“We set out to solve one of the most common frustrations we hear — finding and changing settings on your PC — using the power of AI agents,” Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft, said in a blog post on Tuesday. “An agent uses on-device AI to understand your intent and with your permission, automate and execute tasks.”
Couldn’t they have used ai to figure out how to make the settings less obscure instead.
Apple has entered the chat.
The biggest frustration is not me changing settings.
The biggest frustration is windows changing back those settings whenever it feels like it.
This is just doubling down on the “greatest frustration”
Well tbf, they did keep moving them on me and hiding them from me.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they moved them again…behind an AI wall that can interact with them but you can’t without using that AI. Also they’ll continue to reset them whenever they feel like it, if they even successfully get changed by the AI, if the AI doesn’t say “I can’t let you do that Dave” when you try and disable telemetry.
This is why I got my 70 year old mother on a frameworks laptop running pop OS. It looks like a Mac and she thinks its pretty. Switching cost is over hyped. Fuck big tech
Couldn’t make a proper settings menu and AI is dumb as rocks…… - + - = - -? Shoot control panel is better than this combo.
Holy shit.
Your ux SUCKS SO MUCH, that instead of making it not shitty…
You developed AI for it?
Are you fucking kidding me
How inept are these developers
They broke alt tab.
That’s how fucking inept they are
You brought back an old, old memory of reading a Dave Barry novel about computers. In it, he describes going to a Microsoft convention in which they introduced, IIRC, Windows 95; while describing the taskbar, they apparently touted “no more alt+tab!”
Dear god, those fools never worked with two spreadsheets at once in their life
Microsoft Windows be like
**bangs chest** **glass panel of case explodes**
I set up my pc as dual boot a few weeks back. Opened up windows yesterday, for the first time in a while, to export a few settings from thunderbird. Took about half an hour to get it started. Felt like popping round to the house of an abusive ex to pick up the last of my things.
Ah Christ. We’ve collectively regressed so much in computer knowledge that people can’t even find a settings menu? Even I have trouble believing that one.
kinda fair considering windows has like 20 control panels that should all do the same thing but at the end of the day you still need to use regedit.
Well, there’s the small issue of Windows now having control panel the settings app and some shitty third thing sprinkled in there somewhere. There are some things that should have settings but don’t. You can no longer simply disable Windows update on your own, because Microsoft has decided they know best.
The last time finding settings in Windows was straight forward was Windows 95. Since the stupid dumbed down ‘settings’ app was vomited upon us, it has been nearly impossible to find the thing you know is there but has now been renamed and moved, and isn’t even indexed in the settings app search bar.
The registry never has and never will be simple nor usable. Windows is rotten to the core.
Have you tried to configure gnome beyond what is offered in its GUI ?
The reasoning I moved from Windows to Linux was this right here.
If I’m going to be fighting with Windows anyway, because of the registry giving me issues, then the drawback of “but Linux hard! You have to configure things!” was moot.
No, I’m a happy i3wm user.
Because I’ve tried to get GNOME to do what I wanted. (Also it was too slow on the machines I was using at the time).
And that’s besides the point: on linux you can just use a good DE without messing with much – KDE, cinnamon, etc…
Just to be the devil’s advocate here: There are way more settings now than back then. That interface wouldn’t cut it either.
The problem isn’t the new coat of paint - it’s more that Microsoft keeps painting half the building then starting over for the new OS. It’s frustrating that the key to finding a setting is knowing when it was developed to know which UI you need to be digging through.
Even on 11 hit winkey+r then type in CONTROL
Not convinced the number matter as much if settings are indexed and thus searchable, which they probably are now otherwise the “AI” wouldn’t be able to access them. So… just more convolutions for the end user?
Finding settings in Windows is pretty hard
You know that windows 10 still has the original control panel hidden deep in there.
Why do that
“Hey Copilot. Delete yourself, Recall and all other bloatware from my system. Thank you.”
Copilot: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”
While the precise words were different, I otherwise had this exact exchange with Gemini.
WTF! Just keep it!
You know that friend who wants to sell you his laptop but keeps showing you know it works instead of letting you try it? That Microsoft. So I say fuck them, just keep the fucking thing if they love it so much that they can’t let me use it the way I want to use it -> Linux.
I actually like the ability for a local AI to help with this in theory. I don’t think it’s an excuse for unintuitive UIs though.
I appreciate the sentiment - in fact it’s been fun watching AI being integrated into home assistant by end users and being given full control, lots of incredibly interesting times.
