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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> I mean I cant even control when my computer reboots anymore on Windows.

Each of the last few major updates have added more and more control over this. The latest release is allowing even more user control.

Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.

At some point MS, as the maker of the largest consumer OS, has a responsibility to patch critical vulnerabilities. Balancing the need to keep users secure with the inconvenience of a reboot, and the feelings of lack of control that come with it, is not an easy task.

On the opposite side, I've been frequently annoyed when Windows, unable to install an update, turns my computer on in the middle of the night, fails to install, and keeps the machine on. Lovely way to waste electricity, error messages are silent, and I had to run a command line power management tool to determine why my machine was waking up every night at 1am.

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> Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.

Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.

Reboots are a reality and they are never going to go away on this architecture.

Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot.

Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can.

There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me."

We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?

Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.

> We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?

Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening.

I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.

The latest features I see in Windows Update seem to give the user total control. Am I mistaken? Maybe it's because I'm running a more expensive SKU? I can defer updates for 7 days, get extra notifications for reboots further in advance, and put myself in a channel that sees very few updates.

For a while now, users have been forewarned about a reboot being needed because of an update for at least a day, in my experience. Most of the time it is multiple days.

It's not like it hits you without warning. You also have the ability to manually reboot whenever you like(!) and prevent surprises that way.

It doesn't give you a warning if your computer has been turned off for an extended period beforehand (for instance, if you're dual booting and Windows isn't your main OS.)

It does for me. Updates are no surprise for me, and I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. They're literally never a surprise to me and I am given many days notice.

http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/

Stage 2.

In macOS, apps tell the OS whether they're capable of perfectly restoring their state after a reboot.

If you, or the system, initiates a reboot/shutdown, and all apps that you have running are such apps, the reboot will just happen, with no further confirmation.

If, however, any app that you have running does not assert that it can be perfectly restored after reboot, then the OS will pause the reboot process and prompt the user to confirm that they want to shut down said app. If the user says no, the reboot is aborted. If the user does nothing (or isn't there to respond), the computer just stays stuck on that prompt forever.

I don't see anything wrong with such a "conservative" auto-detection system, personally.

Oh, I'd have no problem with that. It works fine on macOS, as you say.

Microsoft would have to actually implement it that way, though.

Windows offers that capability as well. Applications can be "reboot-aware" and relaunch after a reboot in their pre-reboot state.

Not many apps take advantage of that, however.

My browsers do, my IDEs do, and my productivity apps do.

All in all, not too shabby.

But Windows will reboot for an update even if an app isn’t “reboot aware”. So I can be encoding videos or downloading a large game and it will just reboot, and I’ll wake up to the task not done.

Windows implements it in exactly this same way though. If all apps report that they can handle it gracefully, it reboots, otherwise you get a similar prompt.

Problem is, apps can lie.

Apple has no problem with the rate of people updating their phones and laptops, but still respects user choice. It's a simple thing to do, MSFT just chooses not to do it in a paternalistic manner. Not to mention how MSFT doesn't respect user privacy to the same degree as apple does.

The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.

So your contention is that Microsoft decided to deliberately annoy its customers, and presumably many of its own employees, by forcing updates for no good reason?

Sorry, but I don't buy that. If Microsoft did this, I think it was for a reason. It's very easy to sit on HN and opine about how Apple can persuade iPhone users to upgrade. But we're not the ones at Microsoft with the job of dealing with the reality of millions upon millions of desktop computers that simply aren't ever being patched, no matter how hard we prod our users, with the result that they are being exploited en masse, used for criminal purposes, and as a result our reputation is getting trashed and governments and other powerful actors are demanding we do something to fix this problem.

Microsoft has caused me more damage with their paternalistic attitude than any malicious software ever did.

They may have all the reasons in the world, but Windows is objectively worse for me (and I believe other power users) in this regard than other OSes.

I'm not sure why you think it's a good idea to defend a company that takes away _your_ control of your computer, and how the other computers having been exploited makes you feel better about losing _your_ work (when you are presumably qualified to avoid and/or detect being exploited on your own). Perhaps you're lucky to not have had trouble with this yet?

