[Rumor] Windows 12 to arrive in fall 2024 with a floating taskbar and a focus on AI

socK said:
And they're usually pretty good at figuring out whatever cryptic horse shit you asked it. Your terminology or spelling can be a bit off and there's a good chance it'll manage.
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When you say that, this is what I think of.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5p0gqCIEa8

The issue I see with language models, which is why I never want to speak to any computer or device, is a lack of preciseness, and countless potential unintended consequences.

These can probably be made better my inserting a confirmation dialogue between voice command and action, but it all just feels frustrating. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It applies to people, but it applies doubly so to any AI language model.

Like, we've had Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby now for years, but apart from the initial novelty and cool factor, most people don't actually regularly use them. its much simpler to directly interact with a UI and get exactly what you want the first time.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
most people don't actually regularly use them.
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Would be curious, it is not really simpler to start a 10 minutes timers/setting a reminder or adding something to the grocery list with the UI than just saying it, specially for watch user or while driving.

you need to either have the hand busy or action that would have needed multiple click to feel nice too, saying timer 10 minutes for example is quicker than most UI ways to start a 10 minutes timers, same goes to saying outloud after just lifting the arm up: Add Tide to the grocery list.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
When you say that, this is what I think of.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5p0gqCIEa8

The issue I see with language models, which is why I never want to speak to any computer or device, is a lack of preciseness, and countless potential unintended consequences.

These can probably be made better my inserting a confirmation dialogue between voice command and action, but it all just feels frustrating. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. It applies to people, but it applies doubly so to any AI language model.

Like, we've had Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby now for years, but apart from the initial novelty and cool factor, most people don't actually regularly use them. its much simpler to directly interact with a UI and get exactly what you want the first time.
Click to expand...


I don't think this is that great if a comparison because Alexa and all those other assistants aren't backed by modern LLMs (yet). They're much closer to just recognizing keywords than anything and are comparatively stone age. It occasionally becomes abundantly clear at just how dumb and limited these things actually are when you manage to step ever so slightly out of one of the magic incantation words and it has no clue whatever.

Modern models are just staggeringly better than anything going on here.

Plus they can easily be focused and chained, and requests routed to one that specializes until it formulates an ultimate answer. Take a look at RAG.
 
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I might be interested in AI when it could be hosted on a machine on my local network. No subscriptions and no requirement for a external account (like a Microsoft account). The only time the AI should access the internet is when I told it to.
 
sadsteve said:
I might be interested in AI when it could be hosted on a machine on my local network. No subscriptions and no requirement for a external account (like a Microsoft account). The only time the AI should access the internet is when I told it to.
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Specific appliance AI for specific jobs is becoming a thing, especially for network monitoring and security, anti-crypto attack is a pretty big application for it, it's not uncommon for bad actors out there to make a minor change to a known threat enough so it changes the signature and boom "new" zero-day, so you need software that is able to identify threats based on how it behaves and associate it to known threats based on more than a threat signature. Stuff like that, but AI's running against network traffic logs to learn what is normal and what is unusual to find things is a relative new thing that Nvidia is again at the forefront of providing the hardware and API's for to the big players.
 
sadsteve said:
I might be interested in AI when it could be hosted on a machine on my local network. No subscriptions and no requirement for a external account (like a Microsoft account). The only time the AI should access the internet is when I told it to.
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Just install this in your basement!

IBM_Watson.png
 
socK said:
I'm on the Snap/Flatpak are shit train, but what's wrong with systemd?
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I'm not, but that's because I don't like dealing with dependencies.
Zarathustra[H] said:
You used to be able to run Linux on pretty much anything no matter how old. System resources (drive space used, ram needed etc.) used to be super light for Linux, unless you intentionally chose packages that were heavy. I remember installing Linux with a light window manager (like Xfce or LMDE) on ancient machines that could barely run modern Windows releases, and they were snappy as all hell. With SystemD the bloat is real. It has gone a long way to harm the lightness and efficiency of Linux.
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I would agree except that most distros even dumped 32-bit support. I think people hate it for the same reason why I do, because I had to relearn everything.
pendragon1 said:
what any of that got to do with windows 12?
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Because no news about Windows is good news. When was the last time you heard anything about Windows that was beneficial to the end user or power user? The rumor is that Windows 12 is going to have a subscription service. It is after all just a rumor, but how far fetched would it be that Microsoft either requires you to pay a monthly fee to access features of Windows 12, or forces you to watch ads? What does any sane person do in this situation? You either keep using Windows 10 or 11, or jump to Linux. Linux is inevitable. There's always MacOS, but that's like jumping from the fire pan and then into a walled fire.
 
