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.NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

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Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#211

Post by acdha »

roblabla wrote: post #139
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare. Manually run the update check every 2-3 days and run it again two hours before the presentation. Any updates that come out in that two hour window will allow you at least one delay. Come on, folks, this isn't exactly rocket science here. Keep your OS up to date and, surprisingly en…

OS updates (or any update that potentially takes more than 2 minutes) shouldn't ever be forced. It's just terrible. Sure, there should be some prominant prompts saying "Plz update me" from time to time (so the average joe's computer isn't terribly out of date). But don't force me to update in the middle of prez. Because clearly, I'm best placed to know what's the best time for my computer to become an expensive paper…

The problem is that if you don't make them automatic, people won't install them. Microsoft spent most of the Windows XP era with people being bitten by problems which had been patched in many cases years before.

The approach they've taken of making things mandatory is clearly not universally popular but most of the arguments about it tend to ignore the fact that it was designed to solve a very real problem which affected millions of people.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#212

Post by softwarelimits »

cozuya wrote: post #197

Here's my anecdata after recently attempting to move permanently from Windows to Linux Mint: * No logitech mouse support = severely disabled experience. I can't use any of the extra mouse buttons in the way I want on my Performance MX. And yes I did spend several hours trying to get it to work but it seems that the button mapping works only for keyboard commands and even that I couldn't make work. And never could mak…

You should understand that it is a decision about your and our all freedom. A few missing features and annoyances are a good price to pay for freedom.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#213

Post by acdha »

douche wrote: post #48
elorant wrote: post #43

Windows 10 is a clusterfuck of an OS. Installed it on my dad’s PC, a simple machine with browsing software and a few arcade games. Didn’t go with the full install, instead did an upgrade from Win7. Everything was honky dory until it downloaded a ginormous 1GB update. The update failed and now every time he shuts down the update tries to install again. It takes north of five minutes to shut down. Install, fail, rollba…

Trying to upgrade an operating system is almost always a good way to ensure you're going to have a bad time. Copy any files you care about off, wipe the disk, and install from scratch. This is also usually worth doing with an OEM machine, to get rid of all the crap and weirdly configured partitions they set them up with.

> Trying to upgrade an operating system is almost always a good way to ensure you're going to have a bad time.

That's a really strong assertion to toss out without supporting evidence. I've had the opposite experience with Debian/Ubuntu (100s of systems, starting in the late 90s) and OS X (dozens of systems, starting with 10.0) — the process is almost always start the update, reboot, resume work with rare exceptions for something like previously-undetected filesystem corruption.

Even my experience on Windows has not supported that conclusion – you might always want to be ready to reimage the machine but it hasn't been rocky for at least a decade.

The difference might starting and staying clean: avoid OEM Windows installs, apply updates regularly rather than putting it off for years, don't install system-level hacks (Mac users were terrible for awhile about using “haxies” and then complaining about Apple when some random binary monkey-patching broke on the next major release), and be careful about installing software from irresponsible sources.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#214

Post by jongalloway2 »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #129
scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

> The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare. Manually run the update check every 2-3 days and run it again two hours before the presentation. Any updates that come out in that two hour window will allow you at least one delay. Come on, folks, this isn't exactly rocket science here. Keep your OS up to date and, surprisingly en…

I do a lot of presentations, and I'm on the Windows Insiders Fast Ring, meaning I get a new build about weekly, hence a lot more Windows Updates. I check for and install updates as part of my preparations before presenting. I've been doing this for years, on every operating system I present on (yay xcode updates over hotel wifi!). I've never had a problem with unexpected OS updates, because I run them explicitly. I do the same for frameworks and IDEs I'll be demonstrating. I'm surprised someone doing a presentation wouldn't make sure their software was up to date before doing a presentation, honestly. Not just because it makes sure you know the state of your software stack, but because you'll know if - for whatever reason - your demonstrations don't work or work differently on the latest software release.

End to end tech checks (including your software stack) is just part of respecting your audience.

I think some people run into surprise software updates because they do demonstrations on a virtual machine. I don't think that's a good idea, but if you're going to present on VM images, it's just good practice to test out your environment before you present on it.

