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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

I very rarely use Windows now (at the time this happened I was working with it M-F doing support) - I’m not convinced it’s any better now is it? I downloaded an “IETester” image from Microsoft to confirm behaviour of a clients site from a Windows PC - it literally spent more time installing updates and rebooting than I did either downloading the entire vm image file or actually testing the thing I wanted to test.

How fucking convoluted is Windows that every single update that can only install via a reboot, then suddenly produces more such updates?

How on earth does anyone still use this on a daily basis?

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From a user's perspective, there are signs it's getting better. The most noticeable is that applications that were unloved for years, those low-priority no-group-wants-to-own-them ones like the terminal and Notepad, are finally getting attention. It feels like in the past development was much more design-by-committee with little room for anyone to actually fix broken or substandard things.

The biggest problem seems to be that there is insufficient pushback against bloat. E.g., the calculator is 10MB and takes a quarter second to load on a very fast PC. Lots of little things like that. The whole push for the a new, separate mobile/tablet/Metro environment was a major mistake. It's left a schism between the extant and greenfield worlds. This is exemplified by the disaster of what are effectively _two_ control panels, each of which can only control half of the OS's settings.

This isn't the typical user experience if you power on your computer more than once every few months.

No, but it is a typical experience for many developers that need to test our versions of IE.

Why do Microsoft think it is OK to waste our time when we are validating against their software?

Why is MS making the work developers and testers need to do so hard and wasteful?

At the time I was using Windows, and downloaded these VMs, and I swore black and blue at Microsoft for the very same thing GP noticed.

And the VMs expire after six months, so you have to go through the whole process again if you are not careful - arrgh.

I use the Microsoft IE vm's to do IE testing in virtualbox and I have never had to install an update.

You seem to be assuming that behavior is a daily occurrence for most users?

End users are not updating dependencies or even installing that much new software on a weekly basis, let alone daily.

Also a lot of software wants to reboot for no reason other than “just to be sure”. That’s hardly a Windows issue when a random developer includes behavior that isn’t needed.

None of the rebooting or installing I’m talking about was new or third party software.

Just whatever the hell they call windows update now.

I have an Ubuntu dedicated server. I reboot it every Sunday, yet there is rarely a week where on Friday I don't see this when SSHing in due to auto-updates:

    0 packages can be updated.
    0 updates are security updates.


    *** System restart required ***

    Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

    Linux ubuntu 4.15.0-34-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Mon Aug 27 15:21:48 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

This is just an Ubuntu-ism. Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates (and dbus in special cases).

On a side note it's a bad idea to run Ubuntu on a server in prod. Ubuntu is great for desktop and pretty trash for everything else. You'd be better off just running Debian, it's a lot more stable.

> Linux doesn't require a reboot for anything other than kernel updates

You can say the same about Windows updates.

Ubuntu has a new kernel update every 3 weeks, unless CVEs force sooner ones.

https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kernel/StableReleaseCadence

Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing.

Not really. Linux Mint is more popular and is far more usable and stable in my experience. And it does not force updates.

> Anyway, parent was saying that Windows is shit because it forces frequent updates. Ubuntu, which as you say it's the closest to a user friendly Linux dist does the same thing.

Windows will kill all your apps and reboot your machine in the middle of the night on a regular basis, unless you do some serious digging in the registry. (And they may have closed off even that by now.)

Is that "the same thing" as Ubuntu?

One thing that's different is that you'll be never forced to update on linux and you will never be forced to reboot, even on Ubuntu.

In most cases this is exactly kernel updates that Ubuntu ask reboot for. You can just go check contents of this file to see what packages requested upgrade:

   /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs

In 99% of cases this is efficiently mean that your kernel been upgraded, but it's doesn't affect system usability at all and rarely affect security. I have servers that been continuously upgraded over years, never got single reboot and still function properly.

As far as I know, Linux doesn't support library hotswapping any more than Windows does, so if you have a security update in libc for example, you can either manually restart all programs which use it, or reboot the system. Unless you do one of these, you don't have the security patch up and running, right?

Yes it does but differently: the library is placed on disk and the symlink pointing to the new version is updates. Services depending on this library are restarted. Ssh handles this exceptionally well in that it keeps running sessions open and new sessions use the new library. There is alsof no risk of having locks on files during installation: Unix keeps a gidsen copy of a file until the last process closes it. All in all, almost no reboots required unless a critical kernel bug is found that can be exploited remotely.

Still, each individual process using an updated library needs to be restarted for the update to take effect.

The way I see it, Linux does give you much more flexibility in how to deal with these restarts; and the ability to overwrite libraries on disk guarantees you don't get into the horrible Windows update-restart-update-restart cycles: you only ever require one restart at most.

