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Topic: Windows Frustration Thread (Read 41055 times)

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #101 –
Quote from: krake on
Because MS killed security only updates many IT people were reluctant to swallow MS all-in-one shady updates.
There's a reason Debian has been my primary OS since 2011 and it's not that it's gratis. (Heck, I still have Windows on both my desktop and my laptop. Only the old netbook is Xubuntu-only.)

The update process is so much more streamlined in most Linux distros. By and large only kernel upgrades require restarting. Most updates can just run in the background daily and e-mail you a report about it.

(Okay, that's not the reason, but the nicer update process is certainly a big boon.)

But yeah, I can very much see where people are coming from with the "update to Windows 10" debacle. And it wasn't just a one-time fluke, they kept sneaking the damned Windows 10 update nonsense.

On a related note, after my Windows installed the "Creator's Update" the other day it booted to Edge telling me to make it the default browser. Have they learned nothing?

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #102 –
Since Win2K I did only install security related updates on Windows.
Even those security updates were selective. As an example - among the first things I've done with a new computer was a tailored fresh install.
No .NET framework and as such no security updates for that risky environment.
Over 90% of Windows' security updates were/are addressed for Internet Explorer/Edge and the .NET framework.
On Win7 I've also disabled WindowsDefender which I had no use for and as such skipped the definition updates as well.
I didn't have to install many updates over the years and never had problems with the OS.
As of the "update to Windows 10" debacle, it didn't affected me and prooved me right for the way I did updates all over the years.

Speaking of Linux
Do all popular distros offer security updates?
Are you offered to review the security updates and select which one to install?

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #103 –
Quote from: krake on
Speaking of Linux
Do all popular distros offer security updates?
Are you offered to review the security updates and select which one to install?
Different Linuxes do it differently. Popular ones resemble Windows in that even if you can take a look at the code of every single patch (at Github or the like) it may be difficult to bypass it.

The most relevant patches we are talking about concern the kernel. If you are proficient enough to tailor the kernel, you can bypass all updates for it while still receiving all other updates. I'm a noob and I don't care for that. When I run into too many issues, I simply reinstall. But my experience on Linux has been generally solid and pleasant.

The worst problem I've had with Linux was buying a computer with AMD Phenom processor which seems to be specifically designed to seriously hickup with Linux. Reinstallation does not help there. Selling it off helps.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #104 –
If I understand you correctly all security updates concerning the OS are kernel patches.
Security updates for third party software like Java, .NET, browser, ..., are separate update packages/patches.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #105 –
No. The main point is: It's kernel updates versus everything else. It's just that kernel updates for a single point version tend to be security updates and minor bugfixes only. If you want a kernel feature update, you generally upgrade to a different kernel version number (upgrade as distinguished from update). Linux makes it easy to keep several kernel versions on board and you can switch them by rebooting.

If I remember right, the last time I looked at a *Buntu, there were three levels of updates, one level for kernel (labelled Security, the way you like, but it was really more like for kernel only) and you could refuse that level.

Browsers and such also receive security updates, obviously, but they are not distinguished from ordinary app updates in any way. Generally you can click around and make selections in the thing called updates notifier, but there are a lot of interdependencies within Linux, so in reality you cannot tailor things too much there.

Linuxes fall roughly into two classes. In the more popular class it's generally assumed/recommended that you update everything. In those distros (including Ubuntoids) you don't go to the Firefox website to update your Firefox. You wait for the Firefox updates in the distro repository[1] and you can only update when the volunteers who work for the distro have completed administering all the packages in the repository so users can update their computers from there. You can refuse updates for some select packages/apps, but you must know what you are doing.

There's the thing called package manager (related to, but distinct from updates notifier) that is specific to each distro. You will need to learn to know the package manager for your distro. When things break and the package manager is a good one and you know it well enough, you can revert updates, change labels/tags on the packages etc. to fix things. When you end up not liking a distro and you choose another, you must learn to know the other package manager.

Generally it's the easiest and safest to refuse kernel updates. Other packages/apps tend to have more interdependencies that can break.

