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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, Windows has become an acceptable Unix. (I'm not trolling.) I don't want to admit this, but I've been wondering whether, over the long term, FOSS stuff really can't match the quality of a sustained commercial endeavor.

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For me, "acceptable" implies full control over updates, among other things. In that regard Windows only got worse. Their system's update behaviour would only be justified if the updates were absolutely perfect on all devices. They aren't, not even on their own Surface hardware.

And after one of the updates started without even giving me time to close files and then proceeded to completely wipe my system drive I can't see me using Windows ever again unless drastic changes are made.

I fail to see the supposed "quality of a sustained commercial endeavor" here.

An update wiped out your system drive? Sounds very unlikely. There are millions of Windows 10 PCs if something like that happened it would be major news.

It literally happens all the damn time, and it does make the news. Microsoft has had to recall several update roll outs on Windows 10 because they can't seem to make them stop breaking shit.

It was major news [1], but afaik it "only" wiped all user data. Which quite frankly is just as bad.

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-october-2018-updat...

That's terrible, I thought that Microsoft had a somewhat better QA program. Though to be fair that is not what i would call wiping out the system drive, because you are still able to boot into Windows and similar things do happen on other operating systems.

> I thought that Microsoft had a somewhat better QA program.

They did. In 2014, they eliminated their extensive and effective separate testing positions as part of a large layoff/restructuring. Supposedly, testing was going to be consolidated in engineering, and not eliminated, but the proof is in the pudding: Windows releases since then have had big problems that feel like they should have been caught and fixed before release.

It was news, 3 years ago. They also had problems of updates causing boot loops which one time affected some of their own Surface Pro line. Some Windows 10 updates were delayed for months because they crashed computers and destroyed installations.

But it doesn't make the computer literally explode so nobody cares if some random users have to pay a repair shop to restore files and get it running again.

       Working on updates
          30% complete
  Don't turn off your computer

I just saw our Macs on the office do the same thing.

Does it do that automatically, closing apps doing stuff?

(I have a Mac, it never did)

One trick sysadmins did on Windows was to keep Notepad with an unsaved file running, because it was able to interrupt the forced system restart.

I am mostly on Windows, but in both cases those updates get actually forced on all machines by IT remote management tooling.

We don't have "IT remote management tooling". I would be surprised if it happened for Macs, since it's one of those things that can lead to work being lost and it's incredibly stupid.

Also the situation I described happens for personal computers outside of remote corporate control.

When Windows updates, you get a dialog saying that the computer will restart soon and if you're not there to stop it from doing that, it will force close all apps.

One side effect is that you can't leave it alone to process something and heavens forbid leaving it on as a personal server for you to connect remotely to it because it will shut down.

And to make matters worse, Microsoft is pushing those updates frequently and depending on whether you got the shitty version or the expensive version, you can't disable this behavior.

We surely have it on any enterprise I have worked for with Macs around.

And they even have anti-virus running due to compliance with security regulations.

They probably weren't kicked out of what they were doing or lost work as a result. MacOS is comparatively much better-behaved when it comes to update behavior.

Actually they were, remote update push from IT.

When an admin, local or remote, tells a computer to restart, it should restart. That's the computer working as intended.

What we are talking about is a program that updates the system kicking users out and spending a very long time doing things the user finds opaque.

  Fetched 1,321 kB in 1s (1,054 kB/s)                                 
  Reading package lists... Done
  Building dependency tree       
  Reading state information... Done
  All packages are up to date.

Anecdote

    Failure configuring Windows updates
            Reverting changes

And it does that (update and revert cycle) every boot..

Back in the NT days, had Microsoft actually invested into their POSIX subsystem, instead of having it around for DoD contracts, Linux would never had taken off.

As proven by those that buy Apple to develop for Linux, a large majority only cares about having a POSIX like experience around.

I doubt this.

Back in the NT days, there really was a religious war of Microsoft vs everyone else. They really were seen as the evil empire, using anti-competitive behavior to force crap down everyone's throats. A lot of people felt that way, including me.

For me it was easy to buy an Apple to develop for Linux. Why? It was Unix, and it wasn't Microsoft. If Microsoft had sold the exact same laptop with exactly the same operating system, I would have refused to buy it. Remember the motto Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... if you've forgotten.

I've matured. I laugh at myself. But I have a deep sympathy for the old Unix people that I saw when I was young who had spent a lifetime fighting IBM only to see IBM playing nice with open source and having trouble accepting it at face value. Because no matter how much Microsoft tries to change, I still have trouble seeing them as anything other than the company that they were back in the late 90s, early OOs. Give them opportunity, and I'm still on alert for when the "extinguish" bit is coming.

I felt that OEMs had a major role to play, it is so easy to blame Microsoft alone. Poor OEMs, enjoying their license deals.

The same ones that now fill Android handsets with crap.

I'm not sure that's true. Windows did just fine siphoning off marketshare from the commercial Unixes without a POSIX subsystem, and Linux's original supporters were people who wanted a free Unix they could tinker with, and it started gaining market penetration when those people started getting sysdmin jobs and Linux was what they were most familiar with. I can't imagine they'd have used Windows instead just because it had a POSIX userspace- remember, this was when Microsoft was peak Evil Empire.

Not everyone was seeing them like that.

It also comes with some ugly trade-offs, like giving up the notion of privacy.

You may be right (about Windows) but I am not going to pay $100 (for a new Windows license) or so to find out.

edit for clarity

You can buy online-only keys for about 10€ on amazon. They work well, although they are not transferrable to a new pc.

Those cheap Amazon keys are still not legal, so you might as well pirate Windows

Pirating Windows is a lot riskier (think downloading random unlock.exe files) while the key gives you a fully working functional official Windows without any hassles.

Thank you! I hate people on Reddit who advocate for those cheap keys. If you don't follow the license you are pirating it. Simple as that. Now whether or not piracy is okay is a whole different issue.

You can just download a trial from MSFT if you want to try it.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...

FWIW I was a die hard Linux user for ten years, and I usually never ran a desktop environment in favor of tmux and vim. About a year ago I started a new job at a dotnet shop and had to switch to Windows. I dreaded it at first, and I still do have to fight the OS to preserve my privacy, but overall I am loving it. Vscode with the new wsl extensions and vim bindings is the best IDE I've ever used, and the new terminal emulator is amazing. The upcoming version of WSL will be shipping a full linux kernel, and having the software library of Windows with the productivity of Linux is a win win as far as I'm concerned. Using so much closed source software makes me feel yucky, but I've never been more productive. YMMV.

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