My Windows 10 installation forcibly rebooted to install updates right in the middle of a 10+ hour overnight render.

I can't believe this is a thing. I recently switched back to Windows after deciding I wanted to play around with VR development (and honestly, get back into gaming) and was horrified to see a notice telling me my computer was going to reboot itself in one minute, with no way to abort.

I was right in the middle of something, and my first instinct was to Google how to stop the damn reboot. Of course, my computer was already rebooting by then.

I now know to turn on the setting to postpone updates for a month. But wow, I can't believe such unbelievably hostile UX is the out of the box experience.

(Also, side note, I'm pleasantly surprised at how robust and hassle free the Windows experience has otherwise become. I may even prefer this laptop to my MacBook, which I never thought I'd find myself thinking in a million years.)

Wait until you find out it's updating your motherboard BIOS/firmware (it tells you when it starts doing it!), and there's no way to stop it.

Not super great when the whole point of not upgrading to the latest BIOS was because it introduced a critical bug.

This only happens on Microsoft hardware though (or it is not Windows doing the update).

UEFI updates can now be delivered by vendors thru Windows Update now : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br...

Good to know. But do any PC manufacturers do that in practice?

Not true. I only found out about this when my Acer laptop did it. :(

I just leave Final Fantasy 14 running in the background perpetually which stops windows from sleeping or running updates although it probably is helping kill the planet slightly faster as a result.

Personally, I'd prefer the system repeatedly prompt the user to restart to apply security updates (of which almost every update contains these days) instead of automatic restarts. It does try to apply those during what it believes are not "active hours", but it is not a perfect system.

Until that happens, consider setting your active hours manually in the Update & Security -> Windows Update settings panel. The update system is designed to avoid automatic restarts during active hours.

You can also pause updates for a period of time as well when you know that you don't want your system disrupted overnight.

I empathize with your frustration around the timing and I would encourage you to file feedback asking for more control over when updates happen.

Unfortunately, I often have renders that take way longer than 24 hours, so setting active hours wouldn't help much.

With that being said, I now have the box in question completely disconnected from the internet and I task it remotely via serial.

Update & security options can pause updates for 35 days at a time.

This should prevent automatic reboots: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/aavocr/after_6_mo...

To people that post this type of comment, do you not have qualms about announcing to the Internet that you repeatedly decline critical security updates for enough weeks that Windows forcibly installs them?

Pretty easy to fully disable updates.

Easy to do on a temporary basis but they will come back. I think even if you do 'sc delete wuauserv' it will eventually come back.

Don't do that on a computer you care about...

You can't do that anymore. You can pause updates for a while, but eventually it'll start again.

I did so via the registry, but my changes were reverted after updating.

"do you like this photo?" nooooo....

That's why you get Windows 10 Pro instead of Windows 10 Home.

It's a Windows 10 Pro installation.

Can you not schedule updates on Pro? Or change the option to not automatically reboot?

You can make it not reboot with group policies, not commonly known though - most people try the registry stuff which doesn't seem to work consistently. Been running Win10 Pro for a couple years, never had a single unwanted reboot, once went nearly a year without doing a single update.

Specifically, in group policy:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > "Configure Automatic Updates" and "No auto-restart with logged-on users for scheduled automatic update installations"

Not on mine in the UI, you can pause for 7 days or set hours to reboot during (but you need X hours per day that it can reboot during) but not have it disabled perpetually.

I did via the registry, but I later discovered that these changes reverted after updating.

I now have my render box completely disconnected from the internet and I task it remotely.

Arch Linux representing: my OS can turn a directory into a container w/ arbitrary programs loaded that is split from my main OS. My backup routine moves 50gb to an external hdd in 30 seconds because I use rsync with hard links against previous deltas. I have ~75 lines of python that poll my downloads directory and unzip, untar, and un-rar anything I download. Another ~75 lines moves downloads into a quarantine zone after 48 hours, then deletes them after 5 days.

My entire OS weights 26gb, I can remote into servers across the globe faster than you can get a right-click menu on a win10 desktop, and I want to finish by reminding windows 10 users that their videogame OS ships with a start menu and boots like an orangutan with a PHD in sales.

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I work professionally as a programmer, so I agree with your overall sentiment, but I'm also very involved in film & video restoration outside of work and can state with confidence that GNU/Linux is a second-class citizen in this space.

