The only reason I use windows 10 is for gaming. The millisecond linux gaming is supported by all the games I love I will be paying whatever price necessary to drop windows for ever. I use OS X for work and find it a near perfect developer experience for my rather pedestrian use cases.
Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
181–190 of 391 posts
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you fighting the wind(ows)mills? Linux desktop is in it best shape since its inception. Mint (doesn't siphon), Ubuntu (siphons responsibly) or Manjaro (if you miss rolling updates, but for humans)... Why suffer needlessly?
For me? Because I'm trying to work through the several hundred steam games I've accrued from humble bundles over the years (and for one or two works apps hopefully going away soon). I used Linux on the desktop for over a decade, usually with a highly customized FVWM2 config. I found windows 8 to be okay, and windows 10 to be a pretty good minimal desktop. All my dev work is done remote on PuTTY anyways, so beyond a b…
Did you miss the announcement recently from Valve that Steam on Linux now bundles a version of wine + other goodies that make it so you can run many windows games now? Not all, but the list will grow. https://spcr.netlify.com/
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure this is how ChromeOS' update system works.
Are you sure? Because ChromeOS is just a Gentoo fork where google replaced the package manager to support their binaries instead. Programs running in memory just stay running, even if you update the files that are those programs. This is how Linux works. Restart them when you need the new version. Its clean. Its easy. I kept watching netflix as firefox compiled (~30 mins), and got to close the browser after the next…
> Are you sure? Because ChromeOS is just a Gentoo fork where google replaced the package manager to support their binaries instead.
Yes, and that's a gross oversimplification. Android got the idea from ChromeOS.
I suspect it's possible to reload the OS in place with kexec, but haven't proposed it yet.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#184I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…
It never stops to amaze me how unwilling most people are to explore the latest Win10 options to always defer updates by number of days (eg stay a week behind on feature updates to let others be more on the cutting edge), or even temporarily freeze the windows update service by up to a two digit number of days. If I ever wanted to be sure that no updates took place I'd use the freeze. Switching OS might be a solution,…
I think the problem isn't just that Windows updates happen immediately by default. It's that Windows updates when you boot up your computer.
See, turning on a computer is an explicit declaration that you want to use it. Windows updates ignores this declaration by taking that time to itself. It doesn't matter if I can defer the update by how many days if one day it will stop/delay me from using my computer when I want to. Almost no one outside of IT Administrators turns on computers solely for updates and maintenance.
Contrast that with Linux (Ubuntu distro in mind) where updates happen when the computer is shutting down. In contrast with turning your computer on, shutting down is a declaration that you no longer need your computer. That's the OS' cue to chime in and perform some routine maintenance.
I wonder how much of this is an architectural problem. The first time I remember being frustrated with this Windows behavior was in Vista. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall that 95, 98, and XP used to do updates on shut down. I know Vista isn't fondly remembered but, gee, did they deliberately make it so that it updates when you start your computer? Why couldn't a company who takes pride in backwards compatibility keep the old update behavior?
To wit, people make a big deal about how immediately can you use your computer (i.e., start-up times) but all your fancy-schmancy SSD + hyperthreading set-up is useless if Windows decides to update just before that one presentation you've spent weeks on. Updating on shut down is the user-friendly way.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure this is how ChromeOS' update system works.
Are you sure? Because ChromeOS is just a Gentoo fork where google replaced the package manager to support their binaries instead. Programs running in memory just stay running, even if you update the files that are those programs. This is how Linux works. Restart them when you need the new version. Its clean. Its easy. I kept watching netflix as firefox compiled (~30 mins), and got to close the browser after the next…
Eventually the kernel has to be updated, which you want to reboot for. Plus ensuring that the entire userland is running the same new versions of base system libraries isn't much less disruptive than simply rebooting.
Anyway, ChromeOS swaps the system and kernel between 4 partitions [1] - automatic update effectively installs a new system into the system partitions you're not booted from, then tells the boot loader to boot from the other ones next reboot.
[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#186I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…
Humble tip - You can pause updates for up to 45 days. During this period, you can enable them at your leisure. This is what I do when I'm leaving my computer for an overnight rendering.