But not all AI is the same. Somehow I expect that Microsoft’s implementation will make it ridiculously easy to opt-in to Microsoft services and relaxed privacy settings, but will leave opting out as an exercise left to the user.
Wow, a take that isn’t just “AI bad?” Wild.
Yeah I thought it was weird that it couldn’t do this in windows in the first place when you had to click a button to allow the AI to change your computer from light to dark mode or something. It was right 99% of the time in my brief testing, and just include an undo button in case it isn’t.
All of that said, I’m glad to be on Linux where there isn’t any AI built into my OS, but I’m also not the target audience for needing an AI to change my settings for me.
I agree but with Microsoft you know an air-gapped ‘AI agent’ is never going to happen.
Maybe if you didn’t split settings into that half-baked settings app, then leave control panel in place with the remaining settings, but make control panel increasingly difficult to get to, we wouldn’t need a stupid AI agent to help us change settings.
Yes! I really feel all this copilot bullshit is to hide the fact they released windows 11 broken as fuck and here 2.5 years later it’s still a pile of shit. It’s just fucked. I have to use it daily for work and clients and it’s done nothing but prepare me to install W10 LTSC this summer or move to Linux. Problem with Linux is a have an Nvidia GPU and don’t like having to fuck with that, otherwise Zorin it will be. Windows 11 pushes me everyday to hate it more and more. Seriously. Daily fucking updates for broken shit and shoving AI down our throats. Fuck windows.
I’m dualbooting CachyOS with windows, no issues with my rtx 4070 super.
CachyOS rocks. I settled on it after trying many Linux distros and CachyOS won. All distros had pros and cons CachyOS was easy to update. Easy to install and remove programs without the terminal. Proton and Wine run great on it so most of my Steam and Epic games are playable and all media types play without tinkering. That was an issue with Fedora.
I’ll look into it again this summer. It’s on the list, just not at the moment
I’m in a similar situation, though I’ve already got a dual boot set up so it’s just a matter of only using Windows when I just absolutely have to.
Earlier today, I tried to zip a directory on Windows 11 with the context menu, and it wouldn’t do it! It’s a feature that’s been in Windows forever and is even in Ubuntu, but somehow over at Microsoft they’ve managed to break it. Incredible.
Windows 11 actually released 3.5 years ago!
Oof.
deleted by creator
Ot you can just right click the start menu
They really are trying to drive away their user base huh
No, we’re just not their target market. Most of their users, inexplicably, actually like changes like this.
Yea, but in my experience most people just dont care.
Perhaps you could just make them easier to find by putting them in one location… You could call it a “control panel”.
Curious who the hell downvoted you.
They even killed wmic. It was like control panel but in the command prompt.
That functionality is built in to powershell now, that’s why they retired that.
Have you actually ever used Control Panel?
Misses the point.
Firstly they still have the control panel.
Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.
Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.
This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.
I know what the point is. It sucks.
Firstly they still have the control panel.
For now
Secondly they are slowly transitioning everything relevant from the control panel to the settings app.
The settings app is half-baked dog shit.
Thirdly even having everything in the control panel didn’t make it easy to find exactly what you wanted.
It was certainly easier than the current state of things.
This makes it so you can just say “set my power profile to balanced” and it would do so. That’s a nice, welcome addition.
Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn’t been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app and the one you wanted conflicts with their data gathering and add presentation and it’s not running in the background bogging down your system all the time or trying to interject itself into whatever you’re trying to do without involving it.
For now
Yes, for now. I even said as much, because Microsoft have made their plans on getting rid of it very clear and open. It’s slowly being replaced by moving everything to the settings app.
The settings app is half-baked dog shit.
You could say that it’s slowly getting all the features added to it, couldn’t you? What is “half baked dog shit” about it?
It was certainly easier than the current state of things.
What was easier to find in the control panel than it is in settings?
Sure assuming the AI understands your request and the setting you want hasn’t been removed because they wanted to put everything in the settings app
You think that the AI would not have access and knowledge of the settings app? They made no mention of the AI Agents only being able to make changes in the control panel.
and it’s not running in the background bogging down your system all the time
You’ve never actually used windows 11, have you?
What is “half baked dog shit” about it?
The fact that they’re moving things over slowly instead of just fucking finishing it before they deploy it all at once. They’ve been doing this since Windows 10 came out, they have a trillion dollars. There’s no excuse to have it be half assed for so long especially considering “Settings” isn’t even an improvement.
What was easier to find in the control panel than it is in settings?
