Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations | Hacker News Reader

Even After Fix, Windows 10 Update Is Botching File Operations

gizmodo.com.au

170 pointssharjeelsayed152 comments

This article is super deceptive, these two bugs are completely unrelated, and the one still standing is pretty obscure:

1. You're extracting a Zip file and intend to overwrite your own data

2. The data isn't overwritten, but it doesn't tell you about it

3. You delete the Zip file, thinking that it's extracted.

I'm not discounting that this is a Bug, but I can't think of a time I would've ever lost data because of this, and relating it to the upgrade bugs seem downright deceptive

You’ve never edited a file and rezipped it? I did that a lot in the nand2tetris course, where you upload zips.

This would be a nasty surprise when the other party carries on as if you send the old while you think you sent the new. Probably would have been testing my hear out on the course.

And I don’t get your attitude. The data is still gone. The fact that it’s unrelated to the original bug isn’t any kind of comfort.

Aha, this explains it:

>Developer tools at Facebook

I know it was an error on my part, but I lost an updated password database file because of unexpected behavior with the Windows file explorer. I had mainly been working out of a single folder, so I didn't realize the next time that I opened the file explorer that it was showing me "quick access" since the file list was populated with the contents of the one folder I was using. I dragged the updated database file to the explorer window, and didn't get any notification. I'd thought it had overwritten the old file without warning, so I deleted the updated file I had dragged over. When I went to load the database, I saw it was missing recently added passwords, so I opened the explorer window and realized that it defaulted to quick access and silently ignores any drag and drop file copying.

This shows what a steamimg pile of incoherent features and behaviours the Windows Explorer has been gradually turned into since Windows 7. It is quite hard for average users to coax that tool into showing an actually honest content of some directory on the hard drive. There are so many abstractions, redirections, alternative view and on the fly translations (only obvious with languages other than English) in there that the very thing it is supposed to be good at becomes cumbersome and error prone. And you cannot easily disable all these things that just tend to get in the way.

If anyone who is working on that program reads this: please rein in this madness and turn the Explorer back into a decent and simple file manager without abstactions and lies to the usera

Microsoft seems to think users are idiots. And often they are. But you can't help these people, every solution they come up just creates more idiots who don't know how it works. Some point soon we'll all be idiots who don't know how anything works anymore.

Maybe you can make computers easier to use by providing abstracted, context-dependent views of the data instead. Mobile phones rely on that prerty successfully. But they also do not merge these views with the single file manager the system has. Therein lies the true madness of the Windows Explorer in my oppinion.

If you want to have a view for the barely computer literate average user, (ab-)use the myriad predefined folders in the user profiles and create a launcher for dummies that starts a comtact manager for the address book, a photo gallery for the photos and so on. And hide a file manager in this set of tools that has no stupid extras like forced OneDrive integration and Libraries.

Mobile iOS don't abstract complexity; they don't have complexity. Mobile apps are just silo's that can barely communicate with each other. Nobody working on a PC wants that.

You cannot simultaneously give people the power to work on files between multiple apps, organize them how they want, and make it as dumb as iOS. You want to zip up your photos and email them to your boss? Good luck getting your photo gallery to do that.

For sure you can do that on Android, and I guess with the new iOS file extensions as well.

How many smartphone users do even know what a zip file is? I'm fairly certain that at least 70% don't and that is an optimistic estimate. Even more, I think that almost every advanced use case relies on some deeper than average knowledge that the user must have about how some particular technological thing works. This means that at least 70% or 80% of users likely won't even understand what that use case is even about.

The amount of garbage I get free with every ZIP file from a Mac user makes me think Apple users aren't the brightest bunch either.

That unfortunately does nothing but help MS' goal...they make simplified tools for both business, personal, and development use.

Try using Total Commander (http://ghisler.com ), it shows you the drive as it really is!

since Windows 7.

I agree with your main point, but putting the cutoff at Windows 7 is extremely generous. Already by then it was doing absolutely insane things like hiding the actual name of the "Program files" folder and instead showing the localized name.

Let me explain: in Swedish Windows, for instance, "C:\Program Files" was traditionally called "C:\Program" since Windows 95. (Here is where the ACTUAL mistake was made that has turned into technical debt ever since -- why in the name of hell would you LOCALIZE the FILENAME of a SYSTEM FOLDER?)

Anyway, lots of installers aren't locale aware and assume "Program Files" so it used to be that most Swedish users had some software installed in "C:\Program" and some in "C:\Program Files" and it was a total mess. Microsoft "solved" this by having Explorer show "C:\Program" but under the hood it is actually "C:\Program Files". The mind boggles, truly.

