> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not.
Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).
Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.
> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:
> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows
> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard
> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]
> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same
> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing
> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection
There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.
That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.
They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:
- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)
- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"
- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"
- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback
- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so
- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release
- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"
- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker
And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.
This is like, the least bad thing GNOME have ever done. Middle-click pasting makes no logical sense and only exists as a holdover from before copy-paste conventions were established. Nobody would design it this way today.
I would say the issue itself is almost irrelevant... I think it's mainly your dogmatism. Speaking in absolutes as if you always know everything, that there can seemingly only be one right answer and there can be no other valid perspectives or opinions. To me it just screams low emotional intelligence and a lack of critical thinking, humility and empathy.
Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
Because all of Microsoft's people secretly use linux on thier machines.
(No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
When one of the senior executives from Bing Search visited my university for a talk, they personally told the director of the computer science department that they envied the fact that the director could use a 27-inch iMac at work, whereas they could only use one at home.
The head of bing search is not ever going to be in position to issue an emergency patch for windows. They are far more likely to cause such a situation than resolve one.
They’re at the last step of their enshittification process, where the focus is to extract money from everyone, not to ship a good product or fix things.
Pulling the power cord on a laptop won't shut it down, it will just start using the battery.
Some desktop PCs have a physical power switch on the power supply, usually next to where the power cord plugs in. But it is becoming more rare. Every $0.50 they can save in costs is added to the bottom line.
Maybe EU requires it? Most (all?) newer Dell desktops here have only the "soft" pushbutton power switch on the front of the case. Of course you can just pull out the power cord itself.
I understand the sarcasm but copy pasting a bash or powershell command is faster and less error prone than following the instructions to open menus, dialogs, tabs and clicking buttons, especially in deeply nested UIs.
I think you are being premature, I'll wait until HN updates the site and someone posts their counter point in dance notation before deciding which medium supports actions that are easiest to communicate about.
I don't see how a command line tool with 10 different flags is necessarily less "error prone" than UI. In fact, I have used many tools where a flag is confusing or has conflicts with another flag in an unexpected way, not to mention subtle issues like escaping.
I once had to pass along to the support team a command for one of our customers to run. It ultimately didn't work because someone along the chain A) autocorrected the spelling of the command name, B) converted the quotation marks to fancy “”, and C) converted the hyphen into some fancy dash.
It is easier to copy/paste. If the GUI has more than one step people might be confused. Also some GUIs are hard to see or read for people with vision handicaps.
>the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue
This always annoys me because you're really handicapping yourself by ignoring the CLI on any OS. Sure I use it more heavily on GNU/Linux than I did on Windows as a kid, but that's because it's so good. If I'm ever in front of a Windows machine now I still like to have a terminal handy (and it's even better/more-familiar on macOS, of course), and I've learned things like "type is like cat", "robocopy is like rsync", "tasklist is kinda like ps and taskkill like kill/pkill" which help me to do things better on Windows than when I used it fulltime. I'm glad Microsoft invested more in the CLI with Windows Terminal, OpenSSH in the default install, winget, PowerShell, etc. I think it's better for everyone. I fear the CLI hate is spreading anti-intellectualism. Some people seem annoyed when they even have to use their keyboard instead of their mouse for something.
GUIs are great for when you're new to a bit of software as you can see the various options and get a feel for the possibilities. CLIs are nearly always more flexible once you've read the man page, but is a steeper learning path.
Automation/scripting is when CLIs really come into their own as otherwise you end up becoming a GUI click monkey. The best is when there's both a GUI and CLI (as long as they work the same way).
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
I often get my way through unknown CLI commands by just typing TAB and selecting the option that sounds like what I want. Works, most of the time, I don't think that is really an issue. For most CLI programs you also have a reference/cheat sheet, examples and an interactive hypertext systems of tutorials available.
Many GUI designers these days don't like discoverability and don't think it's important. They prefer to hide everything behind "gestures" that you just have to know somehow.
Along with the "-h,--help" options, an option to show common usage examples would be useful. I find it much easier to learn from an example as you can modify and build upon it. Otherwise, it's a case of skimming through the man page and then switching back and forth between the man page and the command that I'm writing. (This is most common with tools that I don't use all the time, yet have expert features such as "ffmpeg")
> an option to show common usage examples would be useful.
That's what the man page is supposed to be (and most do contain example) and why GNU wanted to split it into info (tutorials and exhausting documentation) and man (reference and examples).
Why do you serialize and then deserialize the list of files? Even if you do disable the splitting on reparsing the list, why don't you just do this:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec some command {} ';'
That sounds just unnecessary and bug prune. Unless you target some odd platform where find doesn't support '-exec', but it is even in POSIX. I think due to your use of process substitution, your code has a higher chance of being unportable, so why do you want to complicate your code?
Stuff like that is why I personally prefer the man pages to random websites.
Honestly for something as complex as a shell (which describes both a language, an editor, and an implementation) the man page is surprisingly short. (6418 lines for me) I have just found the section on process substitution in <1min, without even using the search, just by reading. I looked it up, because I didn't knew the name of that syntax, so I needed to actually look for what I wanted and I do not use the man page of bash often.
It's to deal with problematic filenames (e.g. containing a newline) and enables setting of variables within the current process. Putting multiple commands into the "-exec" of find is possible, but looks horrible. To be fair, my example didn't use multiple commands, so your version is okay for simple processing.
Don't get me wrong, the BASH man page is great, it's just that I prefer to work with examples.
Yep, you can chain multiple commands with find's "-exec", but I'm not a fan of it myself. I suspect setting variables in the current process is trickier though.
(Very minor nitpick, it should be 'a\nb.mp3' to be included, but that does work fine)
Incidentally, ShellCheck isn't happy with that although I don't follow their reasoning:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' -exec bash -c "
^-- SC2156 (warning): Injecting filenames is fragile and insecure. Use parameters.
I see, but now you are essentially operating on multiple files, at once, so the serialization makes some sense. Although for just this, I wouldn't write the operation in bash at all:
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' | wc -l
Honestly I don't really view the shell / filesystem interface as a security boundary. I use the shell mainly for (automation of) interactive use, so any screwup due to e.g. quoting issues is my own fault, maybe even of using stupid filenames. Shell is a great language to connect streams of different programs into each other, not so much for doing any work. If I do that, I would reach for C.
The serialisation is just to work around the fact that filenames can have any character except for \0 which is why the "-print0" is used. It doesn't by itself allow for concurrent processing.
You're right about just using "wc -l", but I was just trying to demonstrate how you can set variables. A real use would be doing more than just counting files as your example would likely be quicker (assuming that calling an external programme is quicker than running a naive loop in BASH).
I am guilty of using BASH for stuff that most people would use a different language for - I just find that for system admin work that BASH is just at the right level of abstraction for me and is ubiquitous.
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem. In reality, CLIs are inconsistent and basically function as robotic interfaces, a lot of them not that far of programming.
> If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem.
On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?
Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, it would kiss your ass while it hallucinates about the files on your hard drives, invent command line switches that either don't do anything or does something other than what you want, and every command that used to take just 5-10 characters would now require you to type paragraphs. No thank you.
Can this be pasted into Win+R? That might give a novice user more confidence; pasting a short command that literally says "shutdown" into a small, easily identified text dialog box seems clear enough.
Small added benefit, presumably it's harder to accidentally run a multi-line multi-stage command because you had the wrong thing in your clipboard (I don't have my windows PC handy, but if you paste multiple lines into Win+R it doesn't execute anything, correct?)
Yes. This is how I've been shutting down windows PCs for decades, as I don't want to use a mouse and start menu positioning varies:
Windows + R
(type) shutdown /s /t 0
Enter
The /t is a time flag and you can abort scheduled shutdowns with the /a flag. Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave - just set a timer for 1800 seconds and Kazaa will be done with its download ;).
> Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave
That might maybe work most times, but when your network speed suddenly changes or the downloads is aborted it fails. Far better is just telling your computer that you want it to shutdown after the download finished:
wget ... && shutdown now
Should also work on MS Windows, IE used to be able to be told to exit once the download finishes, not sure how the situation looks like now.
Agreed, but I've found Windows to be relatively finicky with the shutdown command, with some OS versions being fine with that and some not. Additionally, on Windows often the action needed is a GUI program with no simple way to post-hook or provide an output a CLI can easily ready.
As such I usually set my timer 3x what it needs to be (e.g 1800 for a 10 minute) and it's always had a high chance of working.
This is not new. Operating a windows machine has always included a bunch of magical commands. It's just that it has usually been in the registery. The cmd and powershell stuff is kind of a new direction.
Regarding Linux, I dont think most people need command line for normal work. Obviously the guy that runs an obscure dist in RAID-6 on his toaster would be different, but for most normal people just install Ubuntu and use it.
I think this is an exception that proves the rule.
The average Windows user literally has no concept of a terminal. The average Linux user does indeed have to copy and paste terminal commands off the internet to fix issues or do seemingly ordinary customization frequently.
Except its not a hard power off, it only tells windows to shut down... I've seen instances of windows hanging on both startup and shutdown, leaving me no other option but to hard power off the machine (because nobody uses a reset button anymore).
The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.
As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.
What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does
And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
It looks a lot like the recent record-breaking enshittification of Windows may be a subtle ploy to deprecate it and shift everything over to Linux.
Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, macs are certainly the computer for people who like to pretend to be smart for tv... but seeing where the economy is going, nobody is going to be able to afford Apple hardware, let alone the software...
We're talking about Adobe and other paid software, which is generally for professionals. They make back more than the entire cost of the software and the computer by doing a job for just one client.
And Apple computers are incredibly affordable, rumored to get a budget laptop which will be even cheaper. Computers in general are dirt cheap, including Apple. And paid software is not expensive on Apple either. There are tons of quality pro software for $50 - $100 per license. And affordable subscription models of pro creative software for those who are just getting started.
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.
If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.
Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.
> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.
I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.
>Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.
That isn't how you compare things. Server is separate from "Cloud" which is separate from Office 365 which is separate from Windows.
And Windows still makes them ~$28 billion a year, Azure makes then 3x that, but $28 billion is nothing to take for granted. It wouldn't matter if Azure made $150 billion/year, it doesn't make $28 billion look like pocket change.
I compared once segment of the business to others. Several other websites had various estimates on what percentage of the business Windows took up. Most of them said 6-10%, so I took 10%. Other websites group server and cloud, A rough guesstimate for a comment on a discussion thread is good enough. I was't aware I would need to go through the 10Q filings to satisfy you.
The point being communicated (even with your ridiculous nitpicks about the stats) is that Windows isn't a cash cow it once was. Microsoft Strategy is not Windows focused like it was under Ballmer.
In the 1990s Windows brought in $1.2 billion. In the 2010s, it brought in about $14 billion. In 2022 it was $24.8 billion, and in 2024, it was $29.1 billion.
So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
Windows definitely is still very much a "cash cow" for Microsoft. And they can have more than one "cash cow", they can have as many as they want and it wouldn't make Windows any less of a "cash cow".
No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery.
> So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
What don't you understand about being a smaller percentage of their business as a whole?
My entire point that it has gone from the basically a 30% (~2010) of the revenue to less than 10%. Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Saying they make more money with that now, when the growth compared to other parts of the business is low is missing the point.
>"No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery."
I'm not the one who first used the term "cash cow" here. It apparently doesn't mean what you think it means.
If you look up the definition, you will find this:
"a business, investment, or product that provides a steady income or profit."
Windows definitely falls under that definition. This isn't "semantic wankery". Next time you want to use a colloquialism, make sure you look it up first.
>Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market. MacOS will never achieve anything close to Windows, never has, never will. Windows is Microsoft's bottom bitch, it's not going to be forgotten as you think it will.
Yeah it is. I never said it wasn't a cash cow. I said "it wasn't the cash cow it once was". I obviously meant relatively compared to other parts of Microsoft's business.
Considering you keep omitting that from what I said, I can only assume you are continuing to engage in bad faith.
> Next time you want to use a colloquialism, make sure you look it up first.
I understand what it means fine. I did use it correctly.
> Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market.
On on laptops and desktops. The vast majority of people at home are using phones and tablets (outside of work usage). In that space Android dominates, then iOS and have done so for about a decade now.
> Feel free to quit this conversation at any time.
And that is wrong. It's even better than the "cash cow" it used to be, I provided some values of what Windows brings in over the years, and it has grown and grown. You ignored that.
>I understand what it means fine. I did use it correctly.
