We recently started rolling out 11 at work, and we have all sorts of group policy hacks to disable stuff... one thing I noticed is that despite copilot being disabled, the button still appears at the top of every office app. I'll have to check on the weekend, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hard enable this option as we have our own OneDrive instance to replace our terabytes of network shares.
This is already how alternatives like google docs work, being cloud first so I think it makes sense for Microsoft to follow as its natural to want to be able to read, modify, and share documents from various computers.
Seems like Microsoft's Modus operandi the last few years has been:
Make anti-consumer move -> get backlash -> repackage same egregiousness while stalling & deflecting -> repeat cycle
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
I'm old as dirt but I recall one of the arguments for TPM was shoved down our throats was the ability to tie documents to machines and organizations. Something something... industrial espionage. Now we know that is a lie. They just wanted to fill landfills with old working computers.
Or those working on export controlled content. ITAR is everywhere these days, and it would be un-fun to experience a deemed export of technical data because an engineer didn't watch where their document went and the data center has non-US-persons working in it.
If this report is accurate and the change is made quietly and automatically as it predicts then how does this not end up with the mother of all lawsuits? We have several clients in sensitive industries and contractually it is very clear that we must not upload data for those projects anywhere. Surely many others do as well. Anyone working in industries like healthcare or security could get in a lot of trouble for uploading data even once.
I don't know what's new on this. For the last two years all Office apps I own have insisted on saving to OneDrive first. I have always had to explicitly click on the path and select another folder. Every. Single. Time.
Just recently moved onto Linux. Most likely not coming back when these kind of things just keep happening. I'm really surprised how well everything works. 120Hz HDR 4k Nvidia no issues on Wayland. Kubuntu 25.04/Plasma 6.3 is very nice. EasyEffects/PipeWire makes audio better compared to Windows. Steam/Proton/Wine works very well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits. Outside DualSense controller having issues connecting to bluetooth I can't think of anything that's worse than Windows while many things are better.
All of that compute can’t compensate for the fact that starlibreopenoffice is atrocious. Big corps have been looking for ways to migrate for decades but fail because it’s so abysmal.
Meanwhile, I just tried 3 different flavors of Fedora last week and could not even get to the point where I could log in reliably. Never mind getting the handful of Windows-only apps I still rely on to work. I'm despairing that I may have to let Windows update itself to Win11 while I wait for my next hardware upgrade cycle to roll around so I can try to pick more compatible hardware.
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Love Linux. Finally moved over it more than 10y ago and never looked back.
Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.
Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
Yeah I get tired of them trying to suck every bit of data and work that you do into the cloud so they can hoodwink you later with licensing fees and to train their AI. The last straw for me was their "we want to constantly snap shot your screen and index, oh and -wink- it's for your own good, so we'll enable it automatically for you!" I was done at that point and deleted it off my last PC with windows and put Ubuntu on it. I have Mac version of Office that's good enough for now.
>well for games outside ones that have kernel level rootkits
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
My computer broke while I was traveling a few years ago, so I bought a cheap Windows laptop at Walmart. It took me an hour to figure out get that thing up and running without setting up a Microsoft account online. I even had to change a freaking BIOS setting! I bet you can't even do it at all now.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
If I am reading this right I assume this is only if you have onedrive enabled?
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
> The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
For CV I use libreoffice and save it as a PDF/a. If it needs to be editable for some reason you can use docx or odt(odt might scare the average office worker so stick with docx).
I think that for "normies", the risk of losing data because of a dead / stolen device (because in all probably they don't have / do backups) is higher than the risk of loss privacy or other problems that HN "techies" may have with this.
What next? Even my text files will be default synced to the cloud, and nothing will be beyond the prying eyes of advertisers, governments and data-hungry LLMs?
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
They will secretly use your docs to train their models on it, say it was a mistake, pay their $4million dollar fine in 2040 for doing that and laugh the whole time.
"Furthermore, any new document will be named with the date instead of a traditional name by default."
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 76.6 ms ] threadI am thinking Fedora's atomic desktop for family. Any other suggestions?
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.
Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.
If that is the case, I think it makes some sense if you are already setup to use that to default to saving there since it makes it easier to find your files on other devices and they be safe. Theoretically if you have it setup you already agree to the risks of storing data in the cloud.
however... The real problem to me is that onedrive is enabled by default and that they are now requiring you to login with a microsoft account to use Windows. If both of those were not the case this makes complete sense.
But until they stop enabling one drive by default and making it a pain in the ass to disable this is bad.
The only issue with linux I am wondering about is sharing my CV where most companies need a word file.
For dev work/play time - 100% linux
Maybe it's regional, but I've never been asked for a Word file resume.
I've never had somebody turn down a PDF. And all of the "Upload you resume" online applications I've seen also support PDF. A lot of them lately will even correctly parse out the info and auto-fill forms with it, but some of them mangle it.
To be fair, I already sync some of my text files to the cloud, but I choose which ones I sync to which services. This seems to take away our agency.
I can't parse this? They're going to append the date to the filename you give? Is it updated in real time as you edit the document? Or you get multiple files with multiple dates?