6 ms·

Programs that were launched with impossible command line options

52 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

ghostly_s 5y ago
tldr; the author considers "none" to be "impossible options." save your time.
- cshokie 5y ago
  > But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments Specific arguments aren’t the same as no arguments. The distinction is important here.
- easton 5y ago
  From a Windows perspective, launching the start menu without explorer.exe should be impossible (at least for non-wizards), which is why they thought this was impossible. It doesn’t make sense for a user to kill the start menu to relieve memory pressure, unless of course it’s a pig. Which it is in Windows 10+ :(
  - more_corn 5y ago
    It’s been a while since I games or windowsed, but don’t you want to kill the start menu anyway so you don’t accidentally hit the windows key and interrupt your game?
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      I remember that would be kind of an issue like 15-20 years ago -- not sure why, but switching out from a 3D game to the desktop would take forever (I mean I can imagine a bunch of reasons -- ram was expensive, hard drives were slow, swap was more of a thing, processors were single core, graphics cards had terrible drivers, etc etc -- the reasons are too numerous for me to nail it down). Nowadays on any reasonably performant system, it would just possibly pop the start menu up for a second, and then you'd click on the game -- everything should be fine outside of super competitive situations. Hitting start was always a rare event anyway, but now it's been degraded from a rare catastrophe to a rare minuscule inconvenience.
      - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        It used to be a lot more common for games to run a separately set screen resolution than the OS, so transitioning in and out of a game might change your screen size. Windowed mode and "Windowed (Fullscreen) were usually to not do this, and generally were easier if you task switched while gaming (especially for MMOs). I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to.
        hnra 5y ago
        > I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to. I would guess the opposite? 4k monitors are fairly cheap while GFX cards which can run games at that resolution with a decent FPS are expensive. Maybe hardware has gotten cheaper or way more performant in the last years though.
        tym0 5y ago
        A lot of games now have an option to render the UI at native resolution but render the actual game at a lower resolution for performance reasons.
        ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        I think more than likely the majority of people have either a 1080p or 4K display, and if they do, they are using that resolution both when on their desktop and when in a game. But if you remember back in the VGA days, it wasn't uncommon to have a game set an 800x600 resolution even though you had a 1024x768 display, so switching in and out of the game came with some delay to manage that.
    - plorkyeran 5y ago
      Disabling that doesn't require killing the start menu.
  - metaphor 5y ago
    > It doesn’t make sense for a user to... Famous last words of many a unemployed junior developer...just sayin'.
encryptluks2 5y ago
This seems like partially a failure with how Microsoft launches UWP apps. I honestly can't stand Microsoft's app store. It has to be the worst.
duxup 5y ago
I remember trying to kill everything I could to optimize my gaming on my PC when I played a lot of games. I soon discovered that outside one or two “bad” programs, I was killing a lot of little programs for no noticeable benefit.
themodelplumber 5y ago
It's funny to read this. My system did something similar to me today, since I run a python script that sacrifices (kills) memory hogs that end up contributing to total system lock up in Linux: https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733 https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733 So there I was, working on an illustration in Inkscape, zoomed in a bunch, selected a path, and after a brief lockup, no mouse cursor movement even available, boom. Inkscape was auto-killed and the script sent a notifier that it had intervened in this way for the greater good. Mouse cursor moveable again. And OK, so I was running up against the limit for sure, tons of memory use. There is supposedly built-in system tooling that handles this in Linux, but it doesn't. In the meantime I'm happy for my little script I found online, because the whole point is to break just one or two things and hand some control back to me, instead of breaking _everything_. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-runs https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-run...
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  In case you haven't already seen it, there's a relatively widely packaged program called earlyoom to do this. Especially helpful because it lets you tell it what to try and kill first, and what to try and spare.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Oh that's cool. Yeah I'd much rather it kill Firefox or all my VLC windows than my artwork. Thank you.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Happy to help:) Yeah, I set it to kill Firefox since that's "safe" and that's usually the memory hog in the first place:)
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Linux's OOM killer always seems to run too late (once it's already locked up meaning it takes like half an hour for it to free up the memory. It's been like this for years, so I hope someone eventually fixes it.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> But the Start menu is a UWP program, > More generally, instead of terminating UWP apps, just minimize them, which causes them to save their state and suspend. If the system is placed under memory pressure, the system will terminate suspended UWP apps automatically. So... Can you minimize the start menu? Will the system automatically terminate it? And how many holes did they have to poke in the sandbox to make that even work?
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  I think the Start Menu is in fact, mostly always minimized. The taskbar is not the same thing as the Start Menu. And the taskbar often displays correctly even when the Start Menu is broken and won't open.
throwawayboise 5y ago
The linux OOM killer should take a lesson. It seems to like killing sshd, when all it really needs to do is grep the process list for "java" (or more often these days, "python")
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Or even worse is when it kills your X server taking everything else down with it.
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  As a linux admin java launch options drive me absolutely crazy. In the process list a lot of normal, easily understood things, and then a 400 char list of -XX -Xms -Xmx overly verbose randomness. Don't get me started on how it's also always the java apps that have mem leaks and eat way more than intended mem. I don't have time to do your heap dumps for you devs!
userbinator 5y ago
I was a little mystified when I read the following sentence, since the start menu (and taskbar) has in my experience always been part of explorer.exe, and not a separate process (unless he was referring to explorer.exe itself, which I've killed and restarted a few times without issue, so that couldn't be it either): And one of the programs that this utility decide was not worthy of keeping around was the Start menu, so it terminated it when your game started. And then when the game was over, it relaunched it. ...and then all became clear shortly after: But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments, and it is supposed to be run in a low integrity app container. Raymond is obviously going to be pro-MS, but I can't decide whether the ultimate blame here is the third-party utility, or MS for the design decision that somehow the start menu needs to be its own process, require commandline arguments and whatever starts it to do something special (unlike explorer.exe, which establishes its own environment appropriately) or indeed the whole shitshow that is UWP. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607 It seems people have tried replacing the shell with one from an older version of Windows, but it's not a direct drop-in (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsbU73Idx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsbU73Idx4 , warning: audio is useless); with some additional work, I suppose it might be possible.
- Swisstone 5y ago
  The fact the start menu lives in its own process is an implementation detail, no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe, so no one should expect start menu to be part of explorer.exe. Third party utilities should never kill random processes to begin with... that's a non-sense.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    Why shouldn’t they kill processes? If the OS didn’t want third party apps to be able to kill random processes it wouldn’t provide APIs for it to do so.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe I'm pretty sure the older versions of Windows actually had that in the (much more detailed) documentation they came with.
nik282000 5y ago
> Its advertising copy calls out useless “productivity apps” as one of those non-essential processes. (Yeah, how dare you let a computer be used for productivity? Can’t you see I’m playing a game?) So, does this guy not realize that 'home gaming' makes them a hell of a lot more money than 'home productivity'?
vital_beach 5y ago
if the start menu was just a list of programs you may want to launch, it could probably be started and killed as needed...

