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Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed

theregister.com

191–200 of 223 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS fired all testers and scrapped their testing hardware and now they are testing virtually in cloud. I'm fairly certain this isn't the case. 1) Microsoft still adds Microsoft drivers for hardware; this implies having hardware and people to work with it. 2) Microsoft has a massive base of corp and gov customers buying hosting, surveillance, etc. Widespread issues with Windows would could affect that. I'll go out on…

nope. as indicated by a sibling comment, Microsoft used to have parallel SDE and SDE/T tracks and orgs. They killed the test org completely around 10 years ago because of course developers can just do TDD and ship an operating system with 30 years of legacy applications/hardware ecosystems around it. Or "telemetry will just tell us what to fix" Of all the mountains of dumb shit this company has done in the past 10 ye…

I haven't liked Windows since Friends was still on the air, but even I must concede... the version shortly before they dumped their testing org, Windows 7, was probably the best version they made.

Windows 9x was extensively user tested using mockups made in frickin' Visual Basic; user feedback was incorporated into the next round of mockups to converge on something that was actually easier to use. It was agile development before that was a buzzword. What's replaced that? Just rolling out whatever UI brainfart the design team came up with into the product and using bitching on X (formerly known as Twitter) to gauge whether to keep it?

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

#193
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Hence "boring".

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

#194
"I use Windows because I don't want to have to go to the command line to fix one simple thing."

Yeah, join the club. Actually you've been in the club. A few years back I had Windows decide that I didn't have permission to access my own user directory anymore, resulting in a system with a glitchy Explorer and taskbar where nothing worked. To fix things I had to drop into an administrator console, create a new user, then move all my old files from the old user account to the new one and change ownership and permissions on them. So no, the idea that Windows is easier because graphical is BS. If the system is going to get into weird failure modes that I need to type commands to démerde myself out of anyway, I'm just going to stick with Linux and NetBSD.

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

#195
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What hardware? Your experience with Linux can be very different depending on that. For example, my laptop's WiFi refuses to work properly on Linux, so I'm forced to use Windows. Edit: oh, and not to mention graphics (Nvidia), multiple monitors and HiDPI, especially with fractional scaling and different multiples per display. HiDPI on Linux doesn't work nearly as well as Windows and macOS.

My current machine is a "clevo". Some whitelabel thing that I bought from a company that delivers Laptops with linux preïnstalled. Intel i7, intel iRIS, etc. It all "just works".

I'm not trying to argue that "Linux Just Works" or that "you won't run into hardware issues on Linux". I'm arguing that by choosing "boring" hardware, and "a boring LTS from a large distro" you won't.

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

#196

Can Microsoft just bring back a proper QA department instead of leaving it to unpaid "Insiders" who drink the Flavor-Aid and think Microsoft can't code a single thing wrong?

Based on the feedback community I don't think that's a particularly accurate take of Insiders as a whole. That said it's been ~10 years now since they dumped the traditional QA department (which involved more than just leveraging external user validation) and I honestly can't say Windows is blowing up any more than it was the previous 10 years to that. I'd really like to see some actual measured statistics of e.g. pa…

[deleted]

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

#197
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a fresh install of windows 11 yesterday and winget doesn’t work. Seriously. I haven’t even installed any software yet.

The output turns blue and nothing happens? Update Terminal and then winget will work.

No I was getting "0x8a15000f : Data required by the source is missing" out of the box. Then after that went away it was another error. It might be related to this not being a "local only" account and not a microsoft account.

Ultimately, thinking winget can be used like apt to get a new system up and running is misguided on my part.

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

#198
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I am extra vigilant, pendantic and strict when writing or reviewing code that handles exception and error paths. More than happy-path code, I want this to be simple, rediculously easy and very loosely coupled. No inheritance, no abstractions, very shallow dependency trees and so on. Just once too often did a bug in exception handling cause a system to go down - It is often not or hardly covered in tests (…

This attitude seems a little silly to me—being "extra vigilant, pedantic and strict" about happy-path code would necessarily imply the same about "exception and error paths". Generally speaking, bugs mostly appear in a binary fashion and not in varying degrees—ie your code either reflect expected behavior or doesn't.

In "happy paths" I except some fancy abstractions, allow large dependency trees, complex state-machines or business-logic. I'm "fine" with deeply nested trees of includes, inheritance, modules and whatnot.

But I insist the "unknown unknowns" are handled extremely simple, predictable and decoupled. Because those happy paths will fail. And then the exception-path must take over and this must be able to handle it predictable.

So no third party error services that I have to call over HTTP (HTTP will fail). No complex logging libraries (dependencies will become outdated). No difficult tracing middleware that has to be configured "just right" (configs will break). And certainly no flows that require a spaghetti-wrangler to follow along.

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

#199
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's usually not the full error message, and you can still easily find the number's meaning by opening the man page of wathever piece of software terminated with that exit code.

Depends really. If it's some kind of runtime or VM you pretty much have zero idea what the exit code was. Python, CLR, JVM tend to leave you in this mire.

Yes, but remember that usually nowadays a piece of software also logs something to stderr instead of relying just on exit codes to signal error.

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a fresh install of windows 11 yesterday and winget doesn’t work. Seriously. I haven’t even installed any software yet.

You have to wait for all the back-end updates to finish. Install all the Windows Updates, then open Microsoft Store and go to the Library and wait for it to update even more shit, then you finally will have Terminal and WinGet. Yeah, I found that one out the annoying way too.

Maybe I was experiencing something else on top of that because I was getting exception codes at first. But then once I started getting "source errors" I decided to check the store and such and that's when things started working more normally.

What's surprising though is that it listed the msstore source as operating normally when I did winget source update. Regardless, kind of crappy this doesn't work out of the box and I have wave dead things not mentioned in any instructions to get this dumb thing working.

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