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I recently installed Windows 10 after a few years of Linuxing and holy shit, the updater is just bad. I had more fun running Gentoo updates back in early 2000’s. How is Windows updater so slow? How is it so bad at informing the user what’s going on? How is it that every open source package manager I’ve used handles update infinitely better? Microsoft has a lot engineers, what are they doing with their time? Why is it so bad? Like, just, why?
Windows is horrible at informing in general. The event viewer is a terrible mess to get through, too. I wish I could get paid as much as Microsoft to deliver products as bad as Microsoft.
Microsoft has a lot engineers, what are they doing with their time?
probably replacing everything with Ai, so that they don’t get replaced themseves
Using a modern package manager in Linux after being used to windows for a decade or two was absolutely stunning.
But it was not unique. I see that kind of difference all over the OS as well as in FOSS vs commercial apps.
The difference in design motivations and important stakeholders is pretty obvious!
"Exact time is no longer available. For the precise time, subscribe to Clock com. Thank you for upgrading "
"WELCOME TO CLOCKO COM
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE"
Wow, a Zombo reference in 2025? Hell yeah!
laughs in Linux
Cries in arch
Laughing yourself to tears about windows, peak arch user behavior
My wife came to me saying her laptop wasn’t working. She was on it last night. It was forcing a Windows account login. Shift-10 disabled so I couldn’t bypass.
Microsoft can straight fuck itself after this. Trying to brick an 8 year old laptop with a local account. Fuck that noise. My wife is gonna have to learn Linux.
This would be illegal in a world not run by Microsoft and companies like it.
I think it’s illegal in the EU
trying to reinstall Windows on a used computer I got recently sent me over the edge. holy fucking shit that was so complicated. there is just no way to install windows without a Microsoft account now, their documentation is both out of date in some locations, non-existent in others (posts removed), and seemingly up-to-date yet incorrect in other locations. I followed the instructions for installing with a Microsoft account and then unlinking it, and it was fucking hell. I had to do some back door shit (not really, but stuff that the average user doesn’t stand a chance of doing) in order to get my account actually unlinked so that I could sign in with the local credentials
I will not be buying Microsoft again. just going to transition slowly as Windows 10 fades away
Download pro, during install before setting initial account: shift+f10 (may have to hold fn key if laptop). When the cmd box opens type oobe\bypassnro hit enter an PC reboots. Disconnect networking. Say I don’t have internet. Now you can do local accounts.
I have no idea why a clock would need an update.
The sticky note app makes my skin crawl every time it gets an update.
To show the current time, duh /s
All apps need updates as new features are added. The problem on windows the updates are slow and UX is poor.
Nobody’s complaining about android clock needing updates, because they’re seamless.
Also Clock is now an Electron app running in its own instance of Chromium, because the devs are afraid of static typing, thus everything needed to be in Javascript.
Not sure if joking…
This makes me sad. I get using electron for cross-platform stuff like VSCode or all the other examples (trying to do desktop apps with decent looking UIs that work across Linux/Windows/Mac is a nightmare) but the clock that only works on windows? WPF and/or WinUI ARE RIGHT FUCKING THERE WHAT THE HELL?!
THEY’RE YOUR FUCKING PRODUCTS, MICROSOFT!!!
trying to do desktop apps with decent looking UIs that work across Linux/Windows/Mac is a nightmare
I’d argue that both Qt as well as GTK is right there for the taking… but those are not “industry-standard”.
I fear the day my little Win7 lappy finally cooks itself. The modern computing landscape is bizarre, alien, and frightening to me. Maybe I can build a XT and find a 300 baud BBS?
New Update: Microsoft deleted 12 hours from your clock (every hour now is really 2 hours), so now you have to work 2/3 of every day. Sleep? What sleep? Get the fuck back to work! You pleb
Nah, they just moved them between 9-5, so now your work day is twice as long as your personal time is twice as short.
Clock needs an update? To decimal time, or what?
Or did they have to patch it because they managed to build a security hole into the original?
It’s probably got AI now.
hallucinates It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!
