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A quiet but consequential migration is unfolding across the professional computing landscape: an increasing number of developers, sysadmins, creators, and budget‑conscious IT teams are moving at least part of their workflows off Windows 11 and onto Linux distributions. The reasons are pragmatic rather than ideological — measurable performance gains in CPU‑ and I/O‑bound workloads, clearer privacy controls, lower total cost of ownership on aging hardware, and a maturing compatibility layer...

Algolia’s new pact with Microsoft aims to push real‑time, retailer‑approved product data directly into the emerging frontlines of AI commerce — Copilot, Bing Shopping, and Microsoft Edge — promising fresher product visibility, improved discoverability, and a way for merchants to extend their merchandising influence beyond their own sites. Background / Overview The retail landscape is shifting from property‑centric discovery (searching on a retailer’s website or a marketplace) to agentic and...

Microsoft’s first Windows 11 Insider preview of 2026 quietly introduces a new, narrowly scoped tool for IT: a Group Policy called RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp that can target and uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app on managed devices — but only when a short list of strict conditions is met, and only as a one‑time, best‑effort removal. Background Microsoft has been threading a difficult needle since it began rolling Copilot into Windows: deliver a consistent AI assistant experience...

If Elden Ring: Nightreign is stuttering so badly on your Windows PC that the combat and exploration feel broken, you’re not alone — a wide swath of players have reported sudden and severe micro‑stutter after updates or routine play, and the most reliable way out is a methodical troubleshooting plan that targets the common software, driver, and power‑management causes behind frame‑time inconsistencies. Background / Overview Elden Ring: Nightreign is a demanding open‑world title that mixes...

Older PCs that choke on modern Windows releases can often be brought back to life — and kept that way — by switching to a lightweight Linux distribution, a practical shift that reduces idle CPU and memory use, cuts fan noise, and limits long-term software bloat that drags performance down. Recent community reports and hands‑on writeups show the improvements are immediate and persistent: machines become quieter, idle memory footprints fall dramatically, and daily tasks feel snappier — not as...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 Insider Preview build quietly hands enterprise IT a narrowly scoped but practical tool: a new Group Policy that can uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app on managed devices under strict conditions — a one-time cleanup capability designed to remove provisioned, unused Copilot installs without breaking tenant-managed Microsoft 365 Copilot workflows. Background Windows 11’s Copilot family now spans multiple, overlapping experiences: a free consumer-facing...

Windows 8 was not a throwaway experiment — it was an ambitious, uneven attempt to fuse a touchscreen-forward “Metro” experience with a four-decade-old desktop model, and that collision explains why it polarized users so fiercely. Thirteen years later, revisiting Windows 8 shows an OS that did some things very well (startup speed, resource efficiency and the tile paradigm) and some things very poorly (UX coherence, app ecosystem management and discoverability). The story of Windows 8 is...

VLC’s latest maintenance release quietly rewires two very different eras of Windows: it brings a modern, native Arm build for Snapdragon-powered laptops while simultaneously polishing compatibility for relics like Windows XP Service Pack 3, all inside a single, stability-focused update that matters to both power users and conservators of legacy hardware. Background / Overview VLC has long been the Swiss Army knife of media playback: free, open source, and famously capable of decoding just...

Microsoft’s latest Insider build gives administrators a supported, one‑time way to uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices — but the control is deliberately narrow, gated by strict conditions, and not a fleet‑wide “kill switch,” which means durable removal still requires layered controls and ongoing verification. Background / Overview Microsoft has been folding Copilot into Windows 11 as both a standalone app and a set of shell integrations (taskbar...

Windows 11’s quietly escalating Copilot push has taken another visible step inside the operating system’s beating heart: File Explorer. Over the past few Insider preview builds, researchers and journalists have spotted non-functional UI hotspots, resource strings and new policies that together point to a possible docked Copilot chat inside File Explorer — complete with a “Chat with Copilot” trigger and a “Detach Copilot” affordance that would let the assistant live in a sidebar or float free...

