8 ms·

I find Microsoft also deprioritizing Windows, as mentioned many times here on HN its a mess with settings everywhere and a total mix of different paradigms. Ads

by jdance 7y ago

I find Microsoft also deprioritizing Windows, as mentioned many times here on HN its a mess with settings everywhere and a total mix of different paradigms. Ads? I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. I actually use linux as my daily desktop environment for the first time in my life because Windows just feels so split to me. Using ubuntu feels like Windows used to feel, and the native package managers are just amazing compared to something like homebrew. That is my experience now, ymmv and all that

com2kid 7y ago
> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. Each of the last few major updates have added more and more control over this. The latest release is allowing even more user control. Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless. At some point MS, as the maker of the largest consumer OS, has a responsibility to patch critical vulnerabilities. Balancing the need to keep users secure with the inconvenience of a reboot, and the feelings of lack of control that come with it, is not an easy task. On the opposite side, I've been frequently annoyed when Windows, unable to install an update, turns my computer on in the middle of the night, fails to install, and keeps the machine on. Lovely way to waste electricity, error messages are silent, and I had to run a command line power management tool to determine why my machine was waking up every night at 1am.
- majkinetor 7y ago
  W10 has seriously fucked up updates. Nowdays its more like - will I be able to use computer AT ALL after the update then anything else. Not to mention problems to disable it, unlimited restarts etc. Seriously, YOU DUDE, who lead this at MS - just go, get fired, whatever !!!
  - com2kid 7y ago
    Yeah, the recent # of updates with critical failures has resulted in a huge loss of trust. I wouldn't touch an insiders build, I rely too much on my machine being stable. It is rather sad, a decade ago everything coming out of Microsoft was super stable, but of course it came out much more slowly. The entire industry has moved to a "less testing, more releases" mentality. Not so bad for websites, where the damage is sandboxed by the browser, but IMHO it is unfortunate this mentality has pervaded everything. I totally get rapid release cycles, I've lead teams that releases C++ code every 3 weeks! But we had a A+ solid test team backing up every one of our releases, and each of those releases got 2 weeks of testing done to them before they went to beta. Best team I ever worked on automated every single bug that they have ever seen into a regression test. That mentality requires having a test team that is equal in size (and technical capability!) to the development team, and the current trend of "developer tests" tends preclude such thorough testing practices. We live in a world where car entertainment systems can lock-up and reboot themselves and where headphones need firmware updates.
    - majkinetor 7y ago
      Yes, almost every single bug (not cosmetics IMO) should have proof in the form of test. Not doing it ? Instant turn down for me. But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. In one of my previous updates my camera stopped working so I couldn't use any IM any more. Tried to fix it for days in vain. Then latest update returned it so I realized that first time they simply turned it off by default (for paranoid people I guess that cover their camera with a tape; I found a setting after reading a changelog). Why ? WHy? WHY ? Why turning off camera FFS ? Or any other stupid decision like keeping windows.old for months with all those GBs of unused space ... You are totally right about it - web apps need this, browser is their OS. Normal OS doesn't. Even phone doesn't. At least leave me an option.
      - com2kid 7y ago
        > But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. Eh, it depends. Microsoft got seriously dinged in the press, and by customers, for their long release cycles. MacOS and all the mobile OSes, offered seriously cool new features on a regular basis! Windows looked stale by comparison. And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful! Being able to iterate on search so it now actually works! The improvements to OneDrive and the underlying file system. These are all great features that have rolled out with Windows. (Media controls from the lock screen, improvements to Windows Snap, better BT pairing.) Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers, and Google Music can't differentiate between differently named files that have blank ID3 tags, necessitating my using a file manager to play my MP3s. (That one seriously throws me for a loop, just show me the file name as a fallback!) (I should just get around to manually adding ID3 tags, but how is a regular end user supposed to figure out what is happening?) Honestly most of the time rolling Windows updates mean my OS just gradually gets better. I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?
  - arthurfm 7y ago
    Updates will get a lot better with Microsoft's new 'Santorini' OS (based on Windows Core OS). https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-os https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-os One of the big things Microsoft has been working towards with Windows Core OS is an improved Windows Update system that installs updates in the background and requires less than a minute to restart once those updates are ready to do so. How it works is very similar to how Android and Chrome OS do updates today. On those platforms, the OS runs in two separate mirrored partitions, and when an update is ready to install, the update is downloaded and installed to the offline partition that you're currently not using. When that's done, the OS will ask you to restart, and while it may look like you're just rebooting, what's actually happening is you're booting into the partition that just spent 25 minutes installing an update in the background. Windows Core OS keeps system updates to under a minute. It boots right up, as if there was never an update waiting to be installed, and that's because all the installing has already been done while you were busy using the other online partition. Now, you've booted into the partition where the update is installed, and the partition you were just in becomes the offline partition for newer updates to be installed to down the line. This should solve one of the big issues Windows has when it comes to updates. Updates can usually take anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes to install, and even longer on older devices. Windows Core OS solves this problem by making it so the user isn't unable to use their PC for no longer than a minute. It simply restarts like normal, and you're back up and running again.
