Microsoft Delivers Another Broken Windows 10 Update | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Delivers Another Broken Windows 10 Update

thurrott.com

110 pointsokket136 comments

I have updated three computers -- a Lenovo laptop, a surface book, and a custom desktop -- all without any issues.

Its important to remember that everyone with a problem will make sure to say something, but everyone without a problem usually moves on and doesn't talk about it. Its extraordinarily easy to assume that everything is broken just because only people whom it broke for are talking about it.

> Its extraordinarily easy to assume that everything is broken

Just like it's easy to assume that everything is fine. Both are fallacies where personal experience is projected on everyone.

This is why it's important to have the choice to use or not use automatic updates. You cannot centrally manage the incredible complexity of all possible PC configurations and use cases; the decision about when to install updates needs to be made locally (which includes the option of deferring that choice to the vendor).

Even if you could disable updates how would you know which will cause problems to your particular setup?

You act as if people should prioritize downloading security updates over actually being able to reliably use their computer. For many people, they want to use their machine first before worrying about security.

And as another sibling commenter mentioned, what about crunchtimes, are those the best times to figure out what works and doesn't?

>You act as if people should prioritize downloading security updates over actually being able to reliably use their computer.

That's because they quite obviously should. An unsecured machine quickly becomes part of a botnet for spamming or DDoS attacks and is, in legal terms, a nuisance; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance.

Neither the infrastructure nor law has quite caught up to penalize individuals for this yet but I wouldn't be surprised to it happen within the next few decades as legislators finally catch up with technology.

If ISPs blocked internet access to compromised machines until they were clean, as I think they should, people would care a whole lot more about keeping up to date.

As it stands now, people don't see the problems they are causing (sending spam, participating in botnets, etc), so of course they don't care.

But they should.

I work for an ISP. I would love to be able to do this.

All that would happen, though, is that the customers would loudly complain until either a) we turned them back on or b) they switched to another ISP.

We don't even monitor or check for such compromised machines anymore, however (other than my periodic scans for open DNS resolvers, NTP servers, devices with an SNMP community string of "public", and so on).

We are almost in a world with 1 Terabit ddos attacks from IoT devices. It scares me but ISP level blocking needs to come yesterday... http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/botnet-of-145k-camer...

You don't, but you know if you have time to deal with an issue or if you're in the middle of a critical task and can't take the risk. Nothing worse than being in the midst of a high-pressure/stress event and being forced to update.

well, if application was on the end users' terms you could test on a dedicated machine not in general service. Or, you could wait until the initial batch releases' beta testers work out bugs & MS makes corrections for the subsequent, fixed releases.

They aren't equivalent fallacies. When everything is fine people are far less likely to report it than when something is broken.

I tried to update 2 Desktops. Both got stuck at 91%. I have not tried again since then. I had the same experience the last time. There 2 of my computers (a Desktop and a Laptop) updated but were unusably slow afterwards until I fixed the swap settings (which I did not touch before the update). It's now at the point where I'm considering automating my computer setup and just do a completely clean install when a big update comes out. The auto update is also pretty nice for large updates, especially when they kick in right when you start your laptop in front of a classroom and try to deliver a lecture. This whole situation is absolutely crazy! I never had any update issues ever with windows until Windows 8 came out. Since then it's just a terrible hit or miss situation.

You see, that doesn’t matter at all. Every edge case is important when you are trying to be the “we know best” OS vendor: destroying people’s home businesses or otherwise coming at the worst time possible (e.g. a student trying to finish an important paper) is simply unacceptable.

The thing that’s really embarrassing for Microsoft is that they should have literally decades of experience telling them how to manage a wide variety of end-user systems, and they should know that they can’t possibly predict everything that may go wrong. Therefore, a “we know best” system with cryptic or unknown ways of turning things off is going to have major issues, and will break somebody, and they just don’t seem to care or are not smart enough to look at their own experience. This should be extremely disturbing to Windows customers.

You're saying that, as if things would be alright, as long as the number of people who have no problem outweigh the number of people who have a problem.

With any software, some people are bound to have problems. I have had issues in the past with OS X installations. But because the number of people who do not have issues outweighs that of those who do, it's diluted easily in the general case. For Microsoft it seems different. I am pretty sure the number of those with a problem is minuscule compared to those who don't, but because it is Microsoft, the voices of that minority is overly magnified every single time by both the media and those who simply just have a bone to chew with Microsoft. Deservedly or not, you have to admit, their flaws are magnified way more than those of other companies.

I don't believe it's unreasonable to expect your computer to boot reliably and in a known amount of time.

How long do you think it would take for people to abandon a Linux distribution if it started auto-updating and locking people out randomly in the process? Of course Linux systems don't tend to have this problem because they can update while running.

