of sucks. It's very usable, but still quite a few papercuts. In my kids case though, Google Docs pretty much solves that problem so it's largely been a non-issue.
While Open Office still exists (and is being actively supported), LibreOffice (forked from OpenOffice fifteen years ago) gets more frequent updates, is more broadly used, and is widely preferred over OpenOffice these days.
I use it and it's a nice replacement for the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I have Microsoft Office and prefer LibreOffice over it.
I suggest giving LibreOffice[0] a look. Many of the compatibility issues have been resolved and it works nicely.
Actively supported is a stretch. Look at these commits.
For using Teams, I'd recommend just using the web client. I did try installing the Microsoft native client for Linux, but all it seemed to do was open an empty window (i.e. not drawn in, so it showed what was under where it appeared) and wasn't at all functional. The web client seems to work, though I don't use it very often.
Since then I've mostly been at a job where Office is provided and rarely have need of it at home.
Don't bother. I would have said that I was "familiar with Windows", I used 3.11, NT 4.0, XP, Vista, and 10 to a lesser extent and my wife needed help with her work laptop. Honestly Windows 11 is significantly different and apparently hostile enough that I couldn't find anything.
For my other kids that don't care about that sort of stuff, even they have become very capable computer users. It's been easy for them to learn Windows and ChromeOS at school. I already see the same pattern of diving deeper developing with my youngest too.
One of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a parent is seeing the hacker spirit still very much alive.
Still this is the crux of the linux experience and why I still don't main it - having to read logs to understand why an Xbox controller doesn't work.
Or a million other things like this. Sure it keeps getting better, by a lot. But the number of rough edge cases still is an issue every time I try out lonux again after lots of people tell me "Today Linux is different" - they always tell me and I always find, no it's still a thing you will still need to go spelunking in tech wizardry to do things that mostly just works on some other mainstream OS, like macos or even windows.
For example, I have an AMD Radeon 6600 RX. Works great under Windows. Under Linux - and I've tried multiple distros - it's entirely unusable. The screen just flashes. I don't understand.
There were plenty of other "techy" things that older generations take for granted but kids aren't learning about unless parents show them because they are hidden behind modern OS/software interfaces and usually locked down to prevent discovery.
Presumably, you were already well aware just how much new technology and apps tend towards hostility and enshittification, given what you describe.. So why in the world would you have wired up your very home to be a "smart" home? Did you really expect the technology for such a juicy trove of user data so easily, parasitically collected through manipulation to ever have a chance in hell of not being just as awful as anything else?
Granted, not everyone cares about them.
It's not there for me, it's for Microsoft to have a vehicle to point the OS AT ME.
Who runs them if not people?
Decisions are still made by people. Even if Excel is used to calculate the decision trajectory, even if the trajectory is enforced by some law inside the corporation, it's still people who decide that they continue following the road, and it's still people who implement the decision.
I have never, ever, in my entire life, seen a tech work so hard to be everywhere while simultaneously not being very useful.
I feel like that one still hasn't really worked out, and I do occasionally use Bitcoin to buy things
In terms of web3, I think you could broadly say Bitcoin (though it was large before web3 so that one's muddy) and Etherium. But even then... given what they are, I'm not sure in what sense these are meant to be Goliaths...? It's alternative payment processors that have incredibly low adoption compared to virtually every other. They're "big" in the sense that they have a lot of traction relative to other crypto, but I still have never used the shit even once and I do not feel I am missing out even slightly.
I've used LLMs FAR more than any crypto, and I still see it largely as a neat way to get out of writing boring code, and a good rubber duck to bounce ideas off of when debugging. I wouldn't pay for it if I had to.
The only thing I know crypto for is being the new and preferred payment method for scammers, and that you used to be able to buy drugs with it but not anymore. And godawful avatar collections, I guess. I wouldn't call that a Goliath myself but. shrug
Are you not paying attention? Web3 is going just great![0]
It's remarkably fucking annoying and is genuinely one of the worst UX decisions Apple has made in like a decade.
No product in our entire history has been so aggressively pushed into everyone's face. If there's a person alive in modern society who hasn't had 4000 AI apps blasted at them... where are they and how do I achieve this nirvana?
Those things solved problems. Nobody needed to be convinced an iPhone was a good idea; it was an iPod, a PDA, and a newspaper stuffed into a device the size of a credit card that you carried around with you and worked no matter where you were. That's a GREAT idea. No one needed to be convinced about what made an iPhone (or Android, or even Blackberry) a useful and good thing.
Conversely, AWS made starting web businesses no longer require on premises servers, or really knowing anything about servers. You picked what you needed, and if you needed more at some point, you picked that. You could even dynamically allocate and deallocate servers on an incredibly widely available and robust data-center backend. That's HUGE. Numerous massive companies today may not have ever gotten started if not for AWS and it's now making far more money than Amazon's retail business does, and we know how huge it is because East-1 went down some years back, and a third of the freaking Internet stopped working correctly.
