I saw that happen once in a big presentation.
There was a team of students presenting their work to ~200 people. Right in the middle, a pop-up says updates are finished and the computer needs to restart. It has a helpful 60-second countdown, but “cancel” is grayed out, so all they can do is watch.
I was only in the audience and I still have nightmares.
Then it proceeds to take 10 minutes to boot. Happened to me before an important meeting once and i just couldn’t believe it. wtf makes Microsoft think they can get away with shit like this?
Probably that they very obviously are!
Just blame the users. Easy.
They think they can get away with it because they keep getting away with it.
wtf makes Microsoft think they can get away with shit like this?
I’d wager a guess it’s people dumb enough to constantly put up with shit like this?
Combined with myopic developers who always have the newest hardware and fastest connection.
Usually for large businesses like universities IT can choose when to push updates.
Some versions like Home and Education might lack the options, but most Enterprise versions and LTSC versions can let you delay updates via the menu or disable updates completely via group policy fuckery.
Still bullshit that they have to, though.
Shutdown -a or whatever the flag is should abort it if I remember correctly
Because the alternative is people getting compromised and getting their computer crypto locked, accounts stolen or their bank account drained.
Other OSes can update everything while running and you just reboot to the updated system. Microsoft could definitely fix their update process they are not incompetent, they just don’t care.
The super duper shitty thing is that they could have canceled it by opening the Run dialog box and typing “shutdown -a”, so it’s not even like canceling wasn’t an option. M$ just decided to be dicks about it
M$ just decided to be dicks about it
A most concise yet comprehensive company bio.
Maybe? If I recall correctly, this was Windows XP. Also the computer was owned by the school, so the students didn’t have admin access.
That screen didn’t exist in Win XP. If it had, it would have been a different shade of blue. This is either Win10 though I suspect it’s Win11.
The event I’m referring to wasn’t OP’s photo. Mine was back in 2004 or 2005, long before Win10 was released.
shutdown -acouldn’t help in that situation?For every 1 person who knows how to use the windows command line, there are 50 people struggling because they didn’t embed their video into their PowerPoint, or worse, their USB stick only contains a shortcut to their actual .ppt file
That’s a very generous estimate. I didn’t know about it and I work in IT.
I love these comments. If you need to use the command line (the largest argument people have against Linux) why are people still arguing to stay on Windows? Hell, Linux you don’t even need the terminal if you don’t want to use it and choose the right distro.
(I recognize that for schools and offices, people don’t have a choice. These students were probably on a personal laptop though, so they could have a choice. The issue is Windows comes as default and no one actually makes a choice. They don’t choose Windows. They just have Windows.)
Windows always gets a pass from it’s fans. They also tend to overestimate average users’ proficiency with computers (meaning windows) way more than linux users.
Most windows users would be afraid to change stuff on CP or Settings never mind opening up policy editor or registry editor.
They regularly fail to install applications on windows (a big part of them would probably not even try) or install something different than intended.
Usually they end up running million unnecessary things on startup, having completely unresponsive systems. They just shrug and cope with it till they pay someone to format their computer or they buy a new one.
The arrogance of some Linux users… You just can’t fathom that most people just want to use the OS their PC came with. These people don’t want to struggle with the incompatibilities that come with Linux systems. Troubleshooting Linux systems is a daunting task for most casual users. It’s great that you use Linux because fuck greedy corporations. But stop being so uppity about it. This toxic behavior is what steers people away from Linux forums.
You just can’t fathom that most people just want to use the OS their PC came with.
No they don’t they want to get a task done. The vast majority of users doesn’t know what an OS or a browser is never mind that there are alternatives.
These people don’t want to struggle with the incompatibilities that come with Linux systems.
Most people are simply not aware of Linux systems let alone linux system incompatibilities.
Troubleshooting Linux systems is a daunting task for most casual users.
No shit, troubleshooting windows is a daunting task for most casual users. They either nag/pay someone to try and fix it or simply cope with it. And windows fucks up all the time, especially for most users.
It’s great that you use Linux because fuck greedy corporations. But stop being so uppity about it. This toxic behavior is what steers people away from Linux forums.
People don’t just randomly get on Linux forums, especially linux memes forums. Nor is my previous comment in any way or form toxic. I just pointed out the blind spot of windows fans, you just can’t handle criticism.
“Don’t turn off” is the worst kind of status message.
