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I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being t

I stopped using my Microsoft Surface Pro because it had the same issues. It's a clusterfuck of bad design decisions at Microsoft, the most offensive one being that they prioritize the execution of their scheduled spyware upload (telemetry) over honoring the agreement with the user that a sleeping PC will remain asleep unless the user takes action. It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. Plus as described here, many Windows 10 laptops will either burn themselves, or the battery will be empty whenever you need em.

xyst 5y ago
I feel using Windows for anything other than gaming is just going to give you more headaches than just learning to use a unix based OS. Most applications are available on multiple platforms and alternatives exist for those few applications that are not available. In my opinion, the only reason why Windows is so prevalent in the "enterprise" world is because Microsoft provides support contracts to make it easier to adopt. Problems with your windows laptop? Send it off to Microsoft or open a business priority ticket to have them work on it for you. No need to hire an internal IT team.
- lrem 5y ago
  I'm a hobbyist photographer. Not enough energy for the hobby to learn new software, so I'm stuck with Lightroom. And since I didn't want another Mac, I'm on Windows now for my personal laptop. It's ok. Not as snazzy as MacOS. But security/privacy concerns excluded, feels less headachey than Linux (which I'm also using in parallel, since Slackware 7).
- Miraste 5y ago
  I'm not unfamiliar with Linux and I've been looking into switching recently after a long string of Windows "features" causing problems, but unfortunately gaming isn't the only area Microsoft has an advantage. Linux still doesn't support HDR, for instance. It also has a lot of problems with desktop compositing, because the switch from X to Wayland is at the point where neither of them are good options. That's not even getting into enterprise software compatibility. For programming, by all means use Linux instead of Windows, it's better. For anything else, it's still not there yet.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Why is anyone interested in HDR? 16M colors should be enough for anyone. I do have minor issues when scaling my 4K screen to a lower resolution, and starting a fullscreen game, but that’s about it.
    - exikyut 5y ago
      I personally hate the color banding you get from things like big drop shadow radiuses in webpages. Look at them from juuust the wrong angle and... war flashbacks to Windows 3.1 in 256 colors. I'm not sure if newer tech has better viewing angles than my old (but not that old) IPS LCD, but having having greater color depth to represent color fades with finer progression, and having more pixels to spread the fade across (hidpi), does sound like a nice step forward to me. ~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        > ~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace. Given that we're starting with 24 bits / 16.7 million, we're just up 6 bits more.. or 2 more bits per color... so a purely red gradient would have 4x as many steps. And we're using some of that space to get "whiter than white" -- so that the brightest white in photos/videos can be brighter than the normal value of white. https://www.lifewire.com/how-apple-devices-show-hdr-brighter-than-pure-white-5090726 https://www.lifewire.com/how-apple-devices-show-hdr-brighter...
    - Miraste 5y ago
      It's not about the colors so much as the fantastic contrast, it really makes games/videos feel more alive.
- lrvick 5y ago
  I even dropped Windows for gaming. Almost all Steam games work flawlessly out of the box now thanks to extensive investment in Proton. That is why the Valve is confident shipping the steam deck with Linux.
  - dontbesquare 5y ago
    Thank you for giving me the courage to go this route. The only reason I'm on Windows at this point is for gaming. Time to give Proton another try. I can't wait for my Steam Deck to arrive next year! =)
    - milesvp 5y ago
      Some games will have issues due largely to drivers. But I stopped booting to my win7 partition at least a year and a half ago, and gaming on steam has only gotten better. Just know that games with anti cheat tend to not work. Lucky for me the only multiplayer game I play much of is Overwatch on lutris. And lutris is still supported enough by blizzard that it won’t trigger a ban by itself.
      - lrvick 5y ago
        That situation just got a huge update this week: https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...
  - jturpin 5y ago
    I have just recently done the same thing, Pop OS with Steam, on my gaming PC. It works perfectly so far and I'm so thrilled - CS Go, Planet Coaster, and most recently Gas Station Simulator have been playing great for me. It gives me a lot of hope that the Steam deck is going to be a real game changer.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  True but I have to say Microsoft support is pretty awful. Most of the tickets that aren't trivial (and most aren't since we have pretty experienced people) end in endless "give us more logs / try one of the many things we've asked to try before again" loops until we either find the cause ourselves or a workaround. I know business premium support is a selling point (ironic because it actually costs money on its own) which is good for the CYA of top management. Someone to blame when stuff goes wrong. But it doesn't really solve issues on the floor and Microsoft isn't alone in that.
teawrecks 5y ago
Ah, must be why I've never had any issues with my xps running Linux.
- cududa 5y ago
  Yeah because if anything, Linux is definitely known for great power management on laptops
  - rathboma 5y ago
    Typically linux users (like myself) enable S3 sleep mode, which does exactly what most folks expect it to (sleep until a user action is taken). It's rock solid and I've never had a problem with it in ~8 years.
    - nobleach 5y ago
      While there is a BIOS hack to supposedly do that on an XPS 9500/9510, I've yet to see anyone get it to work. I am typing this comment on a 9500 that is mostly great with Linux. Its battery life is subpar though. I'm limited to S2 Idle or deep sleep.
    - Scarbutt 5y ago
      Yes that part works, the issue is when you wake up the laptop, half the system is broken.
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        Sleep and wake up have worked flawlessly for me across many machines over the years.
      - wutbrodo 5y ago
        What are you referring to in particular? I've never had anything be broken, in 15 years of exclusive Linux use. Though I don't share the confidence half this thread has that my experiences are universal, so I'm curious what you're referring to that I've managed to avoid.
cryptonector 5y ago