What problem even remotely on this level does an LLM solve?
It still took a couple of years, though.
Of course in hindsight its rather obvious. But there were other smartphones and they were (on paper at least) superior in quite a few ways.
I mean was that because of the iPhone as a concept or because it debuted as an exclusive on the worst cell carrier in the United States lol
You had Symbian, Palm, Windows CE devices which had all of that and keyboards. I won't pretend it was 100% obvious to me who was going to win at the time (and I don't think I was unique in that).
Translation problem. Google Translate does job poorly, if you compare with chatgpt. Especially if there are mix of languages in input.
Basic search of common, Wikipedia-level knowledge, to explain something. LLM is good at it.
- They have rapidly diminishing returns on higher contexts. They are very easy to overload with user information. You can post-train them, but that’s too much into actual computer science to be useful to the average office worker. They can work well as a co-worker assistant in a few cases, but they really can’t replace humans long term.
- LLMs only really work well when given the ability to call on-device tooling. Which, with a cloud system like Copilot, is going to be super tame and underwhelming because of lawsuits and various business deals. Tool calling is only really agnostic when you’re running the model yourself on your own device.
- On the topic of on-device models, there’s also the fact that AI provider companies have been caught evading things like robots.txt and causing so much crawling activity that it effectively becomes a DDoS attack. On-device AI doesn’t solve this totally, but most people likely won’t be pushing their gaming GPUs to the absolute limit 24/7 to constantly hit websites with crawl requests.
One 386 netbook runs xbuntu w/ firefox to waste hours in the dangerous wild except for HN. It's all a happy arrested-development `Smell of Teen Spirit' nook I continue growing in.
It should be a huge red flag if companies have to force stuff on users.
Sorry if pointing that out is pedantic or rude, but it seems pretty material to the validity of the claim, at least to me.
It was so (comically) bad that I ended up sharing a lot of screenshots on my process trying to make it work with my team just for entertainment value lol.
One time I asked it to do a diff between "col A" and "col B" and it started telling me it was a "goddess of light" blabla. I'm assuming because the random values in col A and col B completely polluted it's context window so it spewed nonsense back.
EDIT: I know the article is about the MSFT counterpart products. I've not used those with Copilot so can't speak to their quality.
But the goddess hallucination was the wildest and funniest one.
The dimensional merge is real! Did it also start talking about how it's a Hyperdimension Neptunia CPU?
Reminds me of when I worked at a company once who hired a new marketing VP.
First quarter he showed up he hired a bunch of cronies.
Second quarter he announced that their new YouTube ads were so great now that NOBODY had ever chosen to skip their ads the entire second quarter. I saw the ads ... they had shortened all the youtube ads to the length that the ads were unskippable. Guaranteed "success".
Considering the web page in a browser can easily eat >5gb RAM just to display a single conversation (it's honestly mind boggling; how can something use 5gb of memory and a noticeable amount of CPU just to display relatively little and lightly formatted text?), having it self-contained makes killing it to reclaim memory easy.
For those of you wanting to get more angry, the "menu key" on my new Thinkpad has the default action of Copilot and the Copilot logo printed on it. On the other hand, he Ctrl key is finally in the -r-i-g-h-t- left place at least...
I thought Ctrl being in the right place on the new keyboard would be nice - sadly it seems to be the worst Thinkpad keyboard I've ever used... not even sure why, but all the spacing just seems slightly but very noticeably wrong.
Notably:
- You can opt out (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Copilot > Enable the "Turn off Windows Copilot" policy)
- You won't get it if you're in the EU
- You'll only get it if you have an M365 app installed (not all windows users)
I would swear I removed copilot from a Dell laptop I just purchased for my father, and it came back after a major update. I could be wrong.
I've had feature-update crapware get reinstalled twice, some reinsallations happen only after a reboot and/or 5-10min delay. So upgrade, clean. Reboot, clean again. Reboot, wait 10 min, clean again.
This during the last year and for dozens of machines.
Didn't they get hauled in front of congress for stuff like this back in the 90's?
I feel like they are playing with fire. Once anti-trust comes back into vogue, this is going to be big trouble for them.
[1] OneDrive privacy confirmed by my own consumer complaint to the Washington State Office of the Attorney General over ambiguities related to AI training and general privacy in Microsoft’s documentation. Both my complaint and Microsoft’s official response are subject to public record and can be legally actionable in the future.
If you want things exactly your way, there's the Gentoo route if you don't mind supporting it yourself.