Then there's the whole "Libraries" vs "Folders" fiasco, don't get me started...

For me, it's been straight downhill since Windows 98 started hiding the contents of system folders by default.

Luckily, we have 64-bit WINFILE.EXE: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile :)

Since Windows 7?

Quick Access (aka Favorites) has been around since XP and default on in Explorer since Vista, though yes some of the views have changed after 7, this particular bug is possible in Vista and 7.

The Windows Explorer being an "object explorer" that doesn't necessarily show physical objects but can also show logical objects that are "folder-like" is a design/architecture that dates back all the way to Windows 95 (and has always been seen in places like the old Control Panel).

"Gradually turned into since Windows 7" is pretty much "has always been since Windows 95", sorry to say.

This would hose me daily if I used windows. Not best practice but the real world has dictated that on occasion we extract data, modify it, re zip it, and ship it off to the product.

But it does gather clicks!

Not obscure at all; this is daily practice.

An OS used by billions of people including government agencies, hospitals, and nonprofits is not some videogame that needs new content. It's mission critical software, and these utter delinquents are treating it like a Steam early release.

If MS won't get its act together, they should be regulated, broken up, or have their OS seized by eminent domain for the public good.

First half, yes.

Second half, no. That's pretty disturbing territory being leapt into, and sets a very bad precedent.

Isn't there already precedent for the state to step-in to ensure the continued survival of privately-owned and operated corporations and infrastructure that society has taken a strong dependency on? ("too big to fail", etc)

Pure speculation time...

Even if there was precedent, I cannot imagine a single government taking over an globally distributed operating system AND making it better.

The US Government could maybe do something like force Microsoft to sell Windows to another large company at firesale prices, like Google or IBM, in the same way that Merrill Lynch was forced to sell at bargain basement prices to Bank Of America, at which point BofA became too big-ger to fail.

Seized, absolutely not. Of course since the government already has the source there is nothing that needs to be seized. The government can just declare the temporary monopoly that they granted on copying it to be over (to be clear, this would take an act of congress...).

I'd almost be sympathetic to them doing that - but I also think the outcome would be absolutely terrible. Necessary maintenance (fixing security bugs, updating to new hardware, etc) takes a lot of work and I'm not clear that anyone else would step up to do a good job of it. See how the various android OEMs act...

The government can just declare the temporary monopoly that they granted on copying it to be over

IANAL, but I think that would violate the Constitutional prohibition of Bills of Attainder.

> IANAL, but I think that would violate the Constitutional prohibition of Bills of Attainder.

No, it wouldn't. A bill of attainder declares a person guilty of a crime or specifies criminal punishment for a particular person.

The 5th Amendment Takings Clause, though, is likely to be an issue.

I bet a lot of enterprises are still using Windows 7 or older because they are mission critical systems for the reasons you state above . (Also because they have to validate all their software to the new operating system .

Win 10 LTSB is really, really good. If you can get it, you should be running it. It would be worth paying a premium for if Microsoft would sell it retail, rather than only through MSDN or volume licensing.

Or using Windows 7 because staff can actually use the UI.

> or have their OS seized by eminent domain

If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.

Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost. It just fails to surface an overwrite dialogue, and assumes the result is no.

I know you're saying this in jest, but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth (e.g. DoD's WGS 84, all the work by NIST, etc.). Sure, healthcare.gov was not a smooth rollout, but they do deserve some credit overall.

Now Windows on the other hand.... I just set up Windows on a new laptop I bought recently.. just plain Windows as it shipped with my new laptop. Didn't do anything "outside the box" here. I've let it update after this fiasco was supposedly over, restarted - and, of course - can't boot, everything's corrupted, had to reinstall Windows from scratch. Never had this happen with macOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.

It's hard to believe, but it really is _that_ bad. I wish it wasn't!

Never happened to me with Windows. It's not the best, but works.

Linux on the over hand it's a continuous installation of drivers and fixing functionality that works out of the box on my windows: graphics problems, audio, screen, usb, WiFi.

Of course and then you try to install some module and says you have incompatible modules. Then you need to figure out what modules you need to change to match the version of the module to install. This was a few years ago, but I don't have the time to do this.

Plus window management is broken on Linux, too many bugs. Last time I couldn't even alt tab like windows.

I don't know, what exactly you are doing with your Linux installation, but you are doing it wrong.

Try installing something released in last 20 years or so.

Just let version of Ubuntu and follow all the steps there. Just standard

Working out of the box is nice, but what's magically fixed can be magically broken just as easily. Traditional Linux was more work to get working, but once I got it working I could rely on it to stay working rather than getting broken in the next update. (Linux is no different from windows these days, so I've moved to FreeBSD).

