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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

Yes exactly.

About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.

By contrast, whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates. The OS suggests things to me I have no interest in. When I want to use Microsoft software, I have to log into accounts for some reason, which often means a round trip through email to reset the password. Once Windows even changed firmware settings without asking me which broke things in Linux.

The best things about Linux are not what it does, but what it doesn't do. I want this for my phone as well.

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Summed up in the following:

Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.

Its time to dim your screen. We don't care if you're reading a recipe while you cook. No we won't put a widget to allow this temporarily. We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.

Its time for feature X to not work or not exist anywhere. We don't care that it worked in the old version. We don't like it.

So in other words you haven't found and used the "Settings" app yet?

The thing mentioned in this bit?

> We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.

The settings app is useless. Even win 3.0 had better settings than settings app in win 10.

You haven't used it in a while. Microsoft is slowly re-implementing or dropping all of the Windows 3.x/9x era Control Panel settings.

A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.

> A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago

How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?

I don't, but MS ships an annual update that for the past couple years has included expansion of the Settings App and remove of Control Panel widgets. The original Settings App that shipped with Windows 10 was, as the op said, useless.

As MS has slowly whittled down and removed features from the Control Panel, they have simultaneously added analogs where appropriate in the Settings App. The Settings App in 20H2 is very different and far from useless when compared to what shipped a year ago, or when Windows 10 launched.

The main criticism of Windows settings is the silent reversion of settings which is tantamount to ignoring them. If Microsoft improved the clarity of the settings menu then that's nice, but ultimately irrelevant.

You shouldn't need a third-party utility for re-disabling settings after updates, and it's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about respecting the user's choices.

I'm cranky about the settings app as it stands right now

That's a lot of words to say "I didn't read what you wrote but I still want to feel superior."

It's fewer words actually.

Huh, guess he was just trying to be succinct then.

Both are 13 words (or if you count contractions as two words, both are 14 words).

The "settings app" is a convoluted mess which is made worse by the fact that it wholeheartedly embraced the weird "everything is an app, except for some things" philosophy.

There are settings that only apply to some "apps", there are "app wide settings", there are important settings hidden 4 layers deep under some category where one would never suspect them to be.

Then there's the fact that MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings, often privacy and telemetry related, after updates. On that end, Windows 10 very much feels like it's actively working against the user, it feels like you are only a tolerated guest on your own system.

> MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings

This is so user-hostile it's not even funny. Imagine if you had someone in your life who silently went back on agreements when you weren't looking. You would work to remove them from your life as soon as possible.

> Summed up in the following: > Its time to upgrade your PC. Now. We don't care you're running a presentation. yeah We'll let you delay it... for now.

My roommate in college refused the Windows update request enough times that it just took the decision out of his hands and _told_ him it was rebooting...in the middle of a LAN Starcraft game we were having. (Hilariously, Starcraft also ran perfectly on my Wine/Ubuntu and had all sort of weird bugs and visual artifacts on his Vista/7)

I truly can't imagine how anyone can consider a system that reboots without your consent, no matter whether you're playing Starcraft or giving a presentation or launching nuclear warheads, to be appropriate for serious work. It seems like one of the very basic jobs of an OS to _not turn off while you might be doing something important_. Perhaps the answer is as simple as "there's a setting buried somewhere that all technically-literate Windows users change", but the default behavior is beyond insane.

> Perhaps the answer is as simple as "there's a setting buried somewhere that all technically-literate Windows users change"

With all the editions and versions of Windows 10, there doesn't appear to be a single definitive answer to that.

I for one settled on https://github.com/marcosbozzani/Win10ActiveHours , which prevents reboots by scheduling a task to update Windows' own "Active Hours" twice a day.

I heard RMS once say "proprietary software subjugates people" and at the time I thought it was over-the-top, sort of out-of-place like "the people's front of judea" opinionating in the middle of a software meeting.