Because this is Windows, users are left helpless while they lose time watching progress bars. The only reason this is accepted at all is through vendor lock in via the various MS ecosystems (Office, VS etc.), and because savy MS-centered developers can go through some pains to disable it on their own systems, after paying the freedom tax (the Enterprise license).

If one user in 1,000 has a significant issue with an outomatic update that's a major problem. MS, gets less slack because it's a monopoly situation. But, they also produce worse software because it's a monopoly.

Windows phone is a great example, after over a decade they put out something that was not terrible, and it's failing because not terrible only works in monopoly situations.

Have you used a Windows phone? I had one for a few years and was much happier with it than my subsequent Nexus phones, I just couldn't live in the app ghetto forever.

-Have you used a Windows phone?

Yes, several versions from around 2003 to 2016.

What do you dislike? I had a Samsung one from 2011-2013 and was much happier with the design battery life and responsiveness of the device.

The one complaint I remember having was that apps outside of the main screen were pretty terrible to navigate. And that so many apps were terrible.

Windows Phones are amazingly good. The only problem they have is related to marketing and mindshare, nothing to do with their design or reliability or quality.

You are very forgiving. As I said, they improved greatly from the Windows Mobile days, but they also had a lot of issues.

I am a .Net developer and I have few apps on my phone, so it really is the base phone I am talking about.

The only "issue" I've had that made me unhappy as a customer and that was actually Mictosoft's fault is the refusal to back-port Windows 10 to the Nokia 1020.

Other than that, there's nothing for me to forgive. I'm genuinely happy with the phone.

The Nokia 1020 was not bad, the problem is it was competing with the iPhone 5 and a great many good Android phones. Which again is the problem, not bad is not enough to compete in most markets.

No it was not bad. It was a great phone. I still use mine. And I enjoy it. I don't agree with you that it was merely "not bad".

Is it really so impossible for you to understand that I might feel differently about the product than you do?

Personal experience and market failure heavily suggest it was not a great phone. At one point we had a small stack of them in the office nobody wanted.

But, I can accept we have different standards.

Ok. Now I ask you a question: how do you definitely disable the Windows firewall and Cortana? After every update they are enabled again.

One fucking annoying design in win10 is that, if my computer never connects to network after a restart, the Cortana search function will never work, even I just want to search my local files.

I don't see the point of disabling the firewall. Windows's current security model involves leaving it enabled.

If you need ports always open, just make firewall rules to open large blocks of ports.

Windows Firewall and Windows Defender, the later increases CPU usage looking for malware and I work in the computer security field... and I am an adult, a professional, and don't have a father called Microsoft.

The point is that I have a dedicated gateway machine on my network that handles security for the entire private network. Windows running its own firewall is a waste of resources.

Yes, but are all of your switch ports isolated to prevent machines from ever talking to each other directly?

Windows' security model has largely become "works in most cases, assumes the user is an idiot". You might want to deploy an AD policy to turn off the firewall, I think you can do this.

But what if you just want to turn it off.

The problem is that - as a user - there is no other way to know whether a faulty update affects a significant number of users (or even just a small group of users that you happen to be a part of)

The only one with telemetry to obtain unbiased numbers is microsoft, and they might refuse to publish that data for PR reasons - or simply organisational ones. So what's a user to do?

Same here I'm surprised with all these posts describing issues I never experience, either we're exceptions or people facing problems are indeed louder.

In case you wanted to disable automatic updates on Win10 (and for some reason didn't do it yet), set your WiFi connection as metered in advanced options. This prevents from autodownloading/installing/rebooting when you just left to make yourself a coffee.

You get notified when an update is available, so you can wait a few days and see if there's no news on front page of HN about update being hopelessly broken, and then you can proceed with an update. You're welcome.

There is another way - disable windows update service. I use this and every month or so I enable it to update.

I do this since Windows XP and it always worked. I don't know why so many were writing that updates can't be disabled anymore.

The control panel setting was removed. Disabling the service entirely is an advanced and somewhat non-obvious (if you don't know update is a service to begin with) solution.

I am afraid Windows will "fix" this whenever this gets more popular though.

You can set wired connections as metered too.

MS has really gone downhill over the past few years with badly designed software and shockingly broken patches. The anniversary update set all the permissions in my registry so it couldn't be written to, and there was no way to fix it.

On another machine, all the network interfaces vanished with no way of restoring them.

These are complete show stoppers on machines I use to make money. I loaded Win8.1 on all machines and will never touch W10.

Honestly, most software development has been going noticeably down hill the last couple years from Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It's understandable from Google whose business is ads (90% of their revenue) and makes software to drive ads. And it would even be a bit excusable for Apple given that Apple is primarily a hardware company. But Microsoft is a software company. Yes, they're dabbling in hardware a bit, but their revenue is software.