I don't know, windows just works most of time just fine. Linux is way more problematic, that's why I just use Windows.

I find windows more problematic, because of the unpredictability. FreeBSD experience: spend a day or two setting it up, but after that you can rely on it always working. Windows experience: it works the first time, but every few months it will have an update that breaks things for a bit.

I tried switching to Linux again for desktop usage since Proton became a thing and I was tired of the weird new licensing model. Installed the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and after fiddling around for a week I still couldn't get my sound cards to work properly. The sound quality is just bad and the sound often cuts.

Honestly if I had a little willpower I think I might have been able to get a satisfying result at some point but the effort just wasn't worth it for me. I use my home computer like 3-4hrs a week in the weekend for games and maybe hobby projects if I don't feel like dying. I'd rather just have something that plainly works in a predictable manner, but even that seems to be asking too much nowadays...

You don't appreciate the difference between knowing what's happening to your system well enough to fix it and hoping that an "update" doesn't cause too much unrecoverable damage when it installs itself behind your back.

I just need to do some work, not fixing the os

>but the (US) government wrote code to fly to the moon and back, control robots on Mars, and model the earth

I don't believe either of this where 100% bug free.

> If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.

That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid. As someone who works in the public sector, trust me, we try to get the money to people we know will do a good job. We have to work with the shit we buy every day. We want it to be good. There's just a lot of people willing to put in maximum of effort on a bid and minimal effort on execution.

> Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost.

I mean, kind of. I agree it's not as bad as the article implies. However, it's a pretty common pattern to download a zip file, extract and overwrite, and then throw out the zip file. It's not directly resulting in data loss, but a very common user pattern will result in data loss when you encounter this bug.

> That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid.

Lots of public sector bodies use best-value rather than lowest-bid procurement.

Not in the EU if you have to buy something expensive with tax money. Because the Public Procurement directive says you

* are required to hold a public tender

* Before you start, you create a list of criteria, with a weight for each of them.

* 50% of the weight goes to price.

* Once the process starts, common sense is treated as being bribed.

Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.

As someone who had to deal with them from both sides, EU public procurement laws are fucked up beyond repair. There is, however, a simple cure for software that the public sector is avoiding in most places:

1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case

2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones

3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members

4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone

Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.

I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:

1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)

2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).

> 50% of the weight goes to price.

Turns out they often need to tender as fast as possible and just use "lowest price satisfying all other criteria" as a way of choice.

> Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.

You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experience". As descendant says, these are used to work around ban of subjective selection. Sometimes, they overdo it, and no vendors qualify at all.

> You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experiene".

Exactly these are being used to pick a specific vendor. "Must have at least N people certified to do X for at least Y years", with "must have turnover of X for the last Y years" and few more, and you find out, that there is exactly one company qualifying.

There is no fast when talking abou tenders. You need to give at least 6 months by law to give companies a chance to respond. If they start asking basic questions, they get extra time to read each others answer. 9 months to 1 year seems a reasonable guess for a not to big tender

If you don’t like their os, we don’t need to seize it, just stop using it. There are multiple other ones.

I don't. I have one Windows 7 machine left.

Windows 7 was peak Microsoft. Between trying to make desktop look like mobile and adding built-in spyware and ads, it's been downhill since then.

MacOS works very well. And if you don’t like Apple hardware, so do many Linux distributions (Ubuntu is very popular and easy to get support for), and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD if you are willing to put in more time.

Most people are better served by NOT windows. Using Win10 without a specific program that isn’t available for macOS/Linux is bordering on masochism.

Should have explained better. Everything is Linux except for one last Windows 7 machine.

> Using Win10 without a specific program that isn’t available for macOS/Linux is bordering on masochism.

Some of us like 100% laptop support without speeding weekends tweaking them instead of being at the park with friends and family.

Even buying from Linux friendly hardware stores isn't always a success, as proven by my own Asus netbook.

I have the opposite experience with Win support - my parents replaced their aging windows laptop with a new win10 one, and I had to spend the weekend trying to get their old printer and scanner working again, whereas it still works out of the box with the latest Ubuntu.

The main difference these days, once you got past the setup, is that as a non LTSB/LTSC user, Microsoft keeps inflicting damage onto you (e.g. in the form of reappearing Candy Crush) with no way for you to stop it without continuously actively fighting.

> Most people are better served by NOT windows.

It sucks that as a gamer, I'm basically forced to use Windows.

If I could run Ubuntu without worrying about game compatibility, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Some Windows Insider MVPs are getting really frustrated with the ”danks and memes” way Windows is developed nowadays [1]. I guess this is the eternal pendulum, swinging between “too boring” and “too hip”.

