Comment by einsteinx2
12 hours ago
> Microsoft says that entering the command "shutdown /s /t 0" at the command prompt will, in fact, force your PC to turn off, whether it wants to or not.
Wow how the tables have turned…the argument used to be you used Windows instead of Linux because on Linux you might occasionally have to use the scary terminal to fix an issue haha.
Microsoft has been issuing fixes like this with alarmingly increasing frequency.
It's part of their secret strategy to turn oldschool Windows dinosaurs into enthusiastic Linux power users. Next they'll introduce middle click pasting.
Now that GNOME wants to abandon it.
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They already did that by forcing "AI" into the OS.
PC mice haven't had three buttons for decades!
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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.)
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.
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Yeah, sure this is a thing. All of Microsoft's people secretly use Linux...
The one dev I know at Microsoft runs WSL2
I can't really add to that one but I do know that many at Cisco turn old Cisco gear into Linux workstations.
That and forced LLM adoption means they solve problems in text.
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
Alt+F4 on the desktop does the same thing, but does it with a neat UI. No scary CLI needed.
Edit - it's Alt+F4.
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 ;).
I use it in command prompt semi-regularly, for some reason never thought to use Win+R to run it...
You can always just pull the power cord too, or long-press the power button on a laptop.
Pulling the power cord on a laptop won't shut it down, it will just start using the battery.
Some desktop PCs have a physical power switch on the power supply, usually next to where the power cord plugs in. But it is becoming more rare. Every $0.50 they can save in costs is added to the bottom line.
Never ever seen a power supply without a switch in my entire life and looking at eshops here in europe i cant find it either. Even the $30 have that
Also try pressing power button for 5-10 seconds on a laptop instead
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Don't PSUs have a physical rocker switch for on/off?
Most but not all.
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I understand the sarcasm but copy pasting a bash or powershell command is faster and less error prone than following the instructions to open menus, dialogs, tabs and clicking buttons, especially in deeply nested UIs.
You’re preaching to the choir, I’m a heavy terminal user and I agree completely.
I think you are being premature, I'll wait until HN updates the site and someone posts their counter point in dance notation before deciding which medium supports actions that are easiest to communicate about.
I don't see how a command line tool with 10 different flags is necessarily less "error prone" than UI. In fact, I have used many tools where a flag is confusing or has conflicts with another flag in an unexpected way, not to mention subtle issues like escaping.
I once had to pass along to the support team a command for one of our customers to run. It ultimately didn't work because someone along the chain A) autocorrected the spelling of the command name, B) converted the quotation marks to fancy “”, and C) converted the hyphen into some fancy dash.
It is easier to copy/paste. If the GUI has more than one step people might be confused. Also some GUIs are hard to see or read for people with vision handicaps.
`find` has entered the chat
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.
> If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, there would be no problem.
On face value, I find this suggestion hilarious. People are having sandboxing issues left, right and center with AI agents and MCPs, so clearly there would be enormous problems with giving an LLM full unscoped terminal access. Remember the guy who had his hard drive wiped?
Do you just mean that the ABIs are inconsistent and you want a more unified way to specify what you want (but the user still more-or-less spells out what command will be invoked)? I have some sympathy for that concern, yes.
If CLIs functioned as LLM and you could talk freely with it, it would kiss your ass while it hallucinates about the files on your hard drives, invent command line switches that either don't do anything or does something other than what you want, and every command that used to take just 5-10 characters would now require you to type paragraphs. No thank you.
GUIs are great for when you're new to a bit of software as you can see the various options and get a feel for the possibilities. CLIs are nearly always more flexible once you've read the man page, but is a steeper learning path.
Automation/scripting is when CLIs really come into their own as otherwise you end up becoming a GUI click monkey. The best is when there's both a GUI and CLI (as long as they work the same way).
I wonder how good CLIs could have been if a fraction of the resources that have gone into GUIs had gone into making CLIs more user friendly. A sequence of words is a pretty natural way of conveying what you want done.
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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