    - majkinetor 7y ago
      If that stays on server only, it will be shame.
      - arthurfm 7y ago
        Windows Core OS is different from Windows Server Core. Santorini is the codename for Microsoft's forthcoming 'Windows Lite' OS designed for laptops and 2-in-1s. Microsoft is building out Santorini as the version of Windows Core OS that runs on consumer and education foldable PCs, laptops, and 2-in-1 tablets. It may even eventually show up on Microsoft's mythical Andromeda device. It's a new take on what Windows can be, introducing a brand new user experience that's a little more like Chrome OS and less like old-school Windows. It has deep ties with web experiences and puts universal Windows apps front and center, with the ultimate goal of having everything in the Microsoft Store runnable on Santorini. Santorini features a centered taskbar experience, similar to that on the Surface Hub 2X. There's a simple app launcher that doesn't feature live tiles, which lists your installed apps from the Microsoft Store or pinned websites. I'm also told that Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience, with apps and websites running under tabbed windows that also get grouped as such in the taskbar.
- einr 7y ago
  Windows [...] turns my computer on in the middle of the night This should be actually fucking illegal. Yet another nail in the Windows 10 coffin, then. It will never be on any of my machines. Never. The level of shit they think we will put up with is utterly outrageous.
  - com2kid 7y ago
    I have cron jobs on my VM that auto restart services, and for managed VMs, providers reboot and install security updates w/o giving me any say beyond a certain point. Although warnings are given. Windows has a slew of options. A giant dialog popped up asking me if I wanted to enable installing updates during quiet hours. I selected yes. I was given choices for when quiet hours are. The OS also has options to auto-detect quiet hours. The idea is good, I just wish the implementation was foolproof. Then again the desktop it doesn't work on is ancient and has been updated from Windows Vista to 7 to 10, so it is a bit finicky. The various update mechanisms work fine on my other machine.
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
      The "quiet hours" auto update is also the default way it always worked in Windows 7 home versions as well. I tend to delay Windows updates, but for patch Tuesday, Windows will override that and restart at 3am.
- blub 7y ago
  What you seem to ignore each time when doggedly defending MS is that this is not some checklist of grievances towards them, that once "fixed" will make everything be just fine again. No, Microsoft have proven that they couldn't care less about the privacy or concerns of large parts of their customer base. Windows 10 telemetry is not an oopsie or one time thing. It's an entire saga that got wide press coverage every time Microsoft was playing dumb, diverting attention or making up excuses and generally being asses. Windows 10 updates completely ignoring the wishes of the owner of the PC is not a one time thing either. Microsoft has simply lost respect for its customers, it thinks it can throw some open source bones over the fence to keep the nerds happy and switch to SaaS, this time copying Google instead of Apple. They deserve zero respect for that, no matter how many terminals they include in their OS.
  - OneWordSoln 7y ago
    The negativity on this site towards people who express any opinion beyond the herd is making this site a groupthink echo chamber. This karma system has failed.
    - zoeysaurusrex 7y ago
      Totally agree. I've largely quit commenting here at all because of it. I always thought gross polarization of topics would never come to HN, but here we are.
      - OneWordSoln 7y ago
        And the result is that the comments are really of very little use anymore. Time was they used to be enlightening. Too bad Paul Graham doesn't give a rat's ass. He has the opportunity to create something beneficial to world society here but doesn't care to put in the money and thought to figure out how to make it work.
      - stupendousyappi 7y ago
        I think HN still has one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the web.
- mkl 7y ago
  > Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless. Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.
  - naikrovek 7y ago
    Reboots are a reality and they are never going to go away on this architecture. Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot. Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can. There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me." We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots? Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      > We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots? Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening. I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.
      - jyrkesh 7y ago
        The latest features I see in Windows Update seem to give the user total control. Am I mistaken? Maybe it's because I'm running a more expensive SKU? I can defer updates for 7 days, get extra notifications for reboots further in advance, and put myself in a channel that sees very few updates.
- dvlsg 7y ago
  Just this morning I got a pop up on my windows computer with a 30 minute countdown to update time. Which I know will fail - my laptop has been failing to update for the past year or so, but windows still insists on restarting my computer so it can fail the update again. _Sometimes_ using the "defer updates for a month" will work. Other times, windows will completely ignore it and restart in the middle of my work day.
baud147258 7y ago
> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. I've been using exclusively Windows 10, for 2 years at work and more at home, not once had I an uncontrolled reboot. Perhaps rebooting at least once a week help.