[ https://win10.guru/how-i-lost-my-windows-insider-mvp-award/ ]

Well, that escalated quickly.

Users can opt out of the targeted updates, so they will update only after the version is consolidated.

Companies and government should not be using the targeted version at all.

It's not an excuse for the issues, but it's not a big problem for companies as you make it seem.

There's an LTS version of win 10 without the constant feature updates. Do you actually support desktop Windows in any of those industries with mission critical desktops? If so, you need to educate yourself. If not, your rant is coming from an uninformed position.

Just cause something says LTSB/C, it doesn't mean it doesn't have the same bugs of the update it was branched from.

The LTSB/C is a joke, it's literally just the regular release with Cortana and other garbage removed.

Are you familiar with LTS releases of Linux distributions? Do you expect them to be something extraordinary?

It's on a completely different release schedule. Sure anything can have bugs but this is not going to get bugs introduced through feature-adds. It doesn't get these feature updates. It's stable. This is the entire point. You test and validate before your deploy and then you deploy and it remains stable.

It's not clear from the article whether this was just an old long-standing bug that has now gotten attention, or if they really broke a basic piece of functionality that has been around since at least XP if not earlier. I'm not surprised either way, but unfortunately I'm leaning toward the latter.

I don't think I'm the only one when I say I want Microsoft to quit messing around with Windows --- just fix the severe security bugs as they're found, and stop rewriting things needlessly. Then again, they're probably doing the latter as an excuse to insert telemetry and ads...

I'm on the previous version, 1803, and the functionality in question certainly works.

So WSL is just "an excuse to insert telemetry and ads"? That's a very original POV.

You’re really putting words in their mouth. WSL is not a core part of windows that has been rewritten.

WSL is one of the features which has seen major improvement from the updates in the past 12 months.

>The good news is, if you use a third-party app for archives, such as WinZip, WinRAR or 7-Zip, you won't encounter the bug.

I'm not excusing the bug, but 7-zip had been one of the first tools I install on any windows installation since XP, setting it as default application to handle all archive formats it supports, .zip included. I'm surprised to see so many comments about potentially running into this bug, doesn't everyone just use 7-zip?

Unregistered WinRAR for life

I actually bought a license a lot of years ago because I had been using it for many more years already, always clicking that nag screen away, and some day I realized that I would be totally hosed on Windows if there was no WinRAR because it really is the only compression tool that packs good format support with a bearable user interface.

7-zip is okay on the format side since they added some of the newer high-efficiency compression algos, but the UI still sucks compared to WinRAR.

...there's a 7-Zip UI?

I take it you're doing more than is offered in the right-click menu?

Sure. Replacing single files deep down in some directory hierarchy in an archive. Compressing bigger amounts of files as efficient and fast as possible, so I want to customize a lot of parameters of the algorithm. Extracting many archives into separate or a common directory. Verifying archive integrity because something seems to be damaged. Encrypting stuff when compressing.

I like to use a good UI for that stuff when I'm on a graphical system like Windows anyway, and WinRAR is consistently better at that than 7-Zip.

I even seriously miss WinRAR when working on MacOS. Does anybody have any good suggestions for archive managers (may also be expensive ones, I don't care much if they are really good) with similar UI and functionality as WinRAR on MacOS?

Apparently there are a lot of people also using Explorer for extracting zip files. Those end up in our support because the .NET License Compiler won't license components that have the Internet Zone black mark on them. And Explorer is the only extraction tool to my knowledge that propagates that marker to the extracted files.

When I hear 7zip I associate it with security vulnerabilities. I remember reading a couple of articles last year that said 7zip was maintained and distributed by a single person with not-stellar security practices, and most mirrors online are hosting old, insecure versions. Therefore I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that doesn't "know what they're doing" wrt security.

source: https://borncity.com/win/2018/02/21/security-risk-avoid-7-zi...

"most mirrors online are hosting old, insecure versions"

The same can be said for every Windows software. Heck, even Windows itself. Although it offers you the option to install updates before exposing your computer to any security risks, I doubt many people are patient enough to take it.