> And that is wrong. It's even better than the "cash cow" it used to be, I provided some values of what Windows brings in over the years, and it has grown and grown. You ignored that.
No and I've never ignored it. As the revenue percentage decreases because it is growing slow. It will become less important.
Relatively it isn't as much of a cash cow, which I explained ad-nauseam to you.
> You seriously do not.
It is correct enough for all intents and purposes. You are quibbling over semantics. It is totally unnecessary and pedantic.
> You are reported.
I don't care. If you make arrogant little statements like that, expect that response.
I agree with you to some extent, but if Microsoft loses Windows here permanently then its desktop-centric control will also come to an end. So it would lose tons of opportunities here. I don't see Microsoft wanting to go that route really. It would basically commit suicide.
Microsoft isn’t going to declare death of the PC and pivot to “cloud computers”/virtual desktops (again) just because of temporary RAM/SSD supply shortages lol
> And Amazon CEO just said it out loud about cloud computers.
And Google said Stadia would have “negative latency”
They don't need it if everything is in the cloud running oh their servers. They won't care if you are running Windows, Linux, Chrome, A tablet with a keyboard and mouse hooked up.
The vast majority of people that don't work in IT don't ever use a laptop or a desktop computer unless it is for work. They are using a phone and/or tablet.
It's already become a veritable Times Square of advertising. We have a windows PC in the office to play DDR, and the "Live Home Screen" or whatever used to be the Desktop looks like MSN! Live or the Yahoo Homepage.
Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.
Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
It's circular logic. The market is "AI everything" because they (and Google, OpenAI, and Facebook) are shoving it down people's throats so they can desperately try to recoup their investment in GPUs.
Because there being a stable desktop OS brings indirect profits and enables efforts like AI to work. AI isn't going to help you if you no longer have a computer to run it on.
This is my general concern with the decline of tech quality. It’s one thing if it’s just consumer products, but it’s now affecting actual tools people including us use to do their jobs.
Yeah. It's really important that you have a platform with your users, because that's how you introduce them to features (not always a bad thing). It becomes a touch point with your customers. Google and Apple have their phones, Meta is desperately trying to get their smart glasses working, Amazon is also desperately trying to get something together with Alexa, and Microsoft is... Throwing theirs away?
Oh I dunno. Maybe people should give a fuck about something other than making nothing but maximum profit. It's the core problem with our whole culture. Fuck you, make money. It's unethical trash.
> Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line?
Their entire ecosystem is built on top of Windows. It will only "not affect the bottom line" until it becomes bad enough that people has to abandon it with all the other MS products that depend on it.
Also, no LLM product is profitable right now. "The market is AI-everything" is complete and absolute bullshit.
It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.
Windows doesn't need QA. Why would it? The entire purpose of QA is to make sure your product has acceptable quality, so that you don't annoy customers and drive them to the competition. This isn't a problem for Microsoft: almost no one is going to stop using Windows, no matter how bad it gets. So why spend money on QA?
It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk
And hence under no circumstances one should ship a code that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do in the first place, we know the cloud doesn’t use it much, but c’mon it’s a critical part of the system.
That still does stuff like unmounting filesystems (which can take a minute with snap, if they haven't fixed it), you can go further with the (rather unsafe) SysRq key "o", which tells the kernel to shut down without any preparation.
I've had the opposite problem with laptops. There's like 3 different menus to configure sleep-on-idle but none of them actually let you disable it even if they claim they do.
They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority.
Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
My biggest fear when getting a new laptop is that I won't figure out the BIOS fast enough to get it to recognize the usb drive I have plugged in and it might actually boot to windows. Now I will be extra freaked out because it might not even let me turn it off to try again!
I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
This was a constant problem with late Intel Macs where I was working at the time, to the point that people started explicitly using shut down enough to the point that security complained it was slowing down their patch rollouts.
Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
> Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
How did this part go down? I'm just curious because it reeks of entitlement and security theatre on their part.
It reminds me of an incident I had once at an old job, surprise surprise security related, where a moronic decision had been made by the combined DevOps and security team (putting aside how a separate DevOps team is a bad idea).
They had decided to use some "dependency security scanner" and if it found ANY, it would immediately disable the CI/CD build pipeline for that repository.
1) This could happen at any point within minutes/hours of some CVE being published. It would frequently block deployments.
2) It could not/would not take into account developer tooling vulnerabilities. Oh, your CSS library has a string DDOS vulnerability, where if someone makes a ginormous CSS file, the library will crash?
3) The CSS library does not reach a users machine, and is run once, at build time. Either it passes and deploys, or it fails and does not deploy. Therefore, it was probably not even justifiably a CVE to begin with, but more importantly, we now cannot deploy. https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1622xia/cve2...
4) The build pipeline would be disabled for ANY type of vulnerability regardless of impact. Even low ratings.
5) Because this security ~~scam~~software did not care about nuance like that, we could not even deploy hotfixes, critical production fixes, bug fixes, or anything.
6) Because it would disable the pipeline within minutes of a CVE, there was never a fix or a newer version to upgrade a dependency to. We had to wait days or sometimes weeks for a new version to be released.
This lasted a couple of months before they were forced to remove all this crap.
I won’t make the claim that it can’t be set up and configured in a way that’s useful, but I will make the claim that I’ve never run into an instance where it was and have wasted more time than I want to remember dealing with similar issues to what you described
Honestly the truth is it ended pretty inconclusively with security saying “well you should let it sleep so it can update” and me saying I wasn’t going to because of the sleep issues and we both kind of left it
Do you have more info on this? It’s not at all the behavior I observe. After I shut down windows, which I do basically every time I use it since I usually use Linux on that machine, it is completely off. Turning the pc on boots Linux (it’s first in the boot order).
It has modern standby and most of its other defaults, which I know because if it goes to sleep it doesn’t: the fan stays on and it never gets cold to the touch despite the blinking power led. The other day it randomly installed the windows update and rebooted because I found it waiting for the LUKS pin.
This once really scared me once on a dual boot system. I had “shut down” windows and while using Linux I did some partitioning as I had run out of space on the efi partition which had originally been created by the windows 7 installer. Worked fine for a while until the next time I “booted” windows which appeared to load the partition layout from the hibernated memory which caused a bunch of data corruption
> "Note: In Windows, fast startup is the default transition when a system shutdown is requested. A full shutdown (S5) occurs when a system restart is requested or when an application calls a shutdown API."
Technically it's entering a "hybrid" S4 Hibernation with S0 Standby after all users have been logged out. To bypass it you need to press Shift while clicking Shutdown, running the `shutdown /s /t 0` command, or else disabling Fast Startup. You can tell that you didn't do a true S5 shutdown because the system's uptime will not reset.
But disabling Modern Standby in your BIOS will also disable it because Window's power management logic is set during installation. With modern standby enabled, Windows tries to be always on and always connected. When you disable modern standby, Windows doesn't entirely change it's logic so much as it notices it can't send the same power state commands, so it reverts to S5 Shutdown.
I chose to disable it in BIOS because Microsoft can't really turn it back on when I do it that way. Because the thing is... I disabled Fast Startup after the second time it happened. But some Microsoft updates re-enable Fast Startup, and it's not hard to find forum posts complaining about that.
My work laptop -- a ThinkPad issued 3 years ago -- has seen multiple blue screens with modern standby. (It is almost always plugged in.). So IT disabled it, and now my machine always hibernates, which means that it usually takes 2 minutes to boot.
Yeah, I got them mixed up. Actually I mixed up S3 and S4, too. I just hit the wrong key.
Microsoft's Fast Startup is also known as Hybrid Shutdown. When Modern Standby is enabled, a system shutdown will log the user off, then use a combination of S4 Hibernation and S0 Standby.
"suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times.
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess.
(Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
This happens regularly for me too, and Luke Lafreniere (from Linus Media Group) reported this too during WAN Show. He said that he sometimes has to hit sleep 3–4 times before his PC actually stays in sleep mode.
Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Microsoft really wants people to use other operating systems. This is quite amazing.
It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.
it was many patches ago when I refused to even start my PC after Microsoft's patches (when they made it so you couldn't reject their telemetry), at least not till I had linux installed (which I had anyhow been running all along via Xwindows, before the Microsoft-mind-virus-infected systemd, wayland, and btrfs crowds decided to ruin linux too.)
well, "linux is just the kernel" eyeroll.emoji so no, you don't, but it's easiest to use a distro, and among distros it's easiest not to use an obscure distro so you can use the package managers to install a variety of apps and tools, but the longterm mainstream distros seem to all be infected, even devuan which is barely mainstream. most "alternate" distros seem to be dedicated to even goofier ideas than the old school that i prefer.
i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.
I know that error since, dunno, i guess: 1995. No other OS has this unprofessional and annoying bug. And no other OS vendor managed it to drag a bug like this for 30 years. None that i know of.
Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.
Some 20 years ago they had patches for a buffer overflow vulnerability. The first patch made the buffer one byte longer. The next round of patches addressed a supposedly new vulnerability and the same buffer got another byte longer...
They already have the ability to unilaterally force any software onto any machine at literally any time. They do not need an excuse or a clever scheme to achieve more updates. We are a long way past that.
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.
Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?
My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.
Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.
I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.
Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.
AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.
How does remote RDP/VNC kill AD and Group Policy? You still need AD to provide centralized authentication/authorization. And you still need Group Policy to configure the VMs according to the corporate standards - disk images may work for the initial rollout but not for applying future changes.
That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.
The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.
You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.
Network boundaries are insufficient. A file share might need to be read-write for some users and read-only for others. Database access is even more granular.
Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
What do you see instead? Aside from a smaller startup that used google-everything every enterprise I've worked with uses MS Office extensively, with a big push to the subscription web version from local installs.
Across the 6 companies in the tech space I've worked in over the years (ranging from 500 - 200,000 employees with the median being 10,000) have been GSuite/Google Docs for their word processing need but with various wiki software (most notably confluence) overlapping quite heavily too.
Yes, but tech is special. And even in tech I presume you're only talking about computer tech, or even more specifically software tech? There's the entire rest of the business world which uses Word because what else would they use? Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft [sic]. Every single OEM computer aimed at businesses is likely to have Office preinstalled, except these days it's the 365 version.
I am encountering it almost not at all. I work in a org that basically doesn't know that Linux exist and outside of top management nobody uses Word. Excel is still massively useful.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
Why not? If it is a small shop, Word has all the features both simple and intermediate ones (like putting shadows on images or removing background). So a 2-5 person businesses can handle their digital needs at very low cost.
The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!
People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.
And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.
Why on earth would you not just send a PDF? LibreOffice even has a handy button just for exporting directly to PDF. Does your customer need to edit your work summary for some odd reason?
I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.
.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux.
Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home.
As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked.
Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.
Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
You might have to give up the applications you are used to, and switch to new ones. This might be easy, or it might be impossible. If all you use is the browser, easy.
I have switched from Windows completely to Linux more than 20 years ago, after a few years of dual-booting.
The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.
I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.
For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.
As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
XFCE is actually a great example of the problem with Linux
It's wayland support is utterly broken right now and getting very little attention. The major distros are about to put X11 in the grave and then XFCE will die (or more likely it'll live on in some weird offshoot distro).
That's not really an acceptable situation for a consumer product.
now obviously xfce is not one of the main DEs pushed by the distros, but it's plight is a symptom of a couple of problems that plague linux
Compatibility is important. MSFT, for all their faults, puts a shitload of effort into making sure that even old ass software keeps working. They're not perfect (especially in the last few years) but they're miles ahead of linux here. As a user, I shouldn't ever have to know or care about wayland or pipewire or whatever other nonsense, but that's not the case. I have to know just so I can find software that works with my system.
X11 is not gone yet, XFCE is working on wayland support, and in addition to that, there are projects that work on allowing X11 window managers to run on wayland.
XFCE just has not updated.
If this is a "linux problem", then what about android and ios? its a million times worse, but somehow thats a perfectly good situation for a consumer product?
there isnt? then how come theres several apps I want to install on android 15 that isnt compatible with newer android because google removed/changed APIs?
you may just not have seen them, because other people work around them.
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
Use Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS , do not upgrade every 6 m0onths to get the latest bugs from upstream just because they GNOME/KDE made some small improvements for some feature you probably do not use. There are PPAs with latest kernels and NVIDIA driver if you really need to upgrade for your work or gaming. This shit on upgrade happens on cool distros too, just Google Arch broke on update and you will see that there were cases where the efi partition was deleted and the user data was lost or some font customization a dude done to GNOME broke the login after an update.