Note: I'm not making any statement here about how I think software updates should be installed or how Windows works. I've blogged about controlling Windows Updates over the years, here's a post from a decade ago: https://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/438009. This comment is about how I make sure, as a developer and presenter, that software updates don't affect my presentations.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, Nazgûl

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#215

Post by sk5t »

scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

Launch "Windows Update Settings" and review "Active Hours." The dialog claims, "When a restart is necessary to finish installing an update, we won't automatically restart your device during active hours."

Note that the use of "we" (instead of "Windows") is a tad unusual, and maybe a little ominous, for Microsoft.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#216

Post by cptskippy »

scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

You're implying that the reboots occur at random without notification. They do not. Windows notifies you that updates were installed that require a reboot and that it will occur at off hours. If you ignore that notification then when the reboot is schedule to occur you receive another notification with the option to postpone the reboot for another amount of time.

I've had these forced reboots happen a couple times and it's disruptive but that's about it. The most disruptive was when I was working on a project and stopped for dinner then never came back and left my desktop on overnight. The next day I discovered that my computer had rebooted and was at the login prompt.

I can see how this would really suck for applications that do not respect the shutdown notification that Windows broadcasts but even the Arduino IDE dutifully saved my work.

I suspect that over time app developers will pay more attention to OS level event notifications and we'll get to a point similar to Mobile or even MacOS where apps can be halted and resumed at will. Personally that sounds like heaven.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#217

Post by teh_klev »

sk5t wrote: post #215
scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

Launch "Windows Update Settings" and review "Active Hours." The dialog claims, "When a restart is necessary to finish installing an update, we won't automatically restart your device during active hours." Note that the use of "we" (instead of "Windows") is a tad unusual, and maybe a little ominous, for Microsoft.

As mentioned in another comment, I have all these things configured and yet twice in that past seven days Windows 10 Pro has given me the 20 minute warning, right in the middle of my working hours. To add insult to injury for some reason the "Use a custom restart time" is now disabled.

I'd love to have the annoying old windows update nag box with the postpone button back.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#218

Post by NetStrikeForce »

Vendan wrote: post #154
jorgeleo wrote: post #149

"Although the application did run correctly, it threw an exception that gdiplus.dll could not be found. It makes sense, that’s a Windows component so it’s not available on Linux. But my point here is that although being the .NET Core application it’d still crash, so imagine what would happen if I’d publish it to some Linux server – everything would seem to work, but actually it wouldn’t. Another point for the .NET Co…

I think the point is "develop on the platform you are going to use". You'd get that error when you were developing on linux, so it'd never make it to production. If you developed on windows, you'd never get the error, cause you have gdiplus.dll. Still you should be at least testing on something matching the target platform, but catching this kind of stuff early is a plus!

Well, I guess he wouldn't have used gdiplus.dll if he was planning to run the app on Linux, so I'm guessing the conclusions should be:

- If you're doing multi-platform software, don't use platform specific libraries.

- If you're doing multi-platform software, test on all your target OSes.

Use any OS that makes you productive.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#219

Post by teh_klev »

cptskippy wrote: post #216
scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

You're implying that the reboots occur at random without notification. They do not. Windows notifies you that updates were installed that require a reboot and that it will occur at off hours. If you ignore that notification then when the reboot is schedule to occur you receive another notification with the option to postpone the reboot for another amount of time. I've had these forced reboots happen a couple times an…

> You're implying that the reboots occur at random without notification. They do not.

Well actually......twice in the past seven days I had updates installed during my "work hours" and it still went ahead and did the 20 minute reboot warning thing during the same specified work hours in the same day.

Re: .NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10

#220

Post by Grazester »

scandox wrote: post #30

The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.

I was out in the field consoling into a cisco switch and I had my laptop restart(I had been cancelling it a while now and it got to the point where it just restarted)

It took the better part of 10 minutes to apply updates. Thankfully it was nothing pressing I was going on the switch. I have disabled auto updates with a registry hack. Microsoft isn't serious about Windows and is now treating it like an OS used for petty un-important work

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