The lack of respect for users is really shocking lately.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  It's "for our security," dontchaknow.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  This isn't a "lately" thing. In 2007, a friend of mine postponed his Windows updates often enough that the machine just restarted to install updates _in the middle of the day while he was using it_. This wasn't a glitch either: there was an Update pop-up that just informed him "fuck you I'm restarting in X minutes". I'm in awe at how much contempt some guy at Microsoft must have for users and their use-cases to conceive of a feature like that. One imagines Microsoft thinks of all of their users as yokels doing nothing more important than playing Solitaire all day. It solidified in my mind the impression that Windows is not meant to be run on any machine you consider more important than a toy.
  - rantingdemon 5y ago
    I'm in two minds on this. As a user, it does irritate me that I'm forced to put all my work on hold to install updates. However, as a security professional, I think the general population doesn't understand just how critical it is to stay up to date with software updates. Sometimes we have to force them!
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      That's the thing: both of those views are compatible with my perspective. Contempt for the user may be in the interest of any given user, just like forcing your kid to eat vegetables instead of ice cream all the time is. But forcibly shutting down a machine in the middle of the day during active usage is a cardinal sin, just about the most fundamental user-hostile activity I can imagine. Microsoft may be right, and there may be a portion of the general population whose computer usage is 100% pointless nonsense that can be interrupted as easily as you'd interrupt your child's videogame to make him do homework. But I'm not in that group, and I doubt anybody here would consider everything they do on their computer to fall into that bucket. Computers touch _everything_. I'm not an NSA agent or a hacker on a heist team, and I can think of a dozen (non-work) times in the last month where a shutdown-interruption of the work I was doing would have been a big problem. Which brings me to my tldr: I'm not suggesting that Windows' decision is a generally bad one. I'm saying that it's a poor fit for anyone who considers their computer to be anything but a useless toy.
satysin 5y ago
This was the reason I returned my Surface Book 2 back in 2018. I got it out of my laptop bag one day and burnt my fingers it was so hot. Fans at 100% and it was sitting at 99C just one degree away from shutdown. That plus a whole host of annoying software bugs with the detachable design, keyboard backlight not working until I reboot, etc. was just a horrible experience so ended up getting a refund and buying a MacBook Pro when the 2018 models came out. Sure it has the crappy butterfly keyboard but three years later and that MacBook Pro is still a fantastic machine that I haven't had a single issue with. Cost the same as the Surface Book 2 as well. The new Surface Laptop Studio looks interesting but I am very hesitant to buy Microsoft hardware again. It looks nice but is plagued with issues even today from what friends and colleagues tell me. Real shame. Hopefully things are better with the new models announced this week but I will be sitting back and waiting a few months to see how they are in the real world rather than a 3 day review.
athenot 5y ago
> It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. That reminds me of last time I upgraded my mac by doing the transfer from one machine to the other. When the new mac booted for the first time, it had the same unsaved documents I had open on the old one. Things have come a long way.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  Yes, it usually works on Mac. And then you get used to it working, which makes it even more frustrating when it doesn't work anymore ^^
- fitzroy 5y ago
  Both proud and embarrassed to say I've had 150+ open Safari tabs persisting across three Mac laptops and five years of OS updates.
radicalbyte 5y ago
This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries. However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.
- Phileosopher 5y ago
  Same sentiment, and that's how I found Linux. I've now made it a solemn vow to convert every daily driver I have to dual-boot Win/Linux when it's a >100GB HD.
  - brianwawok 5y ago
    My XPS 13 on Ubuntu while sleping randomly turns on in my backpack and tries to melt a hole/burns the battery to 0. So I think at least SOME of it might be hardware related.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      The takeaway from this thread is that there is no platform safe from this issue.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The probability of the issue happening seems to be meaningfully far less on certain operating systems than others.
        Godel_unicode 5y ago
        I don't see how you can possibly make any meaningful conclusions about relative probability from this thread.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
Arrath 5y ago
I was chasing this issue with my previous desktop which, at the time, was in my bedroom. I've always preferred sleep/hibernate over shutting it down but when Windows decided it knew better and to constantly wake it from sleep in the middle of the night to do updates, filling my room with light from all the case/fan leds, I was about ready to go Office Space on the thing. What was worse, it wouldn't go back to sleep after the updates were complete. Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.
- qazwse_ 5y ago
  I had the exact same experience. Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. It's one of the major reasons I decided to switch to desktop Linux permanently.
  - chii 5y ago
    > Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. while i understand the intention behind automatic updates, i feel it's an anti-user design. It is based on the assumption (a bad one) that the user isn't intelligent enough to do the update at a time suitable for them. It assumes that the windows design and dev team knows better. It takes control away from the user. Rather than forcing automatic updates, it is better to teach the user why updates are important. Education beats subversion.
    - Firehawke 5y ago
      They tried that. We're all suffering because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches. Of course, now Microsoft has made it even worse by having routinely broken patches since they no longer do proper in-house testing. End result? Damned if you do patch, damned if you don't. Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.
LambdaTrain 5y ago
I used a dell inspiron laptop years ago. As its fan became broken, sometimes it could make noise that people can hear from miles away. And yes, it was scarying when Windows 10 auto reboot and updated at 3AM.
alexeiz 5y ago