by jdance 7y ago

com2kid 7y ago

> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. Each of the last few major updates have added more and more control over this. The latest release is allowing even more user control. Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless. At some point MS, as the maker of the largest consumer OS, has a responsibility to patch critical vulnerabilities. Balancing the need to keep users secure with the inconvenience of a reboot, and the feelings of lack of control that come with it, is not an easy task. On the opposite side, I've been frequently annoyed when Windows, unable to install an update, turns my computer on in the middle of the night, fails to install, and keeps the machine on. Lovely way to waste electricity, error messages are silent, and I had to run a command line power management tool to determine why my machine was waking up every night at 1am.

majkinetor 7y ago
W10 has seriously fucked up updates. Nowdays its more like - will I be able to use computer AT ALL after the update then anything else. Not to mention problems to disable it, unlimited restarts etc. Seriously, YOU DUDE, who lead this at MS - just go, get fired, whatever !!!
- com2kid 7y ago
  Yeah, the recent # of updates with critical failures has resulted in a huge loss of trust. I wouldn't touch an insiders build, I rely too much on my machine being stable. It is rather sad, a decade ago everything coming out of Microsoft was super stable, but of course it came out much more slowly. The entire industry has moved to a "less testing, more releases" mentality. Not so bad for websites, where the damage is sandboxed by the browser, but IMHO it is unfortunate this mentality has pervaded everything. I totally get rapid release cycles, I've lead teams that releases C++ code every 3 weeks! But we had a A+ solid test team backing up every one of our releases, and each of those releases got 2 weeks of testing done to them before they went to beta. Best team I ever worked on automated every single bug that they have ever seen into a regression test. That mentality requires having a test team that is equal in size (and technical capability!) to the development team, and the current trend of "developer tests" tends preclude such thorough testing practices. We live in a world where car entertainment systems can lock-up and reboot themselves and where headphones need firmware updates.
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    Yes, almost every single bug (not cosmetics IMO) should have proof in the form of test. Not doing it ? Instant turn down for me. But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. In one of my previous updates my camera stopped working so I couldn't use any IM any more. Tried to fix it for days in vain. Then latest update returned it so I realized that first time they simply turned it off by default (for paranoid people I guess that cover their camera with a tape; I found a setting after reading a changelog). Why ? WHy? WHY ? Why turning off camera FFS ? Or any other stupid decision like keeping windows.old for months with all those GBs of unused space ... You are totally right about it - web apps need this, browser is their OS. Normal OS doesn't. Even phone doesn't. At least leave me an option.
    - com2kid 7y ago
      > But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. Eh, it depends. Microsoft got seriously dinged in the press, and by customers, for their long release cycles. MacOS and all the mobile OSes, offered seriously cool new features on a regular basis! Windows looked stale by comparison. And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful! Being able to iterate on search so it now actually works! The improvements to OneDrive and the underlying file system. These are all great features that have rolled out with Windows. (Media controls from the lock screen, improvements to Windows Snap, better BT pairing.) Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers, and Google Music can't differentiate between differently named files that have blank ID3 tags, necessitating my using a file manager to play my MP3s. (That one seriously throws me for a loop, just show me the file name as a fallback!) (I should just get around to manually adding ID3 tags, but how is a regular end user supposed to figure out what is happening?) Honestly most of the time rolling Windows updates mean my OS just gradually gets better. I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?
- arthurfm 7y ago
  Updates will get a lot better with Microsoft's new 'Santorini' OS (based on Windows Core OS). https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-os https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-os One of the big things Microsoft has been working towards with Windows Core OS is an improved Windows Update system that installs updates in the background and requires less than a minute to restart once those updates are ready to do so. How it works is very similar to how Android and Chrome OS do updates today. On those platforms, the OS runs in two separate mirrored partitions, and when an update is ready to install, the update is downloaded and installed to the offline partition that you're currently not using. When that's done, the OS will ask you to restart, and while it may look like you're just rebooting, what's actually happening is you're booting into the partition that just spent 25 minutes installing an update in the background. Windows Core OS keeps system updates to under a minute. It boots right up, as if there was never an update waiting to be installed, and that's because all the installing has already been done while you were busy using the other online partition. Now, you've booted into the partition where the update is installed, and the partition you were just in becomes the offline partition for newer updates to be installed to down the line. This should solve one of the big issues Windows has when it comes to updates. Updates can usually take anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes to install, and even longer on older devices. Windows Core OS solves this problem by making it so the user isn't unable to use their PC for no longer than a minute. It simply restarts like normal, and you're back up and running again.