If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
TBH some gaming bound distros enable RT based optizations for gaming not seen in any OS. Also, with Flatpak, there's no excuses, you will get the same software everywhere.
(My current gripe is with KDE on Wayland - i decided to move from Gnome on X11 for $reasons and it's so hard to get a thing as simple as clipboard, multiple monitors to work consistently. Apparently devs have very strong opinions on workflows...)
I mainly use various Linux distributions since 90s, also while working in systems administration for most of that time, but to say that "all Linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software" and suggest that's all is a vast...... understatement to say the least.
Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.
It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.
Then yeah.
Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)
I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)
The combination of
- a programmer's text editor
- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)
- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files
- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)
- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)
...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.
So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
OK; you got me. I was insufficiently prepared for pedantry. Let's add another couple of critical points:
- Must be a GUI application.
- Must integrate at least somewhat reasonably with the platform's keyboard shortcuts and similar, not have its own entire way of doing things that needs 6 years to learn.
Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.
BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.
You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.
I've used both emacs and vim before. Long enough to actually know how.
I don't like using them. (I know, this may come as a shock to a diehard advocate.)
I like GUI text editors much better.
But also: How do vim and emacs do with these points from my requirements?
> - that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
> - that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
To the best of my recollection, they don't do either of those. Which, if true, means that even your initial "genuine" response not actually in good faith, because I did say I wanted one that did all of those.
...So maybe keep your snide remarks and scare-quotes to yourself?
I don't want to be little your experience, but your self professed difficulties are not universal. Especially calling Linux hostile to users (as opposed to friendly Windows??) just seems like you don't like pepperoni pizza so you're going to tell us how horrible pepperoni pizza is for everyone.
> given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
> "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
You really haven't given desktop linux a chance in the last two to four years have you? I will agree its not "ergonomic" enough _yet_ for many casual and intermediary users but I assure you a competent intermediary user or advanced user can do all those tasks without much fuss nowadays. I've been using desktop linux for almost 20 years now and its so much easier nowadays to throw random programs (flatpaks, snaps, appimages, distroboxes and whatnot helps a ton) and have them work correctly, build up a generalist linux workstation that does just about anything you want.
> Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I wish this could be communicated more clearly to prospective desktop linux users but usually what you want is to be using the bleeding edge. Arch is too bloody and complicated for most users, Fedora strikes a nice balance but will leave you with some cuts and Ubuntu is usually the safest choice, but can be a bit stale.
> Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Try a gnome based distro (without all the prejudice like "eww it looks like a tablet ui") and tell me if it isn't a damn good, modern and intuitive UI. It has it's faults and own goals I wished the knucklehead gnome devs would fix but its a far cry from anemic linux desktop environments of yore.
As far as linux supporting everything under the sun... I just don't think thats a prerequesite for it to be a good windows alternative and amass a critical mass of users. Maybe once it has 20% market share being everything to everyone will be a goal but for now the best you can do is give it an honest try every few years and see for yourself if it's good enough for your use case. See if existing FOSS software is adequate for your needs or weather it's possible or you are willing to run some of the niche windows apps in wine.
There is no chance of linux becoming more popular if even the crowd here at hacker news isn't willing to give it chance once in a while.
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb?
Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.
I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
Haha I have never used the start menu to shutdown windows I mean it hasn’t been for 20 plus years; I have it engraved into my head for so long to use the shutdown /f /t 0 /s has what a price of shit os.
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
It affects Win11 23H2. Support for Home and Pro for 23H2 ended in November. Almost everyone should be on 24H2 or 25H2 except the dedicated longer support term editions.
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)
> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not.
Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly increasing frequency.
It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
Now that GNOME wants to abandon it.
GNOME devs really are special. I wonder why.
It is not just GNOME devs. Try to interact with systemd-poettering or I-pwn-glibc-Drepper. For some reason the Red Hat centric guys are troublemakers.
More recently KDE devs also became troublemakers - first David "all must use systemd", then nate "I-can-ask-for-donations-at-will-by-placing-a-trojan-daemon-onto-people-whose-sole-job-is-to-ask-for-donations" (more about this guy here: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde...) and of course the "there are no xorg-server users left on KDE, so all must use wayland". Developers became a LOT more like dictators in the last 10 years specifically. This was a change indeed. I am not sure what happened, but things changed. GTK is now also a pure GNOMEY dev-kit. Good luck trying to convince the GTK devs of anything that used to be possible in gtk2 or gtk3 - it is now GNOME only.
I'm pretty scared what userland piece of software will be re-written while ditching backwards compatibility and making the current body of support knowledge worthless. After all, we've replaced the display server (sort of), audio, init and service management, network commands (netplan) if not much more.
My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust. Oh, your printer that worked for 20 years is now a useless brick? What a shame, at least now the printing subsystem is secure and blazing fast.
Not even Rust zealots want to touch printing ;)
Well, as Apple has basically abandoned CUPS, and not everyone uses the OpenPrinting fork, things in that space are getting "fun".
Please, printers have never worked, it's a side effect when they do.
> My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust.
Please, don't give them any ideas.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio... for the sake of completeness here's Nate Graham version of events.
*turn it from default-on to default-off
It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.
I once watched a co-worker completely bork a customer system by accidentally middle-clicking while moving his mouse after copying an ls -l of /usr/bin (where pretty much everything was a symlink to the real executables in /bin).
Yeah, he shouldn't have been logged in as root, but the point remains that middle-mouse paste can be extremely dangerous and fat-finger-prone.
I love Linux, but the cut and paste situation is really terrible. The middle mouse paste isn't a problem for me--it's that there are two separate "clipboard" buffers, which just causes all sorts of problems.
Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I intentionally use.
Yup, both have their uses. If you use a clipboard manager or have the clipboard synchronized between devices/remote desktops/VMs, the primary selection comes in handy for stuff you don't exactly want saved to disk, crossing VM boundaries, or transmitted over the network. I use middle-click pasting primarily for its separate buffer.
You and I both.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Except it's not a bug that found use. It's intentional behavior. From https://specifications.freedesktop.org/clipboard/latest/:
> The rationale for this behavior is mostly that [having a unified clipboard] has a lot of problems, namely:
> - inconsistent with Mac/Windows
> - confusingly, selecting anything overwrites the clipboard
> - not efficient with a tool such as xclipboard [(tool that maintains a history of specifically CLIPBOARD; it would be messy to keep a history of all selections)]
> - you should be able to select text, then paste the clipboard over it, but that doesn’t work if the selection and clipboard are the same
> - the Copy menu item is useless and does nothing, which is confusing
> - if you think of PRIMARY as the current selection, Cut doesn’t make any sense since the selection simultaneously disappears and becomes the current selection
The selection buffer is easier to understand if thought about more simply. Middle click to “put my selection here”.
The actual clipboard is a separate feature in my mind.
You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping them separate very convenient.
There are a number of DE-independent clipboard managers that can do that as well as other features, like keeping a clipboard history so you can copy in series then paste in series, or having keyboard shortcuts transform the clipboard contents by way of a command, so you can e.g. copy some multi-line text then paste it as a single line joined by spaces.
I use "autocutsel" to synchronize the cut buffer and clipboard in X. Not sure what Wayland might need to do this or if it even has a similar concept.
I love select to copy and middle-click to paste.
https://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/
That problem has been solved by terminals whose readline awaits actual user input (actual enter from the keyboard) even when you paste a command with single line break or a multiline command. Most linux terminals do that nowadays, and it's also great for giving you a chance to review that oneliner you've copied from the browser, which could contain something different than what was shown.
It’s a right pain reverting that on modern desktops.
Shift+Insert has always been my preferred method of pasting into a terminal after too many mishaps with right-click or middle-click paste.
> GNOME dictates onto users what the developers think the users should use or have. I find that not acceptable.
Every operating system (or DE) does that. Hell, every piece of software does that. They're all just a bunch of opinions wrapped in a user interface.
Some may provide more opportunities to change the defaults, but those defaults still remain.
They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:
- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)
- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"
- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"
- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback
- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so
- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release
- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"
- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker
And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.
Yes, but the problem is the GNOME organization is headed by opinionated morons with zero clue how to design a user interface.
I rather like GNOME, which presumably also makes me a moron.
Or perhaps we're all just people with differing opinions on what constitutes a "good" user interface.
There are people who like Windows too. I also consider them morons.
This can be said about literally any software? And as GP points out, it's not "dictating what you can use or have" - you can turn it back on.
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This is like, the least bad thing GNOME have ever done. Middle-click pasting makes no logical sense and only exists as a holdover from before copy-paste conventions were established. Nobody would design it this way today.
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I would say the issue itself is almost irrelevant... I think it's mainly your dogmatism. Speaking in absolutes as if you always know everything, that there can seemingly only be one right answer and there can be no other valid perspectives or opinions. To me it just screams low emotional intelligence and a lack of critical thinking, humility and empathy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
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GNOME is doing something right for a change and fixing a common source of security issues.
If you like it, just keep the behavior enabled.
Never in my life have I heard of this security issue.
defaults matter a lot!
Developers change defaults all the time and make things far worse.
Vim 9.0 default changes required a 6 line vimrc to undo the damage.
Yes, that's the primary reason that made me switch to neovim instead.
They already did that by forcing "AI" into the OS.
PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
Third button has been "hidden" below the mouse wheel for well more than those 10 years, just press the wheel down and you'll hear a mouse button click.
And most Linuxes have option for dual click (right and left mouse button) to simulate middle mouse button.
Useful, as the wheel button is usually first to die in cheap mice.
Not useful, because it made it impossible to play Death Stranding on Linux :(
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.
popularized, not pioneered.
How so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Michelman
Remember Xerox PARC, the people that developed the first computer GUI?
https://archive.is/sKLL
> The three button Alto mouse enabled the first bitmapped and overlapping windows display, known as a graphical user interface (GUI). The Alto dates to March of 1973
My dude, my mouse has 5 buttons. No idea what you're talking about here.
I'm down to one. Less is more.
Is that one of those innovative designs with the charging port on the bottom of the mouse?
Sometimes more is more.
It sounds dumb but the battery lasts long and charges quickly, so I think they made the right decision.
Because all of Microsoft's people secretly use linux on thier machines.
(No joke. This is a thing. It means when something goes catastrophically wrong with windows, the people in position to fix the problem will still be able to function.)
When one of the senior executives from Bing Search visited my university for a talk, they personally told the director of the computer science department that they envied the fact that the director could use a 27-inch iMac at work, whereas they could only use one at home.
The head of bing search is not ever going to be in position to issue an emergency patch for windows. They are far more likely to cause such a situation than resolve one.
Yeah, sure this is a thing. All of Microsoft's people secretly use Linux...
I can't really add to that one but I do know that many at Cisco turn old Cisco gear into Linux workstations.
IOS-XE runs Linux underneath.
That and forced LLM adoption means they solve problems in text.
The one dev I know at Microsoft runs WSL2
CI/CD baby! Deliver early, deliver often, fix it later.
They’re at the last step of their enshittification process, where the focus is to extract money from everyone, not to ship a good product or fix things.
Year of the linux desktop
Year of the windows cli
You can always just pull the power cord too, or long-press the power button on a laptop.
Pulling the power cord on a laptop won't shut it down, it will just start using the battery.
Some desktop PCs have a physical power switch on the power supply, usually next to where the power cord plugs in. But it is becoming more rare. Every $0.50 they can save in costs is added to the bottom line.
Never ever seen a power supply without a switch in my entire life and looking at eshops here in europe i cant find it either. Even the $30 have that
Also try pressing power button for 5-10 seconds on a laptop instead
Maybe EU requires it? Most (all?) newer Dell desktops here have only the "soft" pushbutton power switch on the front of the case. Of course you can just pull out the power cord itself.
Don't PSUs have a physical rocker switch for on/off?
Most but not all.
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I understand the sarcasm but copy pasting a bash or powershell command is faster and less error prone than following the instructions to open menus, dialogs, tabs and clicking buttons, especially in deeply nested UIs.
You’re preaching to the choir, I’m a heavy terminal user and I agree completely.
I think you are being premature, I'll wait until HN updates the site and someone posts their counter point in dance notation before deciding which medium supports actions that are easiest to communicate about.
I don't see how a command line tool with 10 different flags is necessarily less "error prone" than UI. In fact, I have used many tools where a flag is confusing or has conflicts with another flag in an unexpected way, not to mention subtle issues like escaping.