However, there are also risks. For one, if you don't restart long-running processes which use updated shared libraries your system may be at risk; also, even if the update was not a vulnerability fix, it is technically possible for processes that communicate through a shared library to misbehave if they have different versions (one using the old library with an old data-structure for example).

This probably doesn't happen so much in Linux, where IPC is commonly done through text streams, but may be a much bigger problem on Windows if you update some COM library for example, reducing the usefullness of no-restart updates.

Try out Ubuntu Livepatch. It can update the kernel without reboots, which is likely the cause of the message.

You reboot your server every week? Whatever for?

This is the real WTF of this subthread.

To make sure the process works?

Don't some updates set a "reboot required" flag?

Yes. My point is doing this all the time is, generally, a waste of time. I recommend turning off automatic updates, do it on a schedule. Weekly is too frequent. I have some servers I update yearly. That may be too long. At a previous startup, we had boxes that hadn't seen an update in 3+ years.

I installed Manjaro xfce recently and have been extremely impressed by how easy so many things are. I had been using gnome before that, Mac before that, and yet earlier Microsoft had not added telemetry so I used windows

Take a peek at KDE sometime; it's my favorite (and IMO most usable) DE of the pack.

Xfce is at the "light but jank" end of the pool. Try changing your password via Settings: you can't. Thunar, its file manager, is extremely basic. Dolphin, KDE's file manager, is even better than Windows's Explorer (you have split directory views, way more options, terminal integration, etc.), which always amazed me. How is this free GUI product made by a handful of volunteers exceed the thing this megacorporation has offered for decades?! Meanwhile, Gnome's file manager mimics Xfce's in basicness, and on top of that you can't use Dropbox or any other tray apps cuz kek B o l d D e s i g n(TM)(R).

If by Kde you mean plasma, I found plasma is too modular: every part of every window is it’s own window that can be opened independently, making search and navigation very strange.

I like manjaros package management GUI, file manager (for the tree view), and generally good defaults for things (drop down terminal without needing to install guake)

Plasma definitely looks nicer and has better animations.

What about the Deepin desktop? I haven't tried it but many magazine sites say it's now the most polished. I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...

Deepin's, elementaryOS's, and Pop!_OS's DEs look nice, but I've never tried 'em.

I generally avoid "niche", satellite distros/software because, well, you can't expect them to work as well as the their major competitors. Cinnamon IS a major DE and a stylistic competitor to KDE and Xfce, and it's quite nice too (but not offered as a Manjaro flavor, sadly).

>I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...

I've never been brave or OPEN-MINDED enough to try those kinds of DEs... I welcome reinforcement of my biases; w-...what happens when you plug an additional screen in? :v

> what happens when you plug an additional screen in?

Absolutely nothing. I have to tyoe xrandr commands to make anything happen. I3 is strictly just a window manager. Unfortunately projects like Gnome solve these problems in a completely monolithic fashion, with no module or component that I use that just solves this problem.

I remember trying a linux desktop (same time frame I mentioned in my original comment, I had a department issued.. HP(?) and was sick of dealing with windows bullshit.

As a Novell shop I figured I'd give their desktop distro (effectively a customised SuSE from memory) a run a couple of times, and it used KDE. I seem to recall it was nicer than Gnome I'd used under RH a few years prior as a student, but felt much heavier on resource usage?

I agree with your assessment, and as a daily Windows user I believe I can answer your question: because the alternatives are still somehow worse.

We clearly have different ideas of “worse”.

Yes, and? When it comes to "what OS should I use on my computer", is it your assertion that I should use your definition instead of my own?

If so, you're probably a Linux Desktop evangelist.

Thanks for the hourly reminder to praise GNU

Ah, when someone questions your assertion, jump to what you perceive as an insult against them.

(a) no, I'm not saying everyone should use the same thing, or that my "definition" of worse is more valid than yours. But consider this context: The original linked email is about a list of glaring usability failures in Windows, experienced by someone who should at the very least be very familiar with the product. I commented and asked if it's really any different now, with some of my own perceptions and experiences, to which you replied and confirmed that it's not better, but that you somehow believe the alternatives are worse. This follows on as:

(b) no, I'm not a Linux Desktop evangelist. I mean, I'd definitely use it before I use fucking Windows, but I also don't recommend it to people. Servers? Absolutely. Desktops? I honestly don't have recent enough personal experience with it to recommend it.

So, somehow you've managed to agree with the premise that Windows is a dumpster fire of usability bullshit, but then also suggested every alternative is worse, and made a baseless claim about both what I believe, and my likelihood of pushing others to adopt the same viewpoint.