DukenukemX said:
There's always MacOS, but that's like jumping from the fire pan and then into a walled fire.
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o_O

I've used MacOS since the Snow Leopard days. It was a bit hard at first but now it's my preferred mainstream OS in a variety of trades.
From the hardware down to using command line. It just works. This is at a professional level for coding/development and (mostly) video work with some simulation thrown in. I give zero shits about gaming.

I always thought it was funny hearing the Mac junkies saying Windows users spend their time installing and troubleshooting updates and scanning for viruses where Mac users get real work done. After a decade and a half or so, they're mostly right! :-D
 
cpufrost said:
o_O

I've used MacOS since the Snow Leopard days. It was a bit hard at first but now it's my preferred mainstream OS in a variety of trades.
From the hardware down to using command line. It just works. This is at a professional level for coding/development and (mostly) video work with some simulation thrown in. I give zero shits about gaming.

I always thought it was funny hearing the Mac junkies saying Windows users spend their time installing and troubleshooting updates and scanning for viruses where Mac users get real work done. After a decade and a half or so, they're mostly right! :-D
Click to expand...
How long did it take you (or how much time did you have to spend on macOS) to realize that macOS was your preferred mainstream OS over Windows?
 
DukenukemX said:
When was the last time you heard anything about Windows that was beneficial to the end user or power user?
Click to expand...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/open-at-microsoft/whats-new-in-winget-14#time=06m47s
winget support in Native PowerShell adde.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-home/setup
05/23/2023
https://github.com/microsoft/devhome

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/comm...o,installed distributions of Windows Terminal.
The unpackaged and portable mode distributions of Windows Terminal allow you to use Terminal without installing it globally, e.g. on systems where you may not have permission to install MSIX packages or download software from the Microsoft Store. Portable mode allows you to carry around or archive a preconfigured installation of Windows Terminal and run it from a network share, cloud drive or USB flash drive. Any such installation is self-contained and will not interfere with other installed distributions of Windows Terminal.
May 24th, 2023
https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/wsl-containers
03/19/2023
https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/using-wsl2/
From the evolution of hyper-V to there developper tools, MIcrosoft and Microsoft windows is quite active, you can look there github page (github integration to windows being one example):
https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/projects?query=is:open
there powertoys are usually not a big deal, but tend to be simple net benefit to users:
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
 
Quiz said:
How long did it take you (or how much time did you have to spend on macOS) to realize that macOS was your preferred mainstream OS over Windows?
Click to expand...

Years! Win7 was my fav at time of getting my first Macbook. I would run 7 today if I could on modern hardware. As Mac hardware particularly Macbooks improved it was go to especially on the go. I still prefer my Think Pad X1s due to onboard cellular in the field though. If they ever have a Macbook Pro with cellular radio, even esim exclusively it's game over. But overall the X1 is the best Windows laptop!

Looking forward to 12 as long as I can still customize things and remove as much bloat as needed via powershell scripts. If things get truly locked down or fully subscription then goodbye!
 
cpufrost said:
Years! Win7 was my fav at time of getting my first Macbook. I would run 7 today if I could on modern hardware. As Mac hardware particularly Macbooks improved it was go to especially on the go. I still prefer my Think Pad X1s due to onboard cellular in the field though. If they ever have a Macbook Pro with cellular radio, even esim exclusively it's game over. But overall the X1 is the best Windows laptop!

Looking forward to 12 as long as I can still customize things and remove as much bloat as needed via powershell scripts. If things get truly locked down or fully subscription then goodbye!
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Would you switch back to Windows from macOS if Windows 12 turns out to be good? Do you use both Windows and macOS at home? Are you currently using or on a Mac?
 
Won't switch back, but I never really left Windows either! Kind of like phones, have been using both Android and iOS forever. There is simply no cure all.
I would say at home I use Mac about 85% of the time.
 
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cpufrost said:
Won't switch back, but I never really left Windows either! Kind of like phones, have been using both Android and iOS forever. There is simply no cure all.
I would say at home I use Mac about 85% of the time.
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Thanks.

