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Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

blogs.windows.com

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

#51
> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates

I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?

The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.

edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates

Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better

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

#52
post #31
post #10

It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day an…

> obvious alternatives First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows. Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in…

> hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one

Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.

Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.

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

#53

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is. Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user bas…

Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.

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

#54
> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.

This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.

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

#55
post #21

It's fascinating that one of the top features insiders are interested in is making File Explorer more dependable.

They took a real punch to the gut when File Pilot rolled out and showed them what their own devs should have been doing.

Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!

Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.

It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)

The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.

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

#56
This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:

>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.

Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?

>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.

We've reduced AI by renaming the button?

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

#57
post #45
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> obvious alternatives First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows. Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in…

> Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI > Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. Would you or someone else here mind explaining this?

ACPI defines power state of power-saving capable offbrand fake IBM computers(among other things, and also the "fake IBM" part is almost completely moot at this point).

ACPI power state S0 is everything running. S1 pauses CPU and CPU I/O bus. S2 puts CPU to reset. S3 cuts power to CPU. S4 cuts off everything(not actual power off). S5 cuts off everything(actual power off).

S3 and S4 are often referred to as Sleep and Hibernation. In Sleep, RAM contents are kept as-is, and sleep handling code just restore CPU internal states that gets lost. In Hibernation, OS usually dump RAM contents to disk, and write back to RAM upon bootup - S4 and S5 aren't always clearly separated and both Windows and Linux tend to go through standard boot processes, then do the state resume using RAM dump they find on disk.

For SOME reason, Microsoft forced laptop vendors to quit supporting S3 in favor of their custom "S0iX" state, which is more or less just machine running at full power, which can be extremely wasteful as far as sleep state goes.

The official explanation for this pressuring is that everybody want notification and this is the only way Windows could possibly handle notifications. A lot are skeptical about that.

1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...

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

#58

I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.

I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this.

Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.

I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).

Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.

The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).

Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.

To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.

The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.

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

#59
post #30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint…

What was slow? I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth. One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy. But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow". Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Cl…

>What was slow?

Everything, huge input delay in every interaction, clicking on anything, opening menus, typing, tabbing between windows, everything had 1-2s of delay.

>disable variable refresh rate

I think I tried this but dont recall, there were a few things related to monitor refresh I tried that probably included this

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