@mcc @ekg I have set all the group policy to disable microsoft accounts, copilot, and recall and I am still reasonably happy with windows 11. But I agree with this, and I assume that at some point my customizations will break and I will be stuck

@mcc @ekg I don’t love apple’s recent direction either but disabling apple intelligence was a single highly-visible toggle; disabling copilot was a 5-page tutorial involving an enterprise configuration management tool with at least two highly misleading steps.

@glyph @ekg I have heard from a number of people who say that they disabled Apple Intelligence and then the next time they updated the OS it re-enabled. At least one person saw this more than once.

@mcc @ekg I am aware of this problem, and I have strong personal reasons to believe that this is a bug and that it affects a relatively small number of people. But even if it *is* some sneaky dark pattern horseshit, the way you fix it is … you turn the highly-visible toggle off again. As opposed to your experience with Bing, which has been my standard experience with Microsoft preferences.

@mcc @ekg Like there *is* a copilot toggle in the UI but it didn’t even occur to me to try it because the way they treat user consent, I always go straight to group policy now because the enterprise customers they actually care about will complain if those break

@mcc @ekg (Although given the way they have been treating even BigLaw lawyers telling them that copilot is literally illegal for them to turn on in Word, I suspect this defense is crumbling as well)

@mcc @ekg To be clear this is not praise of apple, “letting users turn highly problematic features off after they have defaulted on” is the bar being in hell, but Microsoft is not clearing it

@glyph @ekg If the software is on my computer, in principle it could be run. With Apple or Microsoft I do not have the ability to keep software I consider malicious off my computer, and I am left trusting their goodwill and competence that the malicious software will not simply *switch on*. It would appear Microsoft lacks goodwill and Apple lacks competence. I choose not to use a computer unless the malicious software has been actually removed.

@glyph @ekg My experience with Bing was that I turned it off and then Microsoft removed the old Bing switch and replaced it with a new on-by-default setting so it was on again, and then I turned that off and then Microsoft removed the old Bing switch and replaced it with a new on-by-default setting so it was on again, and then I turned that off and then Microsoft removed the old Bing switch and replaced it with a new on-by-default setting so it was on again, and then I turned that off and then

@glyph @mcc @ekg ooh, have you published that group policy anywhere? I got asked to fix all this crap for a friend but do not have my own 11 capable machine to work with. So if I'm gonna steal someone else's work, I want it to be someone I trust :D

@JennCutter @mcc @ekg 😬 I appreciate the vote of confidence but I am _super_ not the person to go to for group policy; I am just piecing together wikihow articles manually to get myself to the point where I can have a barely functional windows VM for Python development. I have rendered it unbootable and had to restore from a snapshot more than once :)

@JennCutter @mcc @ekg that said, I will look into maybe curating this into something that _is_ publishable since it looks like at least some of this has broken now and I need to re-apply it, so I may need to dive back in anyway and I might as well do a decent job. If I can manage it I'll put it up next week.

@mcc @ekg Kinda off-topic, but I'm glad some people actually liked Windows 8 too.

@stemma_on_a_lemon @ekg The fullscreen startbar was kinda weird but otherwise it was generally pleasant. I was using a lot of msys2 at the time and in some ways it was superior to WSL.

@mcc @ekg The "fullscreen bar" took me back.
I wish big tech just kept pissing their users off with odd UI overhauls instead of violating their basic privacy :(

@stemma_on_a_lemon @ekg Hey, there's Windows 11— it does both!