Fuck Windows and Microsoft really. Today I had a meeting call through Teams first thing in the morning so I start my computer 10 minutes earlier than the call because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot and for Windows to be responsive. Windows decides to apply some past update so it takes 2 or 3 additional minutes which is fine, I am just in time for the meeting call. Well, 10 minutes into the call a notification in windows appears that the computer will restart in 5 minutes and with no option to postpone WTF. Imagine this was an important sales call, an emergency or something else critical, I might be fucked. The computer restarted I started my linux personal computer and I connect my bluetooth headphones to the it but no, they were connected to the Windows computer while it was restarting so I could not just call from it as the microphone started failing a few weeks ago. (I will just replace it, thanks Framework). So fuck my company for using Windows. Fuck Windows for developing such a nightmare OS with so shitty code. This was for sure a patch for a critical vulnerability, like always. And WTF this is Windows for a business, have a fucking super stable branch that does not need patches every other day. I don’t care about your updates to the shitty weather widget, just have a fucking working operating system that let’s me do my work. Fuck Microsoft monopolistic practices that keeps people and businesses from switching to Linux. There is no better publicity for Linux that Windows itself. Most Linux/GNU distros just let you choose when to update.
We have to use Windows at work for our high end CAD. There’s no FOSS alternative.
I use Linux at home. Which is basically a, less crap, copy of Windows. But is still missing important stuff.
I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I’ve used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven’t touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:
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After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, “what do you mean, it’s a fucking jpeg.” Then it did the same thing for a .zip.
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I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. “No worries” I thought, “I made a restore point!” I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it’s own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.
I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.
One similar thing happened to me on windows 8 (except I wasn’t testing it, I lost everything on my pc that day because it didn’t just fail to update and restore…it just fucked my drive with it !), so it’s not even a new type of issue. Even windows 10 was fucked, had a friend who never used bitlocker, never even knew it was a thing, who got his pc encrypted by it after an update, unable to unlock the damn thing, every solutions failed and had no other choice but to wipe his drive. It’s crazy how bad and unpractical windows can be.
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I’m assuming the windows machine is a work PC and the Linux is yours right?
Because what you describe doesn’t sound like a “windows” issue but rather an IT management issue.
You can put off updates and reboots a very long time. And always be able yo postpone them.
Applying updates on boot daily sounds dumb to me. But I’m also figuring your IT dept has poor (or no) sense in managing their inventory well. Most updates can be applied silently at a scheduled time.
Also, your machine sounds old and/or poorly maintained the way you describe it. If its more than 5 years old your company is just cheap.
I’m all for griping about Windows but this seems off to me.
This sounds like a problem with your organization. I use windows at the hospital where I work, and we don’t run into these kinds of issues. Yeah it is rife with other issues like goading you into using microsoft edge, one drive, and more, but updates are handled by IT.
I’ve only worked at one software company where devs where allowed to install Linux as their OS. It was awesome… except when there was an update and then you had an urgent request from management while you where fixing what the update broke
You want to use Linux and yet you don’t know what a newline character is?
why bother with that in a rant, I say it’s bloat, and they were right to no use it. in fact now that im thinking about this i realize i can save a lot of time if i dont give a shit what the text looks like. cry about it
IFYOUREMADENOUGHEVENSPACESANDLOWERCASELETTERSAREBLOAT
NDCNSNNTS2
translation
And consonants too
YMNVWLSRHT?
translation
You means vowels, right?
lmao
I have a channel on my team’s Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬
#windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅
I actually would really prefer for companies to just provide us virtual machines and I can connect to vpn and then to the work hosts. This way I can use my own setup.
VDI is fairly common, but it has is own set of problems
Our work is the opposite. As soon as a new machine arrives we go straight to BIOS at boot, switch the settings and install Linux immediately. Windows never sees the light of day. I do feel for you as we do do sales calls and in the middle of sales calls the people that we are calling have their computers reboot on them, do an update, or I’ve just got to restart and on restart it does an update and huge amounts of time are wasted on those people.
Windows probably costs the world millions a day in wasted, for time for shit like that.
How do you manage your fleet? How big is your network?
I‘d love to push for Linux at work, but have yet to see a solution with similar management capabilities than a Windows domain. And I don’t want to manage individual clients, as sysadmin I want to push templates like GPOs and the like.
Can see it work for smaller environments, but not in a company with a couple hundred machines.
One place I worked at just gave people Linux computers without telling them and disabled the boot image. The job was mostly online Salesforce, so Chrome got them through everything. Imaging was a breeze. We even made it kinda look like windows. No one really commented on it. We didnt hide it from anyone but we didnt go out of our way to make a big deal out of it.
Linux works when people stop thinking of it as “Linux”. Its “Android” or “Steam OS” or “My smart TV” etc… All you need to do is rename it and suddenly they are ok with it.
Oh, hell no. We are absolutely tiny.
It’s very much a trust-based situation as we all work together and in a small team.
I would actually love to know how to handle remote shutdown of PCs and lock out and things like that, for as we do grow, we are getting busier, and starting to expand.
Canonical Landscape, RedHat Satellite, SUSE Manager and Foreman to name a few.
I think Foreman is the only one not tied to an Enterprise subscriptions and supporting more than one distro, but I could be wrong.
I work in a higher ed org that uses a mix of (mostly) Red Hat servers and Windows & Mac endpoints; the Linux-focused admins use Ansible for things I’d do with either GPOs (if it’s something tried & true) or Intune (if it’s some half-baked newness and campus IT would actually give my group the permissions) in Windows.
Oh, Ansible is an interesting starting point. Would not thought of it for that purpose, I always „only“ link it mentally to automated deployment.
