Microsoft will allow you to remove “AI” actions from Windows 11’s context menus

With the current, rapidly deteriorating state of the Windows operating system, you have to take the small wins you can get: Microsoft is now offering the option of removing “AI” actions from Windows 11’s context menus. buried deep in the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7344 release notes, there’s this nugget:

If there are no available or enabled AI Actions, this section will no longer show in the context menu.
↫ Windows Insider Preview release notes

If you then go to Settings > Apps > Actions and uncheck all the “AI” actions, the entire submenu in Windows 11’s context menus will vanish. While this is great news for those Windows users who don’t want to be bothered by all the “AI” nonsense, I wish Microsoft would just give users a proper way to edit the context menu that doesn’t involve third party hackery. KDE’s Dolphin file manager gives me full control over what does and does not appear in its context menu, and I can’t imagine living without this functionality – there’s so many file-related operations I never use, and having them clutter up the context menu is annoying and just slows me down.

There’s more substantial and important changes in this Insider Preview Build too, most notably the rollout of the Update Orchestration Platform, which should make downloading and installing application updates less cumbersome, but since it’s a new feature, application won’t support it right away. This release also brings the new Windows MIDI Services, and Microsoft hopes this will improve the experience for musicians using MIDI 1.0 or MIDI 2.0 on Windows. There’s a slew of smaller changes, too, of course.

I’m not exactly sure when these new features will make their way to production installations – who does, honestly, with Microsoft’s convoluted release processes – but I hope it’s sooner rather than later.