New cities in world clock probably
So why does that need a whole new clock app? That would just be an update to
tzdataon a Linux system.I remember seeing this update on some machines I set up for work and wondering the same. It occurs the first time the clock app is launched, and the “update” is really just pulling the time zone data and setting the clock to what is accurate (internet based world clock), seperate from the bios time it was going off of prior to that. It’s really just looks worse than it is.
Yeah but that shouldn’t be so data or read/write intensive that you need an entire splash. Should take less than a second on any hardware capable of running w11.
Is it just doing some weird backend patching to make it compatible with the rest of windows somehow?
You’re right, it should just cURL a JSON but this is Microsoft
It makes sense in a weird way, but it doesn’t feel right for a clock. You need to account for the case where it does take longer than it should to update, because sometimes it will for any number of really weird reasons. So you can’t just design for the best case scenario.
Now that you have a splash screen you need to ask yourself if it’s better to show the splash screen while doing the update, or to just let the app be unresponsive for the common case of a moment and then show the splash if it goes over that.
The answer is to show the splash in the common case too.
Now people are seeing a “weird screen” for a moment before they can process what they’re seeing. So you need to make the screen have a minimum display time to keep people from being confused.It’s weird, but people can sometimes be more confused by thinking something happened too fast.
Not that I’m thinking about it I bet it’s because the clock is a local app when the OS installs, but if you sign into a Microsoft account they probably re-install the clock from a Microsoft Store version. Which would give it the ability to auto sync features pertaining to your calendar and shit. So items you put in your Microsoft Planner will integrate automatically. Meaning of you use a local account there is likely no update, but if you sign in all your tasks, calendar items and shit likely automatically populate into it.
Bet they tried to integrate it into copilot or something as well, so like in Android if you told Google assistant or Gemini to set an alarm it is able to add it directly to you calendar and such.
Good arguments for any given program, just hard to imagine they’re still valid for a clock. There’s no other example i can’t think of that a clock has noticeable startup delay or even update time. In the most charitable wording this is exceptional, a unique example amongst the broadest class of programs.
I now realize it’s probably not worth attempting to convince me to not be cynical, i’m having as much trouble as OP with this lol. Thanks for your thoughts though.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s odd for a clock to act this way, just not inexplicable. At best it’s an example of UI standards being applied without regard to sense, which is very much in line with Microsoft.
Most other clocks will do something similar, they just do it in the background. Something that’s a lot easier to do if you’re not following a UI framework that says you’re never allowed to change something in a way that might cause the user to see a weird shift. Other things just acknowledge that clock sync should only take a few milliseconds before the clock is even visible, that a timezone DB update will rarely cause a change of more than an hour, and that a user will probably not even notice if there’s a shift.
Windows
I was going to ask what major cities have changed names, but we are on the brink of WWIII.
There’s thousands and thousands of them around the world. And other countries are developing faster than the U.S. too.
Developing country or not, major cities don’t just change names without major conflicts anymore.
New major cities, or smaller ones that weren’t previously listed.
Like in the U.S, major cities are usually actually a dozen or more cities making up a metro area. I distinctly remember in the 2010s a lot of world clocks would only list the name of the metro area and maybe one or two others for a given metro area.
That doesn’t happen often enough or with the urgency that requires Microsoft to push an individual update. Actually, I’m perfectly fine with not actually having my town listed and only being able to give Microsoft a city that’s an hour away from me.
What happened? I can’t find New Amsterdam.
Yay Windows, eh?
I installed Windows 11 on my new office PC yesterday, and it took hours.
- The initial boot took forever because it decided it needed to do an update as part of the install,
- Then after install when you enter your Microsoft account details so it downloads the entire internet including OneDrive (gross),
- Then you switch to AU locale because despite saying I’m in Australia during install it’s set me up as US language and currency and imperial measurements etc but Melbourne timezone (also incorrect),
- Then you uninstall and disable all the stupid Candy Crush and celebrity news (in the start menu?? why??) and LinkedIn and Xbox gaming crap and all this other stuff that just appears,
- Allocate another day to uninstall all the MS Office stuff I don’t want (especially OneDrive),
- Then you can install Firefox and Thunderbird and Nextcloud and Libre Office and Irfanview and accounting software,
- And finally everything starts syncing and away we go time to be productive…
- Jokes! Critical update and it’s time to reboot multiple times.