When it eventually hangs for various reasons, you actually do need to turn off your pc for it to complete or to let it roll back in an error state.
When “just hang in there” is still present on the third day you’ll start wondering why you bought that piece of furniture and won’t mind the consequences of turning it off.
What should it say instead?
Console output with status of the current operation, including error and warning messages
Not to defend Windows too much in a Linux community, but you can turn on verbose status messages for the screens you see during startup, shutdown, login and log off. It’s a setting that can either be turned on with the local or domain group policy, or by registry key.
Still though, it’s not as detailed as full console output, but is definitely more helpful than just telling you to wait.
Source please. I need this as I am forced to use Windows for work. Where is the registry key I need to change mlord
In group policy (local or domain):
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Display highly detailed status messagesAlso make sure that this policy is not set or set to disabled:
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Remove Boot / Shutdown / Logon / Logoff status messagesInstead of using local group policy you could use the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
“VerboseStatus”=dword:00000001If you do it through registry, make sure this key is either non-existant or set to 0.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
“DisableStatusMessages”If you use Windows a lot, get used to the group policy editor. Your computer should have the local group policy editor on it. If you’ve never used it before, you’ll be surprised at how configurable Windows can be if you know where to look. They just don’t really give those options to the everyday user.
Thanks. That should also be fairly easy to automate. Might set it up as a powershell script so I have it on every Windows pc I am forced to use. Much appreciated kind stranger
The average user does not want to see that and does not need to see that. That’s how you end up with thousands of support requests of “why is my computer showing these errors?”
Things should be abstracted from the users by default. There’s no need for grandma to see a console output every time windows needs to update.
I disagree. I think that some aspects of the software should be open about what they’re doing to everyone. Otherwise people just get used to the idea that everything is a black box that they have no real control of. It also helps educate people on IT and its concepts overall.
Even if they can’t specifically tell what is going on, they can see something is going on. And as long as this does not make it harder to use, the more info the better.
That is an MS Teams Room system in the conference room, it runs Windows IOT. Whoever manages those rooms should have set the working hours of the room so it didn’t apply this update during business hours. By default the system updates at 2 or 2:30 AM, I forget… so might be a weird MS bug or someone fudged up a config
Source - installed a lot of these a few years ago.
I’ve always set windows to update around late hours.
But once in a while, Microsoft ignores that and does updates anyways. Usually just a quick min or two. But it’s still annoying.
Every day, my work computers force a shutdown-update, take 20 minites, fail the update, recover from the failed update, and then force a 24-hour timer to do it again that I can’t turn off. IT doesn’t care.
If it’s happening every 24 hours it sounds like they’re the ones that set the policy.
My favorite windows update was when I was attending an onsite coding competition hosted my Microsoft. We were all in this large meeting hall that looked like a theater, and we spent first 10 minutes or so at the start of the competition just looking at Windows update, with the Microsoft rep apologizing to us, because his pc decided to do the “Forced update restart you cant postpone any more” literally two minutes into the presentation
When your dog food tastes like dog food
As a presenter would be mortified.
As an attendee, hilarious.
As an attendee, would be somewhat annoyed
As someone on the Internet, hilarious
That’s probably the presenter’s fault for not updating it earlier. Keep on top of your updates so they don’t force you to do it at an unfortunate time.
This might take several minutes
…or itcould take several hours
Then failed half way through, and needed another hour to “reverse changes”.
Cool ceiling tile
Should make that screen the first slide of the PowerPoint
this is why you use linux
This is why you check your equipment before any important events
What if Windows decided to update after you finished checking the equipment? I mean, they do use AI to determine the worst time for an update…
This looks like a public office space. You really gonna go argue with the building admin?
“Hey boss, the display in the corner office automatically updated. Can we get IT to switch everything to Linux?”
“why would we do that? Our systems don’t work on that, our people aren’t trained on that, no, get back to work”
I think that would be a pretty accurate reply to a casual request for an entire infrastructure change
our systems
Guaranteed all of your backend systems are running Linux. If not, holy hell why.
our people aren’t trained on that
Oh no, pointy-clicky on things on a desktop is so hard to train for people who have used an OS where you… um… pointy-clicky on things on a desktop. Whatever shall we do.
Excuses. All I hear from people who want to keep obsolete, trash, laughable, insecure Windows.