>MS has really gone downhill over the past few years with badly designed software and shockingly broken patches.

Well...

(2014) http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-employees-still-lik...

"Inside Microsoft, test engineers across the company, particularly in the Windows unit, were the hardest hit [by the layoffs], our source said. ... Now, the testing job is part of the development team similar to how other big software companies do things."

(2014) http://www.zdnet.com/article/beyond-12500-former-nokia-emplo...

"Under the new structure, a number of Windows engineers, primarily dedicated testers, will no longer be needed. (I don't know exactly how many testers will be laid off, but hearing it could be a "good chunk," from sources close to the company.)"

If you don't have testers your users become testers. Microsoft is learning this fact the hard way.

Maybe they think they can get away with because their only competition (MacOS) is heading in the same direction. Both OSs peaked somewhere around 2010. Since then, MS has focussed on using their desktop OS to collect data and Apple has been focussed on using their desktop OS to prop up their mobile OS.

Using both reasonably frequently, I really don't see how you think they're moving in the same direction. MacOS still leaves the user in full control if they wish, while Windows forces ridiculous hoops to disable things that should be a stock setting using regedit which most users would and should never touch. Outside of "they both have voice assistants now" I see no similarities. And I'm certain you will never see ads in MacOS as part of the OS "features."

I have been on Macbook Pro's since 10.5 and I completely agree with GP. OSX peaked at Snow Leopard, there is no question in my mind. It seems like nearly every new feature in each OSX release now is something to do with iOS. OSX's software quality has been trending downwards for a while now, I don't think I am alone in that opinion. MBP hardware used to make the software issues less irritating, but even that is starting to feel hopelessly dated.

OSX has lost a lot of its appeal IMO, I am replacing my MBP this month with an windows machine.

I think you misread my post. In both cases, the user experience of the desktop OS has gotten worse because all of the changes the parent company have made to the OS have been to support their larger business objectives at the expensive of this specific product.

In MS's case they've been focussed on data collection. In Apple's case, they've been focused on cross-selling their mobile devices. As someone who doesn't want MS collecting my data and has no intention of ever going back to Apple's mobile devices, I would prefer either product as it existed circa 2010.

I'm not sure how that led you to the conclusion that I think Apple will add ads to their OS, but that definitely isn't what I meant to imply.

You are implying that Apple added absolutely nothing to macOS since 2010 that wasn't useful to desktop-/laptop-only users, or that there've been glaring omissions of functionality since 2010 which they haven't addressed or aren't about to address, without giving any examples of either. Heck, they just announced a new and modern filesystem! Coming next year! [1] What about systemwide support for Wide Color? [2]

It's a free OS, it gets major updates every year and minor ones every few months.

Even if the spotlighted features of every release (like Siri this year) aren't exactly appealing to you personally, what most people seem to overlook — odd for a place like Hacker News — is that every release of macOS also includes many new native APIs for developers. Not to mention subtle new accessibility features, which most of us may hopefully never need but it's nice to know they are there for the people who do need them.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-analys...

[2] https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/

I think your post demonstrates my point. My user experience on the Mac has not been improved by a file system that hasn't been released yet. It hasn't been improved by developer APIs or obscure accessibility features I don't have a use for.

Perhaps I'm in the minority and the vast majority of Mac users are having a better experience today because they use those developer APIs and write CSS that needs obscure colors and use that unreleased file system daily, but I don't think that's the case.

The APIs enable developers to make better apps for you and other users; they are obviously not meant to be showcased as an end user feature. However, if you have obscure requirements that aren't being met by the OS or third-parties, you can just make your own apps, for free.

You are being adamantly hyperbolic about stagnation and "mobile-ification" but you still haven't given any example of how the "desktop OS has gotten worse because they've been focused on cross-selling their mobile devices."

Personally I started using Macs in 2011, with Lion, after a lifetime of Windows (and before that, DOS) and every new release since then has only made the Mac experience better for me;

The App Store model is a boon for desktop OSes (although the current implementation definitely needs improvement) and you can still get apps from other sources. Natural Scrolling is amazing, and really does feel natural. I like all alerts being grouped up in one place in the Notification Center. Pressing F4 for the Launchpad is a quick alternative to opening the Applications folder, and usually quicker than Spotlight. I like iMessage and FaceTime and they don't require an iPhone or iPad. Safari always feels snappier than Chrome. 3D/Force-Touch to preview links without opening a new page is very handy, especially on places like Reddit and HN. The OS is still customizable in all the ways I care about, and nicely extended by apps like TinkerTool [1] and Path Finder [2]. ...

