Windows 11 disabled all ways to get around Auto Restarts. Is there a workaround?
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That SO thread hurts. As-is tradition, there is one answer that while technically correct, is not applicable to an application you do not have the source for/cannot build from source. Then of course there is the suggestions to pirating Windows Enterprise. Then there are the equally useless "just switch OSes!" arguments. And the other user who doesn't understand what editions of the OS the related GPOs apply to.
At least there is one workaround posted which only involves setting up a scheduled task.
There is a reason Windows has almost completely lost the "batch" professional desktop market. Same reason my old company developed industrial/CAD desktop software ... for Linux ... on Windows laptops (with Enterprise edition, of course) .
Microsoft no longer cares about you or your usecase. What are you going to do ? If you enter a cat and mouse game with MS (pirating, registry tricks, whatever), you will lose.
That's probably by far the most useful solution. It may be obvious and annoying to hear over and over, but we only nag you because we love you. Friends don't let friends be abused by Windows.
Many companies run more than one program, even when one of those programs is Matlab.
The question does not specify anything AFAICS that demonstrates the simulations require Windows. If someone said they wanted to run MS Word on their Linux machine (not in the browser) a perfectly valid suggestion would be to use Windows. If the OS doesn't support what you need, there aren't a lot of options.
Folks, no amount of SO threads is going to make MS reverse course. So...?
When an OS and the company that makes it keeps on showing you that you don't own your computer, they do, at some point switching should be on your radar.
So much business software has migrated to browser based applications that most people could dump Windows and would never notice.
This is why Microsoft has been pushing Office365 so hard.
Yes, officially [1][2].
[1] https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...
QuickBooks for Mac is not feature-equivilent to QuickBooks Enterprise. You cannot run QuickBooks Enterprise on a Mac, as far as I know, and if you can, it isn't on the supported OS list.
>"Note: Linux and Windows 10 S Mode not supported. QuickBooks requires you to use Windows natively and not through an emulator or virtual environment."
From https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-artic...
Solidworks only supports eDrawings for Mac. eDrawings is not what I was referring to.
With Solidworks, it would be much more difficult. It is a kind of software, you want to run locally on your beefy workstation.
The author paid for Windows 11. Why try to crowdsource help for free when they can presumably just pick up a phone and get Microsoft to fix their problem for them?
Or it means that QuickBooks is running into issues, and there is no in-house IT department to troubleshoot it, so they call up QuickBooks support.
Now that really is throwing good money after bad. QuickBooks has some of the absolute worst support money can buy.
But if your a small company (i.e. no in-house IT) and you have to choose between using the support included with your purchase of QuickBooks or paying a third-party IT company an hourly consulting rate to fix a QuickBooks problem... The choice is pretty clear.
Fusion360 works on macOS and has been pounding the hell out of SolidWorks in the small business sector.
Nowadays I work on a Mac (finally![0]) and, yes, Office 365 is available for macOS, but it’s not at parity with Office 365 on Windows. Mostly this doesn’t matter and it’s certainly a lot more capable than any of the web versions of the office apps. But, at least for me, it does sometimes matter with Excel.
So I decided to use Wine to install the Windows version of Office 365. The installer started but it crapped out after the intro page and I haven’t been able to get past the error.
I could install Parallels but I kind of hate it because it involves running Windows whose bag o’ shiteness is the whole reason I’m so ecstatic about having a job where I can work on a Mac in the first place.
Realistically, there isn’t anything that comes close to O365 either. Excel is the best spreadsheet app, still, by a country mile, and all the other apps are best in class too. So it’s the industry standard in just about every industry and if you’re in one of the few companies who’ve gone a different way then in some scenarios it can make you kind of a pain in the ass to deal with.
[0] I fully accept that this may just be a stepping stone toward working on Linux. Hopefully by the time I need to do it support for a Linux on laptops will be a bit better, and I’ll be able to avoid buying a Dell.
