• 30 minutes

    I read the article. What’s to hate? Looks like a decent update to my eyes.

  • 59 minutes

    Nadella won’t be satisfied until he maps everyone’s enter key to fuckong copilot.

  • 5 hours

    Can’t they just make tabbed file explorer work properly instead?

  • 6 hours

    Jesus Christ. First they fucked over notepad and introduced dozens of application breaking new bugs and broke decades of existing functionality, now they’re thinking about breaking the damn clock ?

    Wait, no, they’ve already broken the clock in windows 11 because it no longer shows seconds, and doesn’t respond to clicks on non primary displays.

    I guess they decided it wasn’t broken enough.

    I’m getting so sick of their shit, and my employer locks down my laptop so tightly that I can’t run any 3rd party software too, so I can’t even install my own clock application.

    • 8 hours

      I’d switch if every discussion about Linux didn’t devolve into lengthy discussions about the complicated ways you need get anything working on it.

      • Fair.

        There are about 30 different ways to do any single thing and whatever way you choose is guaranteed to provoke 17 neckbeards into writing essays on why you’re wrong and, while they’re at it, you also picked the wrong distro.

        On the other hand:

        • the clocks just tell time
        • your user directory isn’t stored in a data center 1500 miles away
        • the update process understands the concept of consent, and;
        • you can create a local user account during install without … whatever this is.
        • 7 hours

          I’m old, and can’t be fucked learning a whole new system. I just want to browse the internet and play my games. The biggest barrier is getting my simracing gear and modded Assetto Corsa working on it.

          • Yeah, I completely understand. I bounced off Linux desktop several times and I’m a sysadmin.

            It’s only the last few years where there have been rapid and significant improvements to get gaming so it “just works*” and both of the popular desktop environments, KDE (Windows-like) and gnome (Mac-like) have had a heavy focus on fixing all of the little fiddly annoyances that turned people off.

            It’s not perfect and it can be annoying, but its dramatically better than it was 5 years ago while Windows keeps moving in the opposite direction.

            I’m not trying to sell you on it really, Linus doesn’t pay me commissions. Windows isn’t THAT bad and learning a new OS is a big ask.

            I’ve just been impressed by the state of things and enjoy yapping about it.

            • Obligatory “Gnome is NOT Mac-like” comment.

              The Windows people think Gnome is Mac-like. Hah, no it’s not! Gnome is its own weird thing.

              KDE can actually get a lot closer to Mac than Gnome can, if you add a top menu bar, rearrange some stuff, and move the titlebar buttons around.

              (We came from Mac land originally, and that’s how we have our KDE set up. Mostly.)

              – Frost

      • 8 hours

        For most popular distros most stuff works out of the gate. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to wrestle with anything vexing.

        • The big one I see across most distros is: Pipewire needs better default minimum quants.

          I see so many complaints about crackling audio and it’s almost always that pipewire defaults to using a tiny buffer for lower latency and system load (like gaming) can cause the buffers to empty resulting in crackling.

          If this happens, you can fix it temporarily (it’ll last until you reboot):

          pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock force-quantum 256
          

          Increase the 256 to 512 or higher until the crackling goes away (it doesn’t need to be a power of two, any integer will work). It’ll take effect immediately you don’t need to restart pipewire.

      • That depends on the distro, just choose one that’s beginner-friendly or “works out of the box”

        LMDE, Zorin, etc.

        • 7 hours

          OK, so tell me how to get Assetto Corsa Content Manager, Custom Shaders Patch and all the other mods I have installed, Quest 2 VR and Moza Pit House working in Linux, because that’s the thing keeping me from switching. Would WINE work well enough for that?

          • I’ll legit look into this tomorrow.

            The answer is generally: Proton/Steam. There was a patch to WINE or Proton recently that made it much easier to use mods that require custom DLLs.

            The core weird trick is understanding that there’s a directory for your game (once installed/setup in Proton) that’s essentially the C: drive. As far as your game is concerned, it’s running on Windows where it is the only non-system software installed.

            So, any mods that are just scripts/plugins where you copy them into a folder then launch the game (anything without DLL, basically), you install the same way… But you use the directory, that contains the “C drive” for that specific game.

            It sound complicated but once you do it once or twice it’ll feel familiar. You just now have a unique “C drive” directory for each game.

            You can install/run multiple applications in the same bottle (basically what WINE calls the fake-c-drive-using windows environment). For example, when I play PoE2, I use a third party program to make trading easier. I just run that program inside the same bottle as the game and they think they’re both running on the same computer.

            For basic things like installing and playing games on Steam it’s all handled automatically. You click the install button and then click the play button. Installing workshop mods is also exactly like in Windows. Steam just knows how to use WINE/Proton.

      • 6 hours

        How long can a discussion be about pressing a button to install a thing from the package manager, then launch said thing?

  • 7 hours

    Motherf-

    🤦🏻‍♀️

    I started writing a clock app of my own because the Windows 11 clock app didn’t have a proper analog mode and it’s pretty useless. (Windows 3 clock app had analog mode, why not Windows 11?)

    Some time ago I was ranting that instead of adding an analog mode, Microsoft will probably just pointlessly add Copilot to the clock app.

    …Don’t blame me! I was just pointing out the obvious direction Microsoft is going for, whether we like it or not!

    Aaaaanyway. This summer’s project is to figure out how the hell the Godot layout system works so I can make the layout responsive and I can release 1.1.

  • A system prompt hints at local AI-powered productivity features, specifically optimized for students. For example, the Clock app’s Focus session will act as a ‘Productivity’ assistant that breaks down tasks into clear, actionable steps, and it works by inferring the task category, then referencing the coursework of the student.

    It would be great if there were a way to use AI to help people learn more effectively. But this feels like a way to train young people to become dependent on AI assistance for tasks/skills we humans used to be able to do well enough without AI. An addiction, rather than an assistant.

    • But why the clock app? I mean there is already Microsoft To-Do app specifically for reminders and tasks organisation…

    • 6 hours

      Absolutely. Those people will never develop the cognitive skills their degree is supposed to give them.

  • 14 hours

    Instead of numbers it will show an AI-generated image of a text blur

        • 2 hours

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  • …the new Clock app will also have some AI features powered by the NPU in the newer Windows PCs…

    So you need Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to get this. So if you don’t have one. You can’t use the new clock app. So what’s the problem?

    • 8 hours

      Inb4 “Your computer does not meet the required system specifications to run Windows, go get a new one” when the old clock app is discontinued and also there can’t be no clock.

  • 20 hours

    In the future, when Windows users say “advanced users can turn that crap off” they’ll mean the power button, not the group policy editor.

    • 19 hours

      GPOs already suck and MS is forcing admins to adopt program rules out of Intune to get the same effect. See CoPilot GPO failures for further depth.

  • User: “How late is it?”
    Clock: “It’s high time for MOAR SLOP!” *devolves into slop clock*

  • Our test version of the Clock app is missing the actual clock and everything else, like the Timer, Alarm, Stopwatch, and World clock

    Author then goes on to praise the rounded edges omg can you believe it rounded edges on a clock!!!

    • A “clock” that doesn’t do anything that a clock does, but it can write you a plausible-sounding essay on what a clock should do!

    • 19 hours

      A clock that doesn’t tell time, and they follow that quote up with

      which is understandable.

      No it’s not.

      I know a lot of people don’t like or use Windows, but the multiple timers and stopwatch functionality are genuinely useful and pleasant to look at. And “focus session” already exists in it.

    • “every time a user glances at the time in the lower right, we count that as an active user”