I can boot from a Ventoy USB and have a new distro installed and working on my laptop in under an hour ffs.
It’s a good thing that windows is so easy and user friendly. Right?
Right guys?IfranView 🥹 respect 🫡
Irfanview is definitely one of the image viewers of all time.
When I moved away from Windows one of the things I missed was the super lightweight image viewer from the XP and 7 days (even on Windows 10 I used to still copy the exe over from a backup because it was way better than the bloated shitty Photos app, or whatever Microsoft was trying to push)
I really wanted a replacement image viewer that was minimalistic, lightweight, and supported deleting images with a keystroke from the viewer - a feature absolutely essential as I like to arrow-key back and forth through photos and trim the fat, a feature many viewers somehow don’t support.
After trying out just about every option there was, my favourite has ended up being qView.
It’s FOSS, cross platform (Linux, macos, Windows) and pleasantly fast.
I’ve been using it for… god, feels like centuries at this point. Nothing else will do.
It also has an awesome compression if you resave oversized iphone photos for quick 'net sharing
XnView is quite feature-complete for my needs, but it’s constantly trying to phone home to Google, so better run it in a sandbox.
Geeqie is better in several ways - e.g. it supports avif and jxl - but it’s missing some features I’ve come to like.
I’ve yet to try qView.XnView is what I currently use as a Temu Irfanview on Linux. But it’s so awkward compared to Irfanview - everything seems to involve clicks or loading galleries or choosing templates every time. Irfanview does everything I want within a button press or two, and being able to just loop through directories with the mouse wheel is awesome.
Qview is very light on features, so if you like featureful it probably isn’t for you :)
If you still want (or need) to use Windows, I’ve found Ninite to be a great time saver.
I really need to try Ventoy. I’ve had 3 people recommend it to me so far.
Ninite was clutch back in my Windows days.
Ventoy works pretty well, though some people will tell you not to use it due to there being transparency issues with the source code (something about “BLOBS”? I dunno, I’m not a programmer).
Considering all the OSS you’re using, why not run Linux? Not permitted by work?
The accounting software we use (which does NOT run under WINE, despite many hours trying to make it so) and Irfanview are my sole remaining reasons. At home everything is some flavour of Linux.
Also the lack of virtual filesystem support for Nextcloud is a secondary factor. Important as my Nextcloud storage is significantly larger than a reasonably priced SSD. I believe it’s technically available in a bit of an alpha stage under Linux now though?
Nextcloud supports webdav, which you can just mount as a virtual filesystem either with GVFS or some KIO slave. AFAIR there is a fuse implementation as well.
For your single application a Windows VM may be suitable. Maybe even on some remote system in your company cloud. Single application forwarding is a long established technique.
For IrfanView itself I don’t know the capabilities, so can’t advise on it.
Most folks using irfanview started using it as an image viewer 10-15 years ago and never gave native ones on other OSes a chance. Maybe there’s an obscure format it supports but honestly I’ve actually found others to support more.
Personally, I found Irfanview with Ghostscript to be the easiest way to turn multipage color PDFs into single page black and white tiffs with a simple repeatable script. I don’t know if there’s a better way to do that now, but I don’t have to anymore.
As to just viewing images, it wasn’t even all that much better than windows viewer at the time. It really shined as a lightweight image manipulator.
Honestly, if VLC doesn’t open it, it’s a lost cause.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
- Erase the copy of Windows that Dell included on the machine and install it fresh, which might be the only way to actually remove McAfee.
- Spend an entire week, full time, installing software. Downloading setup.exes from vendor websites, running install wizards, telling Windows “Yes, put these program files in the Program Files folder” several dozen times in a row, installing some stuff to include MS Office from disc, which Windows increasingly fights him about.