I really can't think of any examples where I felt macOS had gotten "worse" than a preceding release because of features borrowed from iOS, or that Apple had betrayed me and made me want to go back to Windows.

[1] https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

[2] http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

> I'm certain you will never see ads in MacOS as part of the OS "features."

How certain?

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Uh oh... Please please let this be a defensive patent to use against other OSes which include ads, and not an indication of a future macOS/iOS to come..

This MAY make sense in tvOS, to present ads during a "channel" app while "disabling certain operating system features", but I really hope Apple of all companies aren't that greedy for extra revenue to include ads in macOS/iOS..

The patent filing is also dated 2008, and nothing's happened so far.

>MS has focussed on using their desktop OS to collect data

If by "collect data" you mean the OS telemetry that's used to detect and report bugs, that's right. Thurott even mentions the telemetry in the article.

If you turned off Windows telemetry, MS has no way of knowing about any bugs you encountered. Those who don't vote, don't get to complain about the consequences of not voting.

The Anniversary Update is currently the Current Branch. From Microsoft's own documentation - The CB servicing model is ideal for pilot deployments and testing of Windows 10 feature updates and for users such as developers who need to work with the latest features immediately. In contrast, the CBB servicing branch is typically used for broad deployment. Windows 10 clients in the CBB servicing branch receive the same build of Windows 10 as those in the CB servicing branch, just at a later time. CB releases are transitioned to CBB after about 4 months, indicating that Microsoft, independent software vendors (ISVs), partners, and customers believe that the release is ready for broad deployment. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/waa...

Considering we are only two months past the release of AU, I would consider it to be in the pilot not stable deployable phase.

If you want Windows to be stable, and you dont want to be a beta tester, go to Windows Update advanced settings settings and check Defer feature updates.

It's the same pattern Microsoft has always taken, just accelerated. Vista was released to consumers so their Enterprise release of Windows 7 was adequately tested across as many hardware and software scenarios as possible.

I really like win8.1.

I dislike win10 so much, not only it contains so many bugs, but also I don't like the UI change.

I'd say: fork the old UI and use it instead of the new one. But that's something you'd do on Linux, not on Windows I guess...

That is why I use mate desktop on debian now, for I also don't like the gnome3 UI.

I must say it is the other way round for me. The latest Windows is the best release since Windows 7. Windows 8(.1) seemed like an alpha version of the current OS (I just say: power off button).

The Anniversary Update completely hosed the Windows install on my desktop.

It got stuck at 15% installing with the infamous spinning circle - I let it run 8 hours at 15% just to be sure because there is zero info given to you beyond the spinning circle. Then when I rebooted the machine it got stuck "Restoring previous version of Windows", again I gave it 8 hours. A third reboot and it failed to boot, forcing me to spend a couple hours fiddling with the command line tools in the recovery environment to repair the boot record.

And I still have no idea why it failed, and Google has no answers either beyond vague suggestions like unplugging all USB devices before the install runs.

Not looking forward to losing a day of work to it again, but not like I have a choice.

How does Microsoft screw up Windows that badly? They've had 20 years to figure stuff like this out.

Tone note: Serious question, not just kvetching.

Does anyone have a good clue as to why this update is so big and disruptive?

The feature list [1] shows "biometric security for Windows apps and Edge", "Windows Ink" support, vaguely-specified Cortana improvements (I think that translates to "Cortana has plugins now"), and an Xbox improvement.

I'm thinking that's not really what's in there since that just doesn't seem like a 2-3 reboot and massive disruption sort of update.

[1]: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/03/30/windo...

Supposedly it should fix the webcam issues of the previous update: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsdesktop/en-U...

I really think Microsoft has built themselves a house of cards. It has so many moving parts and is so complex it's very difficult to make changes to this system without edge-case errors. It makes me appreciate the simplicity of design of Linux and macOS.

MacOS I'll buy, but a desktop Linux system feels more brittle than any windows install ever did. Maybe that's just my lack of knowledge with the platform outside of servers, but if you stick to the "Main" GUI screens on macOS and Windows you are pretty foot-gun safe. On Linux this is not the case, and to me its always very difficult to tell if a change you are about to make will open a Pandora's box you can't close again.

I've been using a Linux desktop with KDE 4.x for the last 5 years. The kernel itself isn't unstable. It's the userland that's (relatively) unstable. Most frequently, it's the desktop environment that has issues.

I've experienced more crashes and behavioral bugs with KDE than I have ever in either Windows or macOS. I also tried Unity (Ubuntu), and it too frequently had userland services crash and burn. Now, Enlightenment / GNOME / LXDE / Xfce / Xmonad / etc, might be more stable. But I decided I would rather have the richer and far superior UX of KDE (i.e., in my personal opinion) and take the hit of its relatively high bugginess, rather than leave KDE for another (likely less nice UX) desktop environment.