I once had to pass along to the support team a command for one of our customers to run. It ultimately didn't work because someone along the chain A) autocorrected the spelling of the command name, B) converted the quotation marks to fancy “”, and C) converted the hyphen into some fancy dash.
It is easier to copy/paste. If the GUI has more than one step people might be confused. Also some GUIs are hard to see or read for people with vision handicaps.
`find` has entered the chat
>the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue
This always annoys me because you're really handicapping yourself by ignoring the CLI on any OS. Sure I use it more heavily on GNU/Linux than I did on Windows as a kid, but that's because it's so good. If I'm ever in front of a Windows machine now I still like to have a terminal handy (and it's even better/more-familiar on macOS, of course), and I've learned things like "type is like cat", "robocopy is like rsync", "tasklist is kinda like ps and taskkill like kill/pkill" which help me to do things better on Windows than when I used it fulltime. I'm glad Microsoft invested more in the CLI with Windows Terminal, OpenSSH in the default install, winget, PowerShell, etc. I think it's better for everyone. I fear the CLI hate is spreading anti-intellectualism. Some people seem annoyed when they even have to use their keyboard instead of their mouse for something.
GUIs are great for when you're new to a bit of software as you can see the various options and get a feel for the possibilities. CLIs are nearly always more flexible once you've read the man page, but is a steeper learning path.
Automation/scripting is when CLIs really come into their own as otherwise you end up becoming a GUI click monkey. The best is when there's both a GUI and CLI (as long as they work the same way).
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
The problem with CLI isn't typing, its discoverability. Keep in mind conveying what you want done requires knowing what can be done first.
I often get my way through unknown CLI commands by just typing TAB and selecting the option that sounds like what I want. Works, most of the time, I don't think that is really an issue. For most CLI programs you also have a reference/cheat sheet, examples and an interactive hypertext systems of tutorials available.
Many GUI designers these days don't like discoverability and don't think it's important. They prefer to hide everything behind "gestures" that you just have to know somehow.
That is exactly the sort of thing I think could have been improved. We have very little at the moment - autocomplete and some help.
Along with the "-h,--help" options, an option to show common usage examples would be useful. I find it much easier to learn from an example as you can modify and build upon it. Otherwise, it's a case of skimming through the man page and then switching back and forth between the man page and the command that I'm writing. (This is most common with tools that I don't use all the time, yet have expert features such as "ffmpeg")
> an option to show common usage examples would be useful.
That's what the man page is supposed to be (and most do contain example) and why GNU wanted to split it into info (tutorials and exhausting documentation) and man (reference and examples).
Yep, the examples on man pages are helpful, but I'd like a slimmed down option to just show the examples and a one-line description for the examples.
I usually end up just doing a quick web search for the command if it's not one that I'm familiar with (i.e. where I have read the man page).
An extreme example of my issue would be trying to find BASH examples of how to process a list of files - the man page on BASH is fairly lengthy.
Meanwhile, Greg's wiki provides this example of processing mp3 files:
Why do you serialize and then deserialize the list of files? Even if you do disable the splitting on reparsing the list, why don't you just do this:
That sounds just unnecessary and bug prune. Unless you target some odd platform where find doesn't support '-exec', but it is even in POSIX. I think due to your use of process substitution, your code has a higher chance of being unportable, so why do you want to complicate your code?Stuff like that is why I personally prefer the man pages to random websites.
Honestly for something as complex as a shell (which describes both a language, an editor, and an implementation) the man page is surprisingly short. (6418 lines for me) I have just found the section on process substitution in <1min, without even using the search, just by reading. I looked it up, because I didn't knew the name of that syntax, so I needed to actually look for what I wanted and I do not use the man page of bash often.
It's to deal with problematic filenames (e.g. containing a newline) and enables setting of variables within the current process. Putting multiple commands into the "-exec" of find is possible, but looks horrible. To be fair, my example didn't use multiple commands, so your version is okay for simple processing.
Don't get me wrong, the BASH man page is great, it's just that I prefer to work with examples.
For reference, here's the Greg's Wiki explanation: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#for_f_in_.24.28ls_....
On my computer
works just fine, but maybe it doesn't work everywhere.If you don't like how the multiple commands look like, you can always write it like this:
Yep, you can chain multiple commands with find's "-exec", but I'm not a fan of it myself. I suspect setting variables in the current process is trickier though.
(Very minor nitpick, it should be 'a\nb.mp3' to be included, but that does work fine)
Incidentally, ShellCheck isn't happy with that although I don't follow their reasoning:
https://www.shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2156> although I don't follow their reasoning
I think it is sound. Imagine what happens when the filename contains:
Of course that makes sense now.
Anyhow here's an example of how I would use the while loop and process substitution in a BASH script:
I think that'd be tricky to do using just a find/-exec command.I see, but now you are essentially operating on multiple files, at once, so the serialization makes some sense. Although for just this, I wouldn't write the operation in bash at all:
Honestly I don't really view the shell / filesystem interface as a security boundary. I use the shell mainly for (automation of) interactive use, so any screwup due to e.g. quoting issues is my own fault, maybe even of using stupid filenames. Shell is a great language to connect streams of different programs into each other, not so much for doing any work. If I do that, I would reach for C.The serialisation is just to work around the fact that filenames can have any character except for \0 which is why the "-print0" is used. It doesn't by itself allow for concurrent processing.
You're right about just using "wc -l", but I was just trying to demonstrate how you can set variables. A real use would be doing more than just counting files as your example would likely be quicker (assuming that calling an external programme is quicker than running a naive loop in BASH).
I am guilty of using BASH for stuff that most people would use a different language for - I just find that for system admin work that BASH is just at the right level of abstraction for me and is ubiquitous.
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem. In reality, CLIs are inconsistent and basically function as robotic interfaces, a lot of them not that far of programming.
> If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem.
On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?
Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, it would kiss your ass while it hallucinates about the files on your hard drives, invent command line switches that either don't do anything or does something other than what you want, and every command that used to take just 5-10 characters would now require you to type paragraphs. No thank you.
Can this be pasted into Win+R? That might give a novice user more confidence; pasting a short command that literally says "shutdown" into a small, easily identified text dialog box seems clear enough.
Small added benefit, presumably it's harder to accidentally run a multi-line multi-stage command because you had the wrong thing in your clipboard (I don't have my windows PC handy, but if you paste multiple lines into Win+R it doesn't execute anything, correct?)
Yes. This is how I've been shutting down windows PCs for decades, as I don't want to use a mouse and start menu positioning varies:
Windows + R
(type) shutdown /s /t 0
Enter
The /t is a time flag and you can abort scheduled shutdowns with the /a flag. Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave - just set a timer for 1800 seconds and Kazaa will be done with its download ;).
> Handy if you know your Windows machine will be finished with a task in 10 or so minutes but you need to leave
That might maybe work most times, but when your network speed suddenly changes or the downloads is aborted it fails. Far better is just telling your computer that you want it to shutdown after the download finished:
Should also work on MS Windows, IE used to be able to be told to exit once the download finishes, not sure how the situation looks like now.Agreed, but I've found Windows to be relatively finicky with the shutdown command, with some OS versions being fine with that and some not. Additionally, on Windows often the action needed is a GUI program with no simple way to post-hook or provide an output a CLI can easily ready.
As such I usually set my timer 3x what it needs to be (e.g 1800 for a 10 minute) and it's always had a high chance of working.
I use it in command prompt semi-regularly, for some reason never thought to use Win+R to run it...
This is not new. Operating a windows machine has always included a bunch of magical commands. It's just that it has usually been in the registery. The cmd and powershell stuff is kind of a new direction.
Regarding Linux, I dont think most people need command line for normal work. Obviously the guy that runs an obscure dist in RAID-6 on his toaster would be different, but for most normal people just install Ubuntu and use it.
I think this is an exception that proves the rule.
The average Windows user literally has no concept of a terminal. The average Linux user does indeed have to copy and paste terminal commands off the internet to fix issues or do seemingly ordinary customization frequently.
Except its not a hard power off, it only tells windows to shut down... I've seen instances of windows hanging on both startup and shutdown, leaving me no other option but to hard power off the machine (because nobody uses a reset button anymore).
Does this bring the old Halt and Catch Fire command back as an option?
Alt+F4 on the desktop does the same thing, but does it with a neat UI. No scary CLI needed.
Edit - it's Alt+F4.
Windows always had a command line. I remember I used to do remote stuff via CLI even back on NT 4.0
The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.
As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it. What still shocks me is that the current developers and management on the Windows teams are so extremely bad at everything they do. It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow. It's not like they couldn't make Explorer use less memory and start faster, even with preloading, which was introduced in Vista, opening Explorer remains painfully slow.
> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does
And sadly, the backbone of the majority of quality, paid software... if windows starts losing market share to Linux, things will start becoming interesting when the adobe's of the world start eying the Linux desktop as a platform where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling.
"where everyone already has applications that do what they were selling"
They can probably still sell software there. The problem is that too few people overall are using Linux.
It looks a lot like the recent record-breaking enshittification of Windows may be a subtle ploy to deprecate it and shift everything over to Linux.
Consider that this "Linus Poettering" turned out to be a Microsoft mole as the conspiracy theorists always maintained that he was. Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
> Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
Presumably people who never read the Halloween documents?
People who consult numerous sources before reaching a final, definite conclusion.
Mac would be the preferred alternative platform, as it already is. Linux might take gaming away from Windows, though.
Don't get me wrong, macs are certainly the computer for people who like to pretend to be smart for tv... but seeing where the economy is going, nobody is going to be able to afford Apple hardware, let alone the software...
We're talking about Adobe and other paid software, which is generally for professionals. They make back more than the entire cost of the software and the computer by doing a job for just one client.
And Apple computers are incredibly affordable, rumored to get a budget laptop which will be even cheaper. Computers in general are dirt cheap, including Apple. And paid software is not expensive on Apple either. There are tons of quality pro software for $50 - $100 per license. And affordable subscription models of pro creative software for those who are just getting started.
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> It's still the foundational underpinning of everything Microsoft does. It's just that the other revenues dwarf it.
If a corporate customer is running their stuff in the cloud they don't care if people are using Chromebooks/MacBooks/Linux to develop the software with. They just care that you are using Azure. Ultimately they want you to do everything through a web browser (just like google), even some dev environments are going that way.
Outside of corporations when interacting with non-tech people, none of them use a laptop. It is phone or tablet. A laptop running Windows is a work machine. I wonder what the stats are for home usage of Windows vs other things and honestly I don't believe a lot people are using a laptop/desktop running Windows.
> It's not like they could not serve ads and shove CoPilot in your face, without making the UI so so sloppy and slow.
I have a stripped down Windows 11 on my second disk (I will be removing it at some point). The OS is reasonably fast. I've removed most of the telemetry and other rubbish like the web search on desktop. So I can only assume it is that. I don't really care though anymore. I am running Debian on pretty much everything except for the work machine which I don't own.
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>Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.
That isn't how you compare things. Server is separate from "Cloud" which is separate from Office 365 which is separate from Windows.
And Windows still makes them ~$28 billion a year, Azure makes then 3x that, but $28 billion is nothing to take for granted. It wouldn't matter if Azure made $150 billion/year, it doesn't make $28 billion look like pocket change.
> That isn't how you compare things.
I compared once segment of the business to others. Several other websites had various estimates on what percentage of the business Windows took up. Most of them said 6-10%, so I took 10%. Other websites group server and cloud, A rough guesstimate for a comment on a discussion thread is good enough. I was't aware I would need to go through the 10Q filings to satisfy you.
The point being communicated (even with your ridiculous nitpicks about the stats) is that Windows isn't a cash cow it once was. Microsoft Strategy is not Windows focused like it was under Ballmer.
$28 billion is definitely "a cash cow", no matter how many other "cash cows" they have.
My original comment:
> The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft
My second to you:
> Windows isn't a cash cow it once was
You really need to learn how to read or all you are doing is arguing about semantics.
Yeah, you're still just wrong.
In the 1990s Windows brought in $1.2 billion. In the 2010s, it brought in about $14 billion. In 2022 it was $24.8 billion, and in 2024, it was $29.1 billion.
So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
Windows definitely is still very much a "cash cow" for Microsoft. And they can have more than one "cash cow", they can have as many as they want and it wouldn't make Windows any less of a "cash cow".
> Yeah, you're still just wrong.
No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery.
> So your assumption that Windows is somehow "not the cash cow it once was" is false. It's bringing in more money than it ever did before.
What don't you understand about being a smaller percentage of their business as a whole?
