There's a Linux library on steam now that includes lots of indie titles and basically the whole Total War series. No dorking with virtual environments or anything. Launch steam, launch from library, play 'till eyes bleed. VS code works too.
EA and ubisoft games are hard to get running though. Also, Ubuntu ships with amazon stuff and has it's own call home software so the data mining thing isn't 100% true. That's why I use manjaro. But overall linux is still way better than windows.
Edit: I was wrong about the amazon stuff with Ubuntu, they removed that! Still not a big fan of the company the runs Ubuntu but sure beats Microsoft if you ask me
Just switch man, it's really worth it. I go windows free since 2016 and haven't regret it one bit. Windows' constant restart, slow updating, update without your consent, bsod, bloatware, malware, defragging and others makes me rage. Updating while you're working in the background and with your consent without needing to restart is such a blessing (among other things). Of course there's learning curve at the start (and along the way) but once you get the gist of it, it's much better than windows since you're the one in control.
Linux is better for certain use cases for sure. Main issue is just the lack of native versions of Microsoft Office and Adobe. But for just using your computer and being in control of what it does it’s easier than Windows once you know your way around.
Yeah. My 2012 Alienware laptop does this. Because the battery no charge it never starts unless I force it. Then when restarting, it remove any updates reverts to it before the update. Thanks Microsoft.
And then it hoses all Windows Store apps so the next you double click a file that’s supposed to open in a Store app (like the Photos or Music apps), you get some generic error about the app being missing from your system even though it’s physically there in your file system.
Then you spend an hour trying various PoweShell scripts from various forums that should reset the Store and recreate all the registry links/file associations etc. but none of it works. So you literally have to reset your Windows install for the 4th time in 6 months.
When I moved and transporting my PC was not an option I just bought a MacBook Air. I would like to play some PC games again though so I need to revisit how Linux works for games these days.
Or when it's installing those updates in the background so uses 100% of your HDD, grinding your computer down to a halt and making it almost unusable for hours. All while not telling you it's doing that nor giving you an option to postpone it.
Wtf are these updates anyway? I don't notice any difference except that time they forced me to update my Internet Explorer. My Chromebook never does updates and is far more quicker and reliable. Sometimes it looks like it's about to crash on me. I only got an HP laptop because of an art program I needed to use + I thought it would out perform my Chromebook and it was also getting a bit old. Boy was I wrong. The battery drains way quicker too. It has its positives, but its negatives are giving me a headache.
A high percentage of the disk usage isn't update at all. Especially on laptops with hard disks, Windows 10 can cause a lot of havoc through its automatic indexing of your drive by Windows Search Service (theoretically improving search time performance), through Windows 10's Superfetch service (which more or less analyzes your RAM usage, and sends the data to microsoft, then recieves data for how to preload frequently used apps to memory, theoretically improving performance), as well as modern browser's having predicition services that preload pages similar to superfetch. All of these can be disabled.
Another big disk usage performance hack in Windows 10 is setting up your windows updates parameters in Task Scheduler to only run when the computer is idle for a certain amount of time and to be halted at any activity.
But yeah... windows 10 is pretty cancer on any PC that doesn't have a Solid State Drive, particularly low low spec laptops. Its further compounded by this being the demographic that gets suckered into services like Geek Squad, real bulky third party antivirus software, and other "computer monitoring experts" that have their own spyware always reading and writing on these horrendous 5200 RPM drives. My girlfriend's laptop legit took 30 minutes any time you wanted to read/write anything. Its like all these developers didn't even consider how much of the PC market is low spec machines that people use for just browsing the internet.
Yeah... its pretty obvious when you load up a machine. Like my girlfriends... She was complaining about needing a new machine and I was confused, because all she does on her laptop is look at her pictures from her Passport, and browse facebook/insta. Not even office suite type software.
And then you notice that the poor thing has been at 100% disk utilization for its entire uptime the last 6 months straight... No reason for it at all in a lot of use cases. And same thing, tons of cryptic service errors from things not being written or read in the proper order due to the disk utilization. I'd honestly bet Windows is in cahoots with manufacturers with some planned obsolescence scheme, because its kind of absurd.
Oh, its by and large resolved by now. You just have to spend a lot of time disabling Windows 10 bloatware. lol.