My Windows laptop (Lenovo Ideapad S940) ran out of batter while presumably in the sleep mode in my backpack on multiple occasions. It got so ridiculous that now I listen to its fan after closing the laptop lid to make sure it really really in the sleep mode. I even went as far as trying to figure out how to revert back to the old S3 sleep mode instead of the new Windows 10 "connected standby", but it turned out to be quite a task (and I think it broke something else, so I had to revert things back).
- 1432132143 5y ago
  same story men, i got on my thinkpad lilted red led on front, but still its happens without reasons windows 7,8 many times also wekup by keyboard is disbaled
andrewia 5y ago
I found a solution on Microsoft's website: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/surface-power-management-with-modern-standby-in-windows-10/ba-p/328897 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s... It appears you can instruct it to avoid connecting to the internet to do stuff while in standby. I hope this works since my Surface Book has bad standby drain after sitting on my desk for 2-3 days off charge.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  The best part is, most of these security changes you do get reset every so often from patches, so it will revert to the "bad" behavior within 6 months.
  - xxs 5y ago
    pretty much all kind of settings reset - even extremely obnoxious ones like - Microsoft weather using Frankenstein degrees instead (Cience).
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Ah yes... microsoft implementing user-friendly shell commands: > powercfg /setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0 > powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0
  - VRay 5y ago
    Man, if I have to dig in that deep to get basic functionality, I'd rather just bite the bullet and get a linux machine set up the way I like
tzs 5y ago
I've got a Surface Pro 4. It was great for the first year or so, when I was using it as a tablet on the couch for browsing, reading, and as a digital scratchpad. I then got an iPad via a ridiculously good deal from Comcast (128 GB 6th generation (which was the latest generation at the time) for $120. The iPad took over most browsing, reading, and scratchpad duties, with the SP4 just getting occasional use when I needed something more general than the iPad. What I noticed when the SP4 went from daily use to weekly or so is that the battery would always be low when I went to use it. Charge it up fully and shut it down...and a week later it needs charging again. I believe that is because shut down is really some kind of sleep or hibernate. I've tried disabling all of those, and fast start. I've tried shutting down from the start menu, with and without the modifiers that are supposed to make it really shut down. I've tried command line commands that are supposed to really shut it down. I've tried shutting down from the BIOS. But no matter what I do it consumes significant power while off. If I leave it on the charger so that it will be ready when I need it, it seems to charge to full, then stop charging until the battery drains a bit, and then repeats that cycles. The result is after a couple years of sporadic use, the battery was degraded enough that now just using it for light browsing I'm lucky if I get 30 minutes of battery time. So now it is pretty much relegated to only being usable when hooked to external power. I'm never buying another Surface product. And I'm not buying any Windows laptops or tablets unless there is some reasonable way to definitely turn them all the way off and have them stay that way.
- Vrondi 5y ago
  There was a particular Windows Update, after which my Surface Pro started doing this more and more, and it eventually fried the battery to the point of not being able to charge enough to even get the data off. I loved that thing, but I didn't get another Surface.
thesuitonym 5y ago
Far be it for me to defend Microsoft here, but I feel like if you leave unsaved documents open overnight, you are asking for trouble. Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. This whole post is actually pretty confusing to me. I don't use Windows that frequently myself, but my work laptop, my wife's laptop, my child's laptop, and my Surface Pro 1 all have Windows 10 on them, and this sort of thing has never happened to me. But I do my updates in a timely manner, shut down my PCs regularly, and only use sleep for temporary moments when I'm away from my PC. I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair.
- elcomet 5y ago
  > Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. Because on other computers it just works. And if the computer stops it will re-open your unsaved documents.
- jlund-molfese 5y ago
  But I don’t think it’s an unrealistic expectation. A Linux server might have uptime measured in years, and the same thing is possible for a desktop (maybe you use your desktop as a home server, too)
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  > Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. In my case, it was mostly executables that I'm in the process of debugging and stepping through. I'm not aware of any debugger which can save and restore open file handles. > I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair. I would have argued just like you before I encountered the cursed tablet. That thing had an integrated battery, so no matter what you tried, it could still turn on by itself if it wanted to. The only reliable way to make it stop making noises in the middle of the night was to thoroughly drain its battery. That said, the Dell XPS support post that I commented on is by itself pretty detailed about all the issues that Dell machines are having with Windows 10. I think you'll believe me that Dell wouldn't publicly post that unless they had a lot of support requests related to it. So it's apparently a widespread issue.
naikrovek 5y ago
I mean, I know it's too late to help you, but running "powercfg.exe /lastwake" after a windows computer wakes from standby will tell you exactly what woke it up, if it knows. I've never had it return with "unknown" once in over a decade, but some people I know have. if you can find all the things waking the computer, and fix those things, it will never wake without user intervention. usually, for me, it's been device drivers which have permission to wake the computer from sleep by default, for some stupid reason. removing that permission on those devices has eliminated "hot bag syndrome" for me entirely. I agree that these steps should not need to be taken. device driver authors are the source of almost all bad crap like this in windows.
- oauea 5y ago
  Power & Sleep settings > Additional power settings > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Sleep > Allow wake timers > Disable
  - Vrondi 5y ago
    This "Allow Wake Timers" option does not exist in this location on my PC.
- errantspark 5y ago
  I have NEVER in my life ever gotten a useful output from `powercfg.exe /lastwake`. I'm honestly surprised to hear someone mention it as working, I thought it was the sort of thing that was just copypasted on clickfarming tech-help blogs without any sort of verification that it actually works. In fact I just tried it again on 4 computers and every one of them said "Wake History Count - 0".
