6 ms·

Windows 10 and its forced updates are the best things that happened to Linux in last decade.

by akerro 10y ago

blauditore 10y ago
While you may be right, it's also a good thing for most Windows users, even if they don't see it. Windows 10 is actually a better OS than Windows 7 in so many ways, for power and casual users. Most (causal) users would probably never upgrade and thus miss out on new features and security updates. After using W10 for a while now, I've recently been working in a W7 environment again, and it's terrible. There are many little details that have been improved from 7 to 10, and they add up, making the once-so-great 7 feel like Vista or XP. (No, I'm not paid by Microsoft, this is my real opinion. :P)
- r3bl 10y ago
  Yes, it's especially good when it kicks you out of the Internet connection, decides to restart your laptop while you're rendering a video, or you're in the middle of a livestream, or you're giving a presentation, and let us not even forget the whole "Something Happened" error [0] during the automatic upgrade to Windows 10. The thing that marked my Windows journey as over was exactly this: an automatic upgrade... ...while I had people waiting for me to give a presentation. And it lasted for longer than 20 minutes, at which point, I had to force shut down my computer (which of course, broke the Windows install), boot into the Linux distro I was dual booting, mount the Windows partition from there as read only (because starting from Windows 8, "shutdown" doesn't mean "dismount the partitions" in the Windows world), find the presentation and open it in LibreOffice. And the presentation went as smoothly as it could! From that point on, I'm completely Windows-free. So yeah, you can say that forced updates are a good thing, but once they interrupt you while you're doing something important, you probably will not want to touch Windows ever again. 0 - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10/unable-to-upgrade-to-windows-10-something-happened/be12b76d-af02-46a1-a00c-4e4af0c29588 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
  - croon 10y ago
    I definitely have my issues with it as well, but if you have Pro you can customize quite a few update options in Group Policy Editor, and even if you're on Home you can at least set "Active hours" to when you're using your computer so that it updates outside of that. Unfortunately it's limited on an amount of hours, so still kind of forced, but I've learned to accept it.
    - RossBencina 10y ago
      Forced reboot can be completely disabled (current uptime here is 75 days). Perhaps I tried other things earlier, but this is what finally resolved it for me: https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-from-waking-windows-10-desktop/973029#973029 https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...
      - croon 10y ago
        Not that I need my computer up for more than a day or two at a time, but that does sound excellent, thanks for the link!
    - dspillett 10y ago
      Some of those GPE tricks stopped working in the Anniversary Update. Any remaining ones may follow in future updates.
      - ntauthority 10y ago
        Disabling the Windows Update service and only enabling it when knowingly wanting to install an update (or Store application) has worked ever since XP, and is unlikely to ever cease working.
        dspillett 10y ago
        > unlikely to ever cease working. I remember people saying that about the GPE methods a few months ago...
- cm2187 10y ago
  There are many annoyance to a power user in Windows 10, but there is one that should put off even a casual user: the frequently unresponsive start menu.
  - tdkl 10y ago
    Start8 and 10 by StarDock have been the best 5€ spent on Windows software.
  - tonyplee 10y ago
    I used to have that issue - but I block SearchUI / Cortana from making any TCP connections to the net with Windows Firewall. The start menu is supper fast and search is actually usable for me now.
- jerven 10y ago
  We have one windows laptop for banking reasons. It is not a performance beast by any means. But whenever we want to do any banking we spend an hour waiting for the upgrade dance to complete. That is not a real problem, but the fact that you can't do anything with it while it is upgrading is! To much time is spend in the update while nothing else is possible. One update after the other. The amount of work done by the update procedures while holding an exclusive lock on the whole PC is deranged.
- vacri 10y ago
  Yeah, I've come back to my win10 box having rebooted itself when I have had documents open. Win7 never did that. Also, win10 can't be skinned (colours yes, design no) - I actually liked the old 'glass plate' look and tried to find themes online. Nope, sucks to be me. Stupid flat design has to be preserved. Then there's all the phone-home stuff spread around that you need to disable. I miss my old Win7 box - it Just Worked™.
  - ntauthority 10y ago
