23 ms·

PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

268 points by smurda 9mo ago

ArcHound 9mo ago
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
- quchen 9mo ago
  In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.
    - jetin 9mo ago
      There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
      - zahlman 9mo ago
        IMX people often care more about which web browser is installed than which OS.
        nephihaha 9mo ago
        Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium. I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
      - vander_elst 9mo ago
        > Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
        nephihaha 9mo ago
        Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
      - adrian_b 9mo ago
        That's right. My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is. Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date. However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it. They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever. By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences. Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
        skeeter2020 9mo ago
        >> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
        9mo ago
    - viraptor 9mo ago
      You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
  - grepfru_it 9mo ago
    I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows. This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them. Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF. I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format. Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
      - 9mo ago
- traceroute66 9mo ago
  > End users don't care, companies don't care Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but .... End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn. Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask. Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense. So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really. In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
  - nephihaha 9mo ago
    Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right? Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
    - skeeter2020 9mo ago
      It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
- iLoveOncall 9mo ago
  > At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI. Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both. I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers. I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials. "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
  - beeflet 9mo ago
    Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc. All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software. > I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow. > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both. There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity. Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
  - viraptor 9mo ago
    > but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
  - Telaneo 9mo ago
    While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain. Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
  - izacus 9mo ago
    In what way is Win11 "order of magnitude more complex" than Linux desktop or Windows 7 or 10?
- esafak 9mo ago
  The dinosaurs are going to die off.
- matltc 9mo ago
  A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb? Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness. I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
  - shiroiuma 9mo ago
    TurboTax is on the web now.
- DetectDefect 9mo ago
  Norms and addiction: the same reasons people refuse to quit smoking cigarettes in spite of evidence it will harm them.
26d0 9mo ago
My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in a movie.
- rzzzt 9mo ago
  You pull out the plug, but nothing happens. A shape resembling a human face appears on the screen. It has an evil grin. Exits: N W
  - mionhe 9mo ago
    "> Dennis"
  - tremon 9mo ago
    As you keep watching, you see from the human face growing a silvery-looking tentacle that curves in on itself.
- inetknght 9mo ago
  Laptops with batteries will shrug
  - 1718627440 9mo ago
    Pull out the battery then?
- sevennull 9mo ago
  they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core to generate power.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
  Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
- Szpadel 9mo ago
  I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I always place laptop with vents on the top
- Droobfest 9mo ago
  I did too, it ran Linux.
  - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
    "suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times. Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
    - fpoling 9mo ago
      With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
- hugh-avherald 9mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- Tade0 9mo ago
  Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that. Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".
concinds 9mo ago
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick. Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
- traceroute66 9mo ago
  > I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting. Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since. > Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN. Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
- da_chicken 9mo ago
  It affects Win11 23H2. Support for Home and Pro for 23H2 ended in November. Almost everyone should be on 24H2 or 25H2 except the dedicated longer support term editions.
einsteinx2 9mo ago
> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not. Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
- terminalbraid 9mo ago
  Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly increasing frequency.
  - 0x000xca0xfe 9mo ago
    It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
    - esafak 9mo ago
      PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
      - j1elo 9mo ago
        Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
        olyjohn 9mo ago
        Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.
        shlip 9mo ago
        popularized, not pioneered.
mdavid626 9mo ago
Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.
- kotaKat 9mo ago
  Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.