But wow, phones and computers nowadays are like a giant steamroller, squashing users common sense, interests and privacy.

You have summed my feelings about it excellently. The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities, such as documents opened and programs used, and indexes it into a searchable database ("I can't remember that pdf I was reading last weekend, let me get it"). The most jarring feeling about that was... that for once I wasn't not thinking how privacy invasive all that data collection was! I'm used to seeing programs and websites attempting to collect all sorts of nefarious data and trying my best to stop that collection (including not using the product at all). I was stunned how useful it was once I realised it was all local and serving my interests, not those of its manufacturer.

> The other day I installed an app in Linux that logs my activities

May I inquire about the name of this app? Is it desktop-environment specific?

What app is that? It sounds very useful.

Definitely a refreshing feeling compared to the use of a million cloud services.

> About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux for my home media PC, and it's such a relaxing experience. My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.

My experience with Linux on the Desktop is that it wants to install updates. It doesn't force me to install updates, which I appreciate. However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

This has never happened to me with Windows. I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.

I never had a problem with LTS versions of Ubuntu MATE.

If you want modern-looking LTS, try KDE Neon.

https://neon.kde.org/

I had Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a Dell Inspiron 3137. I ran apt-get update and it crashed and would not boot. I was preparing to lend the laptop out to family so I had to put Windows back on it. It happens. Your personal experience is not everyone's experience.

I would be intrigued to know what happened with this one.

Across well over a decade of using Apt on Debian, Ubuntu & Mint, the amount of times I have seen Apt crash, is never. By contrast I have seen Apt tasks fail leaving packages partially installed. If relevant, it may seem a trivial, semantic difference, but I think it is a little more important than that.

Following the typical Microsoft paradigm of 'just reboot and hope for the best' will rarely result in the desired outcome, and in the case of something like grub could well end up with a system that will not boot.

For me a key difference in this case, is I have never encountered an unbootable Linux system (outside of hardware issues), that I could not fix with some basic tools. I can't say the same of Microsoft products (Personally, I don't consider a fresh install a fix :) ).

I also would love to know more about this. The thing I do is wait for LTS version 20.04.1 or 20.04.2 before installing so all the kinks will be ironed out.

However, eventually I also want to install updates. Unfortunately, on numerous occasions these updates have rendered the system unbootable. This is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

Are these "updates" or "upgrades"? If the problems are with updates, I would say that your experience is not typical of most Linux users.

Its a shame that you are having problems because the modern Linux experience is pretty slick.

They were updates. I have attempted an upgrade once, it broke the system. Now I just do clean installs in favor of upgrades.

I had the same experience with ubuntu upgrades. Something was always broken.

I don't think you can blame linux, it's just a specific distro trying to do a task which is too hard and fail.

Not sure if it's still the case with ubuntu, I just run Arch which is a rolling release distro; I decide when to upgrade and what it implies + their info on breaking updates is always punctual.

> I don't think you can blame linux

No, of course you can't but that's also the problem. It's always someone else's fault.

If you try to upgrade Ubuntu you're told to RTFM. If you try to upgrade Raspbian, you're told you should have just installed a new image.

Linux distros routinely offer up options and features that do not work and there's no responsibility to be had.

With Windows, it's Microsoft's fault and they fix it (eventually).

Kind of changing the goalposts of MS...windows fails too

I see nothing has changed in 10 years.

I've been running Debian testing for a long time, where I kind of expect things to break now and again; and I'm pretty surprised by your experience. The only breakage I've experienced were minor inconveniences, maybe it's familiarity with the OS? Modern Linux DE experience is quite good now a days.

I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.

> I've never once ran into an issue with Fedora.

Fedora (at around version 20 iirc) was the absolute worst in my experience. I haven't used it since.

I've been running linux on the desktop for 3 years now and have never had an update break anything. If you stick to the more stable debian derivatives and forgo some of the bleeding edge features in a rolling distro like Arch (btw I do not use Arch), the update process should be pretty seamless.