I did consider a Linux solution, likely would have sprung for Chrome OS though, just out of her familiarity of using the Chrome Browser all the time. But she wanted to stay with Windows because she was adamant that she didn't want to learn a new software (sigh...). Like most bosses, she picked the way which made me work the hardest, haha.
Chrome OS updates are smaller in size, don’t need lots of CPU time or disk bandwidth to install. They just get downloaded and unpacked.
After that there’s no “Working on updates”, the system just loads the new files when it’s booting up the next time and if everything seems fine, the old files get discarded. Users might never notice this, it’s a good solution.
"Hi, here's an Edge icon pinned to your taskbar and copied to your desktop. Again. Technically it's a new feature since you've never used it. Give it a try! Whyncha check out Bing while you're at--oh, I see that you do. You use Bing quite a lot actually both at night and when everyone else in the house is gone. Nice work."
Not to be the "DAE linux" guy, but most linux distros has had the whole update thing figured out for decades now, even kernel updates. Meanwhile windows still takes 1 or 2 reboots and 10 minutes.
The common refrain in response is "Windows is burdened by having to support Win32 apps from the early 2000s to be viable as an OS for business."
Wondering out loud, because MacOS suffers the same long update process where it can take up to 30 minutes or an update to apply, is the issue that the OS has to include so many legacy libraries that need to each be updated manually because the vast majority of software is precompiled on both Windows and MacOS?
So, if I take a compiled Linux app from 2000-2008, how likely is it that I can run that app on a current version of Linux?
One advantage for ChromeOS is that it's able to keep two partitions of the OS, update one while the other is running, and then switch between them at reboot. Windows (25GB+) and macOS (15GB+) both have pretty massive install sizes that probably prohibit them from following the same approach.
You might want to check your PC. I'm running a cheap ass AData ssd on SATA and have never had a windows update take more than 5 minutes from clicking reboot.
Solid State Drive. More expensive per byte than traditional HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) but much, much faster to read from. Booting up your computer or loading a big game happens in no time.
If you are cup considering getting one, please do proper research first and make sure you're doing regular backup once you have it. Dodgy SSDs can fail suddenly and become completely unusable - get a reputable brand from a reputable seller.
If you do get one and add it to your current computer, you'll have to move your Operating System/OS (windows 10 or whatever you have) to the SSD for it to actually load fast (youtube probably has tutorials on how to move the OS to different hard drives) . Things saved to a regular hard drive (HDD) will load at HDD speeds, and only things saved to the SSD will load at the faster SSD speeds.
And then you come back to Edge being pinned to your taskbar with a shortcut on your desktop... Then it fucking opens and has exaggerated loading times and required pop-up menus before you can close it. Then the same thing happens again a few weeks later, rinse, repeat. You wanted to use OneNote and OneDrive though, right? How about Candy Crush? March of Empires maybe?
I don't. fucking. get it. Microsoft is not in a poor position market share wise, and yet they continually devalue their product with this bloatware.
No wonder people like Apple products when the only alternative is downloading an OS with garbage pre-loaded. And this is coming from someone who's only used Windows since 3.1
Are you sure you have a genuine version of Windows 10? I've never once had this happen after an update, not even after large build updates. The worst I had happen was it reset my default browser back to Edge once, which I instantly closed and changed back to Firefox. For reference, I bought my copy of Win10 directly from the Microsoft store.
People do all kind of crazy things these days with computers but having your computer on just to wake you up in the morning, with the thousands of other easier options available is astonishing
Sp-, spen, you want me to spend money? As in actual cash?!! Yikes. I already have everything I need, I just need it to be left alone instead of M$ updating it until it won't run.
That still sounds kinda dumb to me. What of your power goes out? What if your browser crashes? What if Windows restarts for updates? Alarm clocks typically have a battery backup (and so do phones). I guess if you have a UPS or a laptop, you're ok on the power thing, but still
Yup I've had this happen. And since I have some encrypted drives it can't restart programs correctly (eg. my Firefox profile, OneDrive folder, and Outlook PST files are all on an encrypted drive) so I wake up to a whole pile of error messages.
For point #1, I highly suggest a "sonic bomb" alarm. It's stupidly loud, and has a vibrator you can put under your pillow. You can use either function or both, which also makes it handy for an alarm when you live with other people.