The author of that article's problems with 7zip can be summed up and dismissed like so:

1. 7zip has had security flaws - so does every other software that interacts with untrusted data, and the author admits himself that 7zip's author has responded quickly (it doesn't seem like 7zip has an abnormally high amount of exploits)

2. People are using/redistributing old versions of 7zip which are vulnerable - and that's 7zip's fault how? 7zip's own website has an easy to use and up to date installer, go after the people hosting the shitty mirrors

3. 7zip doesn't use ASLR - the author of the article literally gives the reason for this: shrinking the binary size (he then tries to pretend like this is some gaping security flaw)

4. 7zip doesn't use DEP on 32 bit windows prior to win10 - do people seriously even use 32 bit windows nowadays? (also, this is as dumb of a "flaw" as not having ASLR)

Fun fact: the article's author recommends you use the OS's built in tools (aka windows explorer), so I guess I'll just have to pretend that any tar/rar/etc files don't exist

Isn't it a flaw though? What is the point of ASLR then? Asking as a noob

I'd compare it to a classical steering-wheel lock. It makes your car a bit harder to steal. Even without it, a thief would still have to get into the car and start the engine. But not parking in a bad neighborhood will likely be a more important factor.

ASLR makes it harder to exploit other bugs that might exist in the software. Browser for example should definitively use it, since they are highly complex systems while also your first line of defense against a somewhat competent attacker. As for 7zip... it also can come in contact with dubious files quite easily while also having to support lots of formats (huge attack surface with potential bugs). I'm torn, but would probably prefer it to use ASLR.

Yikes. This sounds, however, like a completely different bug, if it is only triggered by unzipping archives. I'm sure that the situation is more complicated than it looks - because it looks like there is just a shocking lack of QA testing being done, if basic edge cases like this are resulting in undefined behavior.

I'm astonished Microsoft doesn't have automated tests for something as mundane as testing their built-in zip archive extraction functionality.

I expect there are automated tests, but it's been my experience that automated tests are usually not very deeply implemented. They often test the expected code paths, and new code, with new tests that fail to review the existing tests can often result in regressions that are not caught.

Peter Bright at Ars Technica had an interesting article on the Windows development process, with a tidbit of information I thought was interesting. Apparently it's permitted to integrate code into Windows that doesn't have tests:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsofts-problem-i...

Perhaps it the type of bug that only happens 497 days[1]? a few of these class of bugs slip through now and then (intiger overflow).

1. https://blog.ctm-it.com/it-support/blogs/matt-cannon/2013/49...

I'm going to quote my comment on the original bug [1] here:

> Well, you see, when you fire a whole lot of your OS group's QA department...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18154679

It's fine, because "automation" automatically finds all the bugs, and developers are evaluated primarily on code quality and test coverage, not on ability to crank out feature code as rapidly as possible.

Sounds like Linux-class bugs (e.g. KDE copy/paste not working correctly sometimes[0]).

I guess Windows has lost its advantage of perceived quality.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9a7k2i/psa_on_kde_ne...

It still is kilometres ahead.

Yeah, it's getting really bad. It seems like now that MS is embracing open source and Linux, they are also embracing some of their worst practices. Treating users like children, not listening to users, rolling releases without regard to stability or consistency, adding features nobody asked for instead of fixing bugs, inconsistent UIs...

> Treating users like children, not listening to users, rolling releases without regard to stability or consistency, adding features nobody asked for instead of fixing bugs, inconsistent UIs...

None of these are unique to open source. IMHO, commercial software tends to be equally bad, if not worse.

:D As a Linux-lover, Windows 10 has been an absolute gold mine. I get to roll out all the old lines... "I need a system that just works", "I can't afford to waste time fixing it after every update", "it's just a toy OS"[1], etc.

[1] Go on, tell me why Candy Crush is installed by default in the Enterprise edition...

I like seeing how removing the latest unwanted feature requires 'just' a few settings changes. Poetic.

Microsoft has turned Windows Update into a cancer that is the single reason I am going to abandon their platform in future machine purchases. Can't believe I'm longing for the days of Vista (well post-SP1).

What are you switching to in the future for desktop/laptop?

Personal goal: gather ~$13,500 and buy the maxed out iMac Pro 2017 -- 4TB SSD, 128GB RAM, Xeon W (18 cores, 2.3Ghz, turbo boost to 4.3GHz, 42.75MB cache), 10Gb ethernet link, 4 USB Type-C ports, 4 Thunderbolt 3 slots, amazing display.

I view it as an at least 7 years of investment, if not 11-12 even.

(Especially now that macOS has a dark theme as well.)

I have a very keen interest in Linux and the people who make it happen... but reality is they are not dedicated teams of people working with high wages on Linux alone so problems with desktop always arise -- also competing standards, but the real problem is that a lot of end-user or specialized work software just can't run on Linux (3D modelling, architecture planning, professional design programs etc.). Truthfully, Linux on PCs is just fine but laptops are a whole different story.

I love Linux but for all its amazing engineering it remains a mostly programmer/sysadmin system and environment and nothing much else beyond that. I need a lot of stuff done outside of that and I have hobbies I wanna work on in the future and Linux just isn't cutting it. I don't want to hand-craft clever command-line configurations until I die.