> The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.

Hah, say that to my iPhone - every time there is a new update it automatically downloads it (further crippling my already low storage) and keeps asking me for my passcode every few hours. One wrong tap and there goes my phone for the next 10-15 minutes.

Still a choice

No, on my iPhone, it will insist on downloading the update, and the ONLY way to stop it (as confirmed by the "geniuses" at the Austin Domain Apple Store) is to immediately go into storage management and delete the update. This will only stop it until the next time (usually no more than a week or two) that iOS decides to download it again and ram the update down your throat. I'm getting really tired of doing this, especially since Apple's updates have a solid history of slowing performance, so I really just don't want them, in most cases. (I don't have a newer model iPhone, so most of the fixes, which address newer hardware, are meaningless to me...)

If you picked "not now" and gave it your passcode, it would install the update while the phone is plugged into power and not in use.

To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.

> phone is plugged into power and not in use

A) When it thinks it is not in use, not so easy to predict.

> To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.

Yes, but it actually presents the prompt twice, and one wrong tap reboots the device with no way of aborting the process which on a good day takes 10 minutes on my phone.

Screen and Tmux can help a little, but not much (if my work involved stable configurations of tabs, I could save maybe 2 minutes of setup per reboot). Unless you're proposing running all command line tools only on remote servers, which won't work with local files.

I think the problem already has a solution: no automatic reboots. Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.

> Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.

That's EXACTLY what it does now. I have never been surprised by a reboot on any computer I log into and actually use.

My Windows computers still surprise me ~every 3-4 reboots, Pro and Home versions.

Just this morning I got a pop up on my windows computer with a 30 minute countdown to update time.

Which I know will fail - my laptop has been failing to update for the past year or so, but windows still insists on restarting my computer so it can fail the update again.

_Sometimes_ using the "defer updates for a month" will work. Other times, windows will completely ignore it and restart in the middle of my work day.

What you seem to ignore each time when doggedly defending MS is that this is not some checklist of grievances towards them, that once "fixed" will make everything be just fine again. No, Microsoft have proven that they couldn't care less about the privacy or concerns of large parts of their customer base.

Windows 10 telemetry is not an oopsie or one time thing. It's an entire saga that got wide press coverage every time Microsoft was playing dumb, diverting attention or making up excuses and generally being asses. Windows 10 updates completely ignoring the wishes of the owner of the PC is not a one time thing either.

Microsoft has simply lost respect for its customers, it thinks it can throw some open source bones over the fence to keep the nerds happy and switch to SaaS, this time copying Google instead of Apple. They deserve zero respect for that, no matter how many terminals they include in their OS.

The negativity on this site towards people who express any opinion beyond the herd is making this site a groupthink echo chamber. This karma system has failed.

Totally agree. I've largely quit commenting here at all because of it. I always thought gross polarization of topics would never come to HN, but here we are.

And the result is that the comments are really of very little use anymore. Time was they used to be enlightening.

Too bad Paul Graham doesn't give a rat's ass. He has the opportunity to create something beneficial to world society here but doesn't care to put in the money and thought to figure out how to make it work.

I think HN still has one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the web.

I’ll prove my counter point by calling you names.

Serious note: forums decay. Entropy in social media, and forum denizens exists. Such a result is unsurprising,

It isn't accurate to describe HN as pro- or anti-Microsoft (or any $bigco or $bigtopic). It has a wide range of users who feel different things. The comment above isn't representative. Its indignation-to-information ratio was too high to be a good HN comment, though.

Calling names like "herd" and "groupthink" doesn't contain information either; it's just bragging. I wrote about this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19791293

W10 has seriously fucked up updates. Nowdays its more like - will I be able to use computer AT ALL after the update then anything else. Not to mention problems to disable it, unlimited restarts etc.

Seriously, YOU DUDE, who lead this at MS - just go, get fired, whatever !!!

Yeah, the recent # of updates with critical failures has resulted in a huge loss of trust. I wouldn't touch an insiders build, I rely too much on my machine being stable. It is rather sad, a decade ago everything coming out of Microsoft was super stable, but of course it came out much more slowly.