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    If that stays on server only, it will be shame.
    - arthurfm 7y ago
      Windows Core OS is different from Windows Server Core. Santorini is the codename for Microsoft's forthcoming 'Windows Lite' OS designed for laptops and 2-in-1s. Microsoft is building out Santorini as the version of Windows Core OS that runs on consumer and education foldable PCs, laptops, and 2-in-1 tablets. It may even eventually show up on Microsoft's mythical Andromeda device. It's a new take on what Windows can be, introducing a brand new user experience that's a little more like Chrome OS and less like old-school Windows. It has deep ties with web experiences and puts universal Windows apps front and center, with the ultimate goal of having everything in the Microsoft Store runnable on Santorini. Santorini features a centered taskbar experience, similar to that on the Surface Hub 2X. There's a simple app launcher that doesn't feature live tiles, which lists your installed apps from the Microsoft Store or pinned websites. I'm also told that Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience, with apps and websites running under tabbed windows that also get grouped as such in the taskbar.
einr 7y ago
Windows [...] turns my computer on in the middle of the night This should be actually fucking illegal. Yet another nail in the Windows 10 coffin, then. It will never be on any of my machines. Never. The level of shit they think we will put up with is utterly outrageous.
- com2kid 7y ago
  I have cron jobs on my VM that auto restart services, and for managed VMs, providers reboot and install security updates w/o giving me any say beyond a certain point. Although warnings are given. Windows has a slew of options. A giant dialog popped up asking me if I wanted to enable installing updates during quiet hours. I selected yes. I was given choices for when quiet hours are. The OS also has options to auto-detect quiet hours. The idea is good, I just wish the implementation was foolproof. Then again the desktop it doesn't work on is ancient and has been updated from Windows Vista to 7 to 10, so it is a bit finicky. The various update mechanisms work fine on my other machine.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    The "quiet hours" auto update is also the default way it always worked in Windows 7 home versions as well. I tend to delay Windows updates, but for patch Tuesday, Windows will override that and restart at 3am.
blub 7y ago
What you seem to ignore each time when doggedly defending MS is that this is not some checklist of grievances towards them, that once "fixed" will make everything be just fine again. No, Microsoft have proven that they couldn't care less about the privacy or concerns of large parts of their customer base. Windows 10 telemetry is not an oopsie or one time thing. It's an entire saga that got wide press coverage every time Microsoft was playing dumb, diverting attention or making up excuses and generally being asses. Windows 10 updates completely ignoring the wishes of the owner of the PC is not a one time thing either. Microsoft has simply lost respect for its customers, it thinks it can throw some open source bones over the fence to keep the nerds happy and switch to SaaS, this time copying Google instead of Apple. They deserve zero respect for that, no matter how many terminals they include in their OS.
- OneWordSoln 7y ago
  The negativity on this site towards people who express any opinion beyond the herd is making this site a groupthink echo chamber. This karma system has failed.
  - zoeysaurusrex 7y ago
    Totally agree. I've largely quit commenting here at all because of it. I always thought gross polarization of topics would never come to HN, but here we are.
    - OneWordSoln 7y ago
      And the result is that the comments are really of very little use anymore. Time was they used to be enlightening. Too bad Paul Graham doesn't give a rat's ass. He has the opportunity to create something beneficial to world society here but doesn't care to put in the money and thought to figure out how to make it work.
    - stupendousyappi 7y ago
      I think HN still has one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the web.
mkl 7y ago
> Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless. Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  Reboots are a reality and they are never going to go away on this architecture. Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot. Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can. There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me." We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots? Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots? Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening. I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.
    - jyrkesh 7y ago
      The latest features I see in Windows Update seem to give the user total control. Am I mistaken? Maybe it's because I'm running a more expensive SKU? I can defer updates for 7 days, get extra notifications for reboots further in advance, and put myself in a channel that sees very few updates.
dvlsg 7y ago
Just this morning I got a pop up on my windows computer with a 30 minute countdown to update time. Which I know will fail - my laptop has been failing to update for the past year or so, but windows still insists on restarting my computer so it can fail the update again. _Sometimes_ using the "defer updates for a month" will work. Other times, windows will completely ignore it and restart in the middle of my work day.

baud147258 7y ago

> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows. I've been using exclusively Windows 10, for 2 years at work and more at home, not once had I an uncontrolled reboot. Perhaps rebooting at least once a week help.