There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription.
The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. […]
Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for full use of these apps. You’ll see a new overlay that informs you of this before use. In our case, however, the respective features were simply grayed out.
↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld
It’s only the “AI” features that are being paywalled here, so I doubt many people will care. What does feel unpleasent, though, is that the features are visible but greyed out, instead of being absent entirely until you log into Windows with an account that has a Microsogt 365 subscription with the “AI” stuff enabled. Now it just feels like the operating system you paid good money for – and yes, you do actually pay for Windows – is incomplete and badgering you for in-app purchases. The gameification of Windows continues.
There’s also a y in the day, so we have another Ars Technica article detailing the long list of steps you need to take to make Windows suck just a little less. The article is long, and seems to grow longer every time Ars, or any other site for that matter, posts an updated version. I installed Windows 11 on my XPS 13 9370 a few weeks ago to see just how bad things had gotten, and the amount of work I had to do to make Windows 11 even remotely usable was insane. Even the installation alone – including all the updates – took several hours, compared to a full installation of, say, Fedora KDE, which, including updated, takes like 10 minutes to install on the same machine.
I personally used WinScript to make the process of unfucking Windows 11 less cumbersome, and I can heartedly recommend it to anyone else forced to use Windows 11. Luckily for me, a brand new laptop is being delivered today, without an operating system preinstalled. Can’t wait to install Fedora KDE and be good to go in like 20 minutes after unboxing the thing.
Hmm…
There is not enough information on whether these features are local, or cloud based.
One would ask: “why do we need cloud services for spell checks?”
For small ones, we don’t. But if they are using large language models, especially for advanced features like “rewrite”, then it is a different story.
The second question would then be: “why don’t they run locally? don’t we have AI PCs?”
Yes, and no. Tensor cores are not available on all devices. So, this could be a hybrid where you either need to have AI capable PC or pay for the subscription.
Again without knowing all final details we can only speculate. However charing for something that you can actually do locally would be a really bad choice.
sukru,
I agree. I really dislike when companies take something that should be in user’s control and then implement it in a way that user’s can’t control it. I especially hate when hardware gets gets vendor locked with proprietary services creating dependency issues. So I’m not a fan of microsoft’s direction, but frankly they’re following apple and google, who have been doing that for a long time already at the expense of owner autonomy. This is the future all our major tech giants want.
Pretty certain, to be useful output these kinds of LLM models are probably to big for use with a local NPU.
Such a local NPU is mainly for very specialized AI models.
I’m so happy to be Linux user!
Hey Thom what made you switch to fedora as the best KDE host?
How is it better from e.g. Neon?
How dumb do you want to go today?
How will notepad++ and paint.NET ever recover from this?
I’m curious what alternative OSes osnews peops have been using. I’ve been using Bazzite and Nobara (both based on Fedora, both gaming focused). And of course, Steam OS on my Steam Deck. I prefer gnome, but don’t hate KDE as much as I used to. Been eyeballing CachyOS.
What do you use?
FreeBSD been fine. Although I need to boot Windows to use my photo printer and photo scanner. I have it set so that I can, from Windows, boot my FreeBSD from its native raidz1 setup and I can from FreeBSD boot my physical Windows partition as well.
When I’m not using Windows, I use Void Linux.
I’ve been dabbling with Pop!_OS recently to see what it’s like. Jury is still out on that.
I’ll also fire up a Raspberry Pi running RISC OS when I’m feeling eccentric.
Long time Linuxer (90’s). Distro-hopped before settling on Ubuntu because it just worked. Then switched to Mint in the Unity era. Still using Mint, but also recently daily driving OpenBSD w/ XFCE.
compy286,
I used to recommend ubuntu to new users. However I started looking at mint around the same time as you because unity wasn’t my cup of tea. I really appreciated how much mint developers listened to their users when others were treating their users’ opinions as a nuisance. Mint gets my recommendation these days.
I like XFCE too!
I’d probably be a bigger fan of BSDs if I weren’t already so dependent on linux everywhere. I experience both highs and lows on linux. It’s not always clear sailing!
Linux mint xfce, with loads of kde software like kolourpaint, kwrite, kupfer, kupfer, krita, etc. Never could get along with kde itself, but the software fits my xfce environment like a glove.
I have also been eyeing haiku-os – I am rather interested to see how well (or not) the os tabs’ stack&tile features work out.
