We all knew this was going to happen, so let’s just get it over with.
Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it’s not going to be another ‘Ask Copilot’ button in the right-click menu. This time, Copilot will live inside File Explorer, likely in a sidebar or Details/Preview-pane-like interface, according to new references in Windows 11 preview builds.
↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest
What am I even supposed to say at this point? Who wants this? Why utterly destroy what little reputation and goodwill Windows has left? Has the hype bubble become this clouded and intoxicating?
Even system administrators who want to turn off Copilot in their organisations or device fleets in an official, supported way are getting punched in the face by Microsoft. The company rolled out a new Group Policy to disable Copilot, but it’s such a useless mess it might as well not be there at all.
This essentially means that IT admins will only be able to uninstall the Copilot app for customers where their device has both Copilot apps installed by either a clean install or by the IT team itself, as long as the Copilot app has not been opened in a month. So, even if you accidentally open the Copilot app for a second because it’s there in your Windows taskbar, the Copilot app won’t be uninstalled.
↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin
You shouldn’t be using Windows.
So can we expect the file explorer to become even slower and less useable ? I really do wish I didn’t have to use Windows tbh. I just want to do my work and it keeps getting in the way.
Apparently Microsoft have given up trying to improve the startup speed of the new Win11 Explorer and are instead intending to preload it on startup instead!
https://www.techpowerup.com/343149/microsoft-will-preload-windows-11-file-explorer-to-fix-bad-performance
So we now have caps attached to the bottle, USB-C on all smartphones, but where are the EU technocrats when we really need them ?
I wonder how they are designing this under the hood. Because they put too many things under the “CoPilot” umbrella, it is hard to say.
For instance, if this is done on the cloud… ouch
If is is just an extension on the Windows Search Service (WSS) that adds a vector database, and semantic search / summarization capabilities, with local models… That is a quite useful feature.
A lof of things depend on the unknown. So it could be awesome or catastrophic.
(And this shows how bad Microsoft PR and technical writing has become)
More “AI” garbage nobody asked for or wants, but will artificially inflate the `number of people using AI` for their earnings call.
I left Windows about 3 months ago for a Linux desktop. Games work well in Steam, better developer experience. Good times. I have such nostalgia for past times in Windows where it felt like a get-my-work-done operating system. I’d have enjoyed the AI era so much more if Windows had curated a local+secure AI experience for me, but what we get is such trash.
I have that AI experience now in Linux.
Sarah K,
This has been my take for most of “cloud computing”. The technology and features are ok but in many cases they’ve been designed to take control away from users, which isn’t cool. AI integrations has been the same way and IMHO it’s a bad precedent.
I am curious what you are referring to. I run local LLM via cllama and image gen under stable diffusion, though I haven’t used or seen linux software that incorporates AI into a specific application.
Are you using specific open source software? I use a homemade python chatbot but it would be nice to have a more battle tested solution.