    Invasive update rebooting has been a thing by default since XP SP2, it however used to be the case the override switch to disable it was less well-hidden. Similarly, by the way, no Windows version had supported custom theming since XP - if you wanted the XP themes back on Vista/7, you were SOL too. Also, telemetry has been a thing since at least Vista, and any version since (including 10) let you disable most or all of it as a choice during installation.
    - vacri 10y ago
      The update reboot thing in win7 could at least be continuously postponed for 4 hours at a time, instead of 'now or in 15 minutes, that's it'. I'd also never come back to a update-force-rebooted PC on six years of win7, whereas I have several times in the 11 months I have had win10. Win10 is qualitatively worse in this area, even if the same tickbox exists on both versions. Fair point on the theming, but the telemetry thing is much more pervasive in 10 than in 7.
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    I miss my Win NT 4 box the entire OS ran in under 100mb iirc and it performed very well on a range of hardware. But most of all I miss Windows 2000 where the Win9x UI met the Win NT kernel. It had some annoyances (Find tool used to be fast and not require indexing to find by name - that went away in 2000 and never came back) but it was relatively lightweight. It supported the graphics card, USB devices,and applications that I used. Most importantly it didn't do a bunch of shit without telling me.
- bitwize 10y ago
  The problem is that there's some sort of conservation-of-awesomeness law in play for Windows releases. Every improvement Microsoft makes to the core OS must be balanced by the addition of spyware, Modern UI, "Update your PC now (Y/N) [No] Assuming yes..." and other insanity. Just give us the good stuff without the crap! Is that so hard?
  - blauditore 10y ago
    Yeah, I have the impression that MS often rolls out new stuff too early, causing it to be unstable or disliked by users. I really wonder why they're doing this, considering how huge the user base of a product like windows is, and thus what the consequences are. But to be fair, also great stuff emerges out of this. For instance, I really liked flat UI when they introduced it, and a few years later other large companies adopted it too.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  There are many small improvements in W10 with respect to W7, but there are also many things that are much worse. It's a privacy nightmare, which takes substantial effort to address. It now forces shutdown for automatic updates in various circumstances, including throwing away your session while in standby, which can be extremely inconvenient. Settings are now split between the simplified "Settings" app, which has many options missing, and the old Control Panel. And of course, solitaire is now an ad ridden resource hogging piece of shit that you have to install from the windows store, instead of the perfectly adequate version that existed in W7. (Not really important, but representative.)
calferreira 10y ago
Too bad nvidia is killing linux with optimus.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hawski 10y ago
My dad used Linux on his older computer. It was a bit of a hassle for me, but probably because hardware was malfunctioning. I bought newer computer for him and installed Windows 10 on it after all the last-version-of-Windows marketing speak. It was not very smooth, but I thought that he must have time to switch. Some strange Windows quirks aside the update mechanism filled disk completely. At that time my dad wanted to have Linux back, because it may have been not entirely smooth, but it was reliable. Windows was trying to update on each shutdown and boot-up and each time it failed, because of lack of space. Every time it took around 10-20 minutes. My dad bought external HDD and moved all his media files to it to make more space. It did not help. So he went through restoring to defaults or however it is called. But of course more updates came. Now it is somehow broken again. When I will visit him this Christmas I will install Ubuntu on there. The best update mechanism is on ChromeOS. It is totally hassle free. I am working on a Linux distribution that would also have updates in this way. Two partitions for read-only rootfs. You get new image on the second partition and after restart bootloader tries to start the newer image. If it fails system will be booted-up from the previous image.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Do you have a link to your distribution (if it's public already)?
  - akerro 10y ago
    You can get similar thing in TrueOS (FreeBSD based - aka PC-BSD) using zsf based magic for restoring defaults. I love it. It saved my ass a few times when I broke Xorgs, drivers and other system-wide configs. Give it a try.
    - pnutjam 10y ago
      Suse is using BTRFS to do some similar stuff, it supports snapshots.
  - hawski 10y ago
    Not yet. For now it's in very experimental phase. When I get somewhere with it I will certainly do Show HN.

