[HN Gopher] PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
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PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
Author : smurda
Score : 217 points
Date : 2026-01-17 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| ArcHound wrote:
| 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.
| quchen wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| jetin wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| IMX people often care more about which web browser is
| installed than which OS.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| vander_elst wrote:
| > 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?
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.)
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> 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?
| hansvm wrote:
| > 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.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > 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.'
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| 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
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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!
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| > 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's the opposite. .doc was never fully reverse
| engineered properly, but .docx is way easier to handle
| and was for quite a while.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Yeah, I believe you're right.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| .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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| nephihaha wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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...
| reactordev wrote:
| They do but the mode has changed from Word.exe to
| https://www.o365.com/word or sharepoint -> word doc.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| manwe150 wrote:
| 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
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| okanat wrote:
| 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).
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| 9JollyOtter wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Google docs exclusively.
| matltc wrote:
| I know someone who sends screenshots of their entire
| desktop pasted into a word doc in portrait mode
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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?
| Paianni wrote:
| Windows would be 'taught' as a byproduct of another
| activity involving Windows software, usually starting
| with Office/365.
| 201984 wrote:
| Sadly, schools don't have real computers any more, it's
| all chromebooks. Gen Alpha is going to be completely
| computer illiterate.
| furyofantares wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| I don't understand, we didn't have computers at all and
| didn't end up illiterate. Why are you underestimating
| kids so much?
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| Uvix wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| Uvix wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| End users mostly don't know what Windows is. You can see this
| when someone picks up a tablet and opens Google Docs.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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."
| beeflet wrote:
| 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.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| vander_elst wrote:
| 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.
| subscribed wrote:
| 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...)
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| simion314 wrote:
| 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.
| subscribed wrote:
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| > 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository
|
| Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to
| install..."
| pluralmonad wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| 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.
| redeeman wrote:
| 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?
| redeeman wrote:
| it apperas you do not really quite know what you're talking
| about. you should update your ideas of what distributions are
| and do
| amlib wrote:
| > 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.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| > 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.
| Telaneo wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| In what way is Win11 "order of magnitude more complex" than
| Linux desktop or Windows 7 or 10?
| esafak wrote:
| The dinosaurs are going to die off.
| matltc wrote:
| 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.
| 26d0 wrote:
| My mind immediately jumped to the "pull out the plug!" moment in
| a movie.
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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
| mionhe wrote:
| "> Dennis"
| tremon wrote:
| As you keep watching, you see from the human face growing a
| silvery-looking tentacle that curves in on itself.
| inetknght wrote:
| Laptops with batteries will shrug
| sevennull wrote:
| they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core
| to generate power.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I had identical scenario that killed ssd drive. since then I
| always place laptop with vents on the top
| Droobfest wrote:
| I did too, it ran Linux.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| "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
| fpoling wrote:
| 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.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| Tade0 wrote:
| Classic. My last Windows laptop cooked its screen like that.
|
| Meanwhile my work Windows laptop would just go full throttle
| during "sleep".
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| 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...
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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_.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| 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.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Look up 'Fast Startup'. It's a thing since Windows 8.
| It's a curse onto humanity.
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| > 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.
| lovich wrote:
| 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
| dataflow wrote:
| 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).
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I'm sure they meant S5 - shutdown. I had to Google it as I
| also guessed S0 = shutdown.
| da_chicken wrote:
| Actually I mixed up S3 and S4. 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...
| g947o wrote:
| 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!
| concinds wrote:
| 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.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 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. ;)
| da_chicken wrote:
| 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.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| > 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.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly
| increasing frequency.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows
| dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll
| introduce middle click pasting.
| esafak wrote:
| PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
| j1elo wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Ironically, Microsoft pioneered the scroll wheel.
| shlip wrote:
| popularized, not pioneered.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| 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)
| wafflemaker wrote:
| 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 :(
| tremon wrote:
| 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
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| My dude, my mouse has 5 buttons. No idea what you're
| talking about here.
| esafak wrote:
| I'm down to one. Less is more.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Now that GNOME wants to abandon it.
| spookie wrote:
| GNOME devs really are special. I wonder why.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| 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_.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Not even Rust zealots want to touch printing ;)
| networkadmin wrote:
| > My bet would be on a rewrite of CUPS in Rust.
|
| Please, don't give them any ideas.
| kombine wrote:
| https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-
| professio... for the sake of completeness here's Nate
| Graham version of events.
| Andrex wrote:
| *turn it from default-on to default-off
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| defaults matter a lot!
| shevy-java wrote:
| It's still a change. GNOME dictates onto users what the
| developers think the users should use or have. I find
| that not acceptable.
| squigz wrote:
| 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.
| kstenerud wrote:
| 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.
| networkadmin wrote:
| 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.
| garciansmith wrote:
| You can unify the middle mouse selection and the regular
| clipboard in KDE if you wish. Personally I find keeping
| them separate very convenient.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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/
| jolmg wrote:
| 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.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Having two separate clipboard buffers is a feature I
| intentionally use.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1172/
| jolmg wrote:
| 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
| johnisgood wrote:
| You and I both.
