Hacker News Reader

Comment by ant6n | Hacker News Reader

The forced reinstalls for updates is the worst. Sometimes when working on some Excel file etc at night, I went away without saving (e.g. crying kid needs attention, and I never returned). Auto-saving only works when you store files in OneDrive. So then windows Update will shut down Excel, and Excel often won't create an AutoSave, and then hours of work are lost -- totally intentionally, deliberately, all using Microsoft products that are apparently specifically designed to make you lose hours of work.

Who designs these antipatterns!?

View on HN

The forced restarts are mind boggling.

What is an operating system? At it's core, an OS is a program to run other programs. Yet this Windows program likes to randomly kill all the programs it's supposed to keep running, at night, when it thinks you aren't looking. It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.

If they didn't force restart then the patches they release for vulnerabilities would never take effect. What normal user restarts their PC other than when they're having issues?

Straight out of shitty user stories.

As a user I want my computer to restart by itself and lose of my work, because its entire purpose is to collect CVE patches.

Maybe they could stop building the OS in such a way that it requires reboots? You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?

I don't see how it's possible to actually support that considering how many components make up an OS. What would happen if libc had a vulnerability that needed patching? I know a reboot wouldn't be forced but wouldn't it only take effect when all the processes using it restart?

Windows has been around for 40 years, and is worth more than the GDP of many nations. In fact, some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature.

It's not that it's an impossible problem, it's that Microsoft doesn't have to compete...so they don't.

> some of the Windows server versions actually include the feature

If you looked into it though you'd see that you do still need to restart at least every quarter for baseline updates. If you don't restart then future hotpatch updates will not apply because they only target the current baseline update. There are also unplanned baseline updates that require a restart to patch zero-day exploits that cannot be fixed in a hotpatch.

I'm still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.

> m still not understanding how this is a solved problem on Linux. If there is a vulnerability in libc then you need to restart (probably) all processes to have the fix take effect.

Restarting the service that was directly impacted by the patch is preferable to the 1980's techno-brained idea of rebooting the entire system. Most of the time it isn't glibc.

FWIW - I did recently read that hotpatching is already there in 11 if you enable it in an enterprise. Fingers crossed it comes to home users.

The reason I brought up libc is there are a lot more userspace shared libraries in Windows that could need patching.

> You know that other operating systems can manage without that, right?

Not for kernel updates (Linux, by default), and not for macOS which is now RO root fs and also requires a reboot because updates are image based, a. la. Fedora Silverblue.

Also FWIW, Windows now has hotpatching, albeit not available to consumers, it's attached to enterprise licensing

You can update the Linux kernel without killing userspace. Granted it's not without reboot though. Just hibernate/suspend to disk and choose a different kernel on startup, it will still load the RAM image just fine; every program will be still running.

> Windows now has hotpatching,

That's kind of my point. Linux is free and can manage, but 40 year old Windows, which is valued to be worth more than the GDP of many nations can't?

They just aren't trying very hard because they don't have to.

> It literally fails at the most basic purpose of an operating system.

Either you've misunderstood who the customer is, or Microsoft has.

Designed to force you to buy a OneDrive subscription? I bet relevant revenue numbers went slightly but noticeably up when this was introduced. Sweet promotion package stuff!

(Also, say early, save often.)

In the early days of Windows 10, it was even worse because the updates could brick your windows install and you would get stuck on a blue screen or a boot loop after it forced you to restart. I've had to reinstall W10 at least a dozen time because of bad updates.

I personally liked the W8 approach to updates. You were allowed to set windows update in a mode that would notify you of new updates but you got to chose when to download/install them. That setting as also permanent and they didn't "accidentally" revert it back during an update.

This has happened with every version of Windows. NT4 SP6 was a nightmare and recommended to skip because it would cause a BSOD. Microsoft had to release SP6a about a month later.

Updates and unbootable systems are nothing new, to treat any OS as a unicorn in this respect is ignoring past history. Happens with Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Mightn't AutoRecover have found a version of your old sheet?

If AutoRecover worked reliably. Excel is only like 40 years old, so AutoRecover doesn’t work reliable yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com