But in terms of actual day-to-day usage, Linux + KDE has worked out pretty well. Every application I care about runs on it:

* Firefox

* Google Chrome (allows me to watch Netflix)

* Spotify (<- this one's critical)

* Most IDEs: Android Studio, IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, RubyMine, Eclipse, NetBeans, Qt Creator, etc.

* Most GUI text editors: Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code, etc.

* Practically every commonly used dev tool (gcc, clang, python, java, ruby, etc, etc.) & less common dev tools (e.g. GitKraken).

* A lot of Steam Games + Humble Bundle indie games

* Microsoft Office (works perfectly and easy to install with PlayOnLinux)

Everything that matters to me runs perfectly on desktop Linux. I literally can't think of anything that I need that only runs on Windows or Mac. And Linux is so much more configurable than any other OS, which comes handy for certain things.

Not sure what makes you say that about Desktop Linux. I moved away from Windows because the Desktop experience was horrible in the first place. Linux desktops are not perfect but you have choice, they usually have implemented ideas earlier and better than Windows and you can bet your system is going to feel more responsive, too.

Brittle is really the only way I can describe it. It's the only platform where simply installing something has rendered the system non-booting, there are hundreds or more of config files and often changing one will break another system. And I fully admit this might be self-inflicted, but its been my experience.

It's by no means a bad platform, but its not for me. I want a system where I need to do as little as possible to configure it, an I just want it to work. On my windows and macOS systems, I can completely wipe the machine, and be back up and running in a few hours.

This doesn't sound like any linux desktop I've used in the last ten years. Usually I pop a Mint usb in, go through the installer and come back to a system with almost all devices configured. Then it's just a matter of putting back my /home and there we are.

On a non-corporate Windows installation, that would just be the beginning, where I would be hunting for chipset drivers, graphics drivers, HID drivers, network drivers and any other devices I need, each needing separate hands-on installation.

Thank goodness that there's Ninite available now, otherwise all the basic apps that make up a Windows install would then still be another few hours of manual downloading and installation. And then there's restoration of your old Users directory, which is still a fraught process if you don't have a pretty good understanding of windows.

> On a non-corporate Windows installation, that would just be the beginning, where I would be hunting for chipset drivers, graphics drivers, HID drivers, network drivers and any other devices I need, each needing separate hands-on installation.

You haven't installed Windows in a decade.

Ten days ago, in fact, which is why I feel so strongly about this. If your hardware had drivers included on disk, great! If not, at best you'll get generic drivers that won't give you full hardware support.

Some devices that worked out of the box on Linux but required drivers on windows, just off the top of my head: Bluetooth USB dongle. USB wifi module. Logitech webcam. Focusrite audio interface. HP printer (actually this one required firmware on Linux too, so that's a draw). XBox 360 controller (required a driver on Windows 8.1. Maybe that's changed in the last few months with windows 10).

> Bluetooth USB dongle

I admittedly don't use Bluetooth and every time I've tried it's been a horrible experience.

> USB wifi module.

Mine works fine, no driver download.

> Logitech webcam.

Mine works fine, no driver download.

> Focusrite audio interface.

I don't have one.

> HP printer (actually this one required firmware on Linux too, so that's a draw).

I haven't used a printer in probably 10 years.

> XBox 360 controller (required a driver on Windows 8.1. Maybe that's changed in the last few months with windows 10).

Nope. Not on 8.1. Not on 10. There may be an optional driver for it (may be-- I've never seen it), but it's certainly not required. This one I can firmly say you're wrong about. (Unless you have like a Chinese knock-off Xbox 360 controller-- the brand-name ones work.)

I had a great experience the other day when I plugged in my ancient CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner I bought back in the Windows 2000 days, and it worked flawlessly in Windows 10, no drivers or software needed.

Well, we've established we have differing hardware and differing requirements from our computers.

The wifi modules were a generic device with a Ralink/Mediatek chipset, and another TP-Link branded device. I don't recall the specific webcam verson, it's an older Quick series one that really should have worked.

> I had a great experience the other day when I plugged in my ancient CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner I bought back in the Windows 2000 days

In general this is a situation where Linux shines, because hardware tends to remain supported much longer as long as there's someone willing to keep the driver compiling. With TWAIN scanners it's a lot easier of course.

This scanner works out of the box on any distro with xsane too.

If you practice a bit wiping and reinstalling Linux is generally faster. Since all the configuration is done with files you can clone a repo and run a script to have all your preferences restored. Win/Mac always seems to take a few days of use before everything is back to normal.

There are a lot more foot guns in Linux, but the ease of wiping and reinstalling makes those less problematic

Good heavens, what was it that you installed!

