> 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.
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.)
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.
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 ;).
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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'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.
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 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.
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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CI/CD baby! Deliver early, deliver often, fix it later.
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.)
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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
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 ;).
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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.
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Don't PSUs have a physical rocker switch for on/off?
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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.
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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.
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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?
>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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
[dead]
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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
From what I understand, the shutdown command is actually what is still working.
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
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> 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.
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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.
No I always use keyboard for that.
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.
they will just start shipping windows with a thermonuclear core to generate power.
Laptops with batteries will shrug
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.
Maybe they could ask CrowdStrike to issue a software update to "fix" this.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
-omg, I always disable windows update -more harm than good unless you're in some more sensitive position
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...
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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).
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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
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https://xkcd.com/1172/
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.
what's new
They're probably just testing the waters. They already took away proper standby, because reasons.
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.
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
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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
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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.
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The dinosaurs are going to die off.
> 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.
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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.
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> Sure, just add this totally not sketchy repository
Or my old favourite "trust me, just run `curl foo | bash` to install..."
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.
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.
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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. ;)