The entire industry has moved to a "less testing, more releases" mentality. Not so bad for websites, where the damage is sandboxed by the browser, but IMHO it is unfortunate this mentality has pervaded everything.

I totally get rapid release cycles, I've lead teams that releases C++ code every 3 weeks! But we had a A+ solid test team backing up every one of our releases, and each of those releases got 2 weeks of testing done to them before they went to beta.

Best team I ever worked on automated every single bug that they have ever seen into a regression test. That mentality requires having a test team that is equal in size (and technical capability!) to the development team, and the current trend of "developer tests" tends preclude such thorough testing practices.

We live in a world where car entertainment systems can lock-up and reboot themselves and where headphones need firmware updates.

Yes, almost every single bug (not cosmetics IMO) should have proof in the form of test. Not doing it ? Instant turn down for me.

But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes. In one of my previous updates my camera stopped working so I couldn't use any IM any more. Tried to fix it for days in vain. Then latest update returned it so I realized that first time they simply turned it off by default (for paranoid people I guess that cover their camera with a tape; I found a setting after reading a changelog). Why ? WHy? WHY ? Why turning off camera FFS ? Or any other stupid decision like keeping windows.old for months with all those GBs of unused space ...

You are totally right about it - web apps need this, browser is their OS. Normal OS doesn't. Even phone doesn't. At least leave me an option.

> But its not only about bugs, MS should not mandate new features on me, only security fixes.

Eh, it depends.

Microsoft got seriously dinged in the press, and by customers, for their long release cycles. MacOS and all the mobile OSes, offered seriously cool new features on a regular basis! Windows looked stale by comparison.

And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful! Being able to iterate on search so it now actually works! The improvements to OneDrive and the underlying file system. These are all great features that have rolled out with Windows.

(Media controls from the lock screen, improvements to Windows Snap, better BT pairing.)

Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers, and Google Music can't differentiate between differently named files that have blank ID3 tags, necessitating my using a file manager to play my MP3s. (That one seriously throws me for a loop, just show me the file name as a fallback!)

(I should just get around to manually adding ID3 tags, but how is a regular end user supposed to figure out what is happening?)

Honestly most of the time rolling Windows updates mean my OS just gradually gets better. I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?

No.

Make features. Make them optional, non-imposing and non-surprising on existing systems. Maybe do reverse on new installation. You can be nice and respect existing people choices.

> Meanwhile Android is set to kill file managers

Well, there is always Total Commander which has a decent music player too. But yeah, its like Exploder era again.

> And some of the new features are sweet, such as the new terminal! Heck having native OpenSSH support built into the OS is wonderful!

Argh... sweet new terminal 20 years behind everybody else. What else ? Notepad update ? Paint ? Some other completely granny stuff ?

Why is this integrated into OS update is beyond me honestly. Adopt decent package manager and update tools on its own (Chocolatey as an example). I don't need OpenSSH most of the time. When I need it, its `cinst openssh` away. Why is that a problem ?

Actually, I always cringe when OS updates brings awesome new "features". OS update should be all about kernel, file systems , drivers and other low level shit. Package manager can cover everything else.

> I don't notice it unless things go wrong, but isn't that how it always is with software?

It shouldn't be like that with OS. OS is not a typical software. Murphy always worked like a clock for me, so now, I only update OS (Linux too) when I am on vacation :) and have time to lose. Or I can revert ASAP (VM, BTRFS...)

On the flip side, you have people now adays that are chomping at the bit to test out Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora 30 in order to get all the awesome stability and performance improvements from the new version of Gnome. These days, it really seems to me that the only people taking the desktop really seriously are the major Linux distributions. People keep saying desktop linux seems to be waning, but I'll believe it when I see it. Every week it seems like theres a new forbes article or Linus Tech Tips video on desktop linux. Not that this will be the "Year of the Linux Desktop" or anything like that, but it really does feel as if some of the strongest advancements to desktop OS is happening in linux (Minus the hardware support for new monitors/graphics/peripherals)

I am really glad to hear that if true, altho I was never a desktop lover (using i3 mostly but just as a modern semi-tmux replacement, not using it on Windows at all except for wallpaper). One day I might be able to totally ditch Windows (hopefully, I do like it a lot, but Linux culture is something else).