Windows 10 and its forced updates are the best things that happened to Linux in last decade.

by akerro 10y ago

Windows 10 and its forced updates are the best things that happened to Linux in last decade.

While you may be right, it's also a good thing for most Windows users, even if they don't see it. Windows 10 is actually a better OS than Windows 7 in so many ways, for power and casual users. Most (causal) users would probably never upgrade and thus miss out on new features and security updates. After using W10 for a while now, I've recently been working in a W7 environment again, and it's terrible. There are many little details that have been improved from 7 to 10, and they add up, making the once-so-great 7 feel like Vista or XP. (No, I'm not paid by Microsoft, this is my real opinion. :P)

r3bl 10y ago
Yes, it's especially good when it kicks you out of the Internet connection, decides to restart your laptop while you're rendering a video, or you're in the middle of a livestream, or you're giving a presentation, and let us not even forget the whole "Something Happened" error [0] during the automatic upgrade to Windows 10. The thing that marked my Windows journey as over was exactly this: an automatic upgrade... ...while I had people waiting for me to give a presentation. And it lasted for longer than 20 minutes, at which point, I had to force shut down my computer (which of course, broke the Windows install), boot into the Linux distro I was dual booting, mount the Windows partition from there as read only (because starting from Windows 8, "shutdown" doesn't mean "dismount the partitions" in the Windows world), find the presentation and open it in LibreOffice. And the presentation went as smoothly as it could! From that point on, I'm completely Windows-free. So yeah, you can say that forced updates are a good thing, but once they interrupt you while you're doing something important, you probably will not want to touch Windows ever again. 0 - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10/unable-to-upgrade-to-windows-10-something-happened/be12b76d-af02-46a1-a00c-4e4af0c29588 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
- croon 10y ago
  I definitely have my issues with it as well, but if you have Pro you can customize quite a few update options in Group Policy Editor, and even if you're on Home you can at least set "Active hours" to when you're using your computer so that it updates outside of that. Unfortunately it's limited on an amount of hours, so still kind of forced, but I've learned to accept it.
  - RossBencina 10y ago
    Forced reboot can be completely disabled (current uptime here is 75 days). Perhaps I tried other things earlier, but this is what finally resolved it for me: https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-from-waking-windows-10-desktop/973029#973029 https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...
    - croon 10y ago
      Not that I need my computer up for more than a day or two at a time, but that does sound excellent, thanks for the link!
  - dspillett 10y ago
    Some of those GPE tricks stopped working in the Anniversary Update. Any remaining ones may follow in future updates.
    - ntauthority 10y ago
      Disabling the Windows Update service and only enabling it when knowingly wanting to install an update (or Store application) has worked ever since XP, and is unlikely to ever cease working.
      - dspillett 10y ago
        > unlikely to ever cease working. I remember people saying that about the GPE methods a few months ago...
cm2187 10y ago
There are many annoyance to a power user in Windows 10, but there is one that should put off even a casual user: the frequently unresponsive start menu.
- tdkl 10y ago
  Start8 and 10 by StarDock have been the best 5€ spent on Windows software.
- tonyplee 10y ago
  I used to have that issue - but I block SearchUI / Cortana from making any TCP connections to the net with Windows Firewall. The start menu is supper fast and search is actually usable for me now.
jerven 10y ago
We have one windows laptop for banking reasons. It is not a performance beast by any means. But whenever we want to do any banking we spend an hour waiting for the upgrade dance to complete. That is not a real problem, but the fact that you can't do anything with it while it is upgrading is! To much time is spend in the update while nothing else is possible. One update after the other. The amount of work done by the update procedures while holding an exclusive lock on the whole PC is deranged.
vacri 10y ago
Yeah, I've come back to my win10 box having rebooted itself when I have had documents open. Win7 never did that. Also, win10 can't be skinned (colours yes, design no) - I actually liked the old 'glass plate' look and tried to find themes online. Nope, sucks to be me. Stupid flat design has to be preserved. Then there's all the phone-home stuff spread around that you need to disable. I miss my old Win7 box - it Just Worked™.
- ntauthority 10y ago
  Invasive update rebooting has been a thing by default since XP SP2, it however used to be the case the override switch to disable it was less well-hidden. Similarly, by the way, no Windows version had supported custom theming since XP - if you wanted the XP themes back on Vista/7, you were SOL too. Also, telemetry has been a thing since at least Vista, and any version since (including 10) let you disable most or all of it as a choice during installation.
  - vacri 10y ago
    The update reboot thing in win7 could at least be continuously postponed for 4 hours at a time, instead of 'now or in 15 minutes, that's it'. I'd also never come back to a update-force-rebooted PC on six years of win7, whereas I have several times in the 11 months I have had win10. Win10 is qualitatively worse in this area, even if the same tickbox exists on both versions. Fair point on the theming, but the telemetry thing is much more pervasive in 10 than in 7.
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  I miss my Win NT 4 box the entire OS ran in under 100mb iirc and it performed very well on a range of hardware. But most of all I miss Windows 2000 where the Win9x UI met the Win NT kernel. It had some annoyances (Find tool used to be fast and not require indexing to find by name - that went away in 2000 and never came back) but it was relatively lightweight. It supported the graphics card, USB devices,and applications that I used. Most importantly it didn't do a bunch of shit without telling me.
bitwize 10y ago
The problem is that there's some sort of conservation-of-awesomeness law in play for Windows releases. Every improvement Microsoft makes to the core OS must be balanced by the addition of spyware, Modern UI, "Update your PC now (Y/N) [No] Assuming yes..." and other insanity. Just give us the good stuff without the crap! Is that so hard?
- blauditore 10y ago
  Yeah, I have the impression that MS often rolls out new stuff too early, causing it to be unstable or disliked by users. I really wonder why they're doing this, considering how huge the user base of a product like windows is, and thus what the consequences are. But to be fair, also great stuff emerges out of this. For instance, I really liked flat UI when they introduced it, and a few years later other large companies adopted it too.
aninhumer 10y ago
There are many small improvements in W10 with respect to W7, but there are also many things that are much worse. It's a privacy nightmare, which takes substantial effort to address. It now forces shutdown for automatic updates in various circumstances, including throwing away your session while in standby, which can be extremely inconvenient. Settings are now split between the simplified "Settings" app, which has many options missing, and the old Control Panel. And of course, solitaire is now an ad ridden resource hogging piece of shit that you have to install from the windows store, instead of the perfectly adequate version that existed in W7. (Not really important, but representative.)

