Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, that's not my experience with Windows these days at all. I've never had the whole system freeze up on my Win10 desktop. Never noticed a slowdown or app that can't be killed, and never done a reformat or rebuild. Windows Update is mildly annoying when it decides to reboot your system for you, though usually when you're not using it. The registry seems fine to me too. Okay it's not perfect, but I don't think it's meaningfully worse than the MacOS or Linux system of configs in text files with various types of special formats all over the place, unless of course it's some kind of binary format that can only be modified with a special CLI program.

View on HN

I agree. Windows is basically fine these days. It's even better than Mac and Linux in a big way from a desktop stability point of view because it has the Ctrl-alt-delete interface which works reliably and lets you kill the offending program.

Linux has various useless options like sysreq shortcuts that you can't remember and kill random processes, and I don't think Mac has anything, though to be honest I don't recall ever bringing a Mac to its knees so much that I couldn't open a terminal and run `top`.

I wish Ctrl+Alt+Delete would be reliable enough to work with full-screen games. But, half the time, when you try to launch Task Manager that way to kill the offending process, it ends up under the game's output. I've learned to kill processes using keyboard navigation by looking at Task Manager's thumbnail in Alt-Tab process list, but it's ridiculous that we still need to do this kind of dance in 2023.

There's a way to make it always appear above other windows. Let me see if I can find that again...

Ah, it's in the options menu on the task manager itself (alt + O to access the menu without a mouse).

why would you ever want that turned off??

The problem is that it doesn't work reliably when a fullscreen game that is currently using the screen exclusively for itself suddenly crashes.

On MacOS the Force Quit Applications can be launched with Cmd-Option-Esc similar to how on Windows Task Manager can be launched with Ctrl-Shift-Esc.

In my experience, on macOS the Cmd-Opt-Esc force quit dialog works pretty well most of the time. Of course `killall "Foo"` in the terminal works nicely too.

Until the advent of the new screen manager, you could always reliably get to a VT terminal.

Full io access and unlimited kill power, far better than ctrl alt delete...

Any regressions in this area I blame on systemd, which I think runs on cpp, so you know I blame cpp... (kernel is written in c, windows got a bit better when they used c# instead of cpp, Mac never used cpp...everybody kill cpp, quick)

Systemd is certainly not implemented in c++. I don’t think many of the authors are even well familiarized with the language. Look at the chart at the bottom of the project page.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd

ahem ahem gconf ahem ahem

My windows literally doesn‘t boot today due to a bluescreen. No idea why or how that happened. Had it a few times in life before, but never on macos.

I make a full+incremental system disk backup periodically, e.g. once a quarter or two, or when I feel that a set of software that I'm going to install could do something bad, or after big changes which are undesirable to lose in case of failure. It doesn't save everything (important data is in git remotes anyway), but saves me from a reinstall-download-setup-reconfigure hassle. A user folder has a separate automatic and more frequent schedule.

That said, my home PC works since 2018 (buy date) and one at work since around 2016. Only used these backups once to move OS to a new SSD.

Most failures happen when you have no backups, so have at least one to make your system failsafe!

Maybe you should be running in what those git remotes are running in (hint, something Unix probably in a container).

I have multiple irreversible-damage experiences with linux too (not bsods, but think of updates and/or nvidia drivers). Even 18.04 to 22.04 transition on one of my older vpses failed recently despite absolutely default setup. I’m fine with MSYS2 as a unix-like env.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com