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    note that it won't report reasons the machine was woken from hibernate, since hibernate isn't a sleep state. also, run the command as an administrator. not just using an account that is an administrator. use an elevated cmd prompt or PowerShell window. if you're doing all that, idk what's going on. You can, however, see what devices are capable of waking your machine, and then disable them, by using the commands in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647492
jimmaswell 5y ago
I've always had success with hibernate. Does this stuff bypass hibernate now too?
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Yes I had a Surface Pro 3 with Linux on it and it still woke up in my bag sometimes. I'd take it out and it'd be running, boiling hot and battery almost depleted. I never figured out what caused it, maybe it was something in the firmware. Or something bumping the power button? However it was in a padded laptop compartment on its own.This was actually from full-off. Not even standby. What didn't help was that I used LUKS full disk encryption so it would be sitting there waiting for a password and there was no sleep timeout. In the end I found the SP3 was just not great for Linux, I had so many hardware issues. Sometimes I'd detach the keyboard and reattach, and it'd just not work. Or the pen would stop working or the rotation etc. Mind you this is around the time it came out. So a good while ago.
gbba 5y ago
I really like the form factor, but my Surface Pro 7 has really let me down lately. It’s about a year old now and fully patched, but the battery barely lasts 4 hours, camera is buggy (Windows Hello stops working), and randomly shuts down.
theoj 5y ago
What's super annoying is that Dell does not provide a BIOS option to switch between connected standby and S3. It's likely a cost saving decision because S3 is more complex to implement and having both options even more so. There are also some rumors that Dell may be under contractual agreement with MS to only support connected standby.
- MertsA 5y ago
  Psst. On certain motherboards Dell just removed the option from the UI but the implementation is still there. They also oh so helpfully store their config in EFI variables so... If you're lucky you can just flip the right bit and enable S3 sleep again. For example the G5 5505 has it in D01SetupConfig and you just need to find the right offset that corresponds to it. https://www.reddit.com/r/DellG5SE/comments/kpg3ez/how_to_disable_smartshift_and_enable_s3_sleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DellG5SE/comments/kpg3ez/how_to_dis...
silverpepsi 5y ago
I actually had windows go so far as to start a laptop inside a tightly packed backpack around 3am for updates or whatever and restart chrome and start blasting YouTube advertising full volume when I needed to be up early the next morning. Disrupted sleep or potential house fire...Microsoft is beyond shameless and have been brazenly so for at least 20 some years now.
- brokencode 5y ago
  I doubt it intentionally started playing a YouTube video, so I don’t see how this is a shameless act. Most likely it just launched whatever you had open after it restarted or something. I seriously doubt Microsoft is making profit off of YouTube ads in Chrome.
  - noptd 5y ago
    I'd imagine shameless refers to Microsoft's lack of consideration when it comes to the second order effects of decisions like these.
Fogest 5y ago
I've owned both a Microsoft Surface laptop and currently own an XPS 15. Both of them I have had the same thing happen where they are in "sleep" mode and have woken up. I'll have them in a bag and open them up and it's really cooking inside the laptop sleeve and the laptop and bag are quite warm. Honestly the amount of heat there I wouldn't be surprised if there have been fires from this kind of stuff. Basically if I know I won't be using my laptop for a bit and am putting it in a bag I always make sure to turn it off now.
terrywang 5y ago
I was given a Latitude 5300 2-in-1 running Windows 10 by a client for a short term project last year, there were multiple `big bro` installed on it so I didn't bother to tinker it much other than requesting local admin access so as to install WSL2 and Ubuntu in order to build a productive environment to get things done (implement a flavour of K8s distribution in fully air-gapped environment). BIOS is password protected so I can't even run USB Live Linux distros (to test performance of the hardware or play around). Some interesting observations: 1. fan spins crazily for no reason randomly, and the laptop seemed to be always heated (in comparison with MBP and other laptops running Linux). 2. it can become overly hot and fan can spin even if it was in sleep! This was scary so after seeing it once I tend to power if off whenever finishing using it. Some times it didn't wake up, giving a QR code (BSOD...) 3. the not-too-bad specs failed to pump out expected performance (so sluggish), in comparison with similar hardware running Linux x86_64 or macOS (not surprised) NOTE: Feeling lucky that my kids school allows BYOD, simply picked M1 MBA for both to avoid the Windows debt (in most cases hardware is not to blame, I've used many Dell Latitude models with positive impression).
katbyte 5y ago
This is why I don’t use windows right here.
zakary 5y ago
I’d recommend just using a long term service channel version of Windows. It’s designed for embedded systems like MRIs so I doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap. Also doesn’t have the telemetry or most any other bloat ware Windows usually comes with.
- kasabali 5y ago
  > doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap That's misleading. LTSC version does everything regular versions do exactl wrt automatic updates and wakeups. Only difference is you can disable these with group policy in enterprise versions (which ltsc is)
  - marderfarker2 5y ago
    You can absolutely disable them in the Pro and Home editions.
    - kasabali 5y ago
      Updates are mandatory in Home edition. Sure you can brute-force your way around it but that hardly counts as disabling it.
JoBrad 5y ago
This really sounds like a hardware issue. I have had a Lenovo Carbon X1 for 3.5 years and have never had this issue with it.
efreak 5y ago
You can disable some of this by disabling the wake timers setting in your bios/UEFI menu. I personally turned them on intentionally, as I mostly use my PC as a music/fine server these days; I configured most of my applications (bubbleupnp, nginx, airsonic, everything, etc) to start up either as system services on boot; the rest (WSL, fb2k, calibre) start up on login via schtasks, so if my they aren't working remotely I can just login via TeamViewer to log into my profile. Without this setup, my computer would _never_ get updates, as I don't sit down at it much anymore.