My entire point that it has gone from the basically a 30% (~2010) of the revenue to less than 10%. Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Saying they make more money with that now, when the growth compared to other parts of the business is low is missing the point.
>"No. All you are doing is engaging in semantic wankery."
I'm not the one who first used the term "cash cow" here. It apparently doesn't mean what you think it means.
If you look up the definition, you will find this:
Windows definitely falls under that definition. This isn't "semantic wankery". Next time you want to use a colloquialism, make sure you look it up first.>Therefore they are simply not going to care about it as much, because their strategy is basically to push as much as possible into the cloud.
Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market. MacOS will never achieve anything close to Windows, never has, never will. Windows is Microsoft's bottom bitch, it's not going to be forgotten as you think it will.
Feel free to quit this conversation at any time.
> This isn't "semantic wankery".
Yeah it is. I never said it wasn't a cash cow. I said "it wasn't the cash cow it once was". I obviously meant relatively compared to other parts of Microsoft's business.
Considering you keep omitting that from what I said, I can only assume you are continuing to engage in bad faith.
> Next time you want to use a colloquialism, make sure you look it up first.
I understand what it means fine. I did use it correctly.
> Microsoft Windows still dominates the OS market.
On on laptops and desktops. The vast majority of people at home are using phones and tablets (outside of work usage). In that space Android dominates, then iOS and have done so for about a decade now.
> Feel free to quit this conversation at any time.
You are a clown.
>I said "it wasn't the cash cow it once was".
And that is wrong. It's even better than the "cash cow" it used to be, I provided some values of what Windows brings in over the years, and it has grown and grown. You ignored that.
>I understand what it means fine. I did use it correctly.
You seriously do not.
>You are a clown.
You are reported.
> And that is wrong. It's even better than the "cash cow" it used to be, I provided some values of what Windows brings in over the years, and it has grown and grown. You ignored that.
No and I've never ignored it. As the revenue percentage decreases because it is growing slow. It will become less important.
Relatively it isn't as much of a cash cow, which I explained ad-nauseam to you.
> You seriously do not.
It is correct enough for all intents and purposes. You are quibbling over semantics. It is totally unnecessary and pedantic.
> You are reported.
I don't care. If you make arrogant little statements like that, expect that response.
>I don't care. If you make arrogant little statements like that, expect that response.
Okay, Mr 6-day old account. I'm sure you'll just create another one when this one gets banned (again).
Your insistence that you are correct even in the face of evidence to the contrary tells me I'm done with this conversation, completely. Goodbye.
I agree with you to some extent, but if Microsoft loses Windows here permanently then its desktop-centric control will also come to an end. So it would lose tons of opportunities here. I don't see Microsoft wanting to go that route really. It would basically commit suicide.
They don't have to worry about PC segments, if there are no personal computes.
Ram price has sky rocketed, and probably out of hand of most of the people Same with GPU, HDD price is increasing, so is SSD.
How many people can build a new PC next year? And Amazon CEO just said it out loud about cloud computers.
Even though they'll take my PC out of my cold dead hands. But as it seems they want to get rid of Desktops.
Microsoft isn’t going to declare death of the PC and pivot to “cloud computers”/virtual desktops (again) just because of temporary RAM/SSD supply shortages lol
> And Amazon CEO just said it out loud about cloud computers.
And Google said Stadia would have “negative latency”
They will do whatever that will let them get more money.
Who said they cares about consumers? There's also GeForce Now.
> How many people can build a new PC next year?
Why does it matter, my 15 year old laptop is still working fine. And if it goes down, there is still the hardware produced in the remaining 14 years.
They don't need it if everything is in the cloud running oh their servers. They won't care if you are running Windows, Linux, Chrome, A tablet with a keyboard and mouse hooked up.
The vast majority of people that don't work in IT don't ever use a laptop or a desktop computer unless it is for work. They are using a phone and/or tablet.
It's already become a veritable Times Square of advertising. We have a windows PC in the office to play DDR, and the "Live Home Screen" or whatever used to be the Desktop looks like MSN! Live or the Yahoo Homepage.
I just use Windows to launch Steam and rooting for Steam OS.
Instead of putting Copilot everywhere, Microsoft could hire some proper devs and qa to avoid such problems, But no, MS employs vibe-coders only and fired the entire qa team.
Cynical viewpoint: Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line? If the market is AI-everything, any resources that you devote to non-AI is a bad signal. Incentives are everything.
It's circular logic. The market is "AI everything" because they (and Google, OpenAI, and Facebook) are shoving it down people's throats so they can desperately try to recoup their investment in GPUs.
Because there being a stable desktop OS brings indirect profits and enables efforts like AI to work. AI isn't going to help you if you no longer have a computer to run it on.
This is my general concern with the decline of tech quality. It’s one thing if it’s just consumer products, but it’s now affecting actual tools people including us use to do their jobs.
Yeah. It's really important that you have a platform with your users, because that's how you introduce them to features (not always a bad thing). It becomes a touch point with your customers. Google and Apple have their phones, Meta is desperately trying to get their smart glasses working, Amazon is also desperately trying to get something together with Alexa, and Microsoft is... Throwing theirs away?
Oh I dunno. Maybe people should give a fuck about something other than making nothing but maximum profit. It's the core problem with our whole culture. Fuck you, make money. It's unethical trash.
Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing out.
> Why should they if those things don’t affect their bottom line?
Their entire ecosystem is built on top of Windows. It will only "not affect the bottom line" until it becomes bad enough that people has to abandon it with all the other MS products that depend on it.
Also, no LLM product is profitable right now. "The market is AI-everything" is complete and absolute bullshit.
Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.
It was nice in 2015-2017 when I got a free Windows 10 license for my Dell Ubuntu Linux Notebook (much cheaper to buy in Brazil). Back then most of the games only was on Windows. Nowadays I have a Lenovo with Windows 10/11 license but I do not used Windows since 2024.
I thought Nadella fired all the QA in favor of outsourcing to the different "rings" of beta users. Do they have any significant QA in house anymore?
The market isn't AI everything. Only 1.8% of office subscription holders think it's worth paying for copilot.
https://www.perspectives.plus/p/microsoft-365-copilot-commer...
The free Copilot chatbot stands at about 1%: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/01/09/is-microsoft-losing...
The stockmarket is AI everything and is more important. Investors can send the share price down far more easily than users can switch to another OS.
But it can also evaporate in an instant. An actual userbase doesn't.
That is why they do not worry about the userbase.
The share price might go down tomorrow and wipe out the value of management's options. The userbase cannot just do that.
Windows doesn't need QA. Why would it? The entire purpose of QA is to make sure your product has acceptable quality, so that you don't annoy customers and drive them to the competition. This isn't a problem for Microsoft: almost no one is going to stop using Windows, no matter how bad it gets. So why spend money on QA?
Microslop
It seems to me that MS has started to vibe code Windows. It's so surreal that they managed to kill the shutdown program. I mean: this 1 simple program worked for 30 years no probs doctors hated this trick but idk
Just to point, but there's nothing simple about shutdown.
And hence under no circumstances one should ship a code that just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do in the first place, we know the cloud doesn’t use it much, but c’mon it’s a critical part of the system.
D'oh sudo shutdown
Linux: I give a damn about you're super critical nuclear reactor loading up, this computer is going down NOW
Systemd: “A stop job is running for User Manager for UID 1000 (1s / 2min)”
Ctrl-Alt SysRQ, Pause, o (off) for that.
Well it is still shutting down
It would actually be sudo shutdown -h now. Otherwise it waits a few minutes for the control rods to drop before it shuts off the coolant control.
That still does stuff like unmounting filesystems (which can take a minute with snap, if they haven't fixed it), you can go further with the (rather unsafe) SysRq key "o", which tells the kernel to shut down without any preparation.
That's quite interesting, considering that -h flag is usually related to showing help.
From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what is still working.
> MS has started to vibe code Windows
Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in Windows are about 90%.
And then there is the computer who won't stay asleep. I find my PC running about once a week after having it sleep the night before.
I've had the opposite problem with laptops. There's like 3 different menus to configure sleep-on-idle but none of them actually let you disable it even if they claim they do.
They don't even share the same state and can be set to conflicting values, with the oldest looking one usually taking priority.
Disabling screen timeout is even worse since there's additionally the screensaver settings to muddy the waters.
My biggest fear when getting a new laptop is that I won't figure out the BIOS fast enough to get it to recognize the usb drive I have plugged in and it might actually boot to windows. Now I will be extra freaked out because it might not even let me turn it off to try again!
You can always long-press the on/off button to force a power cycle.
Or just pull out the battery.
I’ve killed a laptop by placing it in a backpack which failed to suspend. Based on the heat I assume parts of it cooked despite any thermal throttling. It’ll be interesting to see the damage a bug like this might cause.
I've had a laptop in a bag that decided it should wake from modern standby to run updates. Except the update failed at the laptop froze during boot. It didn't kill the laptop fortunately.
Then two months later, it did it again. And again three months after that.
Sorry, Microsoft, you've lost your S3 privileges. I changed it to S0. Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
This was a constant problem with late Intel Macs where I was working at the time, to the point that people started explicitly using shut down enough to the point that security complained it was slowing down their patch rollouts.
Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
> Had some slack discussions with security about how their need for a green metric on patch deployment time doesn't entitle them to introduce a fire hazard to my personal residence...
How did this part go down? I'm just curious because it reeks of entitlement and security theatre on their part.
It reminds me of an incident I had once at an old job, surprise surprise security related, where a moronic decision had been made by the combined DevOps and security team (putting aside how a separate DevOps team is a bad idea).
They had decided to use some "dependency security scanner" and if it found ANY, it would immediately disable the CI/CD build pipeline for that repository.
1) This could happen at any point within minutes/hours of some CVE being published. It would frequently block deployments.
2) It could not/would not take into account developer tooling vulnerabilities. Oh, your CSS library has a string DDOS vulnerability, where if someone makes a ginormous CSS file, the library will crash?
3) The CSS library does not reach a users machine, and is run once, at build time. Either it passes and deploys, or it fails and does not deploy. Therefore, it was probably not even justifiably a CVE to begin with, but more importantly, we now cannot deploy. https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1622xia/cve2...
4) The build pipeline would be disabled for ANY type of vulnerability regardless of impact. Even low ratings.
5) Because this security ~~scam~~software did not care about nuance like that, we could not even deploy hotfixes, critical production fixes, bug fixes, or anything.
6) Because it would disable the pipeline within minutes of a CVE, there was never a fix or a newer version to upgrade a dependency to. We had to wait days or sometimes weeks for a new version to be released.
This lasted a couple of months before they were forced to remove all this crap.
Did this software happen to rhyme with Veracode?
I won’t make the claim that it can’t be set up and configured in a way that’s useful, but I will make the claim that I’ve never run into an instance where it was and have wasted more time than I want to remember dealing with similar issues to what you described
Ha good guess!
Honestly the truth is it ended pretty inconclusively with security saying “well you should let it sleep so it can update” and me saying I wasn’t going to because of the sleep issues and we both kind of left it
Yeah, the problem is that on Windows 10/11, if you have modern standby enabled and have fast boot enabled, then shutdown puts the system into standby.
Do you have more info on this? It’s not at all the behavior I observe. After I shut down windows, which I do basically every time I use it since I usually use Linux on that machine, it is completely off. Turning the pc on boots Linux (it’s first in the boot order).
It has modern standby and most of its other defaults, which I know because if it goes to sleep it doesn’t: the fan stays on and it never gets cold to the touch despite the blinking power led. The other day it randomly installed the windows update and rebooted because I found it waiting for the LUKS pin.
Look up 'Fast Startup'. It's a thing since Windows 8. It's a curse onto humanity.
This once really scared me once on a dual boot system. I had “shut down” windows and while using Linux I did some partitioning as I had run out of space on the efi partition which had originally been created by the windows 7 installer. Worked fine for a while until the next time I “booted” windows which appeared to load the partition layout from the hibernated memory which caused a bunch of data corruption
It's usually referenced as "Hybrid Shutdown" in Microsoft documentation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...
> "Note: In Windows, fast startup is the default transition when a system shutdown is requested. A full shutdown (S5) occurs when a system restart is requested or when an application calls a shutdown API."
Technically it's entering a "hybrid" S4 Hibernation with S0 Standby after all users have been logged out. To bypass it you need to press Shift while clicking Shutdown, running the `shutdown /s /t 0` command, or else disabling Fast Startup. You can tell that you didn't do a true S5 shutdown because the system's uptime will not reset.
