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Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

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Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different design goals. While there's tension between Windows/Linux (which, interestingly, has over the years partly been released by each adopting pages of the others' playbook) there are a lot of complex or critical systems in the world, where displaying an error message to the user is clearly not a great design choice.

Yes, and some people just want to take their car to the mechanic, while other people want to fix theirs. It's a classic struggle in any area. The big difference though, is if I use my car in a professional capacity , I want to know how to change my own oil, because I'm not an idiot. I want to be able to fix simple issues, because that's just being professionally responsible. Windows discourages this kind of professio…

Might be a bit of hyperbole.

Microsoft had extensive documentation of nearly every API they support, and some they don't. Comprehensive documentation with notes and caveats. Automatically available from their tools.

Compare, for instance, with Apples almost total non-documentation of anything. Mostly just scraped comments with arguments barely described e.g 'a string'. No notes, no architecture, nothing.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean 90's Linux?

Hey! Some of us still use Linux the old "hacker command line" way

I use arch btw, and even then with zsh, shell highlighting, annotations, fuzzy finder and vim on steroids, the "hacker way" can be really different from two decades ago.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is the structure of the program per se. The entire concept of the happy or error path is a cultural phenomenon that requires explicit acknowledgment and rejection to solve (excepting languages that demand error-handling to function) In my experience, these metaphors are introduced to meet time constraints and produce shitty software. It's fine to talk about these metaphors as efficiency-accelerants, but…

I think you're wrong on this. How often does software get created without the creator having a primary goal in mind? How often is the main goal handling things going wrong? If I write something to build a chart out of some logs, the first, most basic thing I'm going to evaluate it on is "can it make the chart?", not "how does it handle a malformed log entry?". I will think about these things, but they're inarguably n…

I mean, how often is quality software made? I agree with you, but I'd argue most software is compromised by shitty incentives. Humans mostly write buggy and incoherent software—this is solved by consensus across disparate incentives. The "primary goal" as you state is often characterized by others as "bias"

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#154
post #65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Linux. You absolutely need to drop down to the command line at times. Upgrading my Kennel, or Graphics driver breaks something like 20% of the time for me.

Strange. I've been on Linux some 28 years now, and it used to be like that¹. But today? I haven't had a kernel or graphics driver update failing on me for years. Maybe 10+ years? Granted, my Linux is the most boring, hardly-configged Unbuntu LTS. Boring hardware. Boring drivers. Everything optimized to "Just Work" - My machine pays my bills and if I'm down for a day because I fiddled around with some fancy custom tra…

I bet you use stable graphics drivers on older graphics cards and the person your responding to uses newer graphics cards and quickly updates to the latest drivers.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#155
post #7

When installing the update, some users are finding themselves faced with an 0x80070643 error, a generic failure message. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, "because of an error in the error code handling routine," this might not be the correct error. Error in the error code code is giving the wrong error code for the error. I'm curious how often the error code code needs touching that there is an error in there t…

My favorite was "Something Happened" (smaller text) "Something Happened"

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#156
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only two monitors? I've no problem with more than that. I don't know what hardware you're using, but that's atypical.

Two monitors with different DPI. Couldn't get them to work well without running a weird xrandr script on every boot with some "1.9999999999...." setting.

Without Wayland I'm pretty sure this is still the case.

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#157
post #7

When installing the update, some users are finding themselves faced with an 0x80070643 error, a generic failure message. Unfortunately, according to Microsoft, "because of an error in the error code handling routine," this might not be the correct error. Error in the error code code is giving the wrong error code for the error. I'm curious how often the error code code needs touching that there is an error in there t…

"But sir, on what does the Windows operating system rest?"

"Why, on the back of an error, of course."

"Um... and on what, may I ask, does the error stand?"

"Ah, but you're clever, young man. Too clever by half. It's errors, all the way down."

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#158
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had an update issue on a Linux device. I update whenever I like, and have never been forced to. Occasionally some items fail due to dependency issues, the error messages are very descriptive, I handle the dependencies and move on with the update. Failed updates are a uniquely Windows issue in my experience, had something like 10-15 of them in my lifetime.

Your experience differs from mine. If I only count major incidents, I've had at least two occasions where a Linux operating system update completely hosed my system. One was a Rackspace VPS I never managed to recover, I had to use their management tools to download a binary image of the unbootable disk and fuss around to mount it and get my files off so I could build a new server. I'm very hesitant to touch Linux upd…

That's quite strange. What distro? For a while I was managing several hundred Linux devices remotely, so I've done thousands of updates with no issues. Linux has been my daily driver for 15 years, and never had an update issue there (that I didn't create myself). Specifically the thing I've NEVER had an issue with was a standard system update. Apt upgrade, pacman or yay -SYU, things of that nature. Had plenty of problems when trying to do weird shit, but I've also learned how to solve those problems. I've never borked an important system so bad it became unrecoverable. Some distros are prone to update failure because they always give you bleeding edge releases. I'd suggest running Debian, a ridiculously stable "fire and forget" system. Many rolling distros, like Arch, I'd say to update every couple of days to avoid dependency chain problems. But again, none of this is difficult beyond having to read some documentation, and none of this should even be able to cause system loss. Did you do something else weird that you forgot to mention?

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wrong on this. How often does software get created without the creator having a primary goal in mind? How often is the main goal handling things going wrong? If I write something to build a chart out of some logs, the first, most basic thing I'm going to evaluate it on is "can it make the chart?", not "how does it handle a malformed log entry?". I will think about these things, but they're inarguably n…

I mean, how often is quality software made? I agree with you, but I'd argue most software is compromised by shitty incentives. Humans mostly write buggy and incoherent software—this is solved by consensus across disparate incentives. The "primary goal" as you state is often characterized by others as "bias"

> I mean, how often is quality software made?

I have no idea what you mean by quality software, so I can't answer that. Can you give an example? I also have no idea what your alternative framing is. It seems like fundamentally not how people think of software.

> The "primary goal" as you state is often characterized by others as "bias"

...yes, that's the point of I (and I believe the others) have been making. People are generally biased to focus on the happy path.

I'm honestly having trouble figuring out your line of argument from your various comments. Maybe I misunderstood what you said earlier about your experience contradicting mine. Were you actually saying that you really did believe everyone else was worse at programming?

Re: Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

#160
post #45
post #42

My win10 kept giving me “bug check” reboot treatment and I had to go win11 reluctantly. Oh well, there goes my vertical taskbar.

If only there’s a way to transfer my win oem license which comes with my laptop, I’d totally switch around the host/guest setup and shrink my host windows to a guest vm.

Massgravel's MAS is an option. Not a license transfer but gets you an activated machine.

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