Which will be running on Windows Enterprise deployments owned by the business, not personal machines owned by individuals. And as has already been commented, Windows Enterprise does let you control this. But that case doesn't seem to be what the discussion here is about.
There are many companies which run Windows-specific software which do not even have an in-house IT department, let alone run Enterprise edition on corporately-deployed machines.
I'd say the vast majority of <50 person companies I have consulted for run Pro, not Enterprise.
What they can do, is to run WSUS. Though today, many businesses do not have on-prem Windows Server deployments, and do not even have suitable space in their offices even if they wanted one.
Having to choose between Windows and the Mac has been the situation since the late 1990s. There hasn’t been any strong commercial challengers to these operating systems since the demise of BeOS.
No-one ever considers the dual of this: if you started using Linux, what software would be so vital that you couldn't consider switching to windows?
This package is part of the pay-to-play entry barrier in my industrial controls industry. My quotes don't win jobs if I can't use these tools. None of these very expensive (the above items add up to more than $25,000, not even counting the subscription fees), closed source applications have native Linux installers or have any hope to run in Wine.
I run a Linux host OS with Windows VMs for the various incompatible versions of these pieces of software that I have to keep around to maintain old equipment, but these software packages are only available on Windows.
Fortunately, the industry has embraced Windows 10 LTSC (in machines where we're not still running Windows CE 6.0, LOL), so I'm good through at least 2032.
Why not?
Like is anyone wishing they had an Intel chip in their MacBook instead of an M3?
I "choose" longer battery life, and maximal computing load, both of which are only really optimizable when you vertically integrate hardware and software
So what works for you is not always what works for me.
If you were going to design a laptop from scratch for a market, would you optimize it for your example?
Guess you never saw 15.6" laptops in your whole life.
Like come on, my 14", 1.2kg is a thing what even I (185cm, 110kg) sometimes find exhausting to handle and I'm not always with it. If my work depended on it 24/7 I would go for 12" or even less. Yet vendors are constantly make those 15" or 17" 2-3kg monstruosities, mraning there is a demand for it.
Try walking in their shoes, I guess?
I've got great news: guess who makes the lightest laptops in the world? Know why they're so light? Vertical integration.
As an aside, if carrying 1.2kg is "exhausting to handle," I'm not sure what will convince you of any point on this topic.
As an aside, go carry at least 1.2 for a full day and tell us back. Not your 'imma sit in starbucks and imitate cool hipster dev' but like a full day, especially commuting.
Though I'm not sure anyone can convince you of any of the points you don't want to accept, because they contradict the only true way of yours. Even if the people directly say what they don't need your vertically integrated laptop.
Every time I forget to kill and purge unattended-upgrade on some Ubuntu install it ends up messing up my system at some later point because apt just can't keep its grubby little hands of my fucking packages. The other day it broke Nvidia drivers on one machine which took me a while to fix. Sometimes it'll just decide it needs to run an update for something e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y-s-l-o-w-l-y while blocking all apt installs for like an hour if you happen to be on slow wifi.
Canonical's worst design decision by far, and that list includes picking Gnome as their desktop environment.
No, it's not. I've been happily running Linux on my personal machines for more than two decades.
> what about those who rely on software that is only available on Windows and macOS?
Matlab is the software in question in this particular case, and as others have already posted, it runs on Linux.
Even for particular software that might be Windows/Mac only, there are almost always functional equivalents that run on Linux. For example, OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice, which is what I run now) as an alternative to MS Office.
I have had plenty of opportunity for comparison because, for all the time I have been running Linux on my personal machines, I have had to use Windows at work. I have always had much more hassle with my work machines, and if I had a dollar for every time I have had the thought that, if only my employer would switch to Linux on desktops, my work life would be so much easier and my productivity would be better, I'd be retired now. And that's not even counting all the times I have had the thought that if my employer would run Linux on servers instead of Microsoft crapware, our IT infrastructure would be so much more robust.