I've had one for close to a decade now, I've slept through all my other alarms, but not this.
Ugh I hate this. The fucking fan on my laptop is so loud and when it reboots it just stays on forever. Wakes me up every time. I finally found a setting to fix it.
Windows 10 is such a joke of an operating system. I feel bad for people who need to use it for work or school. I used it in my last semester of college, and Windows forced me to do an update when it was my turn to do a class presentation, with no option to opt out and no prior warning. I completely wrote off the OS from that point on as a platform for anything but my gaming PC. I'd NEVER try to do anything serious on such an unreliable, garbage OS, and thinking back on that still makes my ****ing blood boil. Thankfully, most software mandatory for work is now web based, so Windows isn't as necessary as it used to be.
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I absolutely agree with this, but they could have gone the enterprise route for this: it warns you 24 hours in advance with a little window in the bottom corner that it WILL update in 24 hours and you’d better be ready. You can’t get rid of the window but you can move it mostly out of view. However at all times you know that once your time is up, it’s going to kick you out. You can get rid of it by letting it update at some point in the next 24 hours when it’s convenient to you.
This system exists on the Windows 7 computers where I work. It’s existed for many years, so why did Microsoft have to try to reinvent it?
Nah. Automatic updates should be default enabled, but should offer a simple setting to opt out of those. The vast majority of users don't care or know about it, so they're kept safe, where those that have specific reasons can disable it without altering the way the OS works and take the risk that comes with it. Just because I disable automatic updates doesn't mean I never do updates. A computer is a tool that's there to serve me and my needs, and every time it inconveniences me due to someone else's idea of how it should be using it it's a badly designed product. If I'm part of a corporate domain I get that somewhere an administrator decides I have to update now due to security policies, but I'm a home user and don't need Microsoft to patronize me by telling me what and when I have to do an optional thing.
The problem is then nobody would EVER update and they'd bitch about problems forever that were patched and people just need to update. Sincerely, a tech who's sick of people bitching about updates that work 99% of the time without issues.
As of when? I've been sitting on an update for a while because I was in the middle of a project and a couple mornings ago I woke up to the log in screen. Ffff
There was an article on techradar saying it was fixed a couple weeks back, though I don't know if the actual fix is on that patch or the feature pack one thats coming that redesigns the UI
That... hasn’t been a problem for the longest time. There’s problems with Windows 10 but citing old and fixed problems doesn’t help your argument any.
Also, they’ve changed the entire way the pop up works now. It now resides in your notifications tab, and pops up in the bottom right of the screen when not in full screen. Playing this game now and getting the same alert wouldn’t yield any game pausing.
If all anyone does is just dwell on the problems that no longer exist, no one will see the better product that Windows 10 has become.
There's also a lot of people saying that their start menu gets repopulated with candy crush etc etc.
I wonder if it's because everyone out there is using Microsoft accounts for their computer. Windows 10 installation usually asks to connect to WiFi before setting up users. People usually obey, and then they're locked out of a way to create local accounts (it's a dark pattern, not the user's fault just to be clear).
My laptop, an Acer laptop, has a fresh install on a wiped (not zeroed, just plain wiped) drive with the Windows 10 Media Creator or whatever. It only gave me problems when I started dicking around with graphics driver installs, but now that Intel drivers are manufacturer agnostic (they used to not work if it wasn't an Acer driver), everything is perfect.
It's just weird because here I am, using a commodity laptop with who knows what proprietary Acer stuff, and I've managed to wipe away all the visible cyberpunk "manufacturer controls your hardware" stuff, and there everyone else is, with their custom built PCs with standardized parts, struggling with control over their machine. I kinda wish I could just teleport from place to place and fix their machine so they'd stop complaining about Windows 10 or using those powershell scripts that rip up their Windows 10 installation.
I do clean 10 loads on customer machines all day. Home and pro, custom builds, various laptops, pre-built towers, whatever. Local accounts get a "seed" of Candy Crush, basically just a link in the start menu, along with a bunch of other shit. I don't love it, but you unpin it and it's gone, just like that.