- Somehow also taking a rather long time manually restoring file backups.
- Tweaking settings for DAYS.
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
- Comes over to my house to monologue about it for 5 to 10 minutes
- Spends an afternoon on the phone with Dell. At some point he convinces them to honor the warranty he paid extra for.
- 1.5 weeks later the one service tech Dell has for this state arrives with an SSD and installs it.
- Engage the full manual reinstall business, because 1. he’s got his whole system on one drive, and 2. for some reason he isn’t willing to actually use the full system image backups he takes.
he convinces them to honor the warranty
Your dad got a long beard by any chance? Has he got a pointy hat with stars on it?
No, he’s a clean shaven 70 year old who has been a computer nerd since punch cards.
But does Ventoy have OneDrive?
/s
I see and acknowledge your /s, but the serious answer is Ventoy doesn’t but many Linux distros offer OneDrive support out of the box and the onboarding process will help you set it up.
Don’t forget the whack-a-mole of finding which ‘features’ got turned back on with the critical updates.
This might assist you in the windows horrors
Use Windows LTSC
Installing Windows 10 or 11 has never taken more than an hour for me, from initial boot all the way to finalizing all updates. Don’t know what your issue was, but it is not the norm.
I had to have Windows not in a virtual machine for a work thing. Installed Windows 10 off a USB in a dual boot on a laptop that was already running Mint (last week). Install time was ~7-10 mins, no Microsoft account required or tricks to get around it. It pulled all the drivers for the Thinkpad when I connected to WiFi on the Desktop screen, and it updated and restarted in about 10 mins. Throw in that I configured my tool bar and themes and set my background to a flat color / changed the settings for performance over looks. Maybe 25 minutes total.
No candy crush or anything to uninstall because the install was created using the Media Creation Tool using the selection to install on another machine.
I use Linux on my machines standardly, and prefer it. My biggest issue was that I had to decide if I wanted to install Grub afterwords because Windows will overwrite your bootloader or just hit f12 everytime.
I don’t think it’s taken less than an hour for me in the past decade
I’ve built probably 350 PCs for customers over the last decade. Not the norm.
It’s just getting updated to, modern times. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
We replaced “Clock” with ClockPilot. It is so much better! Go ahead ask Clock Pilot what time it is!
You: Clockpilot What Time is It?
🤖 Clockpilot: “Ah, an excellent question! It’s breakfast time in 12 different countries, next week already in New Zealand, and—wait, hang on—did you know Saturn’s day is only 10.7 hours long? If you were there, you’d already be late for bed.
…Anyway. Locally speaking: it’s … thinking …did you adjust for Daylight Savings, quantum drift, or whether your cat stepped on your keyboard last spring?
Would you like me to set an alarm for:
Your next existential crisis, The heat-death of the universe, or Dinner?You: Clockpilot I said WHAT TIME IS IT!
V.02 ClankPilot V.03 CrackPilot
Oh, of course! It’s 5.20 AM on the 35. April in the 114. Juche year in North Korea. have a productive day!
We’re going to restart your computer during active hours. Your work will be interrupted. Fuck you.
Yeah, came home to my pc having restarted itself for updates the other day, despite having 2 VMs running at the time that were not properly shut down. Then Windows tried to push their cloud backup on me… twice, and it reset my mouse speed to the default for some reason
Then Windows tried to push their cloud backup on me… twice
This is major boundary respect by Microsoft’s standards
Cloud backup just means they will use all and any data on your pc and network to train their shitty ai to do more shitty things and continue stealing our data. Yay future.
Lets say they don’t use private data for training
(Continue reading when you’re done laughing):
Eventually, victims eventually run out of “free” storage.
The humble corporation will do a bunch of psychologically unethical tricks to basically hypnotize users into forking over those three digits at the back of the family credit card.
Now the victim’s data is effectively held ransom. Keep paying or lose it.
But they won’t stop paying. They paid for a year’s plan at a discount and the peaceful megacorp conveniently hit autorenew for them at checkout.