But disabling Modern Standby in your BIOS will also disable it because Window's power management logic is set during installation. With modern standby enabled, Windows tries to be always on and always connected. When you disable modern standby, Windows doesn't entirely change it's logic so much as it notices it can't send the same power state commands, so it reverts to S5 Shutdown.
I chose to disable it in BIOS because Microsoft can't really turn it back on when I do it that way. Because the thing is... I disabled Fast Startup after the second time it happened. But some Microsoft updates re-enable Fast Startup, and it's not hard to find forum posts complaining about that.
My work laptop -- a ThinkPad issued 3 years ago -- has seen multiple blue screens with modern standby. (It is almost always plugged in.). So IT disabled it, and now my machine always hibernates, which means that it usually takes 2 minutes to boot.
Thanks Microsoft!
Did you mix up S0, S0ix, and S3? S0 is running, S3 is traditional standby (the one you want?), S0ix is modern standby (the one that gave you trouble).
Yeah, I got them mixed up. Actually I mixed up S3 and S4, too. I just hit the wrong key.
Microsoft's Fast Startup is also known as Hybrid Shutdown. When Modern Standby is enabled, a system shutdown will log the user off, then use a combination of S4 Hibernation and S0 Standby.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/power/system...
I'm sure they meant S5 - shutdown. I had to Google it as I also guessed S0 = shutdown.
> Just because you're connected to a WiFi network you know doesn't mean you can turn on and do whatever you want.
When a device is already able to be connected to a WiFi network, I would consider it to be on.
Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that.
Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle during "sleep".
I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I always place laptop with vents on the top
I did too, it ran Linux.
"suspend" was always fragile, and "hibernation" a liability at times.
Close the lid button to shutdown... should be default behavior, as ssd/NVMe can boot a system so fast now it no longer makes sense to risk some fussy software glitching on resume. =3
With Debian 13 on ThinkPad X1 the hibernation is very reliable. Resuming from it while not instant still takes like 40 seconds. So I configured my laptop on lid close to sleep for 15 minutes and then hibernate. This way if I just to another room the wake-up is instant while longer pauses shuts the laptop down removing any security keys from the memory.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Slightly off-topic: my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
My Mac Mini M4 is on its way. Can't wait to stop dealing with this mess.
(Just this morning, I noticed that the login dialog for network drives, which has worked fine for decades, has misaligned text fields. I don't want to think how this could possibly happen.)
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu. I have to to the sleep thing again. Has anyone else run into this issue?
Yes. By default moving the mouse or brushing the trackpad wakes the PC up... so when you have a fast machine it goes to sleep quicker than you can take your hand off the mouse. The solution is to turn off 'Allow device to wake' for the mouse in device manager. Well, that's been my experience anyway, there could be other causes I'm not aware of.
This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
External mouse on the table moves when you bump into the table. And that wakes the computer.
Gets me every time. I have even started turning the mouse upside down to avoid this :(
No I always use keyboard for that.
I have a bluetooth mouse that will wake my desktop, untouched; I physically switch it off when I'm away from home
> my PC always comes back to the login screen immediately after I manually use "sleep" from the power menu.
> My Mac Mini M4 is on its way.
Hate to tell you, but my Mac does the same stupid thing. I have to physically yank the HDMI cable.
This happens regularly for me too, and Luke Lafreniere (from Linus Media Group) reported this too during WAN Show. He said that he sometimes has to hit sleep 3–4 times before his PC actually stays in sleep mode.
Do you have a link for that? Now I am curious. Those videos are 3 hours long and there are too many of them.
My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in a movie.
You pull out the plug, but nothing happens. A shape resembling a human face appears on the screen. It has an evil grin.
Exits: N W
As you keep watching, you see from the human face growing a silvery-looking tentacle that curves in on itself.
"> Dennis"
Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Laptops with batteries will shrug
Pull out the battery then?
they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core to generate power.
Microsoft really wants people to use other operating systems. This is quite amazing.
It does not affect me as I moved to Linux in late 2004 already, but I can't help but feel I would have to be constantly annoyed at Microsoft for abusing me and my computer.
Thank you for spending 22 years debugging Linux. I migrated Windows 11 to it yesterday and it was absolutely painless :=)
Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to "fix" this.
In recent months, with any computer that runs into Windows issues, I just take it as sign that its time for me to format it and install linux.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
>PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
it was many patches ago when I refused to even start my PC after Microsoft's patches (when they made it so you couldn't reject their telemetry), at least not till I had linux installed (which I had anyhow been running all along via Xwindows, before the Microsoft-mind-virus-infected systemd, wayland, and btrfs crowds decided to ruin linux too.)
are the BSDs still safe?
You don't have to use wayland or btrfs on Linux though, right?
well, "linux is just the kernel" eyeroll.emoji so no, you don't, but it's easiest to use a distro, and among distros it's easiest not to use an obscure distro so you can use the package managers to install a variety of apps and tools, but the longterm mainstream distros seem to all be infected, even devuan which is barely mainstream. most "alternate" distros seem to be dedicated to even goofier ideas than the old school that i prefer.
i used fedora for the longest time but now they are not only forcing btrfs, but they won't let you partition either.
I know that error since, dunno, i guess: 1995. No other OS has this unprofessional and annoying bug. And no other OS vendor managed it to drag a bug like this for 30 years. None that i know of.
Don't forget there are younger people, thats maybe new to them, or they seek the error on their own side. Just unbelievable to read that 30 years later.
-omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless you're in some more sensitive position
So, should we assume that they vibe-coded this patch? Sad...
They had plenty of bad patches before this. Microsoft products just aren’t great quality.
It’s insane how many bad patches they’ve had recently though. I swear it didn’t used to happen this often
Some 20 years ago they had patches for a buffer overflow vulnerability. The first patch made the buffer one byte longer. The next round of patches addressed a supposedly new vulnerability and the same buffer got another byte longer...
It sounds like introducing minor issues today is the best way for Microsoft and Apple to push OS updates that nobody is asking for.
My two cents...
They already have the ability to unilaterally force any software onto any machine at literally any time. They do not need an excuse or a clever scheme to achieve more updates. We are a long way past that.
They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away proper standby, because reasons.
I mean... At this point, what even would make people switch from MS? End users don't care, companies don't care so MS just gets away with piles and piles of slop.
> End users don't care, companies don't care
Look, I'm the last person in the world to defend Microsoft but ....
End users do care. But they also have a lifetime of Windows usage and a whole bunch of Windows software. Sure you could run your Windows software in an emulator but that's just another thing for Mom & Pop to learn.
Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Companies also care but it also has to make hard-nose business sense.
So when Microsoft turns up your doorstep and says ... "hey, you can have email, MDM, cloud-based file server, conferencing, calling and your old favourites Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint all for $20 a month .... and all locked behind secure 2FA authentication" what the hell do you expect company management to say ? Its a bit of a no-brainer really.
In addition you are a company, you employ people. Its a productivity killer to tell all those people who have been using Word/Powerpoint/Excel/Outlook all their lives to go learn something else.
> Its fine for a techie to say "I switched to Linux and its fine", but for a complete non-techie who has spent their life on Windows its a big ask.
Feels like a Catch-22, Windows is popular because of the status quo and because it also happens to be what's taught in schools (at least over here) and what you run into in workplaces. Why? Because Windows is popular - of course you should teach it!
At the same time, modern mainstream Linux distros (think Mint, not Arch) are pretty stable and the UI/UX can be more pleasant instead of dealing with the occasional bit of Windows BS. Despite that, there are still some functionality gaps - AD and Group Policy in org settings, I would say that LibreOffice is good enough but now office stuff is being pushed into cloud (which I think sucks but oh well, people benefit a bunch from Google Docs and MS kinda just made the OneDrive/Teams/365/whatever experience be weird), as well as some Windows software just not running on Linux distros even with Wine and whatnot and sometimes there not being Linux native versions, which has gotten better in the past years.
But for a machine for a non-technical user whose mind isn't corrupted with Windows'isms and who will mostly do web browsing and cares that any downloaded files will display (videos, images, PDFs and office docs and such)... I'd say it's already a pretty good option! It's just the case that those users almost don't exist and anyone who might try to assist them will also almost always either assume Windows as the default (e.g. if they gotta call in to some support), or won't even know how to help with Linux cause of the aforementioned status quo.
Do they really "teach Windows" in schools? I see way more people treat the browser as the OS, if they even use a non-mobile device.
Your comment is full of phrases that answer why consumers and enterprise won't switch: "pretty stable", "good enough", "a pretty good option". This are true for the Windows default; why switch?
Sadly, schools don't have real computers any more, it's all chromebooks. Gen Alpha is going to be completely computer illiterate.
My kid has had a public-school-provided Windows laptop since 3rd grade. I don't doubt chromebooks are the majority but I can't find any consistent stats on how wide the margin is.
Even if it had been a chromebook, it's still massively more computer exposure than my generation got. We got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe once a month or whatever until high school, when we might use Wordperfect on occasion.
I would expect that whether a generation becomes computer literate will depend on whether they use computers in work or daily life.
I don't understand, we didn't have computers at all and didn't end up illiterate. Why are you underestimating kids so much?
Over here, in Latvia, yes. We were taught about the basics of computers and how to use Windows in primary education, various Office features and software like physics tests running on Windows in secondary education and even in the university most of it was Windows-centric when it came to the user devices (not servers or VMs). And also stuff like more Office, some graphics editing software, I bet some people had chosen courses with 3D modeling, MATLAB and so on. Luckily a lot of the software is cross platform nowadays so if someone had a Linux distro outside of the computer lab on their personal device and wanted to do some homework, they weren’t completely abandoned but still.
Wonder if Chromebooks have taken over since.
Windows would be 'taught' as a byproduct of another activity involving Windows software, usually starting with Office/365.
AD/Group Policies should have been killed long ago with remote RDP/VNC and VM's with 3D support. Once you can rollback your settings trivially with disk images, AD/GP's are dead since cheap firewalls and virtual network segmentations are everywhere.
How does remote RDP/VNC kill AD and Group Policy? You still need AD to provide centralized authentication/authorization. And you still need Group Policy to configure the VMs according to the corporate standards - disk images may work for the initial rollout but not for applying future changes.
That's a KVM role. The idea in the 21th century it's to spawn a personal VM per user. Network boundaries would be defined in hypervisor devel, (VLANs, network share accesses and so on), you would need nearly no GPO's but different WMI setups with options prebaked.
The old NT based ACL's/GPO's and such are obsolete as I said when a cheap Linux KVM server can do tons of stuff by itself and firewalls (even professional ones) are dirt cheap. The old world died long ago.
You shouldn't be backing up profiles, accounts or settings from an AD domain. We should already have instant VM booting (from the network) with everything snapshotted to a working state since long ago.
Network boundaries are insufficient. A file share might need to be read-write for some users and read-only for others. Database access is even more granular.
Different users will have licenses to different software. Maintaining individualized VM images isn't sustainable.
Microsoft and Google are ubiquitous which is the main reason most people use them. (Apple is out there but different) My office computer was swapped for a Chromebook... Which is awful but hey, Google endorses it, so it must be okay, right?
Microsoft's habit has been to rush things out and fix in post. Constant updates. The entire thing is a mess but there is little choice.
It's really hard to pin down a company like MS with broad generalities; it's such a massive, multi-personality beast. Example: as a homogenized entity it's impossible to reconcile their consumer desktop behaviours with their approach to developers. The same creature that pushes ads in the OS also let's you build software that doesn't even need windows to run? There are good pieces and some great people at MS, and there are obviously some real psychotic a-holes too.
The whole model of Big Tech is very gangsterish — steal and store private property, and eliminate the competition by excluding them. You can't even download a lot of programmes now without going through Google Play or the Apple store, which is an issue going beyond mere security.
End users mostly don't know what Windows is. You can see this when someone picks up a tablet and opens Google Docs.
Do people actually use Word? I can’t remember the last time I saw a docx file at a job. At least five years ago…
They do but the mode has changed from Word.exe to https://www.o365.com/word or sharepoint -> word doc.
What do you see instead? Aside from a smaller startup that used google-everything every enterprise I've worked with uses MS Office extensively, with a big push to the subscription web version from local installs.
Across the 6 companies in the tech space I've worked in over the years (ranging from 500 - 200,000 employees with the median being 10,000) have been GSuite/Google Docs for their word processing need but with various wiki software (most notably confluence) overlapping quite heavily too.