This is another popular trope. "You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"

I never said they were doing it wrong. I said the distribution matters. If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.

Saying "linux" has a poor update process or stability issues is meaningless.

You just said it again...

> If, for example, you are running Arch Nightly and constantly pulling in the latest and greatest features, you're likely to see some stability issues. If you're using something like Ubuntu LTS, you'll miss out on a few new bells and whistles, but you'll get a very stable OS.

"You're doing it wrong, if you did it right it would work"

Not "doing it wrong", making a tradeoff.

That's true of software in general. You can use (often older) more stable tech and lose access to some newer features, or you can used the latest and greatest and get a few more features and accept a reduction in stability in exchange.

Is that not the point here? Labeling something a "trope" isn't a self-contained argument. The reliability of Linux systems is terrible for certain contexts: modern gaming[1], universal hardware compatibility, taking advantage of bleeding-edge software updates (the analogue to which doesn't exist on Windows), etc.

IME, there's a lot of talking past each other when it comes to OSes. The vastly superior experience that Linux fans describe requires a couple of one-time boxes to be ticked, like constraining yourself to known compatible hardware platforms and stable software versions. There are plenty of people who don't realize this dynamic exists and trip over it, and it's not dodging the question to make them aware of these limitations and let them decide whether the cost/benefit fits their situation. Eg, in my case, I like Thinkpads, don't game, and need a stable, reliable, and performant system that I can be productive on. The pitfalls of Linux don't affect me personally, and I obviously can't meet the needs I describe with a Windows system (or to a lesser extent, OS X).

[1] I hear this is getting much better with things like Valve's Proton, but I assume that Linux is still far worse than Windows for a dedicated PC gamer that wants to play new games.

I think you make an excellent point. Many of the posts admonishing Windows speak to the loss of freedom but, as you pointed out, you have to willingly give up a great deal of freedom if you want stable Linux.

I'm not trying to bash on Linux, merely point out that for everything it does right there's just as much it does wrong. The same is true of Windows and MacOS.

No arguments there! It's a pretty good rule of thumb that the no-exceptions maximalist view is wrong, on almost any topic over which there's meaningful disagreement.

I've had Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora break on me, all of them stable releases. Fedora was the worst.

Linux Mint has addressed this specifically. They enabled auto-updates in 20.1 only after they launched and tested Timeshift, which is a backup tool that enables you to boot into a past snapshot of the system much like FreeBSD's snapshots. It's geared mainly towards btrfs however, as ext4 doesn't support snapshots.

And to be fair, updates broke my Windows systems multiple times in the past as well. This isn't really a problem by itself since errors and mistakes happen, the problem is that the state of recovery tools in both systems is somewhat lacking. Linux can be repaired from Live USB and has Timeshift, but it doesn't have an easily accessible built-in rescue environment that's actually useful. Windows has DaRT, but all decent Live USB's for it are third-party and it's very hard to repair its internals if the existing tools don't work. FreeBSD is probably the closest to being bulletproof, but it has its own problems.

> I'm aware that it does happen to some users, but I have trouble believing that I'm just really unlucky with Ubuntu/Debian/PopOS and Fedora.

"Unlucky" is probably the wrong word, since I doubt all those failures were independent, but you're presumably in some niche with a high probability of update failure (just as the users failing their Windows updates are). For a counter anecdote, I've used Linux laptops/workstations (primarily Debian/Ubuntu, but dabbled in others) exclusively for 15 years and have never had an update break _anything_.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's a hardware compatibility issue? Linux can still be a _terrible_ experience relative to Windows if you have strong opinions about the hardware you want to use. IME, all the people who talk about Linux being a vastly superior user experience to OS X/Windows are those whose hardware preferences line up with good Linux support.

> This has never happened to me with Windows.

