Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 550 posts

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#501

Post by pseudohadamard »

sagacity wrote: post #81

I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account. Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password becaus…

That's one thing that struck me in TFA, almost everything mentioned was stuff I never asked for and never wanted: CoPilot in my inbox, some Insider Program bumf, widgets and feeds, the sole thing in there that means anything is that updates are slightly less annoying.

So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#502

Post by sagacity »

Krasnol wrote: post #409
sagacity wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so, to be clear: I'm fairly sure Linux will also have its fair share of issues that I occasionally would have to repair. I don't necessarily even have a problem with Windows occasionally needing a bit of hand-holding, either. It sucks, but it's IT so meh, unfortunately it still comes with the territory. What I'm mostly pissed off about is the fact that I have a perfectly useable machine but since I'm unable to…

I don't know where you are but oobe/bypassnro worked for me just 2 weeks ago.

I've reinstalled using this trick, so this issue won't bite me again in the future.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#503

Post by sagacity »

will4274 wrote: post #288
sagacity wrote: post #81

I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account. Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password becaus…

> I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account Not sure what's so confusing here... When Windows is online, it checks your password against the cloud and updates the local store. When Wind…

Clearly if that was the actual issue I would've been able to get it working :)

The thing is, I was online, I had a working internet connection (and confirmed this by doing the 'utilman' hang to get a command prompt and getting a working ping command). It was just that Windows corrupted some kind of internal Microsoft Account connection and was locking me out.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#504

Post by aboardRat4 »

senfiaj wrote: post #456
aboardRat4 wrote: post #108

Windows can ensure its quality quite easily: restore support for Windows 7.

In ideal world, but it's too late. The codebase is old. It's very difficult to backport/reimplement/integrate features (tons of APIs, kernel features, etc) that new software relies on. Also, because of compatibility you can't remove all the mess.

It's not that old. In fact, there is little new stuff added to Windows after version 7 that is really worth keeping. Even Windows XP supports most recent Chromiums, albeit with a lot of hacky patches.

I would even say that from the usability perspective, Windows 2000 beats them all, but quite some useful APIs were added in XP and 7, including better Unicode support, driver signing, UAC. But 10 and 11 were just a waste of effort.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#505

Post by Orygin »

chihuahua wrote: post #352
noosphr wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done. https://status.canonical.com/ You're in for a bad time. It's been three days and they still can't get updates to work. Get Debian if you must. Use something sane like Guix and OpenBSD if you can.

I've been watching Linux from a safe distance for 25+ years. The one thing that remains constant over the decades is that whenever someone says "You're having this problem? Well what did you expect, you're using X distro. Obviously you should use Y distro, then all your problems will be solved" and then another person comes along and says "No, you idiot, Y distro is completely broken, any sane person would use Z dist…

It's always the exact same distro, and it has been for 10+ years. Nobody is recommending it anymore but users still come with issues due to that.

There are different distros for different taste/needs, but Ubuntu always has been the worst choice of all.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#506

Post by DarkUranium »

ninjagoo wrote: post #366
mancerayder wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff. Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Lin…

> What sort of metric would I have registered as? Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of. Declining stats on these measu…

Considering Win11 being, well, Win11, I wouldn't be surprised if they were sending partition tables of hard drives to detect other OSes.

They won't be able to detect which Linux distro it is that way, but they'd definitely know it's ext4 or whatnot, which heavily implies Linux.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#507

Post by AlienRobot »

kasabali wrote: post #187

> We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around. Great! We've progressed back to Windows XP of 22 years ago.

I hope a miracle happens and it keeps progressing until we have Windows XP 2.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#508

Post by ethbr1 »

xxs wrote: post #306
ethbr1 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle. *XBox and Microsoft gaming's $23.5b revenue (~10% of MS's total) enter the chat* You were saying something about not letting facts get in the way of a preferred narrative, I believe?

xbox is a catch-it-umbrella that includes all the studios bought, and game pass. The xbox hardware sales are beyond appalling[0], $220m a quarter, and it'd be below $1b yearly. That's revenue - the consoles have pretty terrible profit margin by design. (likely negative when it comes to xbox) No need for snarky remarks. [0]: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/111349/xbox-hardware-revenue-...

You realize it's a whole thing, right?

Being a console ecosystem owner doesn't work if one doesn't have a console?

Hence why it makes sense to look at their gaming division revenue as a whole: a large part of that revenue is attributable to shipped to date XBox units.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#509

Post by AlienRobot »

unleaded wrote: post #386
realo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you realize it but your post single-handedly demonstrates a lot of the reasons why Windows is bad ...

When people cricitize Linux there's always people responding "it's simple really, just run this super long command and do this and that".. looks like the same thing to me.

That's actually why I started using Linux.

I hated that Linux has all these commands you had to go through, then I installed Windows 11 and tutorials were telling me run all these commands to fix it. I figure I'd just use Linux at that point.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#510

Post by vrighter »

pndy wrote: post #448
sigseg1v wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how you can tell that they just don't get it. Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive. If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads…

OneDrive isn't a backup solution but a way to put your personal files in danger as was proven many times. And nowadays probably also a fastest way to get data mined - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551504 Microsoft has options to provide local image-based backups but they want to make you dependent on their online services - which surely isn't surprising to anyone. Last time I was installing Windows 10 I had…

their VSS system is actually better than btrfs snapshots, IIRC. It allows you to take atomic snapshots of multiple volumes simultaneously. I haven't found a way to do it with btrfs yet, there's always a race condition.
Post reply on HN