52 points by headalgorithm 5y ago

ghostly_s 5y ago

tldr; the author considers "none" to be "impossible options." save your time.

cshokie 5y ago
> But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments Specific arguments aren’t the same as no arguments. The distinction is important here.
easton 5y ago
From a Windows perspective, launching the start menu without explorer.exe should be impossible (at least for non-wizards), which is why they thought this was impossible. It doesn’t make sense for a user to kill the start menu to relieve memory pressure, unless of course it’s a pig. Which it is in Windows 10+ :(
- more_corn 5y ago
  It’s been a while since I games or windowsed, but don’t you want to kill the start menu anyway so you don’t accidentally hit the windows key and interrupt your game?
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    I remember that would be kind of an issue like 15-20 years ago -- not sure why, but switching out from a 3D game to the desktop would take forever (I mean I can imagine a bunch of reasons -- ram was expensive, hard drives were slow, swap was more of a thing, processors were single core, graphics cards had terrible drivers, etc etc -- the reasons are too numerous for me to nail it down). Nowadays on any reasonably performant system, it would just possibly pop the start menu up for a second, and then you'd click on the game -- everything should be fine outside of super competitive situations. Hitting start was always a rare event anyway, but now it's been degraded from a rare catastrophe to a rare minuscule inconvenience.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      It used to be a lot more common for games to run a separately set screen resolution than the OS, so transitioning in and out of a game might change your screen size. Windowed mode and "Windowed (Fullscreen) were usually to not do this, and generally were easier if you task switched while gaming (especially for MMOs). I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to.
      - hnra 5y ago
        > I think nowadays it's much less common for games to run at a different resolution than you've already set your display to. I would guess the opposite? 4k monitors are fairly cheap while GFX cards which can run games at that resolution with a decent FPS are expensive. Maybe hardware has gotten cheaper or way more performant in the last years though.
        tym0 5y ago
        A lot of games now have an option to render the UI at native resolution but render the actual game at a lower resolution for performance reasons.
        ocdtrekkie 5y ago
        I think more than likely the majority of people have either a 1080p or 4K display, and if they do, they are using that resolution both when on their desktop and when in a game. But if you remember back in the VGA days, it wasn't uncommon to have a game set an 800x600 resolution even though you had a 1024x768 display, so switching in and out of the game came with some delay to manage that.
  - plorkyeran 5y ago
    Disabling that doesn't require killing the start menu.
- metaphor 5y ago
  > It doesn’t make sense for a user to... Famous last words of many a unemployed junior developer...just sayin'.

encryptluks2 5y ago

This seems like partially a failure with how Microsoft launches UWP apps. I honestly can't stand Microsoft's app store. It has to be the worst.