  - davidkwast 9mo ago
    It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.
- AlexandrB 9mo ago
  Microslop
- gessha 9mo ago
  Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
  - b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
    Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
the_wolo 9mo ago
It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk
- steve1977 9mo ago
  From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what is still working.
- hulitu 9mo ago
  > MS has started to vibe code Windows Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in Windows are about 90%.
  - foobarian 9mo ago
    And then there is the computer who won't stay asleep. I find my PC running about once a week after having it sleep the night before.
    - Frotag 9mo ago
      I've had the opposite problem with laptops. There's like 3 different menus to configure sleep-on-idle but none of them actually let you disable it even if they claim they do. They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority. Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
- marcosdumay 9mo ago
  Just to point, but there's nothing simple about shutdown.
  - t_mahmood 9mo ago
    D'oh sudo shutdown Linux: I give a damn about you're super critical nuclear reactor loading up, this computer is going down NOW
tensility 9mo ago
So, should we assume that they vibe-coded this patch? Sad...
- conception 9mo ago
  They had plenty of bad patches before this. Microsoft products just aren’t great quality.
  - aprilnya 9mo ago
    It’s insane how many bad patches they’ve had recently though. I swear it didn’t used to happen this often
    - tosti 9mo ago
      Some 20 years ago they had patches for a buffer overflow vulnerability. The first patch made the buffer one byte longer. The next round of patches addressed a supposedly new vulnerability and the same buffer got another byte longer...
okokwhatever 9mo ago
It sounds like introducing minor issues today is the best way for Microsoft and Apple to push OS updates that nobody is asking for. My two cents...
- estimator7292 9mo ago
  They already have the ability to unilaterally force any software onto any machine at literally any time. They do not need an excuse or a clever scheme to achieve more updates. We are a long way past that.
hexbin010 9mo ago
They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away proper standby, because reasons.
9JollyOtter 9mo ago
The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now. As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
- materialpoint 9mo ago
  It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
  - nubinetwork 9mo ago
    > It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
    - ugubjjjgfchb 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - shevy-java 9mo ago
      "where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling" They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.
kmoser 9mo ago
Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to "fix" this.
emeril 9mo ago
-omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless you're in some more sensitive position
aeon_ai 9mo ago
In recent months, with any computer that runs into Windows issues, I just take it as sign that its time for me to format it and install linux.
g947o 9mo ago
Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess. (Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
- petee 9mo ago
  I have a bluetooth mouse that will wake my desktop, untouched; I physically switch it off when I'm away from home
- lmc 9mo ago
  > my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
  - Hendrikto 9mo ago
    This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
    - throwa356262 9mo ago
      External mouse on the table moves when you bump into the table. And that wakes the computer. Gets me every time. I have even started turning the mouse upside down to avoid this :(
  - g947o 9mo ago
    No I always use keyboard for that.
shevy-java 9mo ago
Microsoft really wants people to use other operating systems. This is quite amazing. It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.
- boznz 9mo ago
  Thank you for spending 22 years debugging Linux. I migrated Windows 11 to it yesterday and it was absolutely painless :=)
jmward01 9mo ago
My biggest fear when getting a new laptop is that I won't figure out the BIOS fast enough to get it to recognize the usb drive I have plugged in and it might actually boot to windows. Now I will be extra freaked out because it might not even let me turn it off to try again!
- pseidemann 9mo ago
  You can always long-press the on/off button to force a power cycle.
  - 1718627440 9mo ago
    Or just pull out the battery.
nahBro 9mo ago
what's new
kaonwarb 9mo ago
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
bfrog 9mo ago
AI already fighting the humans for control of the machine
fsckboy 9mo ago
>PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch it was many patches ago when I refused to even start my PC after Microsoft's patches (when they made it so you couldn't reject their telemetry), at least not till I had linux installed (which I had anyhow been running all along via Xwindows, before the Microsoft-mind-virus-infected systemd, wayland, and btrfs crowds decided to ruin linux too.) are the BSDs still safe?
- za3faran 9mo ago
  You don't have to use wayland or btrfs on Linux though, right?
  - fsckboy 9mo ago
    well, "linux is just the kernel" eyeroll.emoji so no, you don't, but it's easiest to use a distro, and among distros it's easiest not to use an obscure distro so you can use the package managers to install a variety of apps and tools, but the longterm mainstream distros seem to all be infected, even devuan which is barely mainstream. most "alternate" distros seem to be dedicated to even goofier ideas than the old school that i prefer. i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.
psyclobe 9mo ago
Haha I have never used the start menu to shutdown windows I mean it hasn’t been for 20 plus years; I have it engraved into my head for so long to use the shutdown /f /t 0 /s has what a price of shit os.
andyone 9mo ago
Microslop at finest.
reneberlin 9mo ago
I know that error since, dunno, i guess: 1995. No other OS has this unprofessional and annoying bug. And no other OS vendor managed it to drag a bug like this for 30 years. None that i know of. Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.