> On the flip side, you have people now adays that are chomping at the bit to test out Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora 30 in order to get all the awesome stability and performance improvements from the new version of Gnome.

And there are other people running Debian Stable.

I don't think there's anything wrong with Microsoft's fast release cycle, but I think there's lots wrong with forcing everyone on that cycle. Microsoft already makes LTSB/LTSC—why is it limited to enterprise customers? Microsoft seems to be afraid of people actually buying LTSC and preferring it...

Updates will get a lot better with Microsoft's new 'Santorini' OS (based on Windows Core OS).

https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-core-os

One of the big things Microsoft has been working towards with Windows Core OS is an improved Windows Update system that installs updates in the background and requires less than a minute to restart once those updates are ready to do so.

How it works is very similar to how Android and Chrome OS do updates today. On those platforms, the OS runs in two separate mirrored partitions, and when an update is ready to install, the update is downloaded and installed to the offline partition that you're currently not using. When that's done, the OS will ask you to restart, and while it may look like you're just rebooting, what's actually happening is you're booting into the partition that just spent 25 minutes installing an update in the background.

Windows Core OS keeps system updates to under a minute.

It boots right up, as if there was never an update waiting to be installed, and that's because all the installing has already been done while you were busy using the other online partition. Now, you've booted into the partition where the update is installed, and the partition you were just in becomes the offline partition for newer updates to be installed to down the line.

This should solve one of the big issues Windows has when it comes to updates. Updates can usually take anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes to install, and even longer on older devices. Windows Core OS solves this problem by making it so the user isn't unable to use their PC for no longer than a minute. It simply restarts like normal, and you're back up and running again.

If that stays on server only, it will be shame.

Windows Core OS is different from Windows Server Core.

Santorini is the codename for Microsoft's forthcoming 'Windows Lite' OS designed for laptops and 2-in-1s.

Microsoft is building out Santorini as the version of Windows Core OS that runs on consumer and education foldable PCs, laptops, and 2-in-1 tablets. It may even eventually show up on Microsoft's mythical Andromeda device. It's a new take on what Windows can be, introducing a brand new user experience that's a little more like Chrome OS and less like old-school Windows. It has deep ties with web experiences and puts universal Windows apps front and center, with the ultimate goal of having everything in the Microsoft Store runnable on Santorini.

Santorini features a centered taskbar experience, similar to that on the Surface Hub 2X. There's a simple app launcher that doesn't feature live tiles, which lists your installed apps from the Microsoft Store or pinned websites. I'm also told that Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience, with apps and websites running under tabbed windows that also get grouped as such in the taskbar.

Thanks for the clarification.

> Windows Sets has a pivotal role in the overall Santorini experience

Didn't they say recently that Sets is not being developed, partly because it was too closely tied to non-Chromium Edge? Which makes me wonder how much else of that is still being developed.

I think Sets is still being developed, just not in the way originally intended. [1][2]

[1] https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/205364/is-micros...

[2] https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/1119646566782910464

Ah, I missed that followup.

Windows [...] turns my computer on in the middle of the night

This should be actually fucking illegal. Yet another nail in the Windows 10 coffin, then. It will never be on any of my machines. Never. The level of shit they think we will put up with is utterly outrageous.

I have cron jobs on my VM that auto restart services, and for managed VMs, providers reboot and install security updates w/o giving me any say beyond a certain point. Although warnings are given.

Windows has a slew of options. A giant dialog popped up asking me if I wanted to enable installing updates during quiet hours. I selected yes. I was given choices for when quiet hours are. The OS also has options to auto-detect quiet hours.

The idea is good, I just wish the implementation was foolproof. Then again the desktop it doesn't work on is ancient and has been updated from Windows Vista to 7 to 10, so it is a bit finicky. The various update mechanisms work fine on my other machine.

The "quiet hours" auto update is also the default way it always worked in Windows 7 home versions as well. I tend to delay Windows updates, but for patch Tuesday, Windows will override that and restart at 3am.

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