Pavan Davuluri, the president of Windows and devices at Microsoft, recently took to X to share their feelings on the future of the OS (as spotted by Tom’s Hardware). “Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere.”
If that phrase reads to you like someone has thrown a dart at a board filled with LinkedIn buzzwords, you’re not alone. Effectively, an agentic AI is one that can run autonomously, without the need to check back in on each step of the process.
If you ask a standard non-agentic AI to make you a poem, it can. If you ask that same AI to set up supply chains, adjusting stock and employees in real-time, based on information fed to it, it can’t do it .
So, in this sense, Windows as an agentic AI is one that is designed to run automations daily to lighten the productivity load. However, I can’t help but wonder who wants that out of their OS?
The great irony here is that Linux is a better platform for LLMs to interface with. Everything can be done through the shell, and bash is so well documented and well represented in pre-training input, so LLMs are more likely to generate the correct output. Also, since everything can be done through the terminal in Linux, it is possible to give a function to an LLM do do anything, whereas you can’t really do that in Windows. If you want to hook up an agent to an operating system, Linux is a significantly better option for doing that.
And the best part is that the way Linux is fundamentally done, that can happen and even have an entire distro built for that usecase, while leaving every other existing distro working exactly how it used to. If you don’t want that, you can just not install it.
You don’t even need an entire distro. Because you can do everything through the terminal, all you need is a userspace program that users could install or uninstall whenever they want.
Of course, but an entire distro will be inevitably built around it anyway, because more new distros every week is a stereotype about Linux for a reason.
The LLM will learn powershell and they will like it
That’s cruel to the machine