What do you need to do in the other 15% that Windows is required for your use case? Sorry for all the questions, I just got my first Mac and I'm trying to understand things better.
 
I still use Windows to help Windows users and manage things that don't jive well with MacOS. For a while I was connecting via RDP to a VM hanging off a server but some things still need to have COM ports. I have an older Dell latitude laptop...core2duo with 4GB RAM running Win7 x64. It has a Intel 160GB SSD and refuses to die and works great. But it's as clunky as getting in and driving an early 70s Ford pickup with four on the floor too! :)

One thing you'll find with MacOS is printing or getting connected to a printer just works. No more of that dreaded waiting for windows update to find a driver! Even the PIA Canon MFDs!

I've finally gotten used to Win 11's new taskbar even so that classic shell is a thing of the past but so necessary on 10 machines. Never thought that would happen. Of course for every thing done that makes sense there's a 100 that don't. Right click and show more options? Really! Who comes up with that crap! You'd think MS was a government operation! ;-)
 
cpufrost said:
Right click and show more options? Really! Who comes up with that crap! You'd think MS was a government operation! ;-)
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There is a registry key you can edit to change the behavior so that it shows all the options every time. I did that on my work machine because it was driving me crazy.

You are right though. We shouldn't have to do this
 
cpufrost said:
o_O

I've used MacOS since the Snow Leopard days. It was a bit hard at first but now it's my preferred mainstream OS in a variety of trades.
From the hardware down to using command line. It just works. This is at a professional level for coding/development and (mostly) video work with some simulation thrown in. I give zero shits about gaming.

I always thought it was funny hearing the Mac junkies saying Windows users spend their time installing and troubleshooting updates and scanning for viruses where Mac users get real work done. After a decade and a half or so, they're mostly right! :-D
Click to expand...
MacOS is fine, if you ignore that most software isn't on it and older 32-bit applications won't work on modern MacOS. I'm sure you'll say that all the software you need is on MacOS, but again there is far more applications on Windows than on MacOS. There's also the hardware problem, which is that MacOS will only work on Apple hardware. If Microsoft did that with Surface devices, they would get crucified. The problem with Windows is the direction in which Windows is going. Windows is a perfectly usable OS, but does that require a monthly fee to get access to all it's features? Will there be ads if you don't pay? Apple themselves will obviously merge MacOS with iOS. It just makes too much sense for them to do this, but MacOS allows side loading while iOS currently doesn't. I'm not sure about next year with the EU law if it'll work outside of the EU.
LukeTbk said:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/open-at-microsoft/whats-new-in-winget-14#time=06m47s
winget support in Native PowerShell adde.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-home/setup
05/23/2023
https://github.com/microsoft/devhome

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/comm...o,installed distributions of Windows Terminal.
The unpackaged and portable mode distributions of Windows Terminal allow you to use Terminal without installing it globally, e.g. on systems where you may not have permission to install MSIX packages or download software from the Microsoft Store. Portable mode allows you to carry around or archive a preconfigured installation of Windows Terminal and run it from a network share, cloud drive or USB flash drive. Any such installation is self-contained and will not interfere with other installed distributions of Windows Terminal.
May 24th, 2023
https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/wsl-containers
03/19/2023
https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/using-wsl2/
From the evolution of hyper-V to there developper tools, MIcrosoft and Microsoft windows is quite active, you can look there github page (github integration to windows being one example):
https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/projects?query=is:open
there powertoys are usually not a big deal, but tend to be simple net benefit to users:
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys
Click to expand...
Most of that stuff is just Microsoft trying to make Windows more like Linux, which is fine but also ironic. Also, most of that is for developers. As a power user I'd love winget, but that's about it. As an end user, none of that has any value.
cpufrost said:
One thing you'll find with MacOS is printing or getting connected to a printer just works. No more of that dreaded waiting for windows update to find a driver! Even the PIA Canon MFDs!
Click to expand...
It's the same on Linux. Printers just work the moment Linux Mint boots up. The only time I have to setup a printer is for things like Zebra shipping label printers, only because I have to choose the correct driver for it to work. Zebra label printers are a pain on Windows, and even on MacOS you still have to choose the correct driver. The problem is that the name of the printer is not what you go by when choosing the correct driver.