Yes, but tech is special. And even in tech I presume you're only talking about computer tech, or even more specifically software tech? There's the entire rest of the business world which uses Word because what else would they use? Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft [sic]. Every single OEM computer aimed at businesses is likely to have Office preinstalled, except these days it's the 365 version.
I am encountering it almost not at all. I work in a org that basically doesn't know that Linux exist and outside of top management nobody uses Word. Excel is still massively useful.
Google docs exclusively.
That’s depends on your job. If you’re a line chef or florist, then you probably don’t use Word much. But that doesn’t mean MS Office isn’t still heavily used in other industries.
I think our florist sent a word doc with the proposal details for our wedding arrangements. I wonder how many catering contracts and menus are designed in word also
This is a moot point, but line chefs wouldn’t be the ones writing menus or signing catering contracts.
Otherwise I think we’re in completely agreement.
Why not? If it is a small shop, Word has all the features both simple and intermediate ones (like putting shadows on images or removing background). So a 2-5 person businesses can handle their digital needs at very low cost.
The alternatives usually implement limited set of features (Google Sheets) and/or terrible outdated interfaces (Libre Office).
It’s not about Words capabilities. It’s because a line chef’s responsibility wouldn’t be to create menus let alone manage catering contracts.
You’d expect that more from the executive chef. Perhaps also the sous chef.
This is why I said it’s a moot point. Because It’s not really about MS Word.
> Do people actually use Word?
I mean, for starters just walk into any law firm.
Especially the junior desks who do the donkey work of turning contract drafting notes from the Seniors into reality. Their entire careers are based around knowing Word templates and macros like the back of your hand. Those dudes probably know more about Word than Microsoft does.
And a whole niche side-industry has established around them, for example people writing software to diff Word files.
I know someone who sends screenshots of their entire desktop pasted into a word doc in portrait mode
The problem is building (operating) systems that are orders of magnitude more complex than what are possible to fully understand or reason about. I don't think the top developers in the world could avoid catastrophic errors to sometimes creep into systems of that size and complexity.
Not defending Microsoft specifically, as I moved on from their operating systems to Linux 30 years ago, but I just do not see what they could hope to do. Amount of interactions to worry about will grow at least quadratic with the size of a system and there is just no way to expect human (or LLM) developers to keep up with that beyond some (very small) upper limit of system size. No matter how good the developers are and what programming languages or tools they use the result will be a house of cards of flaky components interacting in ways no one can fully predict.
While obviously very difficult, making Windows into a much more cohesive and bug free experience isn't impossible. Windows used to be a lot more cohesive, and I have no doubt it's possible to go back to that while also keeping the stuff that's good. The problem with that is that it requires walking back a lot of decisions which were made by people higher up the chain than those actually making the changes, and it's hard to walk back bad decisions by people high up the chain.
Microsoft also at least used to be capable of fixing bugs in Windows pretty well. XP Service Pack 2 consisted of mostly just that, in order to make a much more stable OS. And it worked quite well. But that was back in the day when Microsoft had a proper QA department and actually gave a shit about the user experience.
> but I just do not see what they could hope to do.
Cut scope. Would you rather have a laptop that sleeps when you close the lid, or one that occasionally does for a bit but not if a thousand different types of events occur, some valid some random? Because right now sleep may as well not exist for a huge number of users.
In what way is Win11 "order of magnitude more complex" than Linux desktop or Windows 7 or 10?
In my recent experience, a new culture of "I switched to Linux and it's fine" is establishing itself. It's on HN, sometimes on YouTube, sometimes my friends are unhappy with ads in their OS. It takes a very good reason to switch OS (most workflows break, after all), and I think the reasons are piling up into mainstream unhappiness.
I switched to Linux. It was great! Then I got some contract work with Redhat. It was great! I completed the contract and provided a summary of my work in a .odt file I wrote on Fedora using LibreOffice. Suddenly it was not great! The team at RedHat said they could not open my file. That’s odd, I’m using their OS. Ok I’ll send the file in LibreOffice’s conversion to Word 2003 format. They opened the file and they said the formatting was off. They said can you just save it in Word and send it to us? I informed them I was using their operating system. They didn’t respond. I sent another message and said I could move to a different computer. Suddenly it was great again! I got paid handsomely for that work, but I had to use Windows.
This is why I do not believe you can switch to Linux. Because the world still runs on Microsoft. It was not until office for Mac reached feature parity (with office for Windows) when companies seriously considered macOS. Currently office for the web has not reached that parity. So the world is still smiling at Linux the same way you would at your 9 year old nephew saying “aww how cute” and then going back to the real world
When you create LibreOffice documents and you want to send them to others, which may not be LibreOffice users, the normal procedure is to export your documents as PDF files, which ensures that anyone can use them.
Less frequently, you may want to export your documents to MS formats, if you want them to be editable, but that is much less foolproof than exporting to PDF.
I have worked for many years in companies where almost everybody was using MS Office, while I preferred to use LibreOffice (nowadays Excel remains better than any alternative, but I actually prefer LibreOffice Write to MS Word, because I think that the latter has regressed dramatically during the last 2 decades). Despite that, my coworkers were not even aware that I was using LibreOffice, as all the documentation generated by me was in PDF format.
Product documentation in any serious company should be in PDF format anyway, not in word processor formats that cannot be used by anyone who does not have an appropriate editor or viewer. Even using MS Office is not a guarantee that you can use any MS Office document file, as I have seen cases when recent MS Office versions could not open some ancient MS Office files, which could be opened by other tools, e.g. they could be imported in LibreOffice.
PDF is THE choice for cross-platform presentation and printing, but a real PITA for collaboration, funny enough one of the places where the web version of Word is pretty decent. A lot of industries live in Word/Office, and "generate PDF" is a pretty small part of their workflow. Also remember that printing to PDF without an expensive purchase was not a thing for many decades; I've only stopped using the Win2PDF license I bought 25 years ago on my most recent computers!
Not that I don't believe you, but something feels off...
> conversion to Word 2003 format
That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format. Why would you do that instead of .docx? Or just a PDF.
> They opened the file and they said the formatting was off.
Who cares about formatting on a work summary? Did it have something more interesting than you can put in .rtf?
> not until office for Mac reached feature parity
It hasn't. There's still a difference in feature support.
People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.
And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.
None of this seems off to me.
It's the opposite. .doc was never fully reverse engineered properly, but .docx is way easier to handle and was for quite a while.
Yeah, I believe you're right.
> That's a twenty year old almost-dead binary format.
I assume its an old story as recent version of MS Office can read ODF formats.
Why on earth would you not just send a PDF? LibreOffice even has a handy button just for exporting directly to PDF. Does your customer need to edit your work summary for some odd reason?
I remember looking into the spec of the... I think it was the DWARF debug info format, mostly just out of curiosity. Also out of curiosity, I checked the PDF metadata. Creator: Microsoft Word. Curious.
.odt mostly works fine. Its the standard for editable files on gov.uk and it goes entirely unnoticed by most people so MS Word users presumably are able to open them.
Linux is great for people that are on HN etc because they're techies, but in my experience most normies struggle to cope with Linux.
There is also a whole population category that isn’t capable of differentiating Windows from Linux. Just yesterday I was showing something on Zorin OS to my father and I had to explain to him that I was not using Windows 10 like he is at home. As long as the web browser is working and he can use his printer, a desktop is a desktop and icons are icons that can be clicked. Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner. OS choice doesn’t matter for him, he will always struggle so making him switch to Linux won’t change a thing of his experience.
That's right.
My parents, being much over 80 years old, have been using for many years Linux, more precisely Gentoo Linux, but they have no idea what "Linux" is.
Obviously, I have installed all software on their computers and I have kept it up to date.
However, after that, they have just used the computers for reading and editing documents or e-mail messages, for browsing the Internet, for watching movies or listening music, much the same as they would have done with any other operating system. When they had a more unusual need, I had to search and install an appropriate program and teach them how to use it.
They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution, in the worst case by reading the source code, when other better documentation does not exist. On Windows, I have encountered far worse problems than on Linux, when whole IT support departments scratched their heads and could not understand what is happening, for weeks, and sometimes forever.
By far the main advantage of Windows over Linux in ease of use is that it comes preinstalled on most computers. I have installed Windows professionally and it frequently has been far more difficult than installing Linux on the same hardware, but normal people are shielded from such experiences.
Most modern Linux distributions have one great advantage in ease of use over Windows: the software package manager. Whenever you need some application, you just search an appropriate package and you install it quickly and freely. Such package managers for free software have existed many decades before app stores (e.g. FreeBSD already had one more than 30 years ago) and they remain better than any app store, by not requiring any invasive account for their use, or mandatory payments.
>> They had the advantage of having a "consultant" to solve any problem, but none of the problems that they have encountered were problems that they would not also encounter on Windows.
I drew a hard "no family tech support" line decades ago, and the difference then is that they can at least find a Windows tech-support consultant. What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
> What happens if an octogenarian phones Geek Squad and says they're running Variant <X> of Linux?
Geek Squad: 'Sorry, we don't support that.'
Grandma: 'Well, what can you do to help me then?'
Geek Squad: 'We can set you up with a new computer. That'll be $Cost-of-new-computer plus $Cost-of-X-hours-of-setup.'
Grandma (possibility number 1): 'Alright, guess I don't have much choice, and you're the expert.'
Grandma (possibility number 2): 'No thanks. I'll use my phone instead.'
> Geek Squad
Man, they've really screwed up all the settings. I've never seen Windows 11 look like this. A clean reinstall ought to fix it.
IMX people often care more about which web browser is installed than which OS.
Yes, very true. Lost count of the number of people who moan about ads on YouTube but don't seem to know how they can get rid of them without paying for Premium.
I hate all the Google and Microsoft worship out there. They just have market dominance, they're not our friends.
> Any other operation will be written on paper in a step by step well phrased manner.
Same exact experience, I cannot get my parents to think about what they are doing, they just follow the steps; if an icon changes or if the button is in a different place the whole workflow stops until I help them. Any suggestions here on how to improve the approach?
Avoid jargon/technical language, show practical steps and tell them what to avoid doing on the new system. (Last bit is important. I like to play around with new things to get to know them, but you need to avoid anything which crashes the system, erases etc.)
You'll see a number of stories where this is not the case. I moved my gf to Linux ~2 decades ago instead of upgrading a laptop. She never had issues I had to deal with after that.
> At this point, what even would make people switch from MS?
Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I use Linux all the time, I have servers to host my websites and a NAS, and I install Debian on all of them and have no problem administering everything, but you have to be blind to not see how Linux is an extremely hostile environment for consumers.
I would never consider installing Linux on my personal desktop for those reasons. I honestly do not even know which distribution would be suitable, given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
"Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
None of that reasonably characterizes the reality at all, only what some might fear. In practice, any distribution is suitable for any ordinary purpose, and only relatively uncommon hardware lacks drivers out of box. Linux supports a wide variety of applications just fine.
Common software is generally provided by your system package manager and doesn't require adding any repositories. In the cases where you need to rely on one of the various third-party packaging solutions you assume the same risk that is normalized for every software installation on Windows. A curl | sh invocation is not fundamentally less secure than running an .msi installer.
Old forum posts don't actually 404 and you will practically speaking never have to go back that far, and people don't give you broken links, and if the old information somehow really disappeared or became invalid you could just ask again. And no, even in the Arch world they don't give you a run-around intentionally; they just expect you to demonstrate basic problem-solving skills and not waste others' time.
You might have to give up the applications you are used to, and switch to new ones. This might be easy, or it might be impossible. If all you use is the browser, easy.
I have switched from Windows completely to Linux more than 20 years ago, after a few years of dual-booting.
The moment when I could ditch Windows was when I got on Linux several video-related programs, e.g. a DVD player and a program that could use my TV tuner. For all other applications I had already switched to Linux earlier. Those other applications included MS Office, which at that time I continued to use, but I was using it on Linux under CrossOver, where it worked much better than on the contemporaneous Windows XP (!!). The switch to Linux was not free as in beer, because I was using some programs that I had purchased, e.g. MS Office Professional and CrossOver (which is an improved version of Wine, guaranteed to work with certain commercial programs). I did the switch not to save money, but to be able to do things that are awkward or impossible on Windows.
I do all the things that you mention, and many others, on various desktops and laptops with Linux. I do not doubt that there may be Linux distributions where you may have difficulties in combining very different kinds of applications. However, there certainly also exist distributions without such problems.