The one example I have seen in this discussion of software that is truly limited to Windows/Mac is Solidworks. But that's a particular product for a particular niche, not a general office application.
In the future I plan on relegating it to a VM on a separate VLAN to keep the cooties at bay.
For work, my work laptop is Windows and provided/maintained by internal IT. I support exclusively Linux based systems for our customer facing product, and the main reason I keep the Windows install on is so I can make any workstation issues a helpdesk issue.
In general though I've had no issues getting Office 365 working on Linux (Chromium / Chrome is best supported, but Firefox works OK too for most functions).
That's the problem. Most Linux users need Windows for something. I use mostly Linux, but I also have a Windows boot partition. For things like gaming, Fusion 360, VR,... Some things don't work that well on Linux: YouTube sometimes gets out of sync, print quality is really bad,...
On the other hand, I don't really need Linux, except for jobs that involve Linux specifically, and these are pretty technical jobs, far from a typical use case for non tech workers. And even with such tech jobs, >90% of these cases could be dealt with with WSL.
There is a video by LinuxTechTips where he tries to go 100% Linux, he is relatively successful but it is painful. I love this video because I think it is representative of the experience of a computer-savvy consumer.
On the other hand, if auto-restarts are a real problem to you, you are probably not a typical user. For most, it is an annoyance, but not really a problem, and it can be important for security. I don't really mind them personally, except that my dual-boot machine restarts on Linux (the default) when Windows does that, with the update process paused half way, annoying.
Sometimes one needs proprietary software packages that only work on Windows or macOS. Granted, the situation in 2024 isn’t as bad as it was in the 2000s thanks to the evolution of Web apps as an alternative to desktop applications. Still, some people rely on heavy-duty desktop apps that rely on Windows- or Mac-only APIs. The GIMP and Inkscape may not fully replace Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. FOSS diagramming tools, last I checked, aren’t at the level of proprietary tools that are unavailable for Linux like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle. Some people need functionality in Microsoft Office that is unavailable in LibreOffice.
Many people are on an OS they hate not because they choose to be.
More seriously though, you are probably bringing assumptions, that are specific to your current OS, and frustrated, that your existing experience is not 100% transferable. This works both ways; if you tried to switch from linux to your current OS, you would be also frustrated by this.
What's "useless" is sticking with an operating system that doesn't support the use-cases you need it to.
(Buying a license for Windows Enterprise might also be a valid and actionable course of advice -- I don't have experience there, but it should be considered if the use-case requires it.)
It's about as helpful as advising to rewrite his code in C/Rust/Julia so that it doesn't take weeks to run.
SRE would never have gotten invented if computers were reliable.
Matlab supports linux, so a dedicated linuxbox for simulations without all the bloat and clutter makes perfect sense.
I can't recall how my one Windows machine received legit Enterprise (wasn't full price), but it doesn't suck as much. With GPO options, most of the junk can be disabled.
I also have some cheap used Windows Server and Office licenses that I bound to unique disposable email addresses + Microsoft accounts.
When the vendor says "FU", piracy and workarounds are legitimate.
(FYI: VMware and Citrix gentlemans' agreement to pirate and not cripple production of each others' stuff for indirect, noncommercial purposes.)
I'm a long-time Linux user and I would discourage people from switching to it on the desktop. Not anymore. It is a viable alternative and the irony is, often more things work out of the box than in Windows as the vast majority of drivers is shipped directly with the kernel.
At some point, when someone makes your life more and more miserable, you will have enough and you will switch. Looking at MS actions in the last decade, it's not the question of if, only when.
What was most frustrating about that was when I would bring it back online to patch it. Evidently Microsoft wants to pretend that patching is cheap and so it would slowly sip CPU/disk/network for over an hour to get caught up. Leaving my beastly 16(?)32(?) core machine 99% idle. If I go to the settings page and click patch now, that should mean Ludicrous Speed Go!