Lucky you! When this happened to me with Windows last time, I had no idea what to do and how to diagnose it even though I spent a lot of time on it and had the knowledge of all of the Internet available. I had to reinstall and painstakingly redo my whole setup.

When it happened to me with GNU/Linux, it gave me enough rope to actually debug what happened, so I could fix it and get back to where I was before. And I went through several Ubuntu and Debian dist-upgrades, and now I'm even using Arch which is a rolling distro that's somewhat expected to break from time to time.

So sure, it does happen more often than it did on Windows - but I don't think I actually waste more time with that than I did when using Windows.

I totally get your point regarding Windows, but does Android do this, too? The only thing mine does is auto-update apps, and only because I told it to. I didn't have to turn on auto updating. OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.

But it spies on you. And transmits data about you to Google. And has pre-installed apps you cannot fully uninstall. And it changes your privacy settings without you knowing when new features are added.

Google spying on you is the least of your worries, they are the most transparent of all the big tech companies if you ever manage to dig into your Google profile these days.

If anything Google is so far ahead they are advocating more privacy and less data being sent if you choose, because they don't sell it directly to people like a local grocery store with its own app or Amazon does.

Federated learning AI is basically making it where Google can continue to have all the benefits of massive data mining without any personal information ever having to leak out

> OS updates are still only suggested, never applied automatically.

The parts involved with spying on you will update regardless of what you want or say. Unless of course you're not using the play store (or any other google services).

my android phone has a nagging "security update" popup that I cannot delete. I don't update so it stays with my phone all the time (it takes a huge amount in the pause screen), i have to deny the updates each time i restart my phone (which doesn't happen often). Nonetheless, it's true I can still use my phone (and the appstore)... huh, now that I take a closer look at this annoying update it appears to be from samsung not from google.

Why would you not update your phone security updates? Do you even read anything about Android updates. It's extremely important for vital security flaws if you use any sort of modern apps.

It's a huge advocate of keeping all my data private but now knowing how useful it is to anonymize, encrypt and use it all on my device with things like Google Pay, I strongly advocate if you're using Google or Samsung services to update.

Plus these updates usually are Android level and not related to Samsung or Google

Most of those updates only apply to the latest. So it isn't just Android it is all the other parts too. For a few months you can only get security, but eventually they decide the only version they support is the one with whatever changed google made to the core not related to security as well.

This is simply not true, unfortunately. I run a Fedora system for more than ten years, and during this period updates shoved into my system tons of unwanted stuff. I still prefer the system to the alternatives, but let me tell you, there is simply no way I would install flatpak into my system, and if it wasn't for the terrible log spam it filled my log with, I probably wouldn't even know it arrived. But it would still be calling home and look for new packages that I will never want to use.

Maybe, even probably, no one have any nefarious motives behind the latest changes, but someone decided that if I want to upgrade my system now I have to start using systemd-resolve, and while I can and probably will alter it so it won't bother me, I wouldn't be installing it on my own.

Also, Firefox is the king of unwanted changes with little to no warnings, and while technically it isn't Linux, one day an innocent yum or dnf update install just killed my customized setup, flagged all my beloved addons as unsupported, and left them in disabled state.

>My computer just does what I tell it to do, and nothing changes unless I want it to.

>whenever I do have to boot into Windows to run some specific application, it's like I've invited a corporate representative from Microsoft into my home. Things are changed for me on updates

Yeah, it is really nice to have a consistent interface. But there is a flip side. Sometimes, people have to change in light of new security problems, and these sometimes need to be done quickly. The most obnoxious of these updates are interface changes (both UI and API). I think Windows does this too much and maybe for non-security related issues. The only real example I can think of is how OpenSSL uses envelope functions because ppl would abuse the primitives [Source: Alexandra Boldyreva, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton: Hedging Public-Key Encryption in the Real World].

I literally and honestly feel like the only difference here is that vast majority of linux distributions don't have auto updates enabled and windows does. I'm literally afraid of running apt-get upgrade in Ubuntu because always, inevitably, things change and move about , which I hate with passion.