Will look into it out of curiosity.
Yeah, I’d never seen it used in this way either. They use it mostly to modify config files, which gives you a lot of control over most things on a Linux box. We also use it for Macs to do things like create a standardized local administrator account (since Apple doesn’t have a LAPS equivalent). It’s a pretty tangled web but we have an old-school Linux admin who keeps it all ticking (we just worry about his ticker!).
Good luck!
So I’m a total noob when it comes to business systems and I have never used ActiveDirectory or group policies, but wasn’t Linux or rather Unix originally designed as a system for many users on one big machine/network? Why is it so difficult for businesses to manage permissions and group settings on a large amount of devices? What does Microsoft/Windows do so much better there?
It was originally one computer that everyone connected to, it wasn’t a fleet of separate computers like Windows PCs.
And there is probably no simple way to set up a system that would function in a way that Linux needs I guess?
They have the management aspect of large environments down to a tee. Apart from costs it does not really matter if your domain consists of ten, thousand or more systems. The tools to manage those systems centralized by core systems is the same set for all sizes so to speak.
That can be on one campus, across multiple cities and locations. It’s quite frankly IMO the foundation on which the success of Windows in the corporate world is built. Standardized deployment of settings across all company systems saves administrators time which can be used for other tasks instead of micromanaging clients.
I have yet to see a similar solution for Linux clients that works the same way.
I heard Ubuntu got some big upgrades starting with 22.04 in terms to support for GPOs.
I never tested it personally but they do have some documentation for it and they can be added to a Windows domain: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/en/latest/
Not really the way if one wants to cut ties with Microsoft completely though. And I suspect most would argue „then you can go the Windows route all the way and have less pain integrating client systems“.
If getting rid of Microsoft entirely is the goal, Samba does AD with GPOs just fine.
Windows also used to show me the ugly face of Trump in the start menu even if I didn’t ask for it. That was more than 4 years ago. Recently was accidentally hovering over some ‘copilot’ button in Edge of a friend. And again - pop-up with Trump. So yes: fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft
Wow, that is some nightmare fuel type shit. That’s actually crazy.
I unplugged my company issued Windows 11 Dell laptop from its charger yesterday so that I could go ask a manager a question in their office, and the entire computer just shut the fuck off despite having full charge. I’m so glad I moved all my personal stuff to Linux.
Sounds like you have a bad battery
Possibly, though I would be surprised. I only recently got this job so the laptop is brand new, but I have also had it long enough that it was an odd and unexpected event, before then I had not had any power issues, and not since either. Since it is not reproducible, I’m not so sure it is the battery.
Outside of this, it is either Win 11 or the Dell hardware that has other peripheral issues. Often when disconnecting from a secondary display, the screen freaks out and I have to try again. Furthermore when logging into the laptop remotely, Windows 11 for some reason decided to wipe out cleartype, making all the font textures crunchy, despite having set Remmina to connect with best-quality settings.
I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.
Fuck Windows and Microsoft really.
🙏🙏🙏 testify, brother.
Hey you can’t just assume someone on a pro-linux rant on Lemmy is a man…
Jk
I’m no Windows fanboy but I have to use it quite a lot, at home and at work. I don’t know what versions or settings you guys have set up but I’ve never had a Windows update I can’t postpone, ever.
In corporate managed fleet of PCs updates are pushed by the company internal management systems. Some companies give you a 24hours option, some others (ahem, power tripping sysadmins, I know, I was one) say “fuck you and your work, you install when I say so”. It’s not strictly a Windows thing, it’s a company policy.
24h2 is now a forced upgrade
Me neither, until today…
Depends on the settings your IT has set up… Mine will let you put it off, but after a couple times you’re left with no choice but to let it run.
but after a couple times you’re left with no choice but to let it run.
That would be an user issue then. If I have an update I’ll try to do it asap, if I can’t then end of my shift.
Well for one, I’m not sure I consider it an “issue”… But yeah, it’s absolutely 100% on me lol…
It’s not always due to procrastination… Sometimes it’s not convenient to immediately do it. If it’s a long thing I’ll just take a short break and go for a walk or something…
That also shocked me. Then again, Windows does suck pretty bad.
I have had several, but usually you had like 1 hour. Entreprise windoze 7 a couple of years ago, happened several times. There was also some update that bricked some 50% of the dell laptops lol, mine went through but my colleagues sweated bullets.
Now it’s force restarting “outside business hours” or some crap. How stable.
I call BS on OP, just another ragebait made-up story.
Forced restarts haven’t been a thing for years, unless the OP somehow badly setup their machine.
Windows fr thinks that getting updates done is more important than getting work done.
because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot
What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?
My one year old Dell Latitude with a fast SSD needs about 8 minutes every morning to boot windows and start all that security crap that company IT has put on there.
Haha that’s on your shitty IT dept. I’m sure the OS has very little to do with it
If windows didn’t have such horrible security and a kernel shoddily stacked on top of an MS-DOS base, IT depts wouldn’t need to install very invasive software like crowdstrike. Windows 11 also only boots up quick if it’s your daily driver and you have fast boot enabled (which isn’t always desirable).
Windows hasn’t been based on DOS for almost 30 years.
This. I have a mobile workstation with a 12th gen i7, 32gb RAM, and NVME SSD but it’s not uncommon to be waiting multiple minutes for boot due to all the pre-installed spyware from IT. It takes up half the RAM at all times and severely limits the performance for many non-whitelisted apps to the point I can’t even run Firefox smoothly on it anymore.
What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?
If it’s anything like my company a “New” desktop is the managers old desktop.