The few companies in this business that target GNU/Linux produce software that pales in comparison to offerings on Windows & Mac OS X. For instance, PFClean by The Pixel Farm barely holds a candle to DIAMANT.

Now, this obviously has nothing to do with them targeting GNU/Linux, but at the end of the day you have to use the best tools for the job at hand.

Is that a temporary issue (GNU/Linux will catch up soon with new upgrades) or a permanent lag for GNU/Linux? And is there a case for “all the tools are good enough really”? Total OS agnostic here. In the early days, performance was really a “can do/no can do” sort of thing for a big chunk of the problem space. Is that still true today?

I'd like to imagine that it's a temporary issue, but the problem is self-perpetuating. Film Restoration houses buy souped-up Windows & Mac OS X boxes and hire workers trained to use specific software which targets only those OSes. It would be very hard to make a good business argument to move to GNU/Linux at present which, unfortunately, disincentivizes having GNU/Linux as a target.

Huh?

There's sandbox in Windows now, and before that there was SanboxIE which I never needed though.

The backup on Windows is transparent and keeps all versions of the files. You just need to specify destination when it starts nagging.

Your Python script has nothing to do with OS. I have a few C# scripts for DynDNS and other stuff.

Windows takes about 20GB, and lives with full Visual Studio on a 60GB drive with about 15GB left.

Sounds like you haven't really used Windows after 7.

And yeah, not only I can remote in under a second with either SSH or RDP, I can do gaming easily, train my TensorFlow models, and use multiple monitors with a tiling WM.

Oh, and my laptops sleep well.

Exactly. I run Windows 10 everywhere -- and Windows Servers in the cloud. None of these problems that the Mac and Linux folks talk about.

They're basing everything on what they read in Mac printed magazines about "Windoze" back in the late 80s.

You need to embrace and containerize more paragraphs of the navy seal copy-pasta to represent arch linux effectively. ;)

Sounds great - do you have a blog or repo describing your setup?

https://github.com/Jeffrey-P-McAteer/azure_os - not polished at all, just what I use to throw away + re-format my laptop when I lose track of the files on it.

EDIT: I am pretty damn proud of it though, nearly every week I'm finding some button I can "not have to click anymore" and packages that support that get recorded in the azure-os build script.

Thanks!

I don't like how locked down OS X is, but Windows is turning in to an absolute train wreck.

I would probably use a frozen in time Windows 7 indefinitely, but for the first time in my life, I'm seriously considering moving to desktop Linux.

I recommend Manjaro with the default desktop environment XFCE.

It's a rolling release, so you always get up-to-date software. Installing software is easier than any other OS (just use the Add/Remove app not the command line). I have tried desktop Linux for years and I never really got an effortlessly stable and worry free system until I used that distro.

I've been running it on one laptop and two desktop workstations now for over two years. It never interrupts me, I update when I want to and it's based on Arch so it's got excellent documentation.

Thanks for the recommendation!

What exactly are you doing that macOS being locked down is a problem? Despite the fact you can turn things like SIP off if you need to?

I ask because most of the time the answers are vague or sketchy. There are legit answers. However, usually it's along the lines of installing a game they torrented that's trying to load keylogger.kext and failing. or 'I just don't like it, so it shouldn't exist'

Those lock down parts are stopping normal people, who arn't well versed in say... not installing things from links sent from [email protected] claiming to be their companies ceo.

Not the op, but I was shocked to see how much effort was required to disable mouse acceleration on a mac. Dragging the slider to 0 doesn't do it. Editing the plist doesn't do it. You need to install some custom mouse driver with kernel extensions to have 1:1 mouse movement.

What's the use case here?

This is the kind of thing I mean, though.

The Windows UI is shockingly tweakable. You can buy programs to do all sorts of things, e.g. multi monitor assistants.

With OS X, Apple's way is fantastic, but if you want to step outside it you're in trouble.

The Unix underlying OS X was strictly superior, although now there's WSL it's much less of an advantage.

Yeah, but what is the use case here? I mean, the author pointed out that it's possible to do, but who needs to do this and why?

I don't know. I think GP is nuts. But when I have my own weird use case I expect people to think I'm nuts, too.

That's kind of the point though?

It's nuts, but you can still manage to do it. Maybe a handful of people would ever actually need to do it, so why would it be a default, or even an option people might accidently set?

Right, it's a different philosophy. I think the OS X way is on the whole better, it's just not my preference.

Yes - so nice! I was using Dual Link DVI for my 2560x1600 because if you use DisplayPort in