Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot.
Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can.
There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me."
We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?
Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.
The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.
Sorry, but I don't buy that. If Microsoft did this, I think it was for a reason. It's very easy to sit on HN and opine about how Apple can persuade iPhone users to upgrade. But we're not the ones at Microsoft with the job of dealing with the reality of millions upon millions of desktop computers that simply aren't ever being patched, no matter how hard we prod our users, with the result that they are being exploited en masse, used for criminal purposes, and as a result our reputation is getting trashed and governments and other powerful actors are demanding we do something to fix this problem.
They may have all the reasons in the world, but Windows is objectively worse for me (and I believe other power users) in this regard than other OSes.
I'm not sure why you think it's a good idea to defend a company that takes away _your_ control of your computer, and how the other computers having been exploited makes you feel better about losing _your_ work (when you are presumably qualified to avoid and/or detect being exploited on your own). Perhaps you're lucky to not have had trouble with this yet?
Hah, say that to my iPhone - every time there is a new update it automatically downloads it (further crippling my already low storage) and keeps asking me for my passcode every few hours. One wrong tap and there goes my phone for the next 10-15 minutes.
To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.
A) When it thinks it is not in use, not so easy to predict.
> To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.
Yes, but it actually presents the prompt twice, and one wrong tap reboots the device with no way of aborting the process which on a good day takes 10 minutes on my phone.
Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening.
I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.
If you, or the system, initiates a reboot/shutdown, and all apps that you have running are such apps, the reboot will just happen, with no further confirmation.
If, however, any app that you have running does not assert that it can be perfectly restored after reboot, then the OS will pause the reboot process and prompt the user to confirm that they want to shut down said app. If the user says no, the reboot is aborted. If the user does nothing (or isn't there to respond), the computer just stays stuck on that prompt forever.
I don't see anything wrong with such a "conservative" auto-detection system, personally.
Microsoft would have to actually implement it that way, though.
Problem is, apps can lie.
Not many apps take advantage of that, however.
All in all, not too shabby.
It's not like it hits you without warning. You also have the ability to manually reboot whenever you like(!) and prevent surprises that way.
I think the problem already has a solution: no automatic reboots. Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.
That's EXACTLY what it does now. I have never been surprised by a reboot on any computer I log into and actually use.
Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.