| m132 wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Shift+Insert has always been my preferred method of
| pasting into a terminal after too many mishaps with
| right-click or middle-click paste.
| amlib wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Never in my life have I heard of this security issue.
| monooso wrote:
| > 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.
| networkadmin wrote:
| Yes, but the problem is the GNOME organization is headed
| by opinionated morons with zero clue how to design a user
| interface.
| immibis wrote:
| 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.
| leptons wrote:
| They already did that by forcing "AI" into the OS.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.)
| steve1977 wrote:
| Yeah, sure this is a thing. All of Microsoft's people
| secretly use Linux...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| That and forced LLM adoption means they solve problems in
| text.
| Bender wrote:
| I can't really add to that one but I do know that many at
| Cisco turn old Cisco gear into Linux workstations.
| potatowaffle wrote:
| 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.
| matltc wrote:
| The one dev I know at Microsoft runs WSL2
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| 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.
| wang_li wrote:
| CI/CD baby! Deliver early, deliver often, fix it later.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You can always just pull the power cord too, or long-press the
| power button on a laptop.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't PSUs have a physical rocker switch for on/off?
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Most but not all.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| lousken wrote:
| 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
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| opan wrote:
| >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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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).
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| kingstnap wrote:
| The problem with CLI isn't typing, its discoverability.
| Keep in mind conveying what you want done requires
| knowing what can be done first.
| whatevaa wrote:
| 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.
| socialcommenter wrote:
| > 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| You're preaching to the choir, I'm a heavy terminal user and
| I agree completely.
| hojofpodge wrote:
| 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.
| g947o wrote:
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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.
| matltc wrote:
| `find` has entered the chat
| lousken wrote:
| Year of the linux desktop
|
| Year of the windows cli
| steve1977 wrote:
| Windows always had a command line. I remember I used to do
| remote stuff via CLI even back on NT 4.0
| nubinetwork wrote:
| 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).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does this bring the old Halt and Catch Fire command back as
| an option?
| socialcommenter wrote:
| 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?)
| apublicfrog wrote:
| 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 ;).
| socialcommenter wrote:
| I use it in command prompt semi-regularly, for some reason
| never thought to use Win+R to run it...
| mdavid626 wrote:
| 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.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Don't forget virtual participation trophies for "Windows
| Insiders" to act as unpaid QA as the replacement system.
| davidkwast wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Microslop
| gessha wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| smj-edison wrote:
| 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?
| jlarocco wrote:
| 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.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Sure, but if your customers can't even use the AI products
| because your OS is dysfunctional, then you're still losing
| out.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| 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...
| graemep wrote:
| 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.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| But it can also evaporate in an instant. An actual userbase
| doesn't.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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_wolo wrote:
| 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
| steve1977 wrote:
| From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what
| is still working.
| hulitu wrote:
| > MS has started to vibe code Windows
|
| Started ? The chances of Shutdown (from the menu) working in
| Windows are about 90%.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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.
| Frotag wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just to point, but there's nothing simple about shutdown.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| D'oh sudo shutdown
|
| Linux: I give a damn about you're super critical nuclear
| reactor loading up, this computer is going down NOW
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| 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.
| tensility wrote:
| So, should we assume that they vibe-coded this patch? Sad...
| conception wrote:
| They had plenty of bad patches before this. Microsoft products
| just aren't great quality.
| aprilnya wrote:
| It's insane how many bad patches they've had recently though.
| I swear it didn't used to happen this often
| tosti wrote:
| 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...
| okokwhatever wrote:
| 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...
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| hexbin010 wrote:
| They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away
| proper standby, because reasons.
| 9JollyOtter wrote:
| 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.
| materialpoint wrote:
| 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.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| "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.
| networkadmin wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Some say RedHat as a whole was created by Microsoft.
|
| Presumably people who never read the Halloween documents?
| networkadmin wrote:
| People who consult numerous sources before reaching a
| final, definite conclusion.
| 9JollyOtter wrote:
| > 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| 9JollyOtter wrote:
| 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.
| t_mahmood wrote:
| 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.
| leptons wrote:
| >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.
| nvader wrote:
| 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.
| kmoser wrote:
| Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to
| "fix" this.
| emeril wrote:
| -omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless
| you're in some more sensitive position
| aeon_ai wrote:
| 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.
| g947o wrote:
| 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.)
| lmc wrote:
| > 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.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| This can be one cause, but sometimes the computer wakes up
| for no reason at all, even when not touching anything.
| g947o wrote:
| No I always use keyboard for that.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| 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.
| g947o wrote:
| Do you have a link for that? Now I am curious. Those videos
| are 3 hours long and there are too many of them.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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!
| pseidemann wrote:
| You can always long-press the on/off button to force a power
| cycle.
| nahBro wrote:
| what's new
| kaonwarb wrote:
| I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
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