This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There’s enough Linux-first vendors these days that it’s easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It’s time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key.
Which is exactly what people said about the Windows key.
Now it’s all but impossible to buy a keyboard that doesn’t have it. Worse, most of us use it without thinking.
Sure you can call it Super if you like, and even have a Tux key-cap on it, but there used to be a literal gap between the Alt keys and their Ctrl brethren in the lateral directions away from the space bar, and those days are long gone.
There’ll be the niche users who stick with old keyboards without this new key, just like there are the die-hards who have stuck resolutely to the old IBM keyboards and the like from pre-1995, but if you want a new keyboard?
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
(Shoutout to the Context Menu key which went as unmentioned in the above as it goes unused in day to day use, despite having been included with its Super cousin since day one.)
Gonna have to shell out a small fortune for a custom build or make do with that dumb new key.
I don’t think this is true. Just buy a laptop from a company that ships it with Linux. No Windows, no Windows keys. It doesn’t have to be ‘custom’.
The post mentioned this, and argues that a super a key is basically just a windows key
The video made it look like this was the context menu key. This may just be a key cap change for WHQL certification of keyboards.
The context menu key is more useful when it’s remapped to the compose key.
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My keyboard has a Linux key. And I happily use it.
I fully agree with you, but Framework is definitely not Linux-first. The only OS they offer preloaded on their laptops is Windows. You have to install Linux yourself if you want it.
Like with the Windows key, this won’t be an option.
I don’t care as long as the placement is ok and I can map it to something useful. I’m a GNOME user so the Windows/Super key gets a lot of use. It’s nice to have. A new key that I use for all my custom shortcuts would actually be kind of nice. Who cares that the default key caps are a Windows icon and this Copilot thing? Change the key caps and they are just keys.
Do people actually want this?
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Do people actually want this?
Absolutely not. But this is the new standard now.
Maybe I’m a pessimist but this is going to really resonate with the people who are “looking forward to AI” because they read headlines, but haven’t actually used any LLMs yet because nobody has told them how.
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
Another key to bind to something else? Hell yeah
Nope, just a new logo on an existing key.
:(
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
I hope the LLM bubble pops this year. The degree of overinvestment by megacorps is staggering.
I suppose having worked with LLMs a whole bunch over the past year I have a better sense of what I meant by “automate high level tasks”.
I’m talking about an assistant where, let’s say you need to edit a podcast video to add graphics and cut out dead space or mistakes that you corrected in the recording. You could tell the assistant to do that and it would open the video in Adobe Premiere pro, do the necessary tasks, then ask you to review it to check if it made mistakes.
Or if you had an issue with a particular device, e.g. your display, the assistant would research the issue and perform the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
These are currently hypothetical scenarios, but current GPT4 can already perform some of these tasks, and specifically training it to be a desktop assistant and to do more agentic tasks will make this a reality in a few years.
It’s additionally already useful for reading and editing long documents and will only get better on this end. You can already use an LLM to query your documents and give you summaries or use them as instructions/research to aid in performing a task.
I guess my understanding of an LLM must be way off base.
I had thought that asking an LLM to edit a video was simply out of scope. Like asking your self driving car to wash the dishes.
A year ago local LLM was just not there, but the stuff you can run now with 8gb vram is pretty amazing, if not quite as good yet as GPT 4. Honestly even if it stops right where it is, it’s still powerful enough to be a foundation for a more accessible and efficient way to interface with computers.
Oh “great”, more crap between Ctrl and Alt.
[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!
In my time it was also nine. Back to the roots. ;->
From the picture, it’s just the context menu key with a new key cap.
That’s still a new key for some people. My laptop doesn’t have a context key, for example.
Aaaaah. I really, really wanted to complain about the excessive amount of keys.
(My comment above is partially a joke - don’t take it too seriously. Even if a new key was added it would be a bit more clutter, but not that big of a deal.)
This is Clippy v2.0 and I’m sure it will be just as helpful.
They’ve learned from their mistakes, and concluded that Clippy failed because there was no Clippy key.
That’s funny, because getting an ad for Copilot inside my startmenu was actually what made me go back to Linux after 10 years.
This tracks.
So you can pressed accidentally activating the fucking AI and make the numbers go up so Microsoft can then go and say to investors look millions are using my AI. So annoying.
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Alas, often, no. Just another logo we can’t be rid of.
In some cases, the Copilot key will replace the Menu key or the right Control key, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. Some larger computers will have enough room for both the Copilot key and the right Control key, the spokesperson said.
I guess I can just buy a sticker and remap the AI key to do ctrl instead lol
Hmm, maybe I can use it for the Compose key instead or Right Alt…
Compose has always been Capslock for me
as an i3wm user, I approve 😁
Lol, the first thing that went through my mind was “what feature can I add to i3 with this key?”
unfortunately it would probably just replace the context menu key. which I’ve already set it to keyboard layout switch. 😁 it’s the best keybind I have. way faster than mod+space or alt+shift 😅
Linux laptops usually come with a super key.
Why? Win+C launches Copilot already, if you want to use it. It’s simple enough currently, why change it? This will just make everything worse.
Why? Investment hype
Awesome Keyboard with AI Support *
* On supported Operating Systems **
** With separate subscription.
Really milking that fad before they inevitably push anything useful behind a monthly paywall.
As long as the ability to manually turn off secureboot and remove the OS isn’t locked behind a subscription…
I am getting flashbacks to the multimedia keyboards on yesteryear:
https://deskthority.net/wiki/Multimedia_keyboard
Thanks MS, but no thanks, I don’t need it.
I love these, it has actual useful keys
I will admit that the volume wheel was awesome
yeah, the media controls are actually useful.
Wonder if it will be CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + WIN + C
Now I’m wondering, with which fingers would you press all those buttons? The most comfortable way to press these keys with 1 hand is to rotate the keyboard 180 degrees
They don’t intend for you to, it’s just easier to make a giant button combo that their generic HID driver handles as a special case than to create a custom keyboard protocol with their special key enums and a custom driver that only windows supports.
Woo-hoo! Secondary hyper modifier key - can’t wait!!!
Yay! I petition to call it Duper
Soon we’ll be able to emacs the way the developers intended.
They’re really pushing this AI shit fr
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Probably through licensing agreements with PC retailers.
But you can also just decide not to buy them.
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There’s always the IBM Model M or, if you prefer USB, there are remakes with it.
Wow it’s yuuge
sure, any Apple keyboard
Umm, it’s just a keycap. You can map the key to whatever you want.
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Microsoft is a monopoly. Stallman was right, as usual in software
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As long as it’s treated like a media key and not an intrusion of the standard, then I couldn’t care less. It’s a stupid idea, but Microsoft is so often full of those.
Edit> And after reading the article…of course MS is intruding on the standard just like they did with the windows key, but at least that one was turned into “meta” or “super”. I guess this will guarantee I won’t buy another MS keyboard.
On the other hand… Super Duper Key.
Touché
It’s Microsoft, intrusion of standards is their entire M.O.
It’s the “extend” in “embrace, extend, extinguish”.
The Windows key turning into “super” and getting some use on Linux was just Linux DE finding a use for that key nobody asked for.
Couldn’t they just convert some existing unused key, like Scroll Lock? To be honest, even Pause/Break seems outdated to me.