Also, one other cute Windows that that burned me a couple of times with this setup- evidently Windows will keep some patches in reserve. Connect to Internet, patch, restart, disconnect Internet, restart. Think you are safe? Haha, windows might decide an hour later to install and force reboot for that final update.
When I have to use Windows at work, I often think that Microsoft must hate us all and are using Windows as a weapon to punish us.
Automatic updates are a good thing... /s 1/2 ...
Some patches depend on previous ones, and until those are installed, and rebooted, the newer patches will not be offered.
This is most evident trying to get a laptop not opened for 6 months up to date, multiple check for updates and reboots over multiple hours are required.
Instead, I took the system offline, did several reboots with healthy breathing time between them, and just had to hope the system would not puke the moment I walked out the door.
There is only so much BS I can take. Microsoft is driving off professionals with their sheer ineptitude at product development.
Yet still they make money on windows. The lost phones and servers already. Maybe Valve manages to take a bit of their gaming dominance.
That said MS office is still better than libre office.
Except I paid for my Windows license.
Some companies I have worked at still used Windows Server 2012. MS is probably making bank on those extended support licenses.
I will bet you everything I own that Windows will still be the dominant OS in business environments for at least another decade. Until the Chromebook generation enters the workforce in large numbers and starts demanding the simple web interfaces they're used to, no IT admin is going to install Linux on his machines.
I wish that was the case. For one professional they drive off, they keep 1,000,000 whose employer decides their OS for them. Same as hospital software and baby clothes: it's not the end user whom they primarily sell to. Their best version of Windows, the LTSC, is not even available to normal customers.
Corporations are nothing else than collections of directors and managers who have their own preferences which definitely influence their decision making.
More and more companies allow using MacOS. Small companies allow MacOS and then grow into large companies that still allow MacOS.
It is taking time, but don't underestimate the power of power users.
The second thing is what Microsoft got better at PR over the years. They, I think, very successfully respond to shifts in the market with products like WSL, which lessen the direct power user need to actually change the OS.
Furthermore, the IT job market just shifted so that the employers have more powers now, not the employees. This means that push for change from below, like for the 4 day work week or a user-favorable change in the computing environment is less likely to happen.
I do, however, see the changes that you point to, but I think that they are small, and I think that they will plateau before reaching market domination. Microsoft will be god damned to hold onto the moat that they dug, whether that be the Windows platform, the Office file formats, the email server software, the gaming libraries that they built, or anything else. Better technology or viable alternatives won't budge them, it will be either mismanagement, regulation, or a more aggressive competitor.
Linux is great, I can even play modern games on it now.
The actual problem OP has is that their simulation can't be restarted if something goes wrong
The latest spilth out of Microsoft seems to deliver a more toxic user experience with each release. It's a real shame as there have been some incredible improvements under the hood in the kernel, which get spoiled by awful product and business decisions.
People here like to criticize holdouts who refused to upgrade beyond Windows 7, but I don't blame 'em for simply saying NO. Most of the ones I've met rely on other mitigations for security (eg. 0patch, firewalls, fully offline environments), and not a single one has reported feeling more pain in practice from nefarious adversaries than peers on recent versions of the OS have endured from Microsoft.
The idea that I can own a computer and could pay good money for a license for the OS but have no control over whether it gets rebooted is just... I don't know. I just can't even imagine tolerating it.
Then again, I'll likely never have a new car because too much of the functionality is out of the control of the actual owners.
And they can't even make a search that works as good as it did 15 years ago because instead of even attempting to look for your local files it'll show you ads and Bing search results that can only be opened in Edge. Their old basic photo viewer app of the Windows 7 is long gone and replaced with a janky "modern" Windows app that crashes if you look at it funny. Windows is just so bad and only getting worse over time.
I wish i could say i am being ironic but lately Microsoft has become increasingly hostile towards users… it’s incredible they still have this large of a market share.
Edit to mention I always make sure these machines are on a VLAN alone and properly firewalled, as we are deferring patches for sometimes weeks after they come out.