xyst 5y ago

I feel using Windows for anything other than gaming is just going to give you more headaches than just learning to use a unix based OS. Most applications are available on multiple platforms and alternatives exist for those few applications that are not available. In my opinion, the only reason why Windows is so prevalent in the "enterprise" world is because Microsoft provides support contracts to make it easier to adopt. Problems with your windows laptop? Send it off to Microsoft or open a business priority ticket to have them work on it for you. No need to hire an internal IT team.

lrem 5y ago
I'm a hobbyist photographer. Not enough energy for the hobby to learn new software, so I'm stuck with Lightroom. And since I didn't want another Mac, I'm on Windows now for my personal laptop. It's ok. Not as snazzy as MacOS. But security/privacy concerns excluded, feels less headachey than Linux (which I'm also using in parallel, since Slackware 7).
Miraste 5y ago
I'm not unfamiliar with Linux and I've been looking into switching recently after a long string of Windows "features" causing problems, but unfortunately gaming isn't the only area Microsoft has an advantage. Linux still doesn't support HDR, for instance. It also has a lot of problems with desktop compositing, because the switch from X to Wayland is at the point where neither of them are good options. That's not even getting into enterprise software compatibility. For programming, by all means use Linux instead of Windows, it's better. For anything else, it's still not there yet.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Why is anyone interested in HDR? 16M colors should be enough for anyone. I do have minor issues when scaling my 4K screen to a lower resolution, and starting a fullscreen game, but that’s about it.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    I personally hate the color banding you get from things like big drop shadow radiuses in webpages. Look at them from juuust the wrong angle and... war flashbacks to Windows 3.1 in 256 colors. I'm not sure if newer tech has better viewing angles than my old (but not that old) IPS LCD, but having having greater color depth to represent color fades with finer progression, and having more pixels to spread the fade across (hidpi), does sound like a nice step forward to me. ~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      > ~"1.07 billion colors" though? Ehhh, I can't deny that does feel like overkill, but I'm honestly not even sure if there's a way to fix the above problem with a smaller colorspace. Given that we're starting with 24 bits / 16.7 million, we're just up 6 bits more.. or 2 more bits per color... so a purely red gradient would have 4x as many steps. And we're using some of that space to get "whiter than white" -- so that the brightest white in photos/videos can be brighter than the normal value of white. https://www.lifewire.com/how-apple-devices-show-hdr-brighter-than-pure-white-5090726 https://www.lifewire.com/how-apple-devices-show-hdr-brighter...
  - Miraste 5y ago
    It's not about the colors so much as the fantastic contrast, it really makes games/videos feel more alive.
lrvick 5y ago
I even dropped Windows for gaming. Almost all Steam games work flawlessly out of the box now thanks to extensive investment in Proton. That is why the Valve is confident shipping the steam deck with Linux.
- dontbesquare 5y ago
  Thank you for giving me the courage to go this route. The only reason I'm on Windows at this point is for gaming. Time to give Proton another try. I can't wait for my Steam Deck to arrive next year! =)
  - milesvp 5y ago
    Some games will have issues due largely to drivers. But I stopped booting to my win7 partition at least a year and a half ago, and gaming on steam has only gotten better. Just know that games with anti cheat tend to not work. Lucky for me the only multiplayer game I play much of is Overwatch on lutris. And lutris is still supported enough by blizzard that it won’t trigger a ban by itself.
    - lrvick 5y ago
      That situation just got a huge update this week: https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...
- jturpin 5y ago
  I have just recently done the same thing, Pop OS with Steam, on my gaming PC. It works perfectly so far and I'm so thrilled - CS Go, Planet Coaster, and most recently Gas Station Simulator have been playing great for me. It gives me a lot of hope that the Steam deck is going to be a real game changer.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
True but I have to say Microsoft support is pretty awful. Most of the tickets that aren't trivial (and most aren't since we have pretty experienced people) end in endless "give us more logs / try one of the many things we've asked to try before again" loops until we either find the cause ourselves or a workaround. I know business premium support is a selling point (ironic because it actually costs money on its own) which is good for the CYA of top management. Someone to blame when stuff goes wrong. But it doesn't really solve issues on the floor and Microsoft isn't alone in that.

teawrecks 5y ago

Ah, must be why I've never had any issues with my xps running Linux.

cududa 5y ago
Yeah because if anything, Linux is definitely known for great power management on laptops
- rathboma 5y ago
  Typically linux users (like myself) enable S3 sleep mode, which does exactly what most folks expect it to (sleep until a user action is taken). It's rock solid and I've never had a problem with it in ~8 years.
  - nobleach 5y ago
    While there is a BIOS hack to supposedly do that on an XPS 9500/9510, I've yet to see anyone get it to work. I am typing this comment on a 9500 that is mostly great with Linux. Its battery life is subpar though. I'm limited to S2 Idle or deep sleep.
  - Scarbutt 5y ago
    Yes that part works, the issue is when you wake up the laptop, half the system is broken.
    - heavyset_go 5y ago
      Sleep and wake up have worked flawlessly for me across many machines over the years.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      What are you referring to in particular? I've never had anything be broken, in 15 years of exclusive Linux use. Though I don't share the confidence half this thread has that my experiences are universal, so I'm curious what you're referring to that I've managed to avoid.

cryptonector 5y ago

The lack of respect for users is really shocking lately.