calferreira 10y ago

Too bad nvidia is killing linux with optimus.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hawski 10y ago

My dad used Linux on his older computer. It was a bit of a hassle for me, but probably because hardware was malfunctioning. I bought newer computer for him and installed Windows 10 on it after all the last-version-of-Windows marketing speak. It was not very smooth, but I thought that he must have time to switch. Some strange Windows quirks aside the update mechanism filled disk completely. At that time my dad wanted to have Linux back, because it may have been not entirely smooth, but it was reliable. Windows was trying to update on each shutdown and boot-up and each time it failed, because of lack of space. Every time it took around 10-20 minutes. My dad bought external HDD and moved all his media files to it to make more space. It did not help. So he went through restoring to defaults or however it is called. But of course more updates came. Now it is somehow broken again. When I will visit him this Christmas I will install Ubuntu on there. The best update mechanism is on ChromeOS. It is totally hassle free. I am working on a Linux distribution that would also have updates in this way. Two partitions for read-only rootfs. You get new image on the second partition and after restart bootloader tries to start the newer image. If it fails system will be booted-up from the previous image.

majewsky 10y ago
Do you have a link to your distribution (if it's public already)?
- akerro 10y ago
  You can get similar thing in TrueOS (FreeBSD based - aka PC-BSD) using zsf based magic for restoring defaults. I love it. It saved my ass a few times when I broke Xorgs, drivers and other system-wide configs. Give it a try.
  - pnutjam 10y ago
    Suse is using BTRFS to do some similar stuff, it supports snapshots.
- hawski 10y ago
  Not yet. For now it's in very experimental phase. When I get somewhere with it I will certainly do Show HN.