Great job.

> and made a baseless claim about both what I believe, and my likelihood of pushing others to adopt the same viewpoint.

I did not. I said that if you believed your definition of "worse" was a better metric for me to choose my operating system than mine, then you were probably a Linux Desktop evangelist. A claim I make in full confidence because I've been having to put up with Linux Desktop evangelism for 20 motherfucking years now.

Perhaps with you, but looking at the market share he is mostly right.

To be fair, the market share being dominated by Windows has a lot to do with history and strategic deals Microsoft made with the OEM's. Vast majority of devices ship with Windows.

...and Macs being expensive and Linux Desktop being an incoherent mess. Literally couldn't even beat Windows by giving the latter away.

I think that's being very unfair. Linux is not the same "incoherent mess" it was 10-20 years ago. There are some OEM's that ship with linux pre-installed, some of them are:

  - Dell
  - System76
  - Purism

> Literally couldn't even beat Windows by giving the latter away.

Beat in what sense?

That's merely your opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect reality. Especially when you don't support it with any facts. Fact is that the linux story and experience has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. That's why there are now OEM's that provide linux as an alternative to Windows, and there are some OEM's that target linux exclusively.

My daily driver is a Dell Latitude E7450 and everything worked out of the box with Manjaro linux. Driver/hardware support in linux these days is quite good.

> Fact is that the linux story and experience has improved dramatically over the past 10 years.

Yes, and it still sucks in a lot of the same ways it always has, and a few new ones (bloat, more incomprehensibly tangled base system than ever before...). Just yesterday I watched PCManFM, when told to copy a directory from an SMB share, copy the folder but none of its contents. This kind of basic functionality being completely overlooked is common, because there are about 100 implementations of anything and about 250 different distros combining those things in differently broken ways.

Oh, I hear you say, you shouldn't use those obscure distros, but a more polished one like Ubuntu. Only it was Ubuntu 19.04 with the latest updates.

This is without even getting into absolutely retarded design decisions like .desktop files.

I think it'd be cool if you provided any verifiable evidence/support at all to validate and support your silly assertions. I pointed out 3 well known OEM's that ship hardware with linux pre-installed, 2 of them target linux exclusively. This wouldn't be the case if there wasn't a market for it and if the experience was as bad as you make it out to be. You provided no rebuttal at all for this point and merely glazed over it.

Ubuntu doesn't even come with PCManFM, it comes with nautilus as the file manager. Are you quite sure you used Ubuntu? Here's a video showing you how to mount an SMB share, it is quiet straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPnVzyMBlAI

No operating system is fool proof. For vast number of users that don't have specific OS specific software requirements, Linux is a very viable alternative.

Here's someone's mom trying out and using linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGbZfR6Vec

I got many beginners to swap over to linux and they have been loving it. My mom and my grandmother both use linux.

Technically it was Lubuntu, but gvfs is still the backing component that handles SMB for PCManFM just as it does for Nautilus.

> Here's a video showing you how to mount an SMB share, it is quiet straightforward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPnVzyMBlAI

This is so exactly the problem with the Linux Desktop evangelists. Someone says they have a problem with Linux, a bad experience, and your childish ego can't handle the concept of your fetishized OS not being perfect so you immediately assume the person talking is an idiot.

> No operating system is fool proof. For vast number of users that don't have specific OS specific software requirements, Linux is a very viable alternative.

Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying this for 20 motherfucking years and yet Linux still has pitiful desktop market share. What will it take for this community to wake up and realize that maybe people aren't retarded and have very legitimate reasons for not choosing your OS? Even people who like the idea of an Open Source Desktop OS?

> Here's someone's mom trying out and using linux

Could you try being less intentionally insulting maybe? This is such typical Linux Desktop evangelist garbage. It's an attempt at shame, but it backfires because what you're really saying is that Linux makes a great web kiosk and as long as you don't want to do anything interesting with it it will work fine.

Ultimately you don't have to listen to me. Look around you, your waifu Desktop OS is not being adopted by the masses, or even the non-masses. You've been telling the same comfort story to yourselves for 20 years about big bad Microsoft's exclusivity deals and Office lock in and all sorts of other nonsense while completely ignoring what people who might actually care what OS they use have been screaming at you about all the ways you've been doing it wrong.

This is why Linux will never be the majority Desktop OS of choice: because the community is full of people like you!

I tried a lot of different OS and I still prefer Windows.

Looking at declining market share of Mac, you are not correct.

Also, I don't see a lot of Linux on other people's Pc

The vast majority of people don't "choose" Windows any more than they "choose" the particular brand of tyres that comes on their car.

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