It’s rare in this day and age that proprietary operating system vendors like Microsoft and Apple release updates you’re more than happy to install, but considering even a broken clock is right twice a day, we’ve got one for you today. Microsoft released KB5053598 (OS Build 26100.3476) which “addresses security issues for your Windows operating system”. One of the “security issues” this update addresses, is Microsoft’s “AI” text generator, Copilot. To address this glaring security issue, this update removes Copilot from your Windows installation altogether.
Sadly, it’s only by mistake, and not by design.
We’re aware of an issue with the Microsoft Copilot app affecting some devices. The app is unintentionally uninstalled and unpinned from the taskbar.
[…]Microsoft is working on a resolution to address this issue.
In the meantime, affected users can reinstall the app from the Microsoft Store and manually pin it to the taskbar.
↫ Microsoft Support
Well, at least until Microsoft “fixes” this “issue” with KB5053598, consider this update a simple way to get rid of Copilot. Microsoft accidentally cared about its users for once, so cherish this moment – it won’t happen again.
Since this is osnews.com – I have a request!
I have removed Windows from almost all my machines in the house. I have replaced it with Nobara, Debian, or mostly Bazzite now. I have 1 last device – a Yoga 730 15, that I’d like to get Linux on. The challenge is, it’s a touch screen, with nvidia optimus and a 1050 GTX.
It’s the only device in my house that has nvidia, and I’ve had trouble running Linux on in the past. I did have Pop!_OS on there for a while, but strangely, in that time I had to run the non-nvidia build, and then install the nvidia drivers. And I never got the Optimus thing to work really. I had to either run it with or without the dGPU, by toggling it on and off in the bios. (I did almost kind of get hackintosh to work on it a few times too, but am not interested in that any more.)
So – osnews peops, any recommendations for a distro to run on this device? The most important feature is not really gaming (it only has 2GB of VRAM, so it’s not super useful any more for that), but I’d like to retain the ability to draw on it with my Lenovo Pen.
Bonus point if you know a way to get the tablet mode hinge detection thingy to work, to switch to tablet mode (disable keyboard, etc.) in Gnome and/or KDE.
Also happy to hear “X is my favorite OS, just because.”
I’ve been running Mint on my two Yogas – older model 900-13isk (no touchscreen) and newer 7i (with touchscreen). Both run great. (I actually had to turn off the touchscreen since I move it around a lot with the lid open.)
I’ll bite.
My first contact with a Mac was at my first job back in 2003. It was a Power Mac G4 733 DA, with the DVD burner, a 22 inch cinema display and OS 9.2. Then we got it with 10.3 and by 2005 I had completely migrated to Macs. They were cool. (almost) full access to the UNIX underbelly, but with the applications I enjoyed using, such as Photoshop.
Fast-forward a few years, Apple hurt me for the first time: discontinuing Aperture. It took me 10 years to fully recover. Then Mojave came and, seriously, computers are fast enough and some old software/games were still useful for me. Meanwhile, I had already been using Linux for my servers so to get a GUI on top of it it was piece of cake. I could not justify the expense and ewaste of getting rid of my heavily upgraded 2009 Mac Pro, so I started looking away…
Then Linux started pissing me off as well: multiple audio servers, the whole X/Wayland brouhaha, the whole systemd brouhaha… then I upgraded Debian and found out that half of my scripts were broken because ifconfig was absent, so I started getting interested in FreeBSD.
I still have my Mac Pro, but I now mostly run a lovely ThinkPad P1 Gen 4 that fully replaces almost all my setup: I get ECC RAM, ZFS RAIDZ1. I can boot from FreeBSD and boot from my Windows 10 partition (heavily sanitized install) using VirtualBox or the other way around: I can boot Windows 10 and boot from my FreeBSD partitions from VirtualBox.
So I get the best of all worlds: I can drive my Canon PRO-1000, my Epson V850 Pro, my color calibrator, use NX Studio and I can make sure my photos do not go to crap due to bitrot (it has happened to me). So during work hours, I am in general booted from FreeBSD and have Windows and Linux in a VM and when I am working with my pictures, I boot from Windows, access my photos via SMB and use my photography hardware.