This is literally the opposite to me. Running apt update/upgrade never breaks anything except a long time ago when I ran out of disk space during an update. This could have been handled better, but it isn't a usual scenario for me.

The problem isn't automatic updates, it's the philosophy behind those updates. On Ubuntu (last time I used it some 5 years ago), an update fixed bugs in software and that's it. Occasionally you'd get a new feature here and there, but rarely in the shell and existing features always stayed in their places. On Windows 10, updates ship breaking changes basically every time and there is no regard for consistency. Whether the updates are manual or automatic is an implementation detail - eventually, you'll update either way. The big difference is between a rolling release with no promise of compatibility and a versioned release with LTS.

Strange, my experience is also the exact opposite. I really wonder why that is?

I'm running about 10 windows 10 machines, various builds, auto updates enabled. Some in a domain, some in a workgroup. The last time an update bricked a system, or even broke a feature, must be over a year ago.

Now on Ubuntu, I have the same experience as some other posters. I'm reasonably confident that I can update if I do it semi regularly. But the number of times I've experienced breakage that lead to hours of bugfixing during $DAYJOB, is way too high. Now everything is in its own tightly controller docker, no more random breakage (unless docker breaks, or a key expires...).

A debian 9 apt upgrade actually managed to render my install inoperable once. But that might be semi-unfair as it had to do with graphics drivers.

Are you running windows systems on semi-recent hardware? Or is it all decades old thinkpad laptops with shitty thirdparty drivers?

I can attest to this anxiety. There is always this question of what will happen if the update is botched and it bricks my system. This is why I consciously stay slim on the host OS (I have used Fedora in the past, and am now using Arch), and run almost all of my applications via Docker from a local container repository. The /home/username directory is backed up rigorously in the internal network so as to cover my ass if an update bricks my computer. As paranoid as I am to go through this, I am yet to need that backup because of a botched update ;-) The only times I reached out to backup were "I deleted this, but I shouldn't have..." scenarios.

The same paranoia applies to my MacBook Pro as well that was provided by work. All user generated content gets backed up regularly to aid recovery if things go north.

It's more than that isn't it? On Ubuntu I never candy crush come pre-installed, and I never have random popups on the bottom right corner of the screen for all types of reasons

Counter example. I switched from Linux to Windows because I find its desktop-experience to be superior. In my mind software and hardware is evolving at a rate that makes it impractical to support the notion that I could usefully modify it myself so it mostly comes down to trust. Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers? Looking at being able to access old data and run old programs I feel MS have been doing a great job. Now if they come up with a way for me to make sure that my data is in some standardized format AND protected in such a way that I could reasonably expect nobody (not even MS) to read it (but still be able to offload it elsewhere) I’d be entirely happy.

> Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers?

Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years.

A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft).

I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.

Your concerns are the same that I had up until about 3 years ago when Microsoft and Google changed everything because at least at Google they do not care about your actual data because they can aggregate and anonymize it and a level that nobody else in the entire world can.

This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.

The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one. The fact they pitch their skills at anonymizing and aggregating data doesn't change the fact you can't trust Google to not utilize data exfiltration techniques in the first place. Your argument about open source license changes applies just as much, if not moreso to Google as well.

Have you really thought through that all the way?

That's why I like using a system which gives me control over which updates I want to receive. I'm not forced to take updates on an operating system which can also change the privacy policy on me and has done so in the past.

Literally the only significant amount of data I've ever lost in my life, either on a personal or professional context, were: 1. half a decade of emails dropped by Microsoft from my old Hotmail account with no reason or warning; 2. all my highlights on a 3000-page book series lost due to a iOS update breaking compatibility with the app I was using for it.

Good post.

Google has actually went even further in making it transparent where they show every bit of data they have on you. You can delete it all review it all have it auto delete, they don't need any of it

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