Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

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For the tldr crowd the root cause is Windows' insistence on automated self maintenance and updates etc. If you keep a mostly stale out of date windows VM around for when you absolutely have to use it and linux is your daily driver, things will constantly break and require extensive self maintenance on the windows front. If the situation was reversed the most you'll get from linux is notification that there are a very large amount of updates available that you can install when you like.

For this reason I don't think the core argument is really sound, because in almost all corporate environments windows is the daily driver and the regular maintenance doesn't come in massive temporally divided chunks of work that make up the large cited overhead in this instance but instead trickles in on a mostly daily basis.

If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux.

> If windows is going to die it's probably just because Microsoft continues to abuse it and try to turn it into a spyware and marketing platform rather than a workhorse and the equilibrium between a hands off linux install and windows slowly tips to favour linux.

They have been doing this for years and intensify their efforts (e.g. by hiding the local user option during install). And I don't see a massive movement towards desktop Linux - Microsoft understands the power of inertia well and they will abuse it as much as they can get away with it.

Absolutely, thus if.

I am no longer under the illusion that any significant fraction of the global population of which the market consists will eventually figure this out and migrate away. There is every possibility that they won't and will remain a captive audience providing a steady revenue stream regardless of how they are exploited.

They do this for every other industry in the world, why not software? Humans simply aren't, at scale, what the mythology would prefer we believe. They probably really are closer to livestock.

One can accept this and work with reality or lie to oneself and deny it and continue to insist otherwise in the face of endless evidence to the contrary. After decades, I have given up and go with the former. Especially in the face of the most egregious examples of livestock like behaviour from the vast majority of humanity in the immediate past.

For this use case would it then be faster to simply download a new VM image each time you needed Windows? That is to say if Microsoft creates images with all the required patched applied?

Microsoft does. Unfortunately the VHDs are fairly big to download, and the ISOs are infrequently updated.

For local development, I can install Windows in under 2 minutes on a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD in a virtual machine from an ISO image. Patching it takes longer, about 5 minutes, but I generally do other things while that occurs in the background.

These days I find the most convenient method to get the "latest" fully-patched version of Windows in a VM is to spin one up in a public cloud. Both Azure and AWS have sufficient free tiers to make this perfectly viable for most developers doing testing or whatever. I just tested Azure's deployment time, and it's about 2 minutes to create an up-to-date VM from scratch.

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