I have no idea what distro fits the bill the best, but surely it’s not like the only two options are: “be treated with no respect as the user” and “sink all of your time into into fixing things up”
Like how Linux Mint doesn’t force snaps on you like Ubuntu does. Probably not it, but one step of many in the right direction. Plain Debian is probably pretty close.
When you think of it in a supply chain sense, Linux is one giant outsourcing operation and a whole bunch of “not my problem” project management styles.
It had the fewest Linux-typical papercuts, it was well-documented, and most importantly required the least amount of system tinkering I've ever done on Linux, allowing me to use my operating system to actually operate my system. It wasn't as turnkey as macOS, wasn't as compatible as Windows, and wasn't as "tinker" friendly as other distros, but it _worked_.
Then again, I was using the default GNOME spin, and I also try to meet OS's in the middle instead of brazenly insisting on my way or the highway. But it _is_ used as a base for RHEL, so it's not like Fedora is a typical stone soup distro either.
You're correct in thinking of Fedora that way - that's my take on it too. But Windows has a lot of glue and infrastructure that we all take for granted that Linux hasn't really implemented yet. Like how calling a Win32 function, in some cases, integrates functionality found in both the Windows desktop as well as backend processes - stuff that would be several lines/files long in Linux, and would likely need conditional logic for GNOME and KDE/Qt desktops.
Even Fedora, which is really rock solid and more "neutral" compared to other distros (lookin' at you, Ubuntu Snap Store), there's a LOT that gets left to either terminal commands or config files when compared to Windows. And even as a dev, I don't want to have to RTFM literally every time I want to change a single setting. Windows solved this 30+ years ago, and it's honestly stupid that the Linux community/field can't even seemingly comprehend this in almost 2026 now.
Yes, thanks for confirming what I wrote... Uh, wait a moment, what? Most Linux users know nothing about systemd? Are we talking about the same Linux, the OS whose main users are developers and sysadmins?
> even after it has a hard dependency on an IBM AI
What are you on about? Nothing of the sort has happened.
My personal issue with it is that logs are stored in a database that (unless it's changed) the documentation is the implementation. There are a few places where people have reverse engineered the design to document it, but it would have been much better for them to use a documented format like sqlite.
Sincerely, a Norwegian guy who thinks the difference is important.
I'm dreaming of a day to come where all people on earth get a bare minimum of freedom to install, remove and disable whatever piece of software on their devices. As a non-EU citizen, I have to confess I'm having some jealous feeling of European citizens because they have a superior authority fighting big companies on behalf of them.
In exchange, we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€ and we don’t have Copilot on our computer. We don’t have the translation on Airpods, and we have to click all cookie banners.
If I had a visa for the USA, I’d be there.
That's the fee charged for giving you aspirin in a US hospital. I can't imagine why you think his US medical access would be better.
Now do broadway in New York. Hell, do off-broadway in new york and it's either barely the same price or even more expensive. Are you sarcastically making the opposite point, I can't tell.
Which is less than the co-pay you pay on good US insurance.
>I pay my best engineer 60k€
Why don't you pay them more?
She has used in sparingly.
Recently, she comes up to me and says "Dad! I cannot run this program". I cannot remember what the message was but it was something about parents permissions. I did not set Windows up but she did not have this problem before. It looks like it had upgraded to Windows 11 and knows about that the main user is under a certain age. It must have installed things I have no agreed with, starting with Copilot.
Once I saw Windows 11 on the screen I started to second guess what installing Windows 11 must be like today. Honestly I cannot remember the last time I did a full install of Windows. Maybe.. maybe Windows 7. I would not be surprised if you have to sign in to a Microsoft account, now. LOL!
I told her that I would backup her work and install something else on there. I said it will look a little different but you should still be able to login to your homework, etc.. as it is all web based. Also.. I said that Gimp, Blender and FreeCAD can still be used.
I explained that, at School, you are likely to be using Windows 11 and MS Office. At home, you will have something similar enough, like LibreOffice.
With that I ended up installing Debian with GNOME and she really likes it. It has been 3 weeks, now -- and so far.. so good.
Honestly, the way Microsoft are going.. I am just waiting for businesses to start mocking the idea of an alternative. That would be a massive shock... not just average joes switching on home machines.
I switched to Sweet Home 3D for the architectural stuff and DesignSpark Mechanical (sadly no Linux version) for 3D printing stuff.
I am more into Blender than I am FreeCAD, but it has improved a lot over the years.
There are some good (modern) tutorials on FreeCAD.. there are a couple of gotchas to look out for.
I installed Linux - Debian 13 with the Gnome desktop - on a few machines which used to only run Windows. These machines are used by non-technical family members aged 14 to 50. When starting the machine they get the choice between booting either Debian or Windows with files on the older Windows installs being available from within the Linux sessions.