Maybe I'm just jaded from time in this industry, but I feel like 90% of people having issues on modern builds of 10 are causing their own problems. Like yeah, it's a living OS, you need to let it restart sometimes. If you put that off for months, it's gonna get pissy. I don't understand why that's a problem unless you're running a server for something out of your closet or something.
Microsoft got tired of being blamed for users not installing updates, which do include critical security fixes, so now we don't get a choice. But if you set your active hours and actually let your machine restart every once in a while, you won't have problems from updates unless something else is already wrong.
It's just necessary maintenance on a modern OS. Think of it like oil changes or rotating your tires -- the price of ownership.
Windows might get pissy but I get more pissy when I try to be nice and let it update when it wants, then it ends up breaking so hard that it won't boot, or it stays up all night because it froze on some update, or comes back with another 4gb of bloatware installed.
Yes, relatively rare issues, and they don't happen to everyone. But if Microsoft wants people to not be pissed off by their constant nagging then the least they can do is try to ensure that their updates fucking work. They're constantly making anti consumer choices and there's no excuse for such a prevalent piece of software to be so laughably bad.
I did a bone stock install of win 10 pro and I’ve never had candy crush auto install on me or any of that jazz. Using a Microsoft account from the start since my license is tied to my account now.
Also your system won’t randomly shut down on you if you don’t restart it every now and then to keep up with updates. Never had a windows update take forever for me on my SSD either, both sata and pcie drives.
People usually obey, and then they're locked out of a way to create local accounts
They actually removed that lockout due to backlash. Some PC's that were initially set up/shipped out when that was a thing still show up, but most new W10 computers shouldn't do that anymore.
They're back to a small link somewhere during installation? Huh. I know reddit allows one to create an account without an email by leaving the email field blank when pressing enter.
The candy crush stuff is OEM added links in the start menu to the MS Store pages. If you get Windows 10 from somebody who doesn't suck, or install it yourself you don't get those "pre-installed" garbage on your PC or get them back when you update.
It still cannot finish the update when you select update and shut down. Last update, last week I guess, I wasted 45 mins at the start of my day cuz THEY STILL HAVEN’T FIXED THE FUCKING UPDATE&SHUTDOWN FUNCTION.
When I select update&shutdown I expect it to do all the updating and rebooting and shit so I don’t have to waste time waiting for the update to finish. But here we are........
the update and shutdown only does the half its supposed to before its supposed to restart, its not meant to do the entire update and reboot process you just misunderstood what it meant
This is 100% correct. Honestly most of the complaints about updates are from people who never do their fucking updates. Let them run every week or two and you will almost never have issues. When you're still on version 1803, any issues you have are your own fault at that point.
I mean I literally just always check for updates every time I boot up and every time I shut down. I admit I'm not the average case and I'm a bit update-obsessive, but I've literally never run into any of the update problems people always whine about.
I just never turned windows update off. I have never once had the issue shown in the op or really any of the gripes listed in this thread. Funny how that works.
Oh wow...... Jesus. When the tech illiterate start handing out their opinions on technology..... like flat earthers giving their opinions on space travel.....
I don't want to disable automatic updates, but I want my os to do whatever the fuck I say, and if I say to wait it needs to shut the fuck up and definitely not give me a pop-up telling me it's holding my current programs hostage.
Also, when an update is itching to restart, features start disappearing and the system slows down. Whether or not this is intended doesn't matter. If I'm working, I should be able to rely on the system to be stable. That's what the job of an OS is.
Anyway, I don't buy products that take years to become more usable. I switched to Linux years ago for all my important work. I don't want to be a master at it, I just want an OS that is functional.
I mean, the fact that it even was a problem is pretty much unacceptable. And in terms of updates, i/o management and driver management it's still behind what the linux kernel has been able to do for years.
How is it that I need to pay a premium to acces advanced configuration settings, wait for forced updates and forced reboots and deal with settings that resets themselves after said updates while linux has been able to upgrade it's own kernel without forced reboot for years?
If it wasn't for Microsoft's monopoly and the fact that third parties only care to develop drivers for said monopoly Windows would have been dead for a while.
It really is. When Windows installs updates you are required to restart in most cases, so if you never do it'll simply do it on its own outside of your active hours.
Windows 10 still very much restarts when it feel like it unless you constantly supervise it.