SteamOS’s recent desktop head‑to‑head with Windows 11 shows Linux isn’t just “good enough” for gaming anymore — on the right hardware and with the right stack it can match or even slightly exceed Windows at native 4K Ultra in several modern AAA titles. ETA Prime’s all‑AMD desktop tests, summarized by NotebookCheck and discussed in community analysis, put SteamOS and Windows 11 within a few percent of each other in games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Spider‑Man 2 and Borderlands 4 — while...

Google’s move to codify shopping for the AI era arrived at NRF as the Universal Commerce Protocol — an open, modular specification designed to let conversational agents discover products, assemble carts, apply contextual offers, and complete tokenized checkouts without bespoke integrations for each merchant and assistant surface. Background / Overview The last two years have shifted ecommerce from page‑centric funnels to conversation‑first, agentic experiences where assistants do far more...

Microsoft and Stripe this week pushed agent-led commerce from prototype to product: Copilot Checkout — a native, in-chat purchasing flow that lets U.S. users discover and buy items from retailers like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and independent Etsy sellers without leaving the Copilot conversation — and Stripe is the payment backbone powering that experience. Background Microsoft introduced Copilot Checkout as part of a larger push to turn conversational AI into a full shopping surface...

Google’s unveiling of the Universal Commerce Protocol marks a decisive push to make AI agents first-class participants in online shopping, enabling conversational interfaces to not only recommend products but to complete purchases, manage payments, and handle post‑purchase workflows without sending users off-platform. Overview The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open, extensible standard designed to create a common language for “agentic commerce” — the emerging class of shopping...

The late arrival of CP/M-86 did more than disappoint a handful of hardware vendors — it rewired the entire PC industry, handing a decisive commercial opening to Microsoft and setting the stage for decades of platform dominance built on licensing, compatibility and historical accident. Background In the late 1970s and very early 1980s the microcomputer business ran on one clear de facto standard: CP/M. Gary Kildall’s CP/M family had become the default operating environment for business...

Microsoft’s quietly useful continuity feature in Windows 11 — known simply as Resume — is finally showing signs of life beyond the handful of first-party and high-profile partners that have demonstrated it so far. Recent Insider updates change the developer integration model and add new resume targets, which could make it a practical day‑to‑day convenience for anyone who bridges work between an Android phone and a Windows PC. The shift is technical but meaningful: Microsoft is adding a...

Microsoft’s AI ambitions for Windows 11 are colliding with a vocal, technically capable user base—and the fallout is no longer just headlines: community tools like Winslop and RemoveWindowsAI are giving users straightforward ways to excise Copilot and other on‑device AI surfaces, enterprises are asking hard questions about Copilot+ hardware and rollout strategy, and a separate UI change to Windows Update labels has stirred confusion among admins at the exact moment Microsoft is pushing...

Microsoft has shipped the first Windows 11 Insider preview of 2026 — Build 26220.7535 (delivered as KB5072046) — and this modest, tightly scoped release sharpens Microsoft’s Copilot strategy along three vectors: accessibility, enterprise control, and developer flexibility. The headline changes are an expanded, Copilot-driven Narrator experience that can describe images across more Windows 11 devices, a new Group Policy administrators can use to perform a one‑time uninstall of the consumer...

Microsoft's long‑buried Windows 11 feature known as Resume — the OS’s answer to Apple’s Handoff — is quietly getting more useful: Microsoft has expanded resume targets in Insider builds and, crucially for developers, added a new low‑friction integration route that makes it far easier for Android apps to trigger a resume prompt on a paired PC. This combination of broader OEM/app support and a Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) path could finally move Resume from an experimental curiosity...

Microsoft’s new Copilot Checkout has quietly shifted the terms of engagement for marketplaces like Etsy — not by changing what Etsy sells, but by altering where and how buyers discover and complete purchases — and that shift has arrived at the same time a senior Etsy finance executive completed an exercise-and-sale that removed her direct holdings, amplifying investor scrutiny of the company’s AI narrative and leadership optics. Background / Overview Microsoft unveiled Copilot Checkout as...