It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.
Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.
It’s no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it’s those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.
Get everything: https://www.voidtools.com/ (the alpha version can also index the content of files). It’s search is instant. As in < 1 second for any file on any of your harddisks (even ones not connected right now).
For base linux cmdline tools I just install Git for Windows it includes tail, sed, grep, tee, iconv, less, scp and tons more. I need git anyways so win-win.
I do small business support. Everytime I do a windows install I do a ninite install of a bunch of things. Everything is always in the set. The fucntionality should have been in windows since NTFS was introduced
Yeah, even XP had Rover, the search dog.
Ninite and Chocolatey helps a bit. But then you get to the point where there is no automation for a start menu entry for some packages. It’s a bit of a mess.
A colleague installed Python from the MS Store on Windows 11 it messed up all python software, PyCharm, the other python versions and some file associations. Quite a mess.