Complain all you want, not a single manager out there is going to shut down any part of the active systems in place and potentially lose business to upgrade to Linux. At that point, just bring your own laptop instead of moaning about it.
And I used to think the “just switch to linux” guys were a meme, bro you’re making me want to switch back to windows out of spite
Enjoy your BSOD and Microsoft stealing all your data, then.
“there is a bomb strapped to my chest, if you don’t install Linux on every computer in here I will explode taking you with me”
I wouldn’t recommend this method but It might work out
Next day headlines:
“Linux user blows up an office. Is Linux a cult?”I mean Is it wrong tho
The IT admin: https://youtu.be/5l6l9T2w1DQ
linux can have some pretty weird quirks though. (don’t get me wrong I’ve been dailydriving linux for several years and I’m not going to use windows unless I’m forced)
one time I was about to do presentation, I has multiple files and windows in order to present the whole program we had developed, some powerpoint, demo, and the source code.
then came my time to do the presentation and I plugged in the hdmi cable and my fucking account just logged out. dunno if the session crashed or something, but I had to quickly scramble everything back since all my apps were closed lol.
I do have older quadro nvidia though
Important question: is mesa? If not, then fuck Nvidia. If yes, then fuck Nvidia regardless, but karlherbst and other nouveau devs would like to get crashlogs if there was crash.
Was it reproduced later? What enviroment?
nah propiertary, sometimes happens randomly and gnome
Ah. When I was using proprietary, I had problems too.
Yeah dude. Just get every computer at school and business to use Linux. Duh.
🙄
This is on you. You prepare your computer ahead of time. Do updates the night before, check if everything works. You also have an empty battery? Like I loathe windows as much as anyone, but this would never ever happen to me. I triple check it all, especially if it runs windows.
That looks like a conference room PC, I would doubt OP even has any control over that and possibly didn’t even have access to the room until right before
It isn’t their computer.
It’s likely on a campus domain managed by campus IT and should be configured with a sane update policy that automatically does this overnight when the systems aren’t being used.
Forced updates are still terrible.
nah. at worst it’s the lesser of two evils. the alternative is keeping a crushing majority of the user base vulnerable forever because virtually no one likes to voluntarily update their os.
Pfffft it’s so much easier to update when it doesn’t shut your shit down for 1hr and instead downloads 573MB of updates in a tiny window you can leave up while going about your business and can choose when to do it by typing “sudo dnf update -y” and your password into said tiny window.
Besides, you can tell linux to auto update if you want, and you’ll never notice it doing so in the background (well it’ll likely tell you depending on the distro but if it didn’t, you’d never notice as it is non-intrusive.)
the download does happen in the background. the installation is what requires shutting down. i only find out there’s any update when the shutdown button is marked and whenever I’m done i tell it to install the update and shutdown. it’s really not as bad as you guys desperately seem to want it to be.
Oh my mistake, I didn’t mean to say the wrong part took 1hr+ and it was actually the other part, silly me. Meanwhile on linux there’s still no such annoyance. You do know we all used to use windows and got fed up with it’s bullshit and jumped ship right? You can stay a frog in boiling water all you want, those of us who jumped out of the pot can see the burner.
whatever floats your boat. keep getting things wrong so you can feel better about jumping ship i guess?
Lmao you really think “nuh uh the long annoying part isn’t the download it’s the install” is better than “well linux has neither issue” don’t you? Bless your heart.
Windows disagrees with the thesis.
So did the rest of the committee.
Is this a joke, or did your friend really fail? Would be interested to know what happened, if you don’t mind sharing
No, he passed.
The longer I use Linux, the harder it becomes to see where windows users are coming from. Its gotten to the point where seeing people use windows in public feels incomprehensible to me, like watching people go to work on a pogo stick instead of a car.
Three words: High Dynamic Range.
HDR is a tacked on feature in KDE that barely works. In Windows 11, it’s a set and forget thing. SDR gets mapped to HDR space, so you don’t have to constantly toggle it on and off when switching between content, like you have to do in other OSes. You can even upgrade SDR videos and games to true HDR, even if they don’t have native support. It legit makes content look more realistic.
And if you have a newer GPU, there’s also AI upscaling, which is great for watching HD and SD content on a 4K display. Pretty sure you can’t do that* at all in Linux, at least not in real-time.