CamperBob2 5y ago
It's "for our security," dontchaknow.
wutbrodo 5y ago
This isn't a "lately" thing. In 2007, a friend of mine postponed his Windows updates often enough that the machine just restarted to install updates _in the middle of the day while he was using it_. This wasn't a glitch either: there was an Update pop-up that just informed him "fuck you I'm restarting in X minutes". I'm in awe at how much contempt some guy at Microsoft must have for users and their use-cases to conceive of a feature like that. One imagines Microsoft thinks of all of their users as yokels doing nothing more important than playing Solitaire all day. It solidified in my mind the impression that Windows is not meant to be run on any machine you consider more important than a toy.
- rantingdemon 5y ago
  I'm in two minds on this. As a user, it does irritate me that I'm forced to put all my work on hold to install updates. However, as a security professional, I think the general population doesn't understand just how critical it is to stay up to date with software updates. Sometimes we have to force them!
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    That's the thing: both of those views are compatible with my perspective. Contempt for the user may be in the interest of any given user, just like forcing your kid to eat vegetables instead of ice cream all the time is. But forcibly shutting down a machine in the middle of the day during active usage is a cardinal sin, just about the most fundamental user-hostile activity I can imagine. Microsoft may be right, and there may be a portion of the general population whose computer usage is 100% pointless nonsense that can be interrupted as easily as you'd interrupt your child's videogame to make him do homework. But I'm not in that group, and I doubt anybody here would consider everything they do on their computer to fall into that bucket. Computers touch _everything_. I'm not an NSA agent or a hacker on a heist team, and I can think of a dozen (non-work) times in the last month where a shutdown-interruption of the work I was doing would have been a big problem. Which brings me to my tldr: I'm not suggesting that Windows' decision is a generally bad one. I'm saying that it's a poor fit for anyone who considers their computer to be anything but a useless toy.

satysin 5y ago

This was the reason I returned my Surface Book 2 back in 2018. I got it out of my laptop bag one day and burnt my fingers it was so hot. Fans at 100% and it was sitting at 99C just one degree away from shutdown. That plus a whole host of annoying software bugs with the detachable design, keyboard backlight not working until I reboot, etc. was just a horrible experience so ended up getting a refund and buying a MacBook Pro when the 2018 models came out. Sure it has the crappy butterfly keyboard but three years later and that MacBook Pro is still a fantastic machine that I haven't had a single issue with. Cost the same as the Surface Book 2 as well. The new Surface Laptop Studio looks interesting but I am very hesitant to buy Microsoft hardware again. It looks nice but is plagued with issues even today from what friends and colleagues tell me. Real shame. Hopefully things are better with the new models announced this week but I will be sitting back and waiting a few months to see how they are in the real world rather than a 3 day review.

athenot 5y ago

> It'll even install updates at night and then make reboot sounds to wake you up. And the next day, your unsaved open documents are all gone. That reminds me of last time I upgraded my mac by doing the transfer from one machine to the other. When the new mac booted for the first time, it had the same unsaved documents I had open on the old one. Things have come a long way.

fxtentacle 5y ago
Yes, it usually works on Mac. And then you get used to it working, which makes it even more frustrating when it doesn't work anymore ^^
fitzroy 5y ago
Both proud and embarrassed to say I've had 150+ open Safari tabs persisting across three Mac laptops and five years of OS updates.

radicalbyte 5y ago

This is the literal reason I switched to OSX. I dislike the impractical design of Macbooks - horrible connectivity and no way to swap batteries. However the combination of 15 hrs battery life + closing the lid and it not melting a hole in my bag trumps any negatives.

Phileosopher 5y ago
Same sentiment, and that's how I found Linux. I've now made it a solemn vow to convert every daily driver I have to dual-boot Win/Linux when it's a >100GB HD.
- brianwawok 5y ago
  My XPS 13 on Ubuntu while sleping randomly turns on in my backpack and tries to melt a hole/burns the battery to 0. So I think at least SOME of it might be hardware related.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    The takeaway from this thread is that there is no platform safe from this issue.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The probability of the issue happening seems to be meaningfully far less on certain operating systems than others.
      - Godel_unicode 5y ago
        I don't see how you can possibly make any meaningful conclusions about relative probability from this thread.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago

Arrath 5y ago

I was chasing this issue with my previous desktop which, at the time, was in my bedroom. I've always preferred sleep/hibernate over shutting it down but when Windows decided it knew better and to constantly wake it from sleep in the middle of the night to do updates, filling my room with light from all the case/fan leds, I was about ready to go Office Space on the thing. What was worse, it wouldn't go back to sleep after the updates were complete. Even worse, Microsoft made it so very hard to hunt down all the various settings and registry flags to disable that behavior, AND it reverted to those same settings after every major update. I absolutely despised that desktop for a while.

qazwse_ 5y ago
I had the exact same experience. Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. It's one of the major reasons I decided to switch to desktop Linux permanently.
- chii 5y ago
  > Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update. while i understand the intention behind automatic updates, i feel it's an anti-user design. It is based on the assumption (a bad one) that the user isn't intelligent enough to do the update at a time suitable for them. It assumes that the windows design and dev team knows better. It takes control away from the user. Rather than forcing automatic updates, it is better to teach the user why updates are important. Education beats subversion.
  - Firehawke 5y ago
    They tried that. We're all suffering because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches. Of course, now Microsoft has made it even worse by having routinely broken patches since they no longer do proper in-house testing. End result? Damned if you do patch, damned if you don't. Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.

LambdaTrain 5y ago

I used a dell inspiron laptop years ago. As its fan became broken, sometimes it could make noise that people can hear from miles away. And yes, it was scarying when Windows 10 auto reboot and updated at 3AM.

alexeiz 5y ago

My Windows laptop (Lenovo Ideapad S940) ran out of batter while presumably in the sleep mode in my backpack on multiple occasions. It got so ridiculous that now I listen to its fan after closing the laptop lid to make sure it really really in the sleep mode. I even went as far as trying to figure out how to revert back to the old S3 sleep mode instead of the new Windows 10 "connected standby", but it turned out to be quite a task (and I think it broke something else, so I had to revert things back).