Windows 10 is... I don't know, feels like it's going downhill overall. Important UX issues aren't being addressed for ages -- like the two sets of configuration UIs (almost everybody I asked says they were confused by that). WSL is good and useful, the cloud offerings look alright but something is just missing. Maybe the fact that after the April 2018 update the Mail program never managed to work with my mail again. Read about a "workaround" which involved resetting your user profile and... yeah, gave up. Who wants to restore their settings for a full workday just so a half-arsed mail program can work again? These things pile up and now I can't even tell you all my complaints nowadays because I never wrote them down -- only my accumulated impression, which is disappointment.

Windows is, in my opinion, descending.

Build a hackintosh imo.

Too much work. Had my fair share of building PCs or flashing ROMs on Android. When I buy an iMac Pro I will be 100% Apple-invested. I got tired of tinkering on minor stuff, I want to build things and have small logistical resistance while doing so.

Ask Mac users what their favorite version of OS X is and it more than likely won't be the latest one.

But I agree Windows is descending -- they fired the guy the righted the ship and made Windows 7.

For Apple, it's always hard to be sure anyone their really cares about OS X and professional hardware.

Truth be told, I don't care much about the aesthetics per se -- with the exception of the dark theme, that has to be the best thing to introduce in a while!

Windows UI has deficiencies, all Linux WMs have some deficiencies (although some are unbelievably customizable and I like them), macOS is no exception as well. I don't care. I want it to work stably, predictably and be somewhat pretty. macOS ticks the boxes. Windows used to but it's very idiosyncratic lately. And the OS is just somewhat slow even on a very beefy PC where games can't go below 120 FPS... and your OS still manages to lag. Not cool.

In any case, I am not under the illusion that the iMac Pro + macOS will be the "perfect" machine and OS. Not at all. But between getting tired of tinkering with minor crap, UX inconsistency, lags and software compatibility to me the Apple ecosystem is the best compromise. Not trying to convince anyone though, simply explaining my thought process that led me to my decision.

> $13,500

> I view it as an at least 7 years of investment, if not 11-12 even.

Hmm, that's equivalent to spending between $1-2k to get a new computer every single year. That sounds like an awful investment to me, and I don't think most people would consider it a good investment to have to buy a $1-2k computer every single year. How do you see that as a good investment?

Not the OP but I bill around that per day, so the investment would only be a days worth of billable time to stay cutting edge, so makes sense in that perspective.

Wow, what do you do?

Funny username by the way. :)

Let me just be really honest and say: I envy you. I am working hard to become as good in sales.

I did the math and even if I don't make that much money as the other guy here in this thread, I view it as an investment in terms of a peace of mind and future-proofing.

Computing is plateauing. Provided the machine is durable and doesn't break for at least 10 years, it makes a lot of sense to have something that you won't have to upgrade for a while -- and be very well prepared for everything your work can throw at you.

Plus, I also tried to calculate the price of that iMac Pro if I assemble a similar machine myself. It came out to almost the same price so Apple is not actually charging a lot of premium on that machine in particular. They are more interested in having you as a long-term customer there (and vendor-lock you) and are not charging you exorbitant amounts of money just because -- at least not in that instance.

I don't think that iMac would last for 12 years. I would save that money for Mac Pro which they promised to be good.

Well I don't have the money now so I am sitting and waiting anyway. :D

I will keep watching and observing. Last I read, the latest Mac Pro is noisier than the iMac Pro which you have to fully load all its CPU cores and both videocards to even hear. To me the [lack of] noise is extremely important in a machine. (That's why I spent $400 on a PC box, CPU cooler and the most silent fans I could find, last year.)

That, plus the fact that it's an all-in-one machine. One gets sick of reshuffling their desk periodically, I gotta tell you.

They are building new Mac Pro from the scratch, don't look at latest one, it's considered a failure (overheating GPUs, etc). But well, if you just want monoblock, then iMac Pro is no brainer, of course. I have opposite view and prefer modular components, especially for long-lasting hardware.

If we're talking PCs then I fully agree. Modular beats monoblock all-around.

Apple has a terrible track record on repairs in warranty however (it's basically a 50/50, lot of luck involved). Whatever I end up buying I'll just pray it doesn't break. So modular or not, doesn't make much of a difference. If anything breaks you're likely screwed. That's why I'm most likely buying an iMac Pro.

But since that ain't happening yet, I'll be curiously following what other machines will they come up with in the meantime.

If I had the cash (like $25k budget), I'd go all out on a Talos II (by Raptor Engineering) with maxed out CPU and RAM configuration, and if I couldn't get OpenBSD running on it I would christen it with NetBSD.