Literally everything? You don’t have to click through 14 different menus to drill down to what you’re looking for. It’s all on one window in Control Panel. Just look at Devices and Printers in Control Panel vs. Devices in settings or Programs and Features vs. Apps and features the newer versions have far less information available at a glance.
You’ve never actually used windows 11, have you?
I use it every day on my work PC. It runs like ass.
Correction: they’ve been doing it since Windows 8.
Windows 8 came out 13 years ago.
Totally forgot Windows 8. We skipped it because of how shitty it was.
Wasn’t it vista that started to hide things in the control panel?
The fact that they’re moving things over slowly instead of just fucking finishing it before they deploy it all at once.
I’ve already been over this, as have MS many times.
There’s no excuse to have it be half assed for so long especially considering “Settings” isn’t even an improvement.
Making any change to legacy systems in Windows is a massive risk and requires a lot of work. Win32 for example isn’t good and should have been removed a loooooong time ago, but here we are still with it.
Literally everything? You don’t have to click through 14 different menus to drill down to what you’re looking for.
Got any examples of this? Settings are generally at most 3 levels deep from the main settings screen.
Just look at Devices and Printers in Control Panel vs. Devices in settings
What am I looking at? The “Bluetooth & Devices” settings page is good. What’s wrong with it?
It runs like ass.
It’s not even debatable though - it’s the most performant windows ever lol. It doesn’t “run like ass” unless you’re using “ass” hardware and/or software, at which point any prior windows would be running even worse.
Bullshit to all those points. If you couldnt find it in the control panel before, you sure as shit cant find it now.
Also, they’ve been “slowly” transitioning for over two years, wtf? We waiting for the next OS at this point?
I do NOT need voice activation, I know how to use a keyboard and mouse, the core components of input for a computer.
You want to use your voice, talk to your mom cause I’m done with her.
j/k on the mom part
If you couldnt find it in the control panel before, you sure as shit cant find it now.
Oh you’ve tried this new AI Agent that can change the settings for you, have you?
Bullshit to all those points.
Which points are “bullshit”? That they’re slowly moving everything out of the control panel to the settings app? This is literally what they’ve been telling us they’re doing, and what we’ve seen them do.
That they still have the control panel? Nope, not bullshit, it’s still there.
That being able to ask Copilot to change a setting would be helpful? How is that bullshit?
I do NOT need voice activation
Good thing it’s not MANDATORY then. You can keep using your mouse and keyboard. Also you don’t have to use your VOICE for copilot - it’s much easier to use the mouse and keyboard. That’s how most people use it.
Also, they’ve been “slowly” transitioning for over two years, wtf? We waiting for the next OS at this point?
This stuff takes time unfortunately. If they change everything at once they get even more anger and pushback. This way it’s just a slow and easy move away from the control panel - 1 thing here, 2 things there, and before you know it hey look! Everything is in the settings app now!
Oh good mum joke big fella! So clever and badarse.
I’d rather they spend time fixing all the things theyre “working on” rather than introduce more half baked shit into the os for fucks sake. There is a huge list of things that keep people from upgrading so instead they said “now you have to”. Fuck that. Just fix your shit and people will upgrade willingly.
Fuck windows. They had a great thing going with Windows 10, then the reneged. They said windows 10 was going to be the last major OS for windows. How do we trust anything from Microsoft now?
now it’s going to cause people to trash their working device because it’s only 7th gen and doesn’t have TPM 2.0. greedy little piggies who want to track their users and throw privacy out the window.
now it’s going to cause people to trash their working device because it’s only 7th gen and doesn’t have TPM 2.0
No one is going to do this lol.
Well see.
Cant argue with a Linux user, just leave
I’m a windows user, but I can call shit when I see shit.
The problem is you’ve got shit on your own glasses so you’re seeing everything as shit.
Easy way to automatically set settings that are convenient for them and disguise it as AI being AI
Worse - easy way to set the settings then gaslight the user to say they asked for it that way.
How much you wanna bet that it makes those changes in a way that is generally indistinguishable from as if it was done by the user’s own credentials? (Except save perhaps in recall’s own logs)
I dumped Windows about 18 months ago, before their recall and copilot BS. There are many Linux distros out there. They are free and there is almost nothing you can do with Windows that can’t be done on Linux. These days, most games for Windows can be played on Linux using Proton and Wine. There is no reason to keep Windows and plenty of reasons to dump Windows, like not wanting your personal data stolen or monitored by corporations and governments.