duxup 5y ago

I remember trying to kill everything I could to optimize my gaming on my PC when I played a lot of games. I soon discovered that outside one or two “bad” programs, I was killing a lot of little programs for no noticeable benefit.

themodelplumber 5y ago

It's funny to read this. My system did something similar to me today, since I run a python script that sacrifices (kills) memory hogs that end up contributing to total system lock up in Linux: https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733 https://askubuntu.com/a/1018733 So there I was, working on an illustration in Inkscape, zoomed in a bunch, selected a path, and after a brief lockup, no mouse cursor movement even available, boom. Inkscape was auto-killed and the script sent a notifier that it had intervened in this way for the greater good. Mouse cursor moveable again. And OK, so I was running up against the limit for sure, tons of memory use. There is supposedly built-in system tooling that handles this in Linux, but it doesn't. In the meantime I'm happy for my little script I found online, because the whole point is to break just one or two things and hand some control back to me, instead of breaking _everything_. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-runs https://askubuntu.com/questions/1258371/oom-killer-never-run...

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
In case you haven't already seen it, there's a relatively widely packaged program called earlyoom to do this. Especially helpful because it lets you tell it what to try and kill first, and what to try and spare.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Oh that's cool. Yeah I'd much rather it kill Firefox or all my VLC windows than my artwork. Thank you.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Happy to help:) Yeah, I set it to kill Firefox since that's "safe" and that's usually the memory hog in the first place:)
charcircuit 5y ago
Linux's OOM killer always seems to run too late (once it's already locked up meaning it takes like half an hour for it to free up the memory. It's been like this for years, so I hope someone eventually fixes it.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> But the Start menu is a UWP program, > More generally, instead of terminating UWP apps, just minimize them, which causes them to save their state and suspend. If the system is placed under memory pressure, the system will terminate suspended UWP apps automatically. So... Can you minimize the start menu? Will the system automatically terminate it? And how many holes did they have to poke in the sandbox to make that even work?

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
I think the Start Menu is in fact, mostly always minimized. The taskbar is not the same thing as the Start Menu. And the taskbar often displays correctly even when the Start Menu is broken and won't open.

throwawayboise 5y ago

The linux OOM killer should take a lesson. It seems to like killing sshd, when all it really needs to do is grep the process list for "java" (or more often these days, "python")

charcircuit 5y ago
Or even worse is when it kills your X server taking everything else down with it.
arminiusreturns 5y ago
As a linux admin java launch options drive me absolutely crazy. In the process list a lot of normal, easily understood things, and then a 400 char list of -XX -Xms -Xmx overly verbose randomness. Don't get me started on how it's also always the java apps that have mem leaks and eat way more than intended mem. I don't have time to do your heap dumps for you devs!

userbinator 5y ago

I was a little mystified when I read the following sentence, since the start menu (and taskbar) has in my experience always been part of explorer.exe, and not a separate process (unless he was referring to explorer.exe itself, which I've killed and restarted a few times without issue, so that couldn't be it either): And one of the programs that this utility decide was not worthy of keeping around was the Start menu, so it terminated it when your game started. And then when the game was over, it relaunched it. ...and then all became clear shortly after: But the Start menu is a UWP program, so it is supposed to be launched a special way, with specific command line arguments, and it is supposed to be run in a low integrity app container. Raymond is obviously going to be pro-MS, but I can't decide whether the ultimate blame here is the third-party utility, or MS for the design decision that somehow the start menu needs to be its own process, require commandline arguments and whatever starts it to do something special (unlike explorer.exe, which establishes its own environment appropriately) or indeed the whole shitshow that is UWP. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28449607 It seems people have tried replacing the shell with one from an older version of Windows, but it's not a direct drop-in (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsbU73Idx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUsbU73Idx4 , warning: audio is useless); with some additional work, I suppose it might be possible.

Swisstone 5y ago
The fact the start menu lives in its own process is an implementation detail, no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe, so no one should expect start menu to be part of explorer.exe. Third party utilities should never kill random processes to begin with... that's a non-sense.
- _3u10 5y ago
  Why shouldn’t they kill processes? If the OS didn’t want third party apps to be able to kill random processes it wouldn’t provide APIs for it to do so.
- userbinator 5y ago
  no official documentation says the start menu is part of explorer.exe I'm pretty sure the older versions of Windows actually had that in the (much more detailed) documentation they came with.

nik282000 5y ago

> Its advertising copy calls out useless “productivity apps” as one of those non-essential processes. (Yeah, how dare you let a computer be used for productivity? Can’t you see I’m playing a game?) So, does this guy not realize that 'home gaming' makes them a hell of a lot more money than 'home productivity'?

vital_beach 5y ago

if the start menu was just a list of programs you may want to launch, it could probably be started and killed as needed...