I would love a "fully open" hardware platform, which is a non-starter in the Apple and amd64 PC world today. It'll take an act of congress (or a California proposition) to enact a tax high enough to economically make this be fixed, say 100%, on all consumer products containing microprocessors which read software/firmware/microcode from a memory store yet a) prevent the owner, if competent, from modifying the software by means of cryptographic signature or "burn-in," and/or b) do not provide enough documentation on design, where a competent owner could write his own software/firmware/microcode, and write his own drivers. This will apply to cars, microwaves, TVs, Intel/AMD CPUs, GPUs, cellphones both smart and dumb, game consoles, kids' toys, and even greeting cards, etc. To not have a 100% endpoint tax, the device must either be: immediately owner writable, or b) must have a jumper or DIP switch to enable owner write-ability, or c) must include a mechanism to accept owner cryptographic public keys to allow owner to write his own signed image, or d) must have an entry for an OEM-provided code which unlocks owner write (OEM must immediately give this code unconditionally on owner request, and may limit warranty for that particular device), and in all cases where OEM public keys exist, they must be completely purge-able.

In the age of Snowden and IoT rolling in, it's completely unacceptable that we lack Total Owner Control of our microprocessor-bearing devices. If Apple or Intel refuse, they can try to justify $1,600-$2,000 iPhones and $400-$1,000 basic CPUs and GPUs to the consumer. Closed hardware will become a national security risk if it isn't already; it's time to nip it in the bud before so.

Sorry late reply, I'd have to do more research but if my machine pooped the bed today probably Linux Mint. Maybe wait for Apple's rumored Mac Mini Pro announcement next week to see if it's not the worst?

Either get LTSB 2015, 2016 or LTSC 2019.

Long-Term Servicing Channel.

...The LTSC servicing model prevents Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB devices from receiving the usual feature updates and provides only quality updates to ensure that device security stays up to date....Microsoft never publishes feature updates through Windows Update on devices that run Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB. Instead, it typically offers new LTSC releases every 2–3 years, and organizations can choose to install them as in-place upgrades or even skip releases over a 10-year life cycle. [0]

Is there a new LTSC release?

Yes. For those customers utilizing the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), we have also released Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019. This is the third feature update for Windows 10 for the LTSC, and it has many benefits for all Windows 10 devices, including the special-purpose devices in your environment. [1]

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/W...

while technically true, the title is misleading because it makes it sound like every file operation (copy, move, etc.) is botched, when in reality it's only messing up when extracting from zip files and they already exist.

I see what you’re saying, but Microsoft is forcing the industry on a treadmill to upgrade as quickly as possible as they aggressively break stuff on their quest the twiddle Windows twice a year. They need to embrace quality control.

Handling zip files is a basic file system function in 2018. If they are fucking up basic operations like this, imagine how bad other parts of Windows are now.

I agree with a lot of this, but I think if we are talking updates as upgrades, the industry and consumers forced their hands with fast update cycles with meaningful feature adds. Not excusing what is happening here, they allowed it to be released, but I do think they were forced into the current position rather than took it on their own.

>the industry and consumers forced their hands with fast update cycles with meaningful feature adds.

Yeah, sure. To hell with reliability, let's have features instead.

Reminds of chinese android forks.

Somewhere at Microsoft some bean counters decided that formal QA was costing them too much and “agile” was a perfect excuse to scuttle QA (move fast and break things.) It’s bullshit that has been propagated throughout the software industry. “Well, Microsoft doesn’t do it this way anymore so...”. I work for an MS partner and this is exactly what’s happening in-house here. You’re just making your customers the beta testers.

Agile has nothing to do with releasing products early or in testing. It allows the development process to run more smoothly, but it should be completed by the time it is released to the public.

Stability is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS priority #1 in an operating system!

Unless it is a development phone, then it is fun to play with new, partially supported features.

It all depends on the context of your statement.

That’s the Microsoft line, but it’s bullshit. The company squandered like 5 years on the Windows 8 disaster, which was a failure based 100% on Microsoft pushing forward with a bad strategy. There’s still a PC on every desk, and some helpless saps are scrambling to upgrade from Windows 7 in 2018.

Nobody, anywhere is or was pining for high tempo Windows changes. What I’m seeing is that more and more institutional customers are looking at mobile, Chrome and other offerings.

The real disaster was XP. Windows 8 was a relatively straightforward push forward from where Windows 7 was at the time. It just didn't get that chance at a benefit of such doubt because the vast majority of (especially corporate) users weren't even trying to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7, they were still trying to wrap their heads around upgrading out of Windows XP before Microsoft dropped an overly-generous run of decades of security updates.