12 months roll around and oopsie, they already have the money. They could go through the refund process, but they’ve got shit on their plate, might as well keep it for another year.
I could keep rambling, but on Lemmy, I’m probably preaching to the choir about the first verse of genesis.
Yeah, there was at least a skip for now option… What more could I ask for?
Interrupted, and not saved
Isn’t everything being saved automatically anyway, when you work in the cloud (i.e. SharePoint)?
Your Comment (version 1).xlsx has been auto-recovered. Do you want it?
No, thanks! ;-)
Actually I work a lot with Office Documents on SharePoint in my job and for each of them “automatic saving” is on, so you never have to worry about anything. Just close the application when you’re done and your work is always up-to-date.
Auto-saving works great except when I’m using an existing document as a template to make a new one only to remember 45 minutes in that I forgot to disable auto-save or make a copy to start with and the original document is gone.
Oh yes, I had this too. Templates filled with random content from various team members. Now we switched to dotx templates to avoid this kind of situation.
MS disabled the auto-save function for anything on a local disk, which is necessary for me because I use *gasp* version control software.
If you turn off a few of Microsoft’s more insane tracking in the privacy settings, it disables the autosave “feature”. The autosave fucked up version tracking badly enough that it was nice to have a global kill button.
I have found that turning off most new “features” that Microsoft makes recently is usually for the best.
Makes sense. You wouldn’t want to hammer that file onto disk every second.
Yes I do. I made a change. Save it. My disk can take it.
in good software autosave happens with a slight delay of 10 seconds or so. It’s really not uncommon.
It’s being saved, but not for you.
Love the snark in this thread
When ppl really Get It, you love to see it
Yes, until its somehow automatically deleted during a syncing error and than you’re fucked.
Libreoffice does this without forcing you to allow them to store all of your files. Because it’s a feature that doesn’t rely on any kind of cloud bs, MS just added that requirement because they are assholes that have no respect for their users.
I have to use Power BI for my job and it does automatically saves until it’s been open too long and then it stops automatically saving and also won’t let you manually save. Then you have to do a Save As for some reason, close every open PBI file, and reopen them, which takes approximately 3-5 business days.
inb4 some commenter says this doesn’t happen.
It doesn’t happen to me, but I took a proactive approach to prevent it from happening. I don’t remember what that action was, since I did it years and years ago… but I know it’s possible. You just have to literally more than nothing to prevent these things.
Or you could switch to linux… but that takes an even more proactive approach.
My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.
It would tell me about updates, but wouldn’t do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).
It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn’t want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.
So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it’s actually been easier and I haven’t even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.
Not saying that it’s been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven’t had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn’t even need as much settings tweaking).
And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I’d instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.
you could switch to linux
Done
Ah, so not even speaking from experience, then.
… why are internet people like this?
I used windows constantly for 20+ years. Since windows 7 I noticed this auto-restarting bullshit. I switched to linux in 2021. What kind of gotcha do you think you have… ?
I never said it didn’t happen, I said you had to take steps to make it not happen.
Why are you like this? With the incessant need to be right and everyone else wrong?
You’re just making yourself look even worse with every reply.
ok. “no experience” in what exactly?
not everyone – just people who are confidently incorrect.
The ‘keep changing hours’ section in this article works for me whenever I have to use that partition.
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-updates-restart-disable
You pretty much create the script and have the task scheduler run it hourly. (You should be able to make it silent, though I’ve never bothered for the hourly, half-second cmd blip)
You should be able to make it silent
You can make it silent. Create a .vbs file, open it in a text editor, and input the following…
Set WshShell = CreateObject(“WScript.Shell”) WshShell.Run chr(34) & “z:\path\to\your\script.cmd” & Chr(34), 0 Set WshShell = Nothing
Have your scheduled task run the .vbs, rather than your initial script.
I want a script that forces the update servers at Redmond to reboot every hour on the hour
Microsoft needs to sit in on a one bar prison for 36hrs. It used to be bad. Now its tortuous.
Why even does anyone put up with any of it?
Tyranny of the default. Also aggressive enterprise salespeople.