I believe it was Docker! Through apt-get on an otherwise standard debian distro in a VM.

Never did figure out what happened, I ended up just hopping over to a debian laptop and doing it there and it worked fine.

Are you sure you followed these advises: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

maybe you would had been better off with some flavour of Ubuntu, Debian is cool and all but it's not for beginners, although if you read into it first - it's one of the most stable systems you could use.

I used debian because I'm most comfortable with it as it was our choice of server distro at the time.

Still, worrying about reading guide after guide before installing routine software from a standard repo is not something I want to do in my desktop software.

Given, my experience is a couple years out of date, but back when I tried desktop Linux, the number of applications that just flat-out crashed was shocking to me. I can use my Windows desktop for months without seeing an application crash, and when it does it's usually a game or some other app built for entertainment and not serious work.

The Linux kernel is, I'm sure, just a stable as the Windows NT kernel and all that-- but the desktop applications are fragile as heck, and I know exactly what the grandparent is talking about.

(I am not and never will be a CLI user, and I don't like tinkering with bullshit-- I want my computers to just work the first time. To pre-empt some of the obvious replies I'm likely to get.)

If you ignore the CLI then uou ignore most of the benefits of Linux in the first place.

benefits such as spending hours trawling through forums trying to find out why stuff is broken with no answer, no matter what you type into a little text box?

Depends on your definition of "responsive". SteamOS (based on Debian) is widely criticized for running games at lower frame rates than the same machine running Windows for example. X11 is a dog in many regards, harming the Linux experience. Wayland can't come soon enough.

This has nothing to do with SteamOS, X11 or Wayland. Game performance on Linux has everything to do with the quality of the port and/or game engine and hardware drivers. For example, Rocket League performance on Linux is on par with Windows while Tomb Raider has 20-30% less. In any case, there is no perceivable difference if you have a modern $200 GPU.

BTW, X11 with DRI3 has the same performance as Wayland.

SteamOS is not a desktop Linux distro, it's a distro made for running Steam and it goes through their own compositor. You can boot into a GNOME session but it's extremely barebones compared to any regular distro, even the terminal is broken by default.

Next, there are a bunch of reasons why Linux distros run games slower than Windows. Most games are made for Windows in mind in the first place, so unless someone does a whole conversion of the graphics code base to optimize it for OpenGL, DirectX ends up wrapped or translated with loss of performance. This has nothing to do with how much the desktop feels "responsive", and it completely off topic here.

Wayland is not the Messiah and is not going to provide massive performance improvement. Already confirmed with the alpha/beta out. And it brings a ton of problems too since each application cannot access information from other applications (screensavers, screen capture programs would not work in Wayland). That's why they have the XWayland project.

And X11 is not a dog. That's a lot of history in it, nad it may be bloated, but it can still perform very well - there are a few games ported from Windows that run faster on Linux (Dirt Showdown is one).

I eventually found great happiness in Linux by using the most popular distribution and leaving every setting that I could, at the default.

That's probably what I'll do when I try again. ElementaryOS looks like a good candidate for that.

No, that's exactly what I wouldn't do.

According to DistroWatch, the top 3 right now are Mint, Debian, or Ubuntu. I would pick one of those (probably Mint because it's #1) and install it leaving everything set to the default setting.

But as much as people here might scoff at me, the way a desktop system looks is high up in my priority list. I spend 8+ hours a day looking at my main system, so looking nice and having a nice UX is important. All of those alternatives you mentioned seem ugly or complex to use to me, so I would want to switch to an "alt" window manager, which just sets me down the rabbit hole.

ElementaryOS would let me leave it at the defaults for just about everything.

I wouldn't scoff at you at all. Aesthetics matter. Attractive things do work better. You just have to be aware of what you are signing up for when you pick a less popular distro.

I beg to differ. As someone who decided it would be hip to buy a Macbook, almost every single day I grumble about MacOS, it's so frequent my gf is sick of it. If we could have a keyboard driver for my model, I would install Linux in an instance and never look back. Please don't get me started on how much of a lie in my experience, "MacOS is really like Linux, but nicer" is. What a load of 1300usd baloney that is.

Even when I do use Linux without the internal keyboard, I am surprised, for example, how the wifi connections don't fickle out. It makes you really wonder what Mac OS is doing under the hood.

As someone who has purchased and maintained dozens of MacBooks over the years, I suspect you have a lemon. Have you run memtest, etc on it?

I can see what you mean by Linux desktop systems being less stable than OS X, but I don't recognize what you say about it being difficult to tell whether a change you make is going to cause trouble. Things may crash if you do something weird, but "something weird" generally involves funny commands, not desktop settings.