For instance, I am using Gentoo Linux, precisely because it allows an extreme customization, I really can combine any kinds of applications with minimal problems, even in most cases when they stupidly insist to use dynamic libraries of a certain version, with each application wanting a different version.
As another example, I am using XFCE as a graphic desktop environment, because it provides only the strictly necessary functions and it allows me to easily combine otherwise conflicting applications, e.g. Gnome applications with KDE applications.
XFCE is actually a great example of the problem with Linux
It's wayland support is utterly broken right now and getting very little attention. The major distros are about to put X11 in the grave and then XFCE will die (or more likely it'll live on in some weird offshoot distro).
That's not really an acceptable situation for a consumer product.
now obviously xfce is not one of the main DEs pushed by the distros, but it's plight is a symptom of a couple of problems that plague linux
Compatibility is important. MSFT, for all their faults, puts a shitload of effort into making sure that even old ass software keeps working. They're not perfect (especially in the last few years) but they're miles ahead of linux here. As a user, I shouldn't ever have to know or care about wayland or pipewire or whatever other nonsense, but that's not the case. I have to know just so I can find software that works with my system.
X11 is not gone yet, XFCE is working on wayland support, and in addition to that, there are projects that work on allowing X11 window managers to run on wayland.
XFCE just has not updated.
If this is a "linux problem", then what about android and ios? its a million times worse, but somehow thats a perfectly good situation for a consumer product?
There’s been no similar situation on ios or Android so your comparison doesn’t make sense to me
there isnt? then how come theres several apps I want to install on android 15 that isnt compatible with newer android because google removed/changed APIs?
you may just not have seen them, because other people work around them.
> Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
Just use any major distribution. Fedora, Debian, Mint, Gentoo, etc.
All linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software. The choice of distribution is just the choice of what organization packages the software.
> I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer.
I do all of that on a single linux installation. Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
> MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
I do believe distribution matters somewhat. For example, Fedora requires a lot of messing around to get video playback to work. A non-techie is gonna have a hard time installing gstreamer non-free plugins and non-free ffmpeg from RPM Fusion (not to mention figuring out that that's what they have to do in the first place...).
Non-techie NVidia users will similarly have trouble installing NVidia drivers on distros which don't make that easy.
And some distros are less careful about breaking stuff on updates than others. I stopped using Ubuntu after too many updates where random stuff broke just because Debian Testing happened to have shipped a bad package at the repo sync cut-off in the Ubuntu release cycle. One update made the Nextcloud desktop client segfault on launch, another broke auto login in GDM and required switching to TTY and editing a config file from the command line to fix.
Whether the distro ships a software center which makes it easy to install snaps, flatpaks or both will also heavily influence how easy it is for a new user to install the software they need.
Yes, it's just different packaging of many of the same software components. But it matters a whole lot to new users who rely on things to just work without the skills or experience to customize and debug stuff.
Use Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS , do not upgrade every 6 m0onths to get the latest bugs from upstream just because they GNOME/KDE made some small improvements for some feature you probably do not use. There are PPAs with latest kernels and NVIDIA driver if you really need to upgrade for your work or gaming. This shit on upgrade happens on cool distros too, just Google Arch broke on update and you will see that there were cases where the efi partition was deleted and the user data was lost or some font customization a dude done to GNOME broke the login after an update.
If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
You perfectly captured in a single sentence the attitude of Linux maintainers and why it will never ever be a mainstream OS.
> > MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
> There is no real compromise here. If you are running a distro that isn't capable of running everything, you are barking up the wrong tree and probably trying to use some random hannah montana linux maintained by 1 guy.
You got me wrong, I'm not saying that you should go for either of those options, but that if you search online a little bit as a layman, you will be confused because some distributions (popular ones at that) advertise themselves as the right choice to do X.
It's all about confusion for the end user. Just search for "linux gaming distro" and see for yourself the slurry of stupid ass distributions recommended when none of them should exist in the first place.
Well from my experience on a Mac or in iOS you either adapt to their workflow or you leave the platform, I don't think there's a middle ground there. From my experience Linux is actually on the total opposite side, which might be even more confusing: it will allow you to create any workflow you want, if you are willing to sacrifice your sanity to get there. Btw Linux user here who already lost part of their mental health.
TBH some gaming bound distros enable RT based optizations for gaming not seen in any OS. Also, with Flatpak, there's no excuses, you will get the same software everywhere.
Whatever changes they make would be better if upstreamed to a more popular OS.
Essentially your argument boils down to "linux is bad because you have choice".
The slop articles you get are the result of the natural SEO competition.
The real problem is that anyone is propagandizing the concept of a "gaming distro" in the first place.
Ah yes, famous "you're holding it wrong" :)
(My current gripe is with KDE on Wayland - i decided to move from Gnome on X11 for $reasons and it's so hard to get a thing as simple as clipboard, multiple monitors to work consistently. Apparently devs have very strong opinions on workflows...)
I mainly use various Linux distributions since 90s, also while working in systems administration for most of that time, but to say that "all Linux distributions are essentially packaging the same software" and suggest that's all is a vast...... understatement to say the least.
Different kernels, different system libraries, GPU drivers either no free or open source, kernel patches available or not (because there's a conflict no one has time to fix), security patches' availability (with distinct difference between RHEL-adjacent distributions and the others), different init, even filesystems and window managers with their quirks.
It's bordering on false to suggest all the tasks can be easily replicated in all the distributions, which is also the sentiment among the users. Oh well, perhaps, if you spend infinite amount of time preparing a very specific ansible playbook which will bend and coerce this specific flavour to install all the necessary libraries and patches, kick the kernel just right, and backport the Improvements from the incompatible distribution to the chosen one.
Then yeah.
Perhaps. But you're basically saying MacOS is FreeBSD.
> Your problem is probably that your first instinct is to emulate your old workflow instead of finding a new workflow.
I recently started a new job, and was given a choice of Windows or Linux for my desktop. Picked Linux, specifically Ubuntu, since others there use Ubuntu. (I've been using Macs primarily for decades, but can operate in any OS.)
I have my workflow set up mostly fine now, but...there isn't really any alternative to BBEdit. Anywhere but the Mac. And believe me, I've looked. (I'd genuinely love to be proved wrong, though!)
The combination of
- a programmer's text editor
- that's not focused around "workspaces" (like VSCode—which I also use)
- that can do robust regexp search & replace, both within and across files
- that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
- that can transparently open & save files requiring privilege elevation (just provide the password when needed)
- that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
- for free (there's a paid upgrade that unlocks more advanced features that are very neat, but that I have never yet needed)
...appears, from what I can tell, to be unique.
So I'm using...I forget, I think it's kate? and it's fine, I can operate...but between that and a variety of other little things, it's just a constant friction. Fortunately, I should be able to get a Mac laptop; it just needs to be quoted, approved, and ordered.
Have you tried Geany? It's what I use often. IDK about privilege escalation, you may need some sort of fumbling around with xhost.
SFTP is an interesting one, I am not sure how the interaction with filezilla goes. I tend to just use scp or edit files in nano over ssh.
So..."try this" that ignores multiple of my requirements.
I think you're describing emacs, or vim. :)
OK; you got me. I was insufficiently prepared for pedantry. Let's add another couple of critical points:
- Must be a GUI application.
- Must integrate at least somewhat reasonably with the platform's keyboard shortcuts and similar, not have its own entire way of doing things that needs 6 years to learn.
Not pedantry; just responding to your "genuine" desire for suggestions. My mistake, I guess.
BBEdit is great, but if you need to learn something new anyway, or if being tied to macOS is ever going to be a concern, emacs or vim are equally-capable and cross-platform options.
You can learn 90% of everything you will ever need in a week or two. You will never need to switch editors again. It's a great trade, all things considered.
I've used both emacs and vim before. Long enough to actually know how.
I don't like using them. (I know, this may come as a shock to a diehard advocate.)
I like GUI text editors much better.
But also: How do vim and emacs do with these points from my requirements?
> - that keeps its list of open files in a sidebar, vertically, rather than in tabs, across the top
> - that can transparently open & save files over SFTP
To the best of my recollection, they don't do either of those. Which, if true, means that even your initial "genuine" response not actually in good faith, because I did say I wanted one that did all of those.
...So maybe keep your snide remarks and scare-quotes to yourself?
You're awfully condescending for someone who started out claiming to be genuine.
That sucks. Good luck out there.
(responding to your edits, for the possible benefit of any readers who are genuinely interested...)
Both emacs and vim can do side panels, and remote editing.
I don't want to be little your experience, but your self professed difficulties are not universal. Especially calling Linux hostile to users (as opposed to friendly Windows??) just seems like you don't like pepperoni pizza so you're going to tell us how horrible pepperoni pizza is for everyone.
it apperas you do not really quite know what you're talking about. you should update your ideas of what distributions are and do
> given that I do everything from programming, to gaming, video editing, browsing, basic stuff on Office, 3D modelling and printing, etc. from this computer. There's literally no way for Linux to support all of this, and even to get 50% of the way there would be a huge headache with emulation and following half outdated tutorials.
> "Oh, you want to install <common software>? Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository and run this command which will work only Debian Bookworm. Oh, you have another version? Then ignore what I said before and run this wget command on https://haxx.notavirus.net/sexy-girls.exe and run install.sh as root. Oh, it errored in the middle of the installation? Here's a link to the solution on a decade old forum post that is now a 404."
You really haven't given desktop linux a chance in the last two to four years have you? I will agree its not "ergonomic" enough _yet_ for many casual and intermediary users but I assure you a competent intermediary user or advanced user can do all those tasks without much fuss nowadays. I've been using desktop linux for almost 20 years now and its so much easier nowadays to throw random programs (flatpaks, snaps, appimages, distroboxes and whatnot helps a ton) and have them work correctly, build up a generalist linux workstation that does just about anything you want.
> Also not having to wonder which distribution to install because MyAss_OS! works best for Steam but FuckNux works best with video editing software and you happen to need both.
I wish this could be communicated more clearly to prospective desktop linux users but usually what you want is to be using the bleeding edge. Arch is too bloody and complicated for most users, Fedora strikes a nice balance but will leave you with some cuts and Ubuntu is usually the safest choice, but can be a bit stale.
> Linux supporting all common end user applications and games, and working with all consumer hardware reliably, and having an intuitive and modern looking UI.
Try a gnome based distro (without all the prejudice like "eww it looks like a tablet ui") and tell me if it isn't a damn good, modern and intuitive UI. It has it's faults and own goals I wished the knucklehead gnome devs would fix but its a far cry from anemic linux desktop environments of yore.
As far as linux supporting everything under the sun... I just don't think thats a prerequesite for it to be a good windows alternative and amass a critical mass of users. Maybe once it has 20% market share being everything to everyone will be a goal but for now the best you can do is give it an honest try every few years and see for yourself if it's good enough for your use case. See if existing FOSS software is adequate for your needs or weather it's possible or you are willing to run some of the niche windows apps in wine.
There is no chance of linux becoming more popular if even the crowd here at hacker news isn't willing to give it chance once in a while.
A lot of commercial software (think TurboTax) doesn't support Linux. Those that do require somewhat convoluted installation. Closest analog that Linux has to this is idk, snap on deb?
Agree that web browsing is easy enough, but people want to install programs on their machines. Doing so on Linux still exceeds the average consumer's capabilities or willingness.
I've been using it daily for a few years, and just last night I had to Google around about AppImage, which I had never heard of.
TurboTax is on the web now.
Norms and addiction: the same reasons people refuse to quit smoking cigarettes in spite of evidence it will harm them.
The dinosaurs are going to die off.
Microslop at finest.
AI already fighting the humans for control of the machine
Haha I have never used the start menu to shutdown windows I mean it hasn’t been for 20 plus years; I have it engraved into my head for so long to use the shutdown /f /t 0 /s has what a price of shit os.
what's new
The health dashboard says it only affects Enterprise and IoT. The KB note says “all editions”. Which is it? I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick.
Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
It affects Win11 23H2. Support for Home and Pro for 23H2 ended in November. Almost everyone should be on 24H2 or 25H2 except the dedicated longer support term editions.
> I wish El Reg did deeper reporting besides their snark shtick
El Reg has never the place to go for deeper reporting, or even simply plain accurate reporting.
Their pieces on Apple for example, are well known to be 100% Apple bashing. Allegedly because one day Apple did not give them a press-pass for an event and they have been holding a grudge ever since.
> Also, 3/4 of comments here are already off-topic. Never change, HN.
Sounds like Lobsters would be a better home for you. IIRC you get banned there if you dare go off-topic. ;)