268 points by smurda 9mo ago

I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.

quchen 9mo ago
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.
  - jetin 9mo ago
    There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
    - zahlman 9mo ago
      IMX people often care more about which web browser is installed than which OS.
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium. I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
    - vander_elst 9mo ago
      > Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
      - nephihaha 9mo ago
        Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
    - adrian_b 9mo ago
      That's right. My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is. Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date. However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it. They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever. By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences. Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
      - skeeter2020 9mo ago
        >> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
        9mo ago
  - viraptor 9mo ago
    You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
- grepfru_it 9mo ago
  I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows. This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them. Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF. I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format. Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
    - 9mo ago
traceroute66 9mo ago
> End users don't care, companies don't care Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but .... End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn. Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask. Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense. So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really. In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
- nephihaha 9mo ago
  Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right? Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
  - skeeter2020 9mo ago
    It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
    - nephihaha 9mo ago
      The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
iLoveOncall 9mo ago
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI. Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both. I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers. I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials. "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
- beeflet 9mo ago
  Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc. All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software. > I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow. > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both. There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
1313ed01 9mo ago
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity. Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
- viraptor 9mo ago
  > but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
- Telaneo 9mo ago
  While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain. Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
- izacus 9mo ago
  In what way is Win11 "order of magnitude more complex" than Linux desktop or Windows 7 or 10?
esafak 9mo ago
The dinosaurs are going to die off.
matltc 9mo ago
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb? Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness. I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
- shiroiuma 9mo ago
  TurboTax is on the web now.
DetectDefect 9mo ago
Norms and addiction: the same reasons people refuse to quit smoking cigarettes in spite of evidence it will harm them.

26d0 9mo ago

My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in a movie.

rzzzt 9mo ago
You pull out the plug, but nothing happens. A shape resembling a human face appears on the screen. It has an evil grin. Exits: N W
- mionhe 9mo ago
  "> Dennis"
- tremon 9mo ago
  As you keep watching, you see from the human face growing a silvery-looking tentacle that curves in on itself.
inetknght 9mo ago
Laptops with batteries will shrug
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  Pull out the battery then?
sevennull 9mo ago
they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core to generate power.
ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago

I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.

Szpadel 9mo ago
I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I always place laptop with vents on the top
Droobfest 9mo ago
I did too, it ran Linux.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  "suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times. Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
  - fpoling 9mo ago
    With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
hugh-avherald 9mo ago
https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
Tade0 9mo ago
Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that. Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".

concinds 9mo ago

The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick. Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.

traceroute66 9mo ago
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting. Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since. > Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN. Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
da_chicken 9mo ago
It affects Win11 23H2. Support for Home and Pro for 23H2 ended in November. Almost everyone should be on 24H2 or 25H2 except the dedicated longer support term editions.

einsteinx2 9mo ago

> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not. Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.

terminalbraid 9mo ago
Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly increasing frequency.
- 0x000xca0xfe 9mo ago
  It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
  - esafak 9mo ago
    PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
    - j1elo 9mo ago
      Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
      - olyjohn 9mo ago
        Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.
        shlip 9mo ago
        popularized, not pioneered.

mdavid626 9mo ago

Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.

kotaKat 9mo ago
Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.
- davidkwast 9mo ago
  It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.
AlexandrB 9mo ago
Microslop
gessha 9mo ago
Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]

the_wolo 9mo ago

It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk

steve1977 9mo ago
From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what is still working.
hulitu 9mo ago
> MS has started to vibe code Windows Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in Windows are about 90%.
- foobarian 9mo ago
  And then there is the computer who won't stay asleep. I find my PC running about once a week after having it sleep the night before.
  - Frotag 9mo ago
    I've had the opposite problem with laptops. There's like 3 different menus to configure sleep-on-idle but none of them actually let you disable it even if they claim they do. They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority. Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
marcosdumay 9mo ago
Just to point, but there's nothing simple about shutdown.
- t_mahmood 9mo ago
  D'oh sudo shutdown Linux: I give a damn about you're super critical nuclear reactor loading up, this computer is going down NOW

tensility 9mo ago

So, should we assume that they vibe-coded this patch? Sad...