Then there's the following important catch. You may refuse an update, either for a select package or for the entire system. Then comes the next update cycle and you will receive the previous updates along with it anyway. It's just the way Linux generally works. It cannot work anyother way, because interdependencies are many and it takes a lot of work to keep a distro consistent. To completely bypass this, there's another class of Linuxes, the hypernerdy old-school tinkerer class.

In that other class of Linuxes, e.g. Slackware, perhaps even better - BSD, the distro repository (the server that hosts the updates for the distro) hosts just the bare essentials, because it's generally assumed that people update the apps/packages locally and individually. In this class, you see an update for Firefox on the internet, just like on Windows. Then you go download the Linux version for Firefox and compile it locally. Compile = build an installable package. It's a good skill because you can modify it to your heart's content. Then install it. If a dependency breaks, you hunt for an update for the dependent package too or you figure out the changed dependency requirements and recompile things from source, applying the changed requirements. In a similar way you can compile and recompile the kernel, applying or removing whatever parts you want/need.

In small ways, we can/must practise all this on the more popular Linuxes also, whenever we want to install something that is not hosted in the repository or when we want (and know how) to modify the kernel.
1 Repository is the server that hosts updates for the distro. It's just like Microsoft hosts Windows updates, but the difference is that Microsoft does not host updates for desktop apps like Firefox or Libreoffice, whereas Linux hosts updates for everything from kernel through system libraries up to desktop apps and it's recommended to update everything all at once, as much as is hosted and administered in the repository.↵

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #106 –
Quote from: krake on
If I understand you correctly all security updates concerning the OS are kernel patches.
Security updates for third party software like Java, .NET, browser, ..., are separate update packages/patches.
No, but the kernel is close to the only thing that necessitates a system restart. The other stuff is more like do you use Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS (only security updates for several years) or do you use a rolling distro where these things are hard to separate.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #107 –
Hmm, stable and rolling releases. It gets complicated for a noob. :)
Let's take a stable release with only security updates and no new features for several years.
I assume that those security updates apply to both, the OS and third party software bundled with it. Correct?
But I'm afraid that things can get even more complicated for a noob.
What happens if (I assume it's possible) you uninstall some third party software of the bundle or replace it with other ones?
Does the OS detect if the security updates don't match the modified bundle?

BTW, as far as I can see Debian has a vast number of software packages as options to choose from.
Besides, there is also Wine.

Edit:
Sorry Ersi, I've overlooked your post which already answers some of my questions. Thanks!

As far as I can see it, there is no silver bullet.
However one thing is for sure. Win7 is the last OS from MS I'm using on my home computer.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #108 –
Quote from: krake on
I assume that those security updates apply to both, the OS and third party software bundled with it. Correct?
Yes. Although in a system like Debian almost everything but the package management system is "third-party" in the way you seem to be using it, the OS itself (i.e., GNU+Linux) included. From a distro-perspective it would generally make more sense to use third-party to refer to software not found in the official repositories.

Quote from: krake on
What happens if (I assume it's possible) you uninstall some third party software of the bundle or replace it with other ones?
Does the OS detect if the security updates don't match the modified bundle?
You can pin packages, but generally the only reason to install a different version of a package is to have it at a higher version than what's currently available in the repo. So the official repo version overwriting it if and when it's updated is normally exactly what you'd want to happen.

Third-party software in general (such as Opera or Vivaldi) often maintains its own repos that integrate with the system.

Quote from: krake on
Besides, there is also Wine.
In Wine you'd have to update manually or use whichever auto-updater is included in a Windows application. Expecting the system to take care of that would be highly irrational. :P (Of course the system does update Wine itself.)

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #109 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
In Wine you'd have to update manually or use whichever auto-updater is included in a Windows application. Expecting the system to take care of that would be highly irrational. :P
As noob as I am I didn't expect that. :)
I only mentioned Wine in regard of some Windows software one might be used to and there is no linux port for it. :)

BSD is not Linux exactly

Reply #110 –
Just to keep it clear, "BSD" is not a Linux distro. It is another operating system - or better, another class of operating systems descendant from the old Unix - or something like that. :)

Re: BSD is not Linux exactly

Reply #111 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
You can pin packages...
This is a gross technical term. You "pin" only in the graphical package manager. It means "to exclude from the common update cycle".

On my distro, the graphical package manager (even though pretty and popular and eagerly developed) is not quite safe. It happens often enough when the update notification explicitly recommends command-line.