I recently checked which system was used most and was surprised to see that this ended up being Debian, on some machines Windows was not even started after I explained the workings of the machines. Linux has been 'ready for the desktop' for decades now while Microsoft is doing its best to make Windows less and less suitable for general-purpose desktop use. Even their former strongholds have withered, especially gaming is now better done on Linux than on recent Windows iterations. I suspect they know this and are trying to reap the last remaining fruit before the plantation succumbs to the self-inflicted disease since I see no other explanation for their clearly user-hostile actions.
Reality is really in a bad place when kids who grew up listening to Franz Ferdinand are nostalgic for Windows Vista. It's like a Slovenian nostalgic for Tito.
I imagine (based on my experiences as a now-former MS employee) that someone's (or some group's) bonus is tied to the number of Copilot seats installed. Which makes them oblivious/uncaring as to who might push back or how a user might feel. That's muh bonus, brah!
And since CoPilot is high profile, it's gets lots of support from the C-suite, limiting meaningful pushback. And here we are. I suggest learning to use gpedit if you don't already know how.
But don't worry, once bonuses are handed out, those same geniuses will find some other high profile initiative to boost their comp and level. Then we'll see some other square peg destructively jammed into a round hole.
Imagine my shock when I booted up W11. It felt like Bill Gates' wildest fantasies of vendor lock-in come to life, if the DOJ and EU cases never happened. A non-removable Edge icon on taskbar, Copilot bloat, lock screen widgets showing tabloid nonsense from MSN.com disguised as 'news'. Even the taskbar couldn't be oriented vertically!
Thankfully I was able to install Linux on it (Aurora, based on Fedora) on a separate partition, and wifi, touchscreen, usb and other things work. I hadn't tried Linux at all in over 10 years, and was worried about bricking the machine. With W11 being this bad, it was more than worth it!
Yeah, great, now you have an OS that respects you and you can delete every file in root directory, but use web apps that steal your data from you and you have 0 control over. What a win!
Microsoft has already used LLM integration to raise prices by force-upselling Copilot to M365 users[0], and of course they are still losing outrageous money on this tech every month.
In a sense, recouping losses via price hikes is the best scenario. If good LLMs truly become as commodified as some people want everyone to believe (meaning MS and especially smaller VC-funded companies in the hypespace would not be able to profit as much as they need to break even), the avenues for financial gain become worse for us—think turning all generative ML-driven output into a two-sided marketplace, where advertisers get to pay them so that the growing generation’s future chatbot therapists inject whatever feelings help them sell more.
It power on instantly, and now it’s minutes.
Bloat bloat bloat.
I gotta say, I'm not a Windows user anymore, but it would drive me nuts if I couldn't do that.
Finder (the MacOS version of File Explorer on Windows) is an app you commonly interact with every day for several minutes. If it doesn't work well that's hours of your life you spend fighting the system instead of getting things done.
Those are the kinds of things that made me move away from Windows 10 years ago.
MacOS already does that. You're not going to drag a video file to the spreadsheet app icon with much success, but if the app knows how to handle it then it will work. I can't imagine using an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality.
Again, not trying to disagree, just curious to understand.
I'd say Windows went to shit entirely because of Nadella. "Mobile first, cloud first, fuck the rest"
-- In October, Microsoft will force Microsoft 365 Copilot upon us all.
The sage furrows his brow, strokes his beard, and replies:
-- Tell me then... what the hell is Microsoft 365? A calendar?
https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2025/09/06/tiny11-builder-sep...
365 copilot, in my own personal humble opinion, is a steaming pile of garbage, and I think that is why they force it so much (the floating thing in excel, repeatedly pinning to taskbar after I remove it, removing the option to disable it via group policy, an obnoxious copilot box on top of new document, top of every context menu). People don't use it, and the reason people don't use it because it is terrible. It's the only, MSFT or otherwise , copilot that hallucinates its own work - says it made changes but no changes are made. On top of not being able to do much in the first place, especially with the typical tedious tasks like minor changes to many things at once; and mangling spreadsheets when it does do something.
no game is worth that.
And we're working hard[0] to identify you based on yours.
Will wonders never cease?
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45050913
Not to mention that AAA or any games with anti cheat are in the minority of all games.
Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on
Edit: Not arch but fedora.
It can load into a desktop environment by default and you can install Flatpacks, and it comes setup for gaming out of the box. That's enough for 90% of people.
For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.
Kubuntu is Debian but i don't think that has caused any issues.
Since i got the deck i don't really use the PC for gaming much though.
This is all purely my anecdotal opinion.
Must be time to trick the market again. “Look guys, AI demand is still growing!”
Why did you greenlight this rape of our computers once again?
I'll include the link because it does help:
I'm about over it. My only hangup at this point is that Ableton Live doesn't run on Linux and I can't live without it. I may consider replacing it with Bitwig 6 when it's released, which is Linux native.
:)