conception 9mo ago
They had plenty of bad patches before this. Microsoft products just aren’t great quality.
- aprilnya 9mo ago
  It’s insane how many bad patches they’ve had recently though. I swear it didn’t used to happen this often
  - tosti 9mo ago
    Some 20 years ago they had patches for a buffer overflow vulnerability. The first patch made the buffer one byte longer. The next round of patches addressed a supposedly new vulnerability and the same buffer got another byte longer...

okokwhatever 9mo ago

It sounds like introducing minor issues today is the best way for Microsoft and Apple to push OS updates that nobody is asking for. My two cents...

estimator7292 9mo ago
They already have the ability to unilaterally force any software onto any machine at literally any time. They do not need an excuse or a clever scheme to achieve more updates. We are a long way past that.

hexbin010 9mo ago

They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away proper standby, because reasons.

9JollyOtter 9mo ago

The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now. As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.

materialpoint 9mo ago
It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
- nubinetwork 9mo ago
  > It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
  - ugubjjjgfchb 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - shevy-java 9mo ago
    "where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling" They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.

kmoser 9mo ago

Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to "fix" this.

emeril 9mo ago

-omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless you're in some more sensitive position

aeon_ai 9mo ago

In recent months, with any computer that runs into Windows issues, I just take it as sign that its time for me to format it and install linux.

g947o 9mo ago

Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess. (Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)

petee 9mo ago
I have a bluetooth mouse that will wake my desktop, untouched; I physically switch it off when I'm away from home
lmc 9mo ago
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue? Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
- Hendrikto 9mo ago
  This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
  - throwa356262 9mo ago
    External mouse on the table moves when you bump into the table. And that wakes the computer. Gets me every time. I have even started turning the mouse upside down to avoid this :(
- g947o 9mo ago
  No I always use keyboard for that.

shevy-java 9mo ago

Microsoft really wants people to use other operating systems. This is quite amazing. It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.

boznz 9mo ago
Thank you for spending 22 years debugging Linux. I migrated Windows 11 to it yesterday and it was absolutely painless :=)

jmward01 9mo ago

My biggest fear when getting a new laptop is that I won't figure out the BIOS fast enough to get it to recognize the usb drive I have plugged in and it might actually boot to windows. Now I will be extra freaked out because it might not even let me turn it off to try again!

pseidemann 9mo ago
You can always long-press the on/off button to force a power cycle.
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  Or just pull out the battery.

nahBro 9mo ago

what's new

kaonwarb 9mo ago

I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

bfrog 9mo ago

AI already fighting the humans for control of the machine

fsckboy 9mo ago

>PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch it was many patches ago when I refused to even start my PC after Microsoft's patches (when they made it so you couldn't reject their telemetry), at least not till I had linux installed (which I had anyhow been running all along via Xwindows, before the Microsoft-mind-virus-infected systemd, wayland, and btrfs crowds decided to ruin linux too.) are the BSDs still safe?

za3faran 9mo ago
You don't have to use wayland or btrfs on Linux though, right?
- fsckboy 9mo ago
  well, "linux is just the kernel" eyeroll.emoji so no, you don't, but it's easiest to use a distro, and among distros it's easiest not to use an obscure distro so you can use the package managers to install a variety of apps and tools, but the longterm mainstream distros seem to all be infected, even devuan which is barely mainstream. most "alternate" distros seem to be dedicated to even goofier ideas than the old school that i prefer. i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.

psyclobe 9mo ago

Haha I have never used the start menu to shutdown windows I mean it hasn’t been for 20 plus years; I have it engraved into my head for so long to use the shutdown /f /t 0 /s has what a price of shit os.

andyone 9mo ago

Microslop at finest.

reneberlin 9mo ago

I know that error since, dunno, i guess: 1995. No other OS has this unprofessional and annoying bug. And no other OS vendor managed it to drag a bug like this for 30 years. None that i know of. Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.