This is ridiculous, but to save yourself, run backups. I've been doing a full system disk backup every 24 hours for the past 2 years. So far it has saved my bacon once.

Fwiw, i use Acronis for bups. The restore process for a 128gb ssd took about 10mins.

I started using Acronis to backup everything I don't want to lose about a year ago. A couple months ago, one of my hard drives failed (which I've never had happen before). Instead of trying to limp my files from the half-working hard drive, I just restored to the new disks and remapped the hard drive to the old letter, took maybe an hour and it was like nothing had happened.

I ran the October update and lost my Desktop folder.

After install, a dialog box appears:

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Desktop is unavailable ..."

Out of curiosity... why was your desktop folder there? That is a really weird place for it.

Systemprofile just hosts configuration files including one which links to the Desktop folder. The OS is either not finding the data or is unable to read it. The actual Desktop folder is probably still present in its usual location.

I _think_ that may be a magic symlink/bind mount equivalent that gets remapped to the running user's location.

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\" is the profile folder (%USERPROFILE%) for the LocalSystem account; it doesn't normally have a desktop folder.

If Windows is trying to find your desktop folder there when you log on interactively, something's gone horribly wrong (but, frankly, that doesn't surprise me with the 1809 update).

Didn’t Microsoft reorganize a bit ago and let go huge swaths of their QA team? Seems to line up with their public beta version to try and get some free QA.

Like, it’s understandable that supporting so many chipsets is hard but it really seems like they were doing a better job 10 years ago.

Note that the windows implementation of zip/unzip does not always return the original file contents after a round trip. Yes, I’ve seen it myself. That’s an even more serious bug, but it’s been there since win7 at least. I don’t trust the builtin zip at all.

Do you have any links to bug reports or other documentation about this?

Unfortunately no. I experienced it when running software signed/hashed and it just would not run. The dev told me that this was well known and that I should not use the builtin zip. Sure enough, unzipping the file with 7zip worked like a charm.

I’ve found the same when downloading a proprietary lib that would not link with a C/Fortran application. The devs there tracked it down to the windows zip being used to pack the file, which they did not normally do.

So, just hearsay, but I’ve never even dreamed of bothering to file a bug report with microsoft. Is that even doable?

Why in 2018 do we still have lousy file managers?

Because for most people file management and document management are kinda the same, so we end up with tools that are barely capable document managers that end up exposing all kinds of details about the underlying storage mechanism and both are kinda iffy. You cannot reliably do document management atop of files while keeping file managers happy and the subset of document management tasks that can be done at the file level is kinda limited as well. So we get some weird hybrid that's horrible to use and still incapable of many interesting tasks.

If you're really tired of this shit, then get LTSB.

What's LTSB?

https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...

I'm not sure how LTSB could have prevented this at all. Ironically, 1809 was a LTSB release, so if you were upgrading from 1607 LTSB (to get WSL working, for example), you would also be exposed to this bug.

I just installed WSL on LTSC and it worked great. The MS docs explained it easily enough and provided the proper power shell commands.

Well at the moment LTSB isn't affected is it? So there you go, proof enough. In any case it's not just that, there are lots of other annoying stuff that I don't need in my life.

>Well at the moment LTSB isn't affected is it?

And you know that based on what? The lack of bug reports? The LTSB population is obviously going to be smaller than the general population, so the lack of reports of it happening on LTSB doesn’t really indicate anything. Besides, the task manager bugs introduced in 1809 is in ltsb 1809 AND server 2019, which makes me inclined to believe that all the windows editions come from the same branch anyways.

I don't expect it to have 0 bugs. But generally speaking less features means less bugs. And as I said it's not just about bugs.

We downloaded the 2019 LTSC (1809) and a day later it was pulled. I suppose it has the same problems.

From your friendly neighborhood enterprise B2B volume sales team? Or from an illegally shared copy of questionable integrity?

> questionable integrity?

What's what integrity checks are for.

Microsoft aren't the ones supplying the tools to fake a licence, though.

They are welcome to make it easier to obtain LTSB license. They are not interested in that obviously.

Technically there's not much that is stopping me from using it in trial mode with a rearm up to 90 days, because I use it in a VFIO VM anyway. But you probably wouldn't like that either, would you?

What's a really good alternative to Windows Explorer?

WSL + bash

Total Commander

I use this for file viewing and managing:

https://www.fileviewer.com/index.html

(the web page describes it as 'an all-purpose File Manager for Windows with a powerful inbuilt text file viewer')

This is why when I run Windows in virtuo, it's Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition with the help of vlmcsd.

Is Microsoft starting to hire bootcamp grads or what?

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