View: https://youtu.be/TtsglXhbxno?t=579
 
DukenukemX said:
Most of that stuff is just Microsoft trying to make Windows more like Linux, which is fine but also ironic. Also, most of that is for developers. As a power user I'd love winget, but that's about it. As an end user, none of that has any value.
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I would imagine yes, then almost all their younger worker on are Linux/Mac bash all day even at work and that it influence a lot the direction. Microsoft is one of the largest contributor to open source code in the world

You have scoop now as well for command line app,

now:
scoop install fzf
Install-Module -Name PSFzf -Scope CurrentUser -Force

And you have pretty much as fast and working well fuzzy searcher in windows.

https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop
https://mrotaru.co.uk/blog/windows-package-manager-scoop/
 
Don't people say Microsoft will adopt a subscription mode every time there is a new version of Windows coming? They said it with Windows 10, then with Windows 11, and now with Windows 12.
 
Quiz said:
Don't people say Microsoft will adopt a subscription mode every time there is a new version of Windows coming? They said it with Windows 10, then with Windows 11, and now with Windows 12.
Click to expand...
Yea but this time it was found in test builds of Windows. The rumor now is that it'll be for Windows 11 IoT Enterprise Subscription. Microsoft is a hungry publicly traded company that will sell Bill Gates mothers soul to have a good quarter. Going subscription anything for Windows makes a lot of sense, but it'll also send more people to Apple as well. Certainly Microsoft fears Linux because we're seeing a lot more Linux features being incorporated into Windows. Much like Chrome's very slow crawl to Manifest V3 will lose users, so too would Microsoft adding a subscription fee into Windows would drive people away. Microsoft must have had many meetings over this, but the question comes down to, would it be worth losing users over it? At this point my suspicion is that it'll AI related to enable a stupid feature in a future version of Windows. Segmenting parts of Windows is the safer way to push a subscription model.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
There is a registry key you can edit to change the behavior so that it shows all the options every time. I did that on my work machine because it was driving me crazy.

You are right though. We shouldn't have to do this
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Yes, it was one of the first things I searched for when I was running the pre release build!
And (finally) ability to make clock show seconds in taskbar is actually an option now under taskbar behaviors. For years I had to use a reg key to turn this on.
 
Endgame said:
telemetry...which power users are more likely to disable.
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When I still developed end-user software I *WISHED* I could've had telemetry information like what is available to the Windows dev team. The software that we wrote could've gotten more streamlined and easier to use for our users. As a fellow dev, I leave mine turned on because I know how valuable the information would've been to us.
 
So I just went through a massive, expensive, 3-computer 14th Gen hardware refresh. Ridiculously expensive.

Are you saying in 6 months all my craps obsolete because it doesn’t have the AI NPUs? WTF MS. Win11 + TPM2.0 kicked my ass. Now this?
 
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Brahmzy said:
So I just through a massive, expensive, 3 computer 14th Gen hardware refresh. Ridiculously expensive.

Are you saying in 6 months all my craps obsolete because it doesn’t have the AI NPUs? WTF MS. Win11 + TPM2.0 kicked my ass. Now this?
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no
 
Forgot about this thread, not sure if I replied or not.....
Loved 7, 10's ok and came on my main laptop. I can get it to feel like 7 with the Win button and Quick Launch to the bottom left, tiles are fine in Start but for some reason they got cleared and reset a couple of months ago
11 is pure crap, it came with my Win tablet and Legion Go, trying to get it to behave like Win 10/7. Not sure if I can get back Quick Launch. IDKW they felt to do away with the tried and true to make it look like Apple.
12 better bring some things back. Would be nice if you can import the look and feel from an earlier OS......
 
I've played with linux for years for various things, but not my primary gaming system. Maybe it's time to revisit to see if I can get all the game launchers working.....

Otherwise I'll just stay on Win 10 for as long as I can I guess. Sighs loudly.
 
The Mad Atheist said:
Forgot about this thread, not sure if I replied or not.....
Loved 7, 10's ok and came on my main laptop. I can get it to feel like 7 with the Win button and Quick Launch to the bottom left, tiles are fine in Start but for some reason they got cleared and reset a couple of months ago
11 is pure crap, it came with my Win tablet and Legion Go, trying to get it to behave like Win 10/7. Not sure if I can get back Quick Launch. IDKW they felt to do away with the tried and true to make it look like Apple.
12 better bring some things back. Would be nice if you can import the look and feel from an earlier OS......
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ExplorerPatcher basically brings back the old style taskbar. I've been using it for months and have had no problems with it.
 