The trouble with Windows is that there is just so much crap available for it. Everyone is trying to get market share and sell licenses, show ads or co-install crap from other people, who are also trying to get market share, and the cycle continues.

On Linux this could never happen because that kind of software wouldn't make it into the repositories. So while I know what you mean about Linux desktops being less stable than the two most mainstream operating systems, there are a hundred other things that can't go wrong on Linux, making it a lot more "foot-gun safe".

I will say this. When it came time to upgrade my home laptop OS from win 7. I chose Elementary OS. As win 10 was seen to be full [edit: Of] MS spyware. That was the impression anyway. I haven't regretted that decision once. To be fair I was considering the move to Linux anyway.

I think that may depend on the kind of changes you want to make.

As a concrete example, on stock Debian stable, uninstalling LibreOffice and then updating and upgrading will result in the package manager cheerfully offering to uninstall most of the Gnome desktop. This is because of LibreOffice being a dependency of the gnome-desktop meta-package. There are ways around it.

My personal experience is that if I stay with the default desktop packages and just add things I need, the stability is quite good.

Windows 10 is an absolute mess, and I would recommend a Linux distribution (Fedora in particular) over it even for the casual user. Nowadays Fedora just works.

Windows has be complex for many many years. I think the issue is Microsoft adjusting to more frequent update and the whole rolling release thing.

They're still rolling out updates as if they where semi-infrequent with loads of internal testing time and the diversity of the PC platform is really working against them.

Still I believe that they will have it have it mostly worked out.... eventually.

> It makes me appreciate the simplicity of design of Linux and macOS.

You realize that the Ubuntu update system has been broken for years?

It's not possible to perform an update without writing cryptic 100 characters long command that might destroy your system.

Right.

Do you really need someone to tell you that millions of people use and update Ubuntu regularly without typing in a cryptic 100 character long command or can you figure out yourself that it has to be you who's wrong here?

Right. I'll help you figure out that you are the one who is wrong.

Millions of people run Ubuntu and can NOT upgrade it at all.

The cause: After a few kernel updates, the /boot partition gets full. Then all future updates simply fail because of disk full. (the updater never clean the old stuff).

The issue is well known and well documented. For instances, read these two questions which are over 100k views each:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/171209/my-boot-partition-hit...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-...

And here the magic one liner command you need to fix it:

    sudo apt-get purge $(dpkg -l linux-{image,headers}-"[0-9]*" | awk '/ii/{print $2}' | grep -ve "$(uname -r | sed -r 's/-[a-z]+//')")

Has a separate boot partition ever been the installer default? I know every time I have installed Ubuntu in the last few years, it doesn't offer to set up separate boot or home partitions -- those are allowed manually.

It'd be nice if the issue you linked to didn't occur (I guess by removing old kernels), but it seems to be something that mostly advanced users would come across -- or I guess they are people that think they are advanced (since they are playing with customizing the install).

The installation default is to make a separate 100MB /boot partition.

The issue happens systematically after a few updates (let's say 5 in average to fill the 100MB space). That means all users will come across this issue after a few months of usage and regular updates.

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt upgrade

That's a lot less than 100 characters.

I haven't experienced any upgrade that has broken my system.

At worst, once or twice I shut down while upgrading (poweroff bypasses any protection I guess) and so I needed to do "sudo dpkg --configure -a" to fix an application.

I got done in by the Anniversary Update. It didn't handle certain combinations of SSDs and non-SSDs.

How did not testing the "SSD for OS, mechanical for data" configuration get past QA...

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-...

As far as I know the bug didn't hit most systems with a SSD+HDD setup, just ones where certain default paths were changed to point to the second drive (which is frequently done through unsupported registry hacks).

I had Gears of War (from the Windows Store) on my HDD. This should be fully supported since changing the default locations for apps is ... built into Windows.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-...

Thank you for this, explains my issue. I wasn't sure if it was just dual boot or something else.

I updated to Win10 on my little Bay Trail convertible thingy, which I use mainly as a tablet for web surfing. It's been fine, but an annoying feature is that the update apparently loaded Win10 into the recovery partition in addition to installing it as the main OS. So, when I did a "factory restore" after (admittedly) horribly screwing things up myself, it restored to Win10.

Of course I had been very sloppy with not creating a recovery drive, etc., so I'm stuck with Win10, but it's just a thing to be aware of.

That's why Linux is for people like me. I get as many chances as I want to screw things up, and recovery is just a matter of downloading an .iso and trying again.

I had the same issue with a previous patch. The forced update resulted in 4-5 restarts, totalling about 30 minutes, to install and then uninstall the update every two days. Needless to say, that this is a bad user experience.

