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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

The only user-hostile behavior I mostly agree with his forced, frequent updates.

It would be better if:

1) Microsoft didn't beta-test with actual customers.

2) Microsoft figured out how to update things without restarting so commonly (as I understand, this is due to how files are locked and how dependent services are updated).

3) Microsoft didn't push out unnecessary crap as "critical" or essential/important updates.

4) Microsoft didn't force updates on shutdown.

I mean Apple has made their phones the preferred secure devices of several organizations because of how well they keep them updated. It's a pain for me in IT when an app wants to require a recently-released version of iOS, but I do see the benefit to forced, frequent updates.

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My Win10 PC sometimes wakes up in the night to complete an update and reboot. My working sessions are lost as a consequence. And since my PC reboots to Linux it stays up until I wake up due to the humming. Quite annoying.

This morning I researched a way to turn off these forced updates but Win10 wouldn't let me apply the option without entering some obscure credentials that I don't know.

But wouldn't it be better if your apps supported hot exit, so you could wake up the next morning with updates already installed AND all your work still there?

It would be better if updating didn't require a restart.

Well, they don't. And more generally, restoring the original session state, whether after a "hot exit" or not, is not really possible. Processes are bound to a running OS. Shutting down causes closed file descriptors, broken TCP connections, and what not. No matter how much effort you are willing to put into restoring a session, it will be unreliable at best.

The solution shouldn't be "make all the apps work around Microsoft being anti-consumer". It should be "Make Microsoft stop being anti-consumer".

It's a standard expectation on mobile that all apps should work that way, and consumers seem to like that pattern better. So is it really anti-consumer to try and push app developers in that direction?

Dude, this is not mobile. I'm using my Desktop PC for real work. Desktop applications are more complex and have more complex interaction patterns than mobile apps. I might be able to restore my session manually (lose an undo buffer here or a private browsing session there) but its still an annoyance.

There's no reason desktop apps can't by default use near-continuous saved state and assure completely persisted state on shutdown request.

They usually don't, because of historical UI paradigms, but there is no reason they can't. It's universal on mobile because mobile rebuilt UI paradigms from the ground up, discarding desktop legacy nonsense in the process.

Mobile apps don't restore very well either, but it doesn't matter so much. There is usually not much to restore because they have less state.

Let's say I have a private browsing session. Or a password manager session where I've been manipulating an unlocked database. I might have manually mounted a file system over the network and might have a bunch of programs running, editing the files over there.

You cannot restore these things automatically after a shutdown. It's annoying each time, and sometimes you are simply going to lose data.

You are presenting situations that are hard but not impossible to deal with.

If you can keep the stuff in RAM, you can also serialize it to disk and then restore it from there. The only thing you cannot do is reply to external inputs during that time (so keepalive connections may be a problem if your updates take too long), but that can also be dealt with.

We are very far from getting there though.

My KDE desktop will restore about 95% of my previous session in its previous state on restart even after a crash or power loss. It doesn't restore private browser sessions or running games in their current state or anything like that. But it restores most of my desktop software to exactly what i had open with undo buffers, terminal states and just about everything exactly the way it was.

I'm not trying to excuse microsoft....if anything there's really no excuse for them not to have a proper session restore and non-forced updates that don't auto-restart your computer.

Just pointing out they really dropped the ball twice here.

KDE these days has pretty much earned my forgiveness for the last couple of bid re-dos. It's a really fantastic DE again.

> The only user-hostile behavior I mostly agree with his forced, frequent updates.

.. by default.

An owner should always have the final say in what his machine does. If they choose to disable automatic updates, then that's their prerogative and they bear the consequences.

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