1432132143 5y ago
same story men, i got on my thinkpad lilted red led on front, but still its happens without reasons windows 7,8 many times also wekup by keyboard is disbaled

andrewia 5y ago

I found a solution on Microsoft's website: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/surface-power-management-with-modern-standby-in-windows-10/ba-p/328897 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s... It appears you can instruct it to avoid connecting to the internet to do stuff while in standby. I hope this works since my Surface Book has bad standby drain after sitting on my desk for 2-3 days off charge.

brianwawok 5y ago
The best part is, most of these security changes you do get reset every so often from patches, so it will revert to the "bad" behavior within 6 months.
- xxs 5y ago
  pretty much all kind of settings reset - even extremely obnoxious ones like - Microsoft weather using Frankenstein degrees instead (Cience).
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Ah yes... microsoft implementing user-friendly shell commands: > powercfg /setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0 > powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_none F15576E8-98B7-4186-B944-EAFA664402D9 0
- VRay 5y ago
  Man, if I have to dig in that deep to get basic functionality, I'd rather just bite the bullet and get a linux machine set up the way I like

tzs 5y ago

I've got a Surface Pro 4. It was great for the first year or so, when I was using it as a tablet on the couch for browsing, reading, and as a digital scratchpad. I then got an iPad via a ridiculously good deal from Comcast (128 GB 6th generation (which was the latest generation at the time) for $120. The iPad took over most browsing, reading, and scratchpad duties, with the SP4 just getting occasional use when I needed something more general than the iPad. What I noticed when the SP4 went from daily use to weekly or so is that the battery would always be low when I went to use it. Charge it up fully and shut it down...and a week later it needs charging again. I believe that is because shut down is really some kind of sleep or hibernate. I've tried disabling all of those, and fast start. I've tried shutting down from the start menu, with and without the modifiers that are supposed to make it really shut down. I've tried command line commands that are supposed to really shut it down. I've tried shutting down from the BIOS. But no matter what I do it consumes significant power while off. If I leave it on the charger so that it will be ready when I need it, it seems to charge to full, then stop charging until the battery drains a bit, and then repeats that cycles. The result is after a couple years of sporadic use, the battery was degraded enough that now just using it for light browsing I'm lucky if I get 30 minutes of battery time. So now it is pretty much relegated to only being usable when hooked to external power. I'm never buying another Surface product. And I'm not buying any Windows laptops or tablets unless there is some reasonable way to definitely turn them all the way off and have them stay that way.

Vrondi 5y ago
There was a particular Windows Update, after which my Surface Pro started doing this more and more, and it eventually fried the battery to the point of not being able to charge enough to even get the data off. I loved that thing, but I didn't get another Surface.

thesuitonym 5y ago

Far be it for me to defend Microsoft here, but I feel like if you leave unsaved documents open overnight, you are asking for trouble. Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. This whole post is actually pretty confusing to me. I don't use Windows that frequently myself, but my work laptop, my wife's laptop, my child's laptop, and my Surface Pro 1 all have Windows 10 on them, and this sort of thing has never happened to me. But I do my updates in a timely manner, shut down my PCs regularly, and only use sleep for temporary moments when I'm away from my PC. I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair.

elcomet 5y ago
> Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. Because on other computers it just works. And if the computer stops it will re-open your unsaved documents.
jlund-molfese 5y ago
But I don’t think it’s an unrealistic expectation. A Linux server might have uptime measured in years, and the same thing is possible for a desktop (maybe you use your desktop as a home server, too)
fxtentacle 5y ago
> Why a person would ever walk away from a computer without saving is beyond me. In my case, it was mostly executables that I'm in the process of debugging and stepping through. I'm not aware of any debugger which can save and restore open file handles. > I just feel like a lot of the problems people have with Windows 10 aren't really in the software, but are between the keyboard and chair. I would have argued just like you before I encountered the cursed tablet. That thing had an integrated battery, so no matter what you tried, it could still turn on by itself if it wanted to. The only reliable way to make it stop making noises in the middle of the night was to thoroughly drain its battery. That said, the Dell XPS support post that I commented on is by itself pretty detailed about all the issues that Dell machines are having with Windows 10. I think you'll believe me that Dell wouldn't publicly post that unless they had a lot of support requests related to it. So it's apparently a widespread issue.

naikrovek 5y ago

I mean, I know it's too late to help you, but running "powercfg.exe /lastwake" after a windows computer wakes from standby will tell you exactly what woke it up, if it knows. I've never had it return with "unknown" once in over a decade, but some people I know have. if you can find all the things waking the computer, and fix those things, it will never wake without user intervention. usually, for me, it's been device drivers which have permission to wake the computer from sleep by default, for some stupid reason. removing that permission on those devices has eliminated "hot bag syndrome" for me entirely. I agree that these steps should not need to be taken. device driver authors are the source of almost all bad crap like this in windows.

oauea 5y ago
Power & Sleep settings > Additional power settings > Change plan settings > Change advanced power settings > Sleep > Allow wake timers > Disable
- Vrondi 5y ago
  This "Allow Wake Timers" option does not exist in this location on my PC.
errantspark 5y ago
I have NEVER in my life ever gotten a useful output from `powercfg.exe /lastwake`. I'm honestly surprised to hear someone mention it as working, I thought it was the sort of thing that was just copypasted on clickfarming tech-help blogs without any sort of verification that it actually works. In fact I just tried it again on 4 computers and every one of them said "Wake History Count - 0".
- naikrovek 5y ago
  note that it won't report reasons the machine was woken from hibernate, since hibernate isn't a sleep state. also, run the command as an administrator. not just using an account that is an administrator. use an elevated cmd prompt or PowerShell window. if you're doing all that, idk what's going on. You can, however, see what devices are capable of waking your machine, and then disable them, by using the commands in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647492

jimmaswell 5y ago

I've always had success with hibernate. Does this stuff bypass hibernate now too?