In the end, I had to remove GRUB, fix the MBR with the windows CD, install the update and reinstall GRUB I can dual boot. It sucked. It should not have passed QA.

I had this exact same issue for two seperate updates (they didn't like a dual boot - same fix as yours). This is what convinced me to finally uninstall windows.

Here's a way to schedule Win10 updates on your schedule, not theirs. It uses the convenient and widely known Local Group Policy Editor.

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-schedule-windows-updates-w...

It's really annoying when the update starts whenever it pleases and bogs the system. Watching a movie or gaming? Enjoy the stutter!

OK, so now every time Windows 10 decides it is time to force an update it becomes a kind of Sci-Fi thriller ... you watch it and watch it and hope the hero doesn't die at the end.

I know people that simply disabled the Windows Update service to avoid this hassle, with the risk of ending up with a non secure system in the long run.

> it becomes a kind of Sci-Fi thriller

So Windows 10 users can now have entertainment for free. Imagine the possibilities with Windows.

I can only wonder what it would be like.

Or watch and root for the hero to die at the end.

I must be an exception, I use Windows insider builds daily for development on 2 PCs (one desktop and a laptop,a quite old one too) and other than virtualbox breaking with some updates which is easily resolved by updating virtualbox itself I never had any issues.

I've never had any issues either. And with over 300 million computers on Windows 10, I'd bet people with issues are the exception, not us. People that have issues are just (rightly) vocal about it.

I also never had any issues with Windows until this update.

I've kinda liked Windows 10 but the updates have been introducing small problems for me now.

First, some update introduced a bug for me where file Explorer will sometimes not update the files when changed. For example, if I paste a file in a folder, the folder view will not show the new file until I press F5 to refresh the view. This sometimes causes Explorer yo crash.

Now, after having to download the the Anniversary update three times over my crappy 1mbps connection, it's stuck in an endless reboot loop. Windows tells me to reboot to finish installing I'll reboot, it gets stuck on "Configuring update ", I have to do a hard reset and the loop starts again.

Very frustrating.

About the Explorer bug, I've had it for years in Windows 7. It's inconvenient, especially when coding. The (very) short workaround is to rebuild the indexation.

I'm sad to hear it is (seemingly) still present in Windows 10.

What finally scared me off MS Windows were the forced updates and the blatant spyware.

I still run a MS OS from time to time: Windows 7, for some legacy software, well confined in a virtual box.

Linux is an alternative the days, both for individuals and companies.

The first time I installed Windows 10 on my Lenovo laptop I was left with a file manager which gets hopelessly spinning circle stuck every few days, requiring a reboot. About 25% of file copies also hang up for about 2 minutes before completing, in the "Calculating" phase, even if the file in question is just a few bytes.

So I was looking forward to this new update. Perhaps it might fix things. No dice. It crashed during the install process. At this point I consider myself lucky to have been able to roll things back to the old version.

I consider myself lucky to not be forced to use Windows: as a developer, everything I need runs on Linux. Haven't had trouble with updates or other crap from vendors ever since.

and I consider myself lucky I managed to push back any of Microsoft's attempts to upgrade me to Windows 10...

And on the other hand Windows 10 has been updating without issue for me on my home machines, I've only caught glimpses of any of them restarting for updates (It schedules them for times when the PC isn't usually in use).

Overall for me the benefits of Windows 10 (Especially better Xbox controller support, which was why I upgraded my first machine to Windows 10) have been nice, and there's been no downside

I do some HTML-to-PDF conversion with Word every now and then, and all of a sudden, Word now offers two different ways to convert, and I have no idea which conforms to the former feature.

I also had a Jekyll site break, because GitHub Pages updated its github-pages gem remotely.

I totally get the advantage of auto-updates, but it's really hard to rely on any software to work the same way for a few years.

Installed in two of my laptops w/o problems two days ago.

You are confusing a fresh install, which almost always works, with upgrading a system.

The system was upgraded,it was not a fresh install.

I guess you are lucky to have a hardware that is well supported by the OS.

I'm not sure that makes a difference here, since a lot of the issues reported are with Surface devices.

At my org we found that Surface+WSUS+ Anniversary Update=dead Surface... And this is just 2 weeks after they fixed the issue where the batteries would stop charging.

I suppose, both of my laptops are HP.

Oh yeah, HP is totally in Microsoft's circle of friends. When they violated the EULA on Windows, Microsoft was like "oh but that's just a minor thing, we don't mind."

> When they violated the EULA on Windows, Microsoft was like "oh but that's just a minor thing, we don't mind."

When did this happen? What was the violation?

Haven't had a problem with Windows, ever, since installing 8 a few years back on multiple PCs.

Neither had I actually... until this update.

At this point anyone who says that Windows is easier to use than Linux, is a troll!

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