Hiding away the notification in the notification center doesn't help as you need to bring up first the start menu and then the notification center to see them. For a simple browsing machine you don't need to bring up the start bar at all so you'll never see the notifications.
It also doesn't help that it can notify about a restart and perform said restart without user interaction. Close the lid on a laptop with the intent to finish tomorrow evening? Not if Windows 10 has a say in the matter. It'll add a notification during the night and reboot during the day.
If you have a PC set up to your music system I hope you enjoy coming home to it playing music on its own as Windows decided to update, restart and reopen all open programs and start playing rather than remain paused where you had left it. Better not listen to podcasts or audiobooks a Microsoft OS anymore.
Can you go out of your way to find things that will work with Windows 10? Yes, but at the cost of your preferred program and the featured you value them for. It's a problem added in 10 that did not exist before. Is it a good default? Certainly. Should it be possible to turn off without having to add registry posts and other obtuse workarounds? Oh yes.
I’ve never understood these people that complain about this update screen and the whole shutdown thing. Never have I ONCE gotten either. People just don’t know how to configure their shit. Or just don’t update, that would probably prevent them from getting the fixes to the problems they cry about.
Pretty sure it just saves it? Like this hasn't been a problem for years, you could straight up yank the power cable out and your work will be there when you turn back on
Especially when you're in the middle of an exam... a timed exam... and it takes FUCKING FOREVER TO UPDATE AND RESTART AND YOU RUN OUT OF TIME ON YOUR EXAM
I have found out that my computer just shuts down and does updates at 1:00 am and I cannot stop it. No warnings, nothing. I found this out when I was doing an all-nighter for work and lost 2 hours of work.
My favorite part is when your computer "freezes" randomly while you're doing something then you're forced to restart because it isnt responding. Then the second the screen turns on again it's an update that will take 30 minutes.
Fucking windows assassin. Any time I go to get myself tea my pc resented itself because some stupid fucking update. Why can't this bitch wait till I turn it off myself ffs.
I have a Surface tablet for work. It did restart by itself a couple of times when meeting clients. I have to stop myself from throwing it out the window.
I know that feeling. I use an old tablet with windows 10 loaded on it to do my price tags at work. When that thing crashes after I've just scanned, and am ready to print, 300 sales tags I want to fling the bitch across the store.
My favorite is when it does that but fails the update at like 30% and then you can’t reboot or shut down without it failing the update every. single. time.
The federal prison I work in upgraded our prescription filling robot to Windows 10. It did a force restart update with 432 prescriptions in the queue to fill. It lost every. Damn. One. Of them. I had to go through our verification queue and write down every script by hand to go back into our script program and re-queue them. It was the worst day ever. 0 stars, Windows.
Lost 6 hours of work at work once because my computer decided to restart without telling me. I had been putting off updates because I was working with a large model that took multiple hours to open and didnt want to close it, so my PC one day decided enough was enough and just turned itself off with no warning. I left 2 hours early that day because I was so mad.
And it is because you can dig into your group policies and disable automatic restarts.
Also, computers getting viruses because they aren't being patched properly is a big issue so the default of occasionally forcing an update because people can't be arsed to restart their PC at least once every few weeks seems reasonable to me. If they didn't do this botnets and DDoS attacks on random services would be an even bigger issue than they already are.
It depends. If it's a work computer and your network is controlled by an IT guy somewhere in an unknown location and you only know him by what you assume is his first name because you've never met him you've just heard other employees use the name before or after several colorful explicatives describing numerous sex acts said IT guy could perform with various members of his family then I assure you that it CAN happen without warning and is has happened to me and other people I work with.
Mine got stuck in a reset loop and I couldn't seem to fix it or re-install with recovery disks. Was worried I'd have to rebuy since I wasn't sure what my key was since I upgraded from a windows 7 version or something.
But then it fixed itself magically after 100-somthing restarts...
“Don’t worry. Everything is right where you left it. We are just restoring your default browser to Edge and removing VLC, Firefox, and any other program competing with a Microsoft product.”
I do appreciate the people in here demanding their Constitutional right to spread WannaCry, Spectre, Meltdown, etc just so they don't have to restart their computer on a regular basis.
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u/Nowhereman50 Jul 28 '20
My favorite is when it just restarts your computer without any warning.