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Yes I had a Surface Pro 3 with Linux on it and it still woke up in my bag sometimes. I'd take it out and it'd be running, boiling hot and battery almost depleted. I never figured out what caused it, maybe it was something in the firmware. Or something bumping the power button? However it was in a padded laptop compartment on its own.This was actually from full-off. Not even standby. What didn't help was that I used LUKS full disk encryption so it would be sitting there waiting for a password and there was no sleep timeout. In the end I found the SP3 was just not great for Linux, I had so many hardware issues. Sometimes I'd detach the keyboard and reattach, and it'd just not work. Or the pen would stop working or the rotation etc. Mind you this is around the time it came out. So a good while ago.

gbba 5y ago

I really like the form factor, but my Surface Pro 7 has really let me down lately. It’s about a year old now and fully patched, but the battery barely lasts 4 hours, camera is buggy (Windows Hello stops working), and randomly shuts down.

theoj 5y ago

What's super annoying is that Dell does not provide a BIOS option to switch between connected standby and S3. It's likely a cost saving decision because S3 is more complex to implement and having both options even more so. There are also some rumors that Dell may be under contractual agreement with MS to only support connected standby.

MertsA 5y ago
Psst. On certain motherboards Dell just removed the option from the UI but the implementation is still there. They also oh so helpfully store their config in EFI variables so... If you're lucky you can just flip the right bit and enable S3 sleep again. For example the G5 5505 has it in D01SetupConfig and you just need to find the right offset that corresponds to it. https://www.reddit.com/r/DellG5SE/comments/kpg3ez/how_to_disable_smartshift_and_enable_s3_sleep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DellG5SE/comments/kpg3ez/how_to_dis...

silverpepsi 5y ago

I actually had windows go so far as to start a laptop inside a tightly packed backpack around 3am for updates or whatever and restart chrome and start blasting YouTube advertising full volume when I needed to be up early the next morning. Disrupted sleep or potential house fire...Microsoft is beyond shameless and have been brazenly so for at least 20 some years now.

brokencode 5y ago
I doubt it intentionally started playing a YouTube video, so I don’t see how this is a shameless act. Most likely it just launched whatever you had open after it restarted or something. I seriously doubt Microsoft is making profit off of YouTube ads in Chrome.
- noptd 5y ago
  I'd imagine shameless refers to Microsoft's lack of consideration when it comes to the second order effects of decisions like these.

Fogest 5y ago

I've owned both a Microsoft Surface laptop and currently own an XPS 15. Both of them I have had the same thing happen where they are in "sleep" mode and have woken up. I'll have them in a bag and open them up and it's really cooking inside the laptop sleeve and the laptop and bag are quite warm. Honestly the amount of heat there I wouldn't be surprised if there have been fires from this kind of stuff. Basically if I know I won't be using my laptop for a bit and am putting it in a bag I always make sure to turn it off now.

terrywang 5y ago

I was given a Latitude 5300 2-in-1 running Windows 10 by a client for a short term project last year, there were multiple `big bro` installed on it so I didn't bother to tinker it much other than requesting local admin access so as to install WSL2 and Ubuntu in order to build a productive environment to get things done (implement a flavour of K8s distribution in fully air-gapped environment). BIOS is password protected so I can't even run USB Live Linux distros (to test performance of the hardware or play around). Some interesting observations: 1. fan spins crazily for no reason randomly, and the laptop seemed to be always heated (in comparison with MBP and other laptops running Linux). 2. it can become overly hot and fan can spin even if it was in sleep! This was scary so after seeing it once I tend to power if off whenever finishing using it. Some times it didn't wake up, giving a QR code (BSOD...) 3. the not-too-bad specs failed to pump out expected performance (so sluggish), in comparison with similar hardware running Linux x86_64 or macOS (not surprised) NOTE: Feeling lucky that my kids school allows BYOD, simply picked M1 MBA for both to avoid the Windows debt (in most cases hardware is not to blame, I've used many Dell Latitude models with positive impression).

katbyte 5y ago

This is why I don’t use windows right here.

zakary 5y ago

I’d recommend just using a long term service channel version of Windows. It’s designed for embedded systems like MRIs so I doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap. Also doesn’t have the telemetry or most any other bloat ware Windows usually comes with.

kasabali 5y ago
> doesn’t do any of the auto install and restart crap That's misleading. LTSC version does everything regular versions do exactl wrt automatic updates and wakeups. Only difference is you can disable these with group policy in enterprise versions (which ltsc is)
- marderfarker2 5y ago
  You can absolutely disable them in the Pro and Home editions.
  - kasabali 5y ago
    Updates are mandatory in Home edition. Sure you can brute-force your way around it but that hardly counts as disabling it.

JoBrad 5y ago

This really sounds like a hardware issue. I have had a Lenovo Carbon X1 for 3.5 years and have never had this issue with it.

efreak 5y ago

You can disable some of this by disabling the wake timers setting in your bios/UEFI menu. I personally turned them on intentionally, as I mostly use my PC as a music/fine server these days; I configured most of my applications (bubbleupnp, nginx, airsonic, everything, etc) to start up either as system services on boot; the rest (WSL, fb2k, calibre) start up on login via schtasks, so if my they aren't working remotely I can just login via TeamViewer to log into my profile. Without this setup, my computer would _never_ get updates, as I don't sit down at it much anymore.