Linux

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.)

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.

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

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.

In my time it was also nine. Back to the roots. ;->

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

From the picture, it's just the context menu key with a new key cap.

They've learned from their mistakes, and concluded that Clippy failed because there was no Clippy key.

Why? Investment hype

As long as the ability to manually turn off secureboot and remove the OS isn't locked behind a subscription...

I love these, it has actual useful keys

yeah, the media controls are actually useful.

Soon we'll be able to emacs the way the developers intended.

Yay! I petition to call it Duper

Probably through licensing agreements with PC retailers.

But you can also just decide not to buy them.

Microsoft is a monopoly. Stallman was right, as usual in software

On the other hand... Super Duper Key.

It's Microsoft, intrusion of standards is their entire M.O.

It's the "extend" in "embrace, extend, extinguish".

It should be the reason to switch to Linux, finally, again.

I guess we'll have to find a use for that new key on Linux, and Linux laptop vendors will end up with some alternative symbol for it...