My own humble tip - switch this shit off. Here's what I've found to work for me:
0. install whichever Windows 10 has the group policy editor - I've got Windows 10 Pro, I think. (I'm at home right now and my work laptop is at the office)
1. run gpedit.msc
2. Go to Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Update
3. Double-click Configure Automatic Updates
4. Set up as follows:
- Overall group policy setting = Enabled
- Configure automatic updating = 3 - Auto download and notify for install
- Install during automatic maintenance = unticked
- Scheduled install day = 0 - every day
- Scheduled install time = 03:00
- "If you have blah blah" = Every week
- Install updates for other Microsoft products = untickedThree things to note:
- this works for me. Ask yourself: are you me? But even if you aren't, don't let that put you off, because you might still get lucky
- there's a popup that pops up to say something like "updates are ready, click to install" - and this actually means literally precisely what it says, nothing more and nothing less, so for god's sake don't do what I did at first and click it thinking that it means you'll get the option of saying no afterwards and then wonder why all the updates are installing. Go to the updates section of the control panel by hand to see what updates are ready before approving them
- the above settings are just what I have set on my work laptop, copied out from the dialog box, based on a screen grab. Some of the settings may be the defaults. I don't remember which
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
It never stops to amaze me how unwilling most people are to explore the latest Win10 options to always defer updates by number of days (eg stay a week behind on feature updates to let others be more on the cutting edge), or even temporarily freeze the windows update service by up to a two digit number of days. If I ever wanted to be sure that no updates took place I'd use the freeze. Switching OS might be a solution,…
I routinely use Linux (Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, CentOS, several others) Windows (98 - 10 (yes, really 98), server 2000 to 2016) and I speak quite a few other OS dialects (NetWare and FreeBSD fex). The worst for updates, by far is Windows 10 and server 2016. I'd better qualify that. Gentoo can take a really long time to crunch through say 1GB of source code if not updated for a few months. Firefox can take an hour or so…
Though my range of operating systems isn't anything like as wide as yours, but still across a pretty broad range of systems, Windows, especially 10, comes out by far the worst.
My other pet hate on Windows that's been out of control since 7, and getting worse with each generation, is the insane hidden wastage under /Windows that simply constantly grows.
After it's a year old, between winsxs and the various installer and update folders you can easily burn 50-100GB of space under ./Windows for an OS that took say 3GB to install. You can clean up only some of it.
No other OS gets anywhere near this idiocy.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humble tip - You can pause updates for up to 45 days. During this period, you can enable them at your leisure. This is what I do when I'm leaving my computer for an overnight rendering.
Doesn't change the fact that you end up having to actively manage the OS not screwing up your workflow, that's not how I would define "good". Plus I would always forget.
The alternative is horrifying though. No regular user ever updates their stuff unless they're forced to, and in a world of increasingly horrifying botnets that can cripple the world economy on command, I can see why having the average user update automatically is necessary. Note that the average user (even myself, who is fairly good at keeping the latest version of everything installed) wouldn't have this problematic update with the (potential) data loss installed yet. You would have to have manually done it.
Does windows not give you the 250 warnings that it used to to postpone the restart? I turn off my computer every night, so I haven't even noticed that updates occur for ~1.5 years.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#189I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doi…
"Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you."
This is, unfortunately, also true of Sonos.
I would say that more than 10% of my attempted sonos usage is blocked by an update process.
If you're just turning on the news for 2-3 minutes while you pack up your things, that's a 100% outage for you.
Re: Microsoft suspends Windows 10 update, citing data loss reports
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It never stops to amaze me how unwilling most people are to explore the latest Win10 options to always defer updates by number of days (eg stay a week behind on feature updates to let others be more on the cutting edge), or even temporarily freeze the windows update service by up to a two digit number of days. If I ever wanted to be sure that no updates took place I'd use the freeze. Switching OS might be a solution,…
I think the problem isn't just that Windows updates happen immediately by default. It's that Windows updates when you boot up your computer. See, turning on a computer is an explicit declaration that you want to use it. Windows updates ignores this declaration by taking that time to itself. It doesn't matter if I can defer the update by how many days if one day it will stop/delay me from using my computer when I want…
Fair enough, and thanks for that info. I haven't really looked at it from the starting up point of view as the shutting down one.
For whatever reason it hasn't impacted me, and that's also having a laptop that only gets irregular use as well as my regular desktop, but I'll be more observant about this going forward.