Quote from: Frenzie on
Third-party software in general (such as Opera or Vivaldi) often maintains its own repos that integrate with the system.
True mostly for Debian and Ubuntoids. There are Linux-friendly software producers, such as Vivaldi etc. that normally produce a Debian and Fedora package, sometimes also OpenSUSE and more. But if you have a different distro, you can't expect the Debian/buntu package to work just so. (Yup, a "Linux" package is guaranteed to work only on a single select distro. This is an unintended consequence of separate package management systems for every distro. A distro normally has its own separate repositories which in turn implies a separate package management system which in turn has brought about incompatibility of package formats across Linux distros.)

If the thing is not in the repository, you must grab the source or tarball and compile locally. Which is why I use Manjaro/Arch whose nicety is, on top of the official repository, an extraordinarily large bunch of user-built software packages and compiler scripts that are conveniently shared.

Quote from: Barulheira on
Just to keep it clear, "BSD" is not a Linux distro. It is another operating system - or better, another class of operating systems descendant from the old Unix - or something like that. :)
This is another gross technicality. Nothing gets clearer this way.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #112 –
Quote from: ersi on
This is a gross technical term. You "pin" only in the graphical package manager. It means "to exclude from the common update cycle".
Exclude is a much "grosser" word than pin. If you pin something it stays put until you unpin it. Same as pinned tabs. Exclude is an ugly, difficult Latinate word. :p

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #113 –
Something I forgot to mention and might be of interest for someone.
Less known is the MUC (MicrosoftUpdateCatalog) wherefrom there is still possible to downlad security-only updates. It's not nearly as convenient as MS updates used to be in the past but it's still a poor option of last resort.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #115 –
Quote from: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/notepad-gets-a-major-upgrade-now-does-unix-line-endings/
Notepad gets a major upgrade, now does Unix line endings

Notepad, being a Windows application, has always demanded the CRLF pair. When faced with Unix files—quite common for source code and similar things—it sees the bare-naked LFs and prints them as black squares. Because it doesn't start a new line when faced with a naked LF, it shows the entire contents of the file as a single lengthy line, which makes it hard to read, much less edit.

But in the next update to Windows (likely to arrive in October or thereabouts), Notepad will handle Unix and classic MacOS line endings in addition to the Windows kind. This will make the editor much more useful than it currently is.
If I am reading right, Unix-like behaviour will become the default.

This particular detail never bothered me much (and it bothers me even less now when I am not on Windows), because it was possible to choose upon saving whether it will be ANSI or UNIX. What bothered me was that the setting was not persistent, so I had to use alternatives like Notepad++.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #117 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
Quote from: ersi on
This particular detail never bothered me much
Every other program auto-detects and correctly displays files regardless of line endings. It's always been pretty annoying to me.
That's right. I could be misassessing my level of annoyance due to my current distance from Windows. There were so many other things that were far more annoying in Windows. And, when on Windows, I gave Notepad++ permission over all possible text files even for quick-viewing, so I did not run too much into Windows Notepad.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #118 –
The Xfce notepad app, Mousepad, is effectively what a basic app like that is supposed to look like.

Notepad has actually received many improvements over the years, but the weird thing is that edit (MS-DOS Editor) was always a lot more like Mousepad. The MS-DOS Editor even received support for Unix line endings in the version shipped with Windows 95! (Albeit in the form of automatically converting them rather than just keeping them whichever way they happen to be.)

I don't think Notepad has changed (on the surface) since XP, and in basic look and feel it's been the same since Windows 3. That's not necessarily a bad thing, of course. They paid attention to Paint and now look what happened to it.[1]
1 You're supposed to use something called Paint 3D instead. Is it just me or does a name like that scream early to mid '90s? Coming soon, Notepad 3D…↵

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #119 –
It has bothering me much, when accessing somebody else's Windows console and having to do something trivial such as quickly editing a small text file of sorts (and then trying to search for an installed alternative text editor).

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #120 –
Second work week remotely. Windows sucks.

