There's an easier way. Switch to Linux. It's good now, and only going to get better with more adoption.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Difficult for most businesses.
People don't realize how difficult it is.
Not only do you have to do a lot of feature replacement (getting off of teams and using zulip and jitsi. Getting off of outlook and using Zimbra. Using next cloud over whatever the hell Microsoft's version is)...
You also have to deal with all the Microsoft chucklefuck IT people who never touched a command line before. The push back I had in previous companies is lazy IT folks who don't want to learn anything their Microsoft certification didn't teach them.
Not to mention that windows domains fail gracefully. You can still format and reinstall if you want but most problems can be cleaned up as you limp along rather than taking the whole company down with a single server failure
Yep. Already did at home and I still need Windows at work. I may get to that point eventually but not there yet myself. When it's time for a hardware refresh for me, I think I'll push for Linux and see if I can work on ways to roll it out elsewhere too. I really need to find a way to manage it in a similar way to Group Policy, but haven't looked into it too much yet.
I would love to, but unfortunately our work requires windows due to the software packages we use. And no, I really don't want to run a virtual machine for CAD.
FYI: as a user, you are already allowed to uninstall Windows and switch to Linux
"allow"
Feels like accident forgiveness from insurance, right
May allow
The benevolence! Your own computer can do whatever you want it to.. if MS agrees to it.
Our luck was that personal computers existed before phones. The fact computing is open is a miracle.
Microsoft would love to only sell computers with locked bootloaders, enforced DRM, locked down stores. Imagine having to jailbreak your desktop.
That was a big concern when TPMs first started appearing. I'm glad that that didn't go the way it might've. Yet.
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
People call me paranoid, but after my dad’s MS Surface spontaneously encrypted itself and lost the recovery keys, my belief is that what you described is the goal they are working towards.
Apple already does all of this along with client side scanning and MS is falling over itself to implement the same ecosystem.
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"Allow"
Fuck you, Microsoft. You and Apple have lost millions of users to Linux, and I'm here for it.
You are not spending tens of millions annually and thus Microsoft doesn't give a shit about you. They literally would not piss on you if you were on fire.
Yes we already know. No need to sell it to us more. We love it.
That's not really the point though. I'm not even talking about end users. Government agencies, corporate backend services, customer service agencies and more are all abandoning Windows for Linux partially because Win11 is a horrible product, but also because the requirements just keep growing which is stupid.
Microsoft's response to this is the above, which they were STAUNCHLY opposed to previously because they need to try and force AI down users throats to justify the money they have pissed away on it. They're shoehorning Copilot bullshit into every product line they have now, and it's WILDLY unpopular and unnecessary. If this is the best they can do to address it, they'll continue to hemorrhage users.
When more state agencies in the US start switching, they'll release some "Windows Lite" bullshit, but it will too late because the commitments needed for these organizations to bother switching is massive. They'll be losing licenses for an entire generation of Windows at the very least.
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I mean, they already lost the war to Linux on infrastructure, those are billions they never made. It's not unlikely for them to lose the desktop as well.
Not really. Almost every Windows-based organization over a certain number of employees will use some shape or form of Active Directory (whether on-prem or in Azure) and most likely also Office 365, which is corporate/enterprise infrastrucure that is really hard to migrate away from once you built your IT and processes around it.
All the license fees for just retaining access to and being able to onboard new employees in that infrastructure is a huge portion of the budget for these organizations.
They just gave up the war on competing with UNIX/Linux on the non-enterprise production infrastructure side, since there were no money to be made there.
Infrastructure meaning servers
I know what you mean, but it's not what you said. :-)
Just wanted to point out that they still have monopoly on the enterprise side of organization infrastructure, which is huge - the number of companies running production systems on self-hosted Linux infrastructure are orders of magnitude fewer than those that don't, even if the number of Windows servers in total might be fewer.
Microsoft gets paid per employee, per application suite and per cloud service (if Azure is involved for the AD) - not only per server. They were very early on the recurring subscription model almost every SaaS provider is leaning into nowadays, even for on-prem stuff.
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"If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs."If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once. Users can still re-install if they choose to. This policy is available on Enterprise, Pro, and EDU SKUs.
so.. they arent allowing admins to uninstall it. they're letting admins ask their users very nicely to not reinstall it.
Let us remove Microslop
But you can!
Business has spoken, consumers have spoken. No one wants AI right now. Large companies trying to out compete each other on LLM is stupid. Time for the bubble to pop before more people get hurt.
No one wants AI right now.
I don't know why anyone would ever want "AI" on their workstation let alone in a production environment. Its like a calculator that works 94% of the time, useless and distracting. Or like a bowl of candy where only one is poison, why would you want that?
Oh they'll "allow" it, how's this go fuck yourself and keep your shitty AI crap to yourself since you fucking love it so much.
IT admins should already know how to do it without Macroslop‘s permission.
IT admin here, we certainly do know how to do it, and already have. It's an appx package, and it's really not difficult to remove.
may
admins
Fuck Microsoft
My computer, my rules... and if I want a piece of software out it will move out.
It used to be "My Computer", now it is "This PC".
Oh... right...
You know what Microsoft doesn't have to allow you? Install Linux on your own device!
There have been devices that forbid disabling SecureBoot or enrolling your own keys, and only boot loaders that microsoft signed are allowed to boot.
Further, I've seen systems that have a setting to not allow the non-microsoft stuff to boot, even if signed by the usual secureboot authority. So there may be a device out there hard set to only allow microsoft software to boot.
You can uninstall Copilot yourself with O&O ShutUp.
Anyway, "Copilot" in my native language is "The bastard".
I thought they renamed their entire product line to "Copilot" by now, didn't they?
Uninstalling it at this point would leave absolutely nothing left!
Reading the article, it's so many conditions to be uninstallable I fear even Bill Gates himself couldn't.
I don't understand the universe in which this is not an option. in an enterprise scenario, you are being very specific about who you share your data with. That's why there's a market for self-hosted AI, and it's why a lot of companies will silo their data. if this thing was on all the time just sending your computer usage shit to Microsoft, there's no fucking way it would have any use in a corporate setting.
with that being said, I don't understand what this article is saying at all
The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app was not installed by the user, and the Microsoft Copilot app was not launched in the last 28 days.
...
"If this policy is enabled, the Microsoft Copilot app will be uninstalled, once.
no, you know what? I don't care. it's really boring
?
In the Enterprise editions of Windows, you can already uninstall it. Maybe not via group policy, but you can just find it in the Apps > Installed Apps list and right click to uninstall it. On the various home user editions of Windows, this is probably not the case. (I have zero systems running those, so I can't check.)
The Enterprise LTSC IoT version of Windows 10 doesn't even come with Copilot, nor have any updates for it thus far installed it on any of the systems I administer, either. Apparently only 11 does.
What's new here is apparently being able to trigger this via group policy, but for anyone in the here and now you can already disable Copilot via group policy as well, even on your local system, even on Windows 11.
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