But if you have an SDR monitor and/or an older GPU, none of this matters to you. Which in that case, there’s no reason for you to use Windows ever. But if your gear is newer, Linux is too outdated for you.
I’ll check back in 5 years. Maybe 2029 will finally be the year I ditch Microsoft products for good.
I am utterly perplexed by the HDR talk, honestly. Why does it even matter? I’ve been consuming media on Linux for more than a decade and it looks perfect to me.
When people talk about making it look even better, I literally can’t imagine what they’re talking about. I mean, when people had black n white TV, they could imagine color. When I had a CRT and 3D games, it was easy to imagine better quality, but going from 1080p to 4k already does nothing. HDR just seems like marketing bullshit that people wouldn’t be able to discern, unless flicking between normal and HDR or having them side by side.
I’ve gone off the FOSS deep end so it doesn’t stop when I see Windows used in the wild.
The longer I’m here, the more I recoil at the sight of people using products from Google so casually and thoughtlessly.
I’ll feel visceral disgust when I see the soulless, dystopian corporate logos of Xitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc that wormed their way into a universal presence on social footers of websites or promotional emails or search engines… and everyone’s locked down devices, sucking up troves of data to map who you are, were, and will be. Even McFuckingDonalds has a clause in a policy saying they’ll measure your intelligence.
The greater the intersect between emotions felt while enjoying a cautionary fictional cyberpunk tale and those felt while experiencing reality… well, anyway you get the idea.
Tldr I need a hug from a penguin or cocaine from a bear or something holy shit
You, reader, go. Hug a penguin. Spread love to the world. Believe in the change you want to see. Be good to each other. And don’t let anyone or anything take who you are, were, or can be away from you, be it a corp, a government, or a bad day.
Have a good day
These comments are copy pasta perfection. Best part they are unironic 🤣😍
Much as I always feel Microsoft has made some horrible missteps around automatic updates…I also think many many users are vocally and unabashedly following horrible update policies.
The biggest one is “Fuck you, Microsoft, I don’t ever want to update.” A simple truth about Windows is that it is currently the most popular operating system in the world. If that OS was Unix-based, the resulting truth would still be true: The most popular OS is going to be the most common target for vulnerabilities, hacks, malware, and exploits. Far more than an antivirus, keeping that computer up to date is the most important step for keeping it secure.
This is true not just of computers used to manage your bank account and nuclear launch codes, but of the swarm of “convenience” computers sitting inside a campus network that could spread a virus to everything on the Wi-Fi.
So, looking at this image, it’s a shame on Microsoft moment if this update came from nowhere, or they once again blatantly ignored the configured update time. It’s a shame on the campus moment if someone was repeatedly closing the “Time to update” popup.
Other systems like ChromeOS and Silverblue do atomic updates in the background and then switch on next restart. No waiting at screens like this. Heck even the conventional Linux update system, while far from foolproof, doesn’t require waiting like this.
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So does windows for the most part
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Do you know how often users actually restart their machines without being forced?
No Windows doesn’t do atomic updates in the background, that’s why there is the whole installing updates screen on reboot or shutdown.
Yes it does? As far as I’m aware even Linux can’t apply updates to an active system.
You vastly misunderstand both what I am talking about, and how updates work on both Windows and Linux.
You don’t press shut down and then get a blue updating screen that stops you from doing anything on Linux. Go and update a Linux system and you will see what I am talking about. You run it just like a normal command or program.
Also yes they update the files on the drive while the system is running.
Do you know how often users actually restart their machines without being forced?
If Windows would actually shut the fuck down when asked to do so, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I complained enough at my work about this that we shut off fast boot domain wide. I haven’t had to have a “I know that you just turned your computer on but I need you to restart it. No, not shutdown and turn on, restart. Yes, they are different things.” conversation in a couple years. Funnily enough I haven’t seen anyone complain about the significantly longer start up times. I guess people just expect that from windows lol.
I think people just don’t care about startup times. They do it maybe once per day (if they don’t sleep and resume), and they probably get a coffee or something while it’s starting up.
Perhaps the solution is to figure out how to update without restarting. It is a hard problem, but a forced restart is the same as a crash from a user perspective.
Imagine if they replaced the crash screen with a fake automatic update.
Years ago there was a screensaver that showed a fake “upgrading to Vista, please wait” screen. Just wait for someone to leave their computer unattended, download and set it as the screensaver, and wait for their reaction when they’re back :)
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