261–270 of 645 posts
> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. This attitude is obnoxious. Yes, not everybody is on a metered connection or running a mission-critical system, but some are, and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.
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This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…
I understand that Microsoft see the large number of vulnerable machines on the internet as a problem thay they are responsible for and the forced update as a necessary solution. Nevertheless, I dual-boot my laptop and use Windows almost only for presentations. Whenever connections to external devices and other OS shenanigans force me to reboot my machine when I'm in the speaker position and the dreaded forced update…
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This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…
> especially now that everybody's jumping on the Agile bandwagon, including Windows. There needs to be a way to ensure new versions reach their users given everyone's just churning out barely working software these days. The fact that everyone is on the agile bandwagon churning out barely working software is the main reason why people do not want new versions of software magically appearing on their computers. Once y…
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I'm still on 18.04, but I agree. Discord and VSCode keep occasionally prompting me to manually download and install .deb files. I'd really prefer if they just updated automatically. Discord gives a full page "download this update to keep doing things" message that interrupts everything. (i think only on larger updates? i havent seen it in a while) A quick google is telling me that both have snap packages - I guess I'…
> Discord and VSCode keep occasionally prompting me to manually download and install .deb files. I'd really prefer if they just updated automatically I installed VSCode from the .deb package on the VSCode website and it automatically added the update repository so that it auto updates via apt. "Installing the .deb package will automatically install the apt repository and signing key to enable auto-updating using the…
> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. This attitude is obnoxious. Yes, not everybody is on a metered connection or running a mission-critical system, but some are, and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.
This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…
I think this is a misconception.
A few weeks ago I was updating my Windows 7 install that hadn't booted for a year or so. I opened Windows Update. It looked for updates, and found some. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot. After the reboot it needed to do something for another 5 minutes. The last 2 of those minutes it showed 100% progress, seemingly stuck again. Then when that was done, it rebooted again.
I started Windows Update again. It looked for updates. There were more updates. I clicked the update button. It proceeded to start downloading, by which I mean it would hang for 1 to 2 minutes and then download very quickly.
When it was done updating, it required a reboot... and so on, and so on, 5 or so times. Every iteration took somewhere between 10 and 45 minutes. Determining how long an iteration would take was impossible, because everything appeared to just get stuck all the time. This has been the Windows update experience through XP, Vista, 7, 8 and now 10.
The result of this madness is of course that nobody updates Windows. To solve that, you can go two different ways: Make updates painless, or force everyone to go through the pain again, and again, and again. Microsoft being Microsoft, they picked the latter.
Meanwhile, on a typical Linux system, I just decide to update every once in a while. I make it look for updates, get a list of everything that will get updated, and accept. It starts downloading, by which I mean it immediately downloads everything very quickly.
When it is done updating, it may require a reboot if the kernel got updated. After the reboot it doesn't have to do anything.
I make it look for updates, and there are none. Updating my system actually brought it up-to-date. This generally takes 2 to 15 minutes, almost entirely dependent on the amount of data that needs to be downloaded.
The result of this is that I update my Linux systems very often. It's painless, so why not?
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This is a hard problem. And Microsoft didn't have a choice. Given an option regular users will never update their computers, perhaps partly due to fear of what they don't understand, fear of change, or maybe due to past bad update experiences. I witness this in my mom with technology all the time. Every time there's a popup she mini-panics, and she has trained herself to click close every time she sees something she…
> Honestly I don't have a problem with that. But if they don't give power user the option to opt out, this is just disrespectful The problem is that "power users" can't be trusted to use this power responsibly, or they operate based on assumptions that won't always be true. Either way they end up hurting other people in enough situations that this becomes an ecosystem issue. Power users often help others set up their…
Of course, since it’s my hardware I just uninstalled Ubuntu and went with something that gave me more control.
> Auto-updating of snaps can only be deferred at best, until at some point, like Windows, it auto-updates anyway. Even on metered connections, snaps auto-update anyway after some time. This attitude is obnoxious. Yes, not everybody is on a metered connection or running a mission-critical system, but some are, and it is hardly unreasonable to accommodate them.
I guess it's finally time to switch to Arch. This is an absolute deal breaker for me as well, as I use an ubuntu system for live visual performances, and I need to ensure that no unexpected auto-updates take place.
Arch with its rolling release model is prone to breakage. Every upgrade gets you closer to having to reinstall everything from scratch. On contrast, NixOS is transactional and if something breaks you can switch to a previous version easily.
(I actually went from Arch to NixOS, after using Arch for about 3 years).
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Are linux users regular users?
Some of them, very much. Go have a look in academia where there are hordes of tech-illiterates working on linux just because of reasons like some obscure piece of software working only properly on linux, because the postdoc did it that way, because it's cheaper, because they think it has to be done like that, ... Last lab I was in it was just painful to see how much time was completely lost on trying to get things wo…