Slackware+xfce for daily use, Windows on spare laptop “just in case” … which hasn’t truly been needed in a while.
I’ve been on Debian and Ubuntu Linux since 2000 or so.
Only reason for me to deal with Windows is for work because the rest of the IT industry is using it for all kinds of reasons.
We have reached the stage of the dot-com bubble where investors are getting cold feet about whether the massive capex and opex investment in datacenters is ever going to pay off. People will use AI chat bots (if just for fun) but most of them won’t convert to paying customers.
And yes, I know Amazon eventually surpassed their dot-com bubble value, but many other dot-com darlings evolved into rather efficient investor money furnaces. Similarly, even if some company wins the “online AI” market, you don’t know which one it’ll be.
Meanwhile on Linux, I have Zed editor which has AI features (and can connect to local text generation model), have nice AI features coming soon to KDEnlive, and there are quite a few AI plugins for Krita. None of that is paywalled (unless you want to use an online model, then you may need to pay for an api key).
F microsoft, even someone as non-technical as Pewdiepie can use Linux (Mint in his case, but still), so technical people really have no excuse. And once enough people switch, software support will follow.
It’s not just “gameification”: It’s “enshittification”.
If you need AI features in Notepad, you’re doing it wrong.
Eh. I feel like the Linux experience is basically the same, where you:
> Install a Linux distro. Use it for a month, until you find out that your distro won’t get the new major release of a certain DE, so you switch to one that does
> Your new distro based off the previous one but with the updated DE is flaky, so you switch distros again
> Your new distro with the updated DE is nice for a while, but a kernel/systemd update introduces bugs with suspend, and rolling back the changes somehow doesn’t fix the bugs, so you switch to the slower release channel for the same distro,
> now your VPN client doesn’t work! Time for a new distro!
> Why is everything packaged as a snap or flatpak? Apps now take up way more disk space, and many of them can’t access their existing configuration files. I wonder how many redundant configurations I have. Oh well, I”m out of space because my root partition used to have plenty of space but now everything is a snap or flatpak and now I’m out of disk space
> Why doesn’t this distro have Blender? Ah. There’s a bug that prevents it from building. The bug was filed almost a year ago though? I guess I’ll switch do the slower release of this distro. I can do without the latest release of this DE.
> Dang. The version of Mesa this distro has has known issues with software I’m using, causing crashes immediately on startup.
> Okay. Now I’m back where I’m started, but since I guess the latest DE isn’t that important, I hope this works out.
And, every time along the way I have to copy files from a backup drive, figure out how to find repos for specific software that isn’t in the native repo or isn’t supported in the native package format by the distributor, adjust scripts for things that point at stuff that is in different locations depending on the repo.
Windows sucks, but so does Linux. Having an issue that only affects a small subset of users of the distribution you are using, which itself is only a subset of Linux users, means it’s often difficult to find a solution.
Drumhellar,
Here here!
I’d rather be on a FOSS OS with open code than a proprietary OS….but they both genuinely have problems and we have to acknowledge them if we ever want to improve.
The repos work well enough for FOSS software that’s actively maintained, but 3rd party software is often problematic even when using the same repo system. I often encounter 3rd party repos that become broken and unmaintained. Despite the cons, I think packages that bundle dependencies and keep working long term may be the only way forward for 3rd party software.
Mmm, I don’t disagree with some of your problems but they sound a lot like 1st world problems!
Note, unlike paying to MS (for the features), you don’t have to pay anything for incredible programs and features.
Just imagine that you don’t like some aspect of MS Windows! Or MacOS? Now what? You can’t switch. If you’re lucky you can pay up.
About stability: generally, I don’t switch distros for years, I don’t pick a vague one.
And even my mother who’s over 80, has no problem using email or surf the web. Nothing crashes. Granted, if she would have wanted something more fancy, it might be more complicated and who knows, we would pay MS.
Choice, cheap, private, potent. Rather than enshitted, straight-jacked, expensive, coerced. I’ll take it any day.
Wondercool2,
I agree, I’d take linux/FOSS over proprietary when these preferences are feasible, but I concede that sometimes running third party software on linux (ie not in centralized repos) can be frustrating. Obviously it depends a lot on the actual software. Sometimes it works fine, but other times it might require me to manually resolve a series of errors.
Does anyone seriously use Notepad for something that needs spellchecking, and do they use a gourd for a drink bottle? Seriously folks, there are better ways to punish yourself!
What a joke. It is Notepad and Paint.