Burticus said:
I've played with linux for years for various things, but not my primary gaming system. Maybe it's time to revisit to see if I can get all the game launchers working.....
Click to expand...

I'm looking at switching to Nobara. It's a Fedora fork made by Glorious Eggroll who is one of the big Proton devs. In other words, the guy who makes gaming on Linux as possible as it is today has his own OS, so...https://nobaraproject.org/

You can always run a Windows VM if you can't get a game to work.
 
sadsteve said:
ExplorerPatcher basically brings back the old style taskbar. I've been using it for months and have had no problems with it.
Click to expand...

This is the solution, works great. I use it for left side taskbar.
 
Axman said:
I'm looking at switching to Nobara. It's a Fedora fork made by Glorious Eggroll who is one of the big Proton devs. In other words, the guy who makes gaming on Linux as possible as it is today has his own OS, so...https://nobaraproject.org/

You can always run a Windows VM if you can't get a game to work.
Click to expand...
Yep, that's what I do. I've got a motherboard that allows multiple graphics cards so I've allocated 1 card for the Windows VM and the other card for Linux. It works very well. GPU passthrough works great with KVM/QEMU/libvirt handling the VM.
 
Floating taskbar? They better give us the option to reposition it that they took away in Windows 11 to begin with, then! (And depending on implementation, it could be very reminiscent of how BeOS and SGI IRIX had this floating menu as opposed to a hard-docked bar.)

This focus on NPUs better not make them a hard requirement like their TPM 2.0 planned obsolescence ploy in Win11, though. The only one I care about fitting in my computer right now is the one that just happens to be the tensor core section of a modern NVIDIA GPU, doing stuff like DLSS and DLAA.

staknhalo said:
And they already wasted and killed the Cortana branding/name that would go perfect with this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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You see, they had to kill off the Cortana assistant before that trademark Bungie AI Rampancy problem set in. You don't want to actually go through that Halo 4/5 plot for real, do you?

Of course, this means they'll have to do away with Copilot after about 7 years, too, but hey, that's still several years longer than the typical Google side project, I suppose.
 
Shit I'm hating 11 the more time goes by and considering going back to 10. Only thing I use windows for is gaming and I have a high end system so it compels me to have the newest operating system to get the latest updates and compatibility.
I think I'm going to check benchmarks and see if I can go back to 10. But I have big and little cores and need the "scheduler" and supposedly win 11 has the scheduler and not win 10?
All this shit forced down out throats. Apple is even worse. WTF are we gonna do boys? I don't wanna deal with Linux bullshit either i only game on my PCs.
 
xDiVolatilX said:
Shit I'm hating 11 the more time goes by and considering going back to 10. Only thing I use windows for is gaming and I have a high end system so it compels me to have the newest operating system to get the latest updates and compatibility.
I think I'm going to check benchmarks and see if I can go back to 10. But I have big and little cores and need the "scheduler" and supposedly win 11 has the scheduler and not win 10?
All this shit forced down out throats. Apple is even worse. WTF are we gonna do boys? I don't wanna deal with Linux bullshit either i only game on my PCs.
Click to expand...

if you have an Intel system (CPU) it's best to stay on Windows 11...for AMD both can be used, but I prefer W10
 
polonyc2 said:
if you have an Intel system (CPU) it's best to stay on Windows 11...for AMD both can be used, but I prefer W10
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The scheduler in Windows 11 still works better on newer AMD CPUs, but you at least don't lose functionality like with Intel's P-E setup.
 
Armenius said:
The scheduler in Windows 11 still works better on newer AMD CPUs, but you at least don't lose functionality like with Intel's P-E setup.
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Bro I miss 10 a lot the more I use 11.

Can you believe Win 11 STILL doesn't have native Z790 Internet connection device drivers ready during a fresh install. You still need to jump through all the bullshit hoops of shift F10 command prompt I don't know what the fawk random work arounds.

Unbelievable. 10 was a breeze. 11 over time has aged very poorly basic functionality has been ignored in a lot of cases and neglected quality of life improvements have continued through it's life span.

I've grown to hate it because I had faith they would fix everything. I was wrong.
 
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