2d ago

Windows Is Adding AI Agents That Can Change Your Settings

www.cnet.com

"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."

238 comments

If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.
- No regular user can configure anything. Most are barely literate and have the reading comprehension of a 6-8 year old.
  Ai allows them to just say, turn down the brightness, turn down the volume, use this program to open this file from now on, which makes 10% configuration accessible to the 99% who otherwise would have 1% or less.
- Let's be honest. You could make the simplest most intuitive UI and people still won't spend the 30 seconds to read.
- For them, adding the AI is probably cheaper then fixing the UI.
- By that definition, linux is doing something wrong. Despite it being my daily driver, I have zero clue how it works, or how to do anything.
  100x worse if the word "terminal" is used.
  
  I don't think anyone's ever said Linux is user friendly for non technical people. Atleast not earnestly or without hard coping
  
  non technical people are doing pretty well, because they don't try to install photoshop or nvidia drivers downloaded from the nvidia drivers page.
  The "windows power user" are the hardest demographic, because they expect to know what they are doing but the don't if they are new to linux.
  What did LTT write in the terminal again: "i know that this opperation will delete my gui and i am sure that i want that", presses enter and wonders why his gui is gone. go figure
  
  I love Linux because it treats the user like an adult, and let's them delete their UI if that's their prerogative. No kink shaming there.
  
  I want to say I've read that statement like 10 times this week on lemmy
  
  I've literally heard for 15-20 years now that "This is the year of linux! It's so much easier and better than windows!"
  My response has been that if Linux ever had an interface that's intuitive, and non-techies can take to instantly, Linux would actually grow. Their reply each time is that "Linux is getting more popular by the day!". And that's true. However, it's a bit misleading. About a year ago I read that Linux was at the highest usage it's ever had, at roughly 5% of the market.
  Think about that. Linux has been around in some form since 1991, and it's always been free (with a few exceptions). A free platform can't compete against Apple, who's notorious for being ungodly expensive, and Windows, who's known for being costly in it's own right, and also terribly optimized. Still running certain code in the background since windows 95. Yet Linux, as of a year ago cracked an all time high of 5%. Which may as well be a rounding error.
  The ONLY reason I use linux as my daily driver, is because my other daily driver, which I haven't booted in a few months, is Windows 7. And I'm not even worried about the security issues. It's just gotten sluggish, and less and less things work on it over time. It's easier to just use linux, as I mostly just use it as a means to open a browser anyways. My desktop looks more like Windows XP than linux. It just doesn't act like Windows XP.
  That's what we need. A Linux distro that functions exactly like a modern day Windows XP. I think Windows XP couldn't handle hard drives with more than 4TB. So, obviously that's something a modern OS would fix. But the idea of just clicking .exe files, and installing them like on windows? That works for me. All the stuff Linux users hate about windows? If it were optimized and modernized, I'd take that over traditional Linux experiences.
  But I will never use Windows 10 or especially 11. Fuck that.
  
  You've clearly never supported users on windows and macos when they weren't already familiar with it or you'd never imply that windows and macos had intuitive interfaces that nontechies could take to instantly. None of them do but for a long time the default interface people were introduced to and taught to use was primarily windows unless they were doing art or media when they got introduced to macos instead.
  
  You're making the mistake in assuming that what's popular must be the best/easiest. That's definitely not true. People don't pick Windows because it's easier to use than other OSes. They pick it because that's what they're used to. It takes a lot of inertia to get over what people are comfortable with and get them to use something different.
  
  You are looking at this the wrong way. Nobody needs to compete with Windows and Mac, particularly volunteers do not want to be free support for people too lazy to learn the slightest thing for themselves and asking all the questions already covered prominently in the documentation again and again. Why would anyone optimize to get those people to Linux in their projects?
  
  My biggest complaint about Linux is how literally everything requires you to do some arcane magic in the terminal.
  Just make it a button damn it. As it is I just copy and paste what I'm told into the terminal so you could have just added a button into the operating system that just did that behind the scenes.
  
  Literally everything? Hardly anything requires a terminal these days. The only reason tutorials tell you to use a terminal is because they don’t know what GUI you’re using. You can usually do the same thing in the GUI.
  
  Not to mention that the terminal is just so much more efficient for a tutorial than that whole 20 screenshots with circles where to click nonsense. 20 screenshots you will have to redo when the GUI designer inevitably decides to do a "redesign" because they are bored and want to justify their existence.
  
  Regardless of the reason the problem remains that there is no consistent design distro to distro and that's a problem for the end user. If we're ever going to have "year of Linux" then the developers are going to have to get over themselves and stop with the idea that everyone who is going to use their platform is technologically inclined.
  Otherwise it's always outgoing to just be for the techies. Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don't know what distro they're on? Nightmare.
  
  Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don't know what distro they're on? Nightmare.
  My mom is in no way technically inclined. Quite the opposite in fact. (She’s in her seventies, so it’s understandable.) She's been using Ubuntu since 2015. My dad used to try to switch her back to Windows once in a while, and she’d yell at him that she hated it, then he’d switch her back. My dad finally came around a couple years ago after getting a Steam Deck, and now he uses Fedora.
  Funnily enough, since Ubuntu and Fedora both use Gnome, they have the same interface. I also use Fedora and Bazzite. All of these OSes use Gnome. They all have the same interface (when Bazzite is in Desktop Mode).
  So, really, I don’t know what you’re on about.
  
  problem remains that there is no consistent design distro to distro
  You might have had a point if you wrote that back in the days before phone UIs and Windows versions and websites all completely redesigning their UIs every 5 minutes but this is clearly nonsense at this point.
  Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don’t know what distro they’re on? Nightmare.
  No, actually the actual nightmare is them using Windows and asking me about it on the phone and me having to talk them through mouse clicks in an unfamiliar GUI instead of just telling them which command to enter in the terminal like I would on a sane OS like Linux.
  
  There is no problem. Yes, they pretty much are consistent distro to distro. Desktop to Desktop is a bit different but not by much.
  My grandparents have had a much easier time with Linux than Windows. Both environments would be confusing to look up if something goes wrong. Fortunately since linux packages are updated together, not much goes wrong. Cant say that for windows. Stuff is always popping up and asking questions and changing.
  
  Why is this repeated over and over on Lemmy? It is nonsense.
  There is a button. You don't need the terminal any more or less than any other OS. Yes people give advice with commands. They are not magic nor arcane, but it is so much easier to tell you to do a command than 20 pages of diagrams and drawings on how to use the gui to do the same thing.
  
  I cut my teeth on Linux when red hat was trying to make things "user friendly" with control panel like guis but they consistently couldn't do what I wanted so I had to learn the terminal anyway.
  25+ years later, I'll use a gui if it works and it's easy, but I still have trust issues that I don't have with a config file. You put shit in a config file, it's going to do what you asked (right or wrong) or sigterm trying... And I appreciates that.
  That said, I do mostly gui config on my daily driver these days. Servers however... No gui, no problem.
  
  The good thing is that most of those "arcane magic things" in the terminal can simply be copied and pasted into said terminal. Whereas finding an obscure option on a windows program setting three requestors and five buttons deep is a nightmare, especially if your UI is not set to English.
  
  I don't think that is a particularly fair assessment. ZorinOS for example has been our home OS for years now. No terminal required.
  
  It's a dying problem, but it's gonna take a while to finish dying off. Linux is currently mostly used by more technically capable people, so avoiding the terminal has historically been a lower priority compared to getting things to work at all. I think that's changing as things get increasingly stable and usable with support for popular things like gaming. Once that base functionality is there, more and more attention will turn to polishing the UI and finding ways to hide the terminal.

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