4 ms·

My Win10 PC sometimes wakes up in the night to complete an update and reboot. My working sessions are lost as a consequence. And since my PC reboots to Linux it

My Win10 PC sometimes wakes up in the night to complete an update and reboot. My working sessions are lost as a consequence. And since my PC reboots to Linux it stays up until I wake up due to the humming. Quite annoying. This morning I researched a way to turn off these forced updates but Win10 wouldn't let me apply the option without entering some obscure credentials that I don't know.

shawnz 8y ago
But wouldn't it be better if your apps supported hot exit, so you could wake up the next morning with updates already installed AND all your work still there?
- rcxdude 8y ago
  It would be better if updating didn't require a restart.
- jstimpfle 8y ago
  Well, they don't. And more generally, restoring the original session state, whether after a "hot exit" or not, is not really possible. Processes are bound to a running OS. Shutting down causes closed file descriptors, broken TCP connections, and what not. No matter how much effort you are willing to put into restoring a session, it will be unreliable at best.
- Derek_MK 8y ago
  The solution shouldn't be "make all the apps work around Microsoft being anti-consumer". It should be "Make Microsoft stop being anti-consumer".
  - shawnz 8y ago
    It's a standard expectation on mobile that all apps should work that way, and consumers seem to like that pattern better. So is it really anti-consumer to try and push app developers in that direction?
    - jstimpfle 8y ago
      Dude, this is not mobile. I'm using my Desktop PC for real work. Desktop applications are more complex and have more complex interaction patterns than mobile apps. I might be able to restore my session manually (lose an undo buffer here or a private browsing session there) but its still an annoyance.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        There's no reason desktop apps can't by default use near-continuous saved state and assure completely persisted state on shutdown request. They usually don't, because of historical UI paradigms, but there is no reason they can't. It's universal on mobile because mobile rebuilt UI paradigms from the ground up, discarding desktop legacy nonsense in the process.
        jstimpfle 8y ago
        Mobile apps don't restore very well either, but it doesn't matter so much. There is usually not much to restore because they have less state. Let's say I have a private browsing session. Or a password manager session where I've been manipulating an unlocked database. I might have manually mounted a file system over the network and might have a bunch of programs running, editing the files over there. You cannot restore these things automatically after a shutdown. It's annoying each time, and sometimes you are simply going to lose data.
        kilburn 8y ago
        You are presenting situations that are hard but not impossible to deal with. If you can keep the stuff in RAM, you can also serialize it to disk and then restore it from there. The only thing you cannot do is reply to external inputs during that time (so keepalive connections may be a problem if your updates take too long), but that can also be dealt with. We are very far from getting there though.
      - grawprog 8y ago
        My KDE desktop will restore about 95% of my previous session in its previous state on restart even after a crash or power loss. It doesn't restore private browser sessions or running games in their current state or anything like that. But it restores most of my desktop software to exactly what i had open with undo buffers, terminal states and just about everything exactly the way it was. I'm not trying to excuse microsoft....if anything there's really no excuse for them not to have a proper session restore and non-forced updates that don't auto-restart your computer. Just pointing out they really dropped the ball twice here.

shawnz 8y ago

But wouldn't it be better if your apps supported hot exit, so you could wake up the next morning with updates already installed AND all your work still there?

rcxdude 8y ago
It would be better if updating didn't require a restart.
jstimpfle 8y ago
Well, they don't. And more generally, restoring the original session state, whether after a "hot exit" or not, is not really possible. Processes are bound to a running OS. Shutting down causes closed file descriptors, broken TCP connections, and what not. No matter how much effort you are willing to put into restoring a session, it will be unreliable at best.
Derek_MK 8y ago
The solution shouldn't be "make all the apps work around Microsoft being anti-consumer". It should be "Make Microsoft stop being anti-consumer".
- shawnz 8y ago
  It's a standard expectation on mobile that all apps should work that way, and consumers seem to like that pattern better. So is it really anti-consumer to try and push app developers in that direction?
  - jstimpfle 8y ago
    Dude, this is not mobile. I'm using my Desktop PC for real work. Desktop applications are more complex and have more complex interaction patterns than mobile apps. I might be able to restore my session manually (lose an undo buffer here or a private browsing session there) but its still an annoyance.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      There's no reason desktop apps can't by default use near-continuous saved state and assure completely persisted state on shutdown request. They usually don't, because of historical UI paradigms, but there is no reason they can't. It's universal on mobile because mobile rebuilt UI paradigms from the ground up, discarding desktop legacy nonsense in the process.
      - jstimpfle 8y ago
        Mobile apps don't restore very well either, but it doesn't matter so much. There is usually not much to restore because they have less state. Let's say I have a private browsing session. Or a password manager session where I've been manipulating an unlocked database. I might have manually mounted a file system over the network and might have a bunch of programs running, editing the files over there. You cannot restore these things automatically after a shutdown. It's annoying each time, and sometimes you are simply going to lose data.
        kilburn 8y ago
        You are presenting situations that are hard but not impossible to deal with. If you can keep the stuff in RAM, you can also serialize it to disk and then restore it from there. The only thing you cannot do is reply to external inputs during that time (so keepalive connections may be a problem if your updates take too long), but that can also be dealt with. We are very far from getting there though.
    - grawprog 8y ago
      My KDE desktop will restore about 95% of my previous session in its previous state on restart even after a crash or power loss. It doesn't restore private browser sessions or running games in their current state or anything like that. But it restores most of my desktop software to exactly what i had open with undo buffers, terminal states and just about everything exactly the way it was. I'm not trying to excuse microsoft....if anything there's really no excuse for them not to have a proper session restore and non-forced updates that don't auto-restart your computer. Just pointing out they really dropped the ball twice here.