Lots of our tasks, appointments, online (chat and video) sessions, and files are force-directed to Microsoft Teams, which is atrocious at managing all that. There is a huge search hole in Teams, but it is useless. Teams (same as modern Office and many other apps) does not respect the Windows theming. There is no tabbing, no tiling, and no detach in Teams, so you can have just one thing open at a time.

And we cannot install our own apps. We cannot install Vivaldi as a browser that is actually suitable for multi-tasking. I hope this Windows thing catches corona and dies soon.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #121 –
The weird thing is that Outlook is better at a lot of that stuff and has been since time immemorial (mid-'90s).

Microsoft Lync was fine for chat/call/video, although no more than that. But was it worse than Teams… disturbingly, probably not.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #122 –
And the permissions and privileges hierarchy is all messed up. You never know when you change a thing in Teams, if it changes just for you or for everyone. You never know that the way something displays for you displays the same way for others, or differently, how differently, to whom and why. A total disaster.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #123 –
Same in Office 365. Filters are an integral part of using Excel, and the whole point of 365 is collaboration, right? But applying a filter applies it for everyone. It's useless.

https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/13151544-enable-user-filter-views

I appreciate that it must be astonishingly difficult to implement. People first publicly noticed at least 5 years ago after all, but the simple fact is that a traditional network drive with user edit lockout works a million times better and has worked that way just fine since presumably at least the mid-'90s. I would expect it hasn't fundamentally changed from a user perspective since MS Office 3 or 4, albeit possibly 95, 97 or potentially even as late as 2000.

Tbh I mostly prefer LibreOffice over MS Office, or at least Writer over Word and possibly Calc over Excel. I've never really played with Publisher for example.

Unlike Writer I don't think Calc is really any better, probably not really any worse either, but Excel doesn't show you what you've selected in inactive windows. It's incredibly annoying. I have no idea what they were thinking. Also Excel has or had this weird program-wide undo instead of document-based undo.

Incidentally, if you use the ribbon in LibreOffice then Alt+letter doesn't work to activate a tab like in MS Office. So they both have their ups & downs. The MS Office ribbon has grown on me somewhat after using it for a decade, although I still think traditional menus are easier to find your way around. In any case Microsoft made very sure that other than visually, ribbons behave exactly the same as menus from a keyboard perspective. This is a lesson that no one else seems to have learned. Rather than contorting your fingers weirdly, you do something like Alt+o, d for "clear direct formatting". This automatically works for every menu entry, so if you use a function a lot you don't have to make up custom keybinds or whatever.

LibreOffice's experimental ribbon ("tabbed") doesn't work that way, unfortunately. It does underline letters though, so I guess it's planned.

Re: Windows Frustration Thread

Reply #124 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
The weird thing is that Outlook is better at a lot of that stuff and has been since time immemorial (mid-'90s).
Yes. The funny thing with a lot being pushed into the bad interface of Teams is that emails are still in Outlook and I have to keep both Outlook and Teams open anyway. Why didn't they extend Outlook with chat, video, file management, etc. instead? And arm Outlook with more tabbing and detaching? And, if they really so badly want Teams, rename Outlook to Teams!

In the current Teams there isn't even a proper fullscreen (for anything except video)! There is only something like fill-the-window, which would be great if it were accompanied with vanish-the-interface, but no, Microsoft just can't give people what people really need. Not even when the people are corporations that pay them by the millions.

Quote from: Frenzie on
Same in Office 365... the whole point of 365 is collaboration, right?
Well, not exactly the same issues, but different equally frustrating issues. The point of Office used to be: View and edit docs. It used to be possible to open as many of them as the computer resources allowed, a window per document.

Now with 365, the thing struggles opening a new document when there is already a document open. With Excel in particular it seems to want to close the previous document when you want to open the next one and throws up an error/dialogue to save or delete the previous one. Wtf is that? I am not allowed to view two documents side by side?

You may not have encountered the same exact glitches. Much of my frustration may be due to the overly protected and locked down, "secure" beyond stupidity administratively controlled work environment settings. This adds a whole new layer of complications and Windows is just not handling complications well.

I miss Unix very much, my first work environment back when I started university. We got an A4 with login and the initial password and a few other commands to type, for email, word processing and printing. The instructions on the single A4 worked as promised, without any glitches or hickups. Forever. Never a need to google stuff to solve problems. Problems did not exist.