Even Steam runs quite decently under FreeBSD. The NVIDIA drivers are functional. The only game I run under Windows is Flight Simulator.
So, if I could choose, my ranking would be:
– old school Mac OS X after finding a nice time machine
– current FreeBSD
– Linux
If I didn’t have any specific hardware needs, I’d probably just stick to FreeBSD or Linux.
Hmm. It’s been a long time since I tried out FreeBSD. I remember having some pretty good luck with it, but ran in to graphics issues back in the day, maybe some network difficulty. I might try that – don’t know if I’d run it on a convertible long term, but can’t hurt to boot it and see what happens.
CaptainN-,
I’m not familiar with the hardware. If you can identify the chip/hardware responsible for touch input it might provide more information to lookup compatibility.
I did load up ubuntu on a fujitsu touchscreen tablet where taps got converted into mouse inputs out of the box. It was not my desire to load up ubuntu, however the hardware was secure boot locked and I could not install distros that weren’t signed through microsoft, including my own. Thankfully this is uncommon because restricting what owners are allowed to boot is very disturbing.
It uses a wacom digitalizer – I believe that all works out of the box with Gnome and KDE, but I didn’t have an Active Pen the last time I tried it, so I don’t know if that works. I know that in Krita on Windows I have to enable Windows Pen support to get pressure sensitivity. The thing the I was asking about is actually the hinge sensor (which actually doesn’t work out of the box in Windows either). The whole thing is mostly Intel platform stuff, with some custom Lenovo Yoga software. I believe the hinge is controlled by the Lenovo Yoga Control Mode software. It’s a Lenovo Yoga 730 15IKB with nvidia graphics: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/laptops-and-netbooks/yoga-series/yoga-730-15ikb
CaptainN-,
You could be right, but I’m a little unsure what the hinge sensor is supposed to do? Is it just a wake up/sleep sensor or does it activate some kind of on screen keyboard mode?
It’s possible that it may be sending an ACPI event to the OS, which used to be viewable using acpi_listen under acpid, but many distros don’t use it anymore so you might have to hunt around for how to get those events.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/83036/where-is-the-log-for-acpi-events
It might not be an ACPI event, but it’s at least worth a look. You can handle handle events to do whatever you like. For example my own distro hooks onto “PWRF” to perform a clean system shutdown when the power button is pressed, which is an obvious application but you could technically use it for anything.
Edit: This might be a useful link under systemd…
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-handle-acpi-events-on-linux
/etc/systemd/logind.conf
I’m not sure what the sensor’s signal mechanism is, but it’s detects basically how open the laptop is. The ACPI functions were working before I got the tablet mode switch in place on Windows – it would sleep fine when closing the lid, etc. So while it may use the same sensor, there may also be a second one on the hinge that tells it when it’s folded back enough to enter tablet mode (changes aspects of Windows, and locks the keyboard, so you don’t press keys while in tablet mode.)
CaptainN-,
Yes, I understand what you are saying about ACPI sleep working. In case I wasn’t clear I’m not saying anything is broken with ACPI, merely that hinge switch you are referring to might also be using ACPI under a different unmapped message that you could potentially hook to. Once you confirm that you can see the hinge triggering ACPI events, maybe there’s a way for you to programmatically disable the keyboard.
Obviously I don’t know if any of that will work but it’s just a thought since you were asking for ideas.
I wish they would remove the damn Copilot key from my linux (yoga) keyboard. I’m losing my muscle memory for using the right control key.
ripzit,
Here here.
I’m pretty sure that Microsoft contractually forces OEMs to add it, but what an anti feature. Microsoft wants it on the keyboard for marketing reasons and not because it benefits users over having a simple hotkey.
On windows you can use Autohotkey to remap the enshittification key back to something useful. I guess it should be possible on Linux as well.