"allow"
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Let us remove Microslop
FYI: as a user, you are already allowed to uninstall Windows and switch to Linux
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.
Anyway, "Copilot" in my native language is "The bastard".
You always could disable it completely thus far
You can request to disable it.
FTFY
There is always the possibility it is always there. Watching. Waiting... For an update
You can't trust big windows
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your computer, their software.
Hardware alone is not a working computer. If you control the software running on your computer then that software is yours (like it's your book on your bookshelf even though another owns the copyright to it). If someone else controls yours computer then that erodes your ownership of the computer.
That you should have the option to run locally without calling back to home base without a special pass from MS.
You do! It's called Linux.
may
admins
Fuck Microsoft
You know what Microsoft doesn't have to allow you? Install Linux on your own device!
Reading the article, it's so many conditions to be uninstallable I fear even Bill Gates himself couldn't.
So every normal logged in user then?
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.
I'm running Pro, and I don't see it as an installed app. Neither do I have it available as an app to run; the little copilot icon on the start menu just opens a web page.
Which means I must have already uninstalled it. Which means you should be able to uninstall it from Pro versions as well.
I see this has a nature healing moment. We are seeing a big technology company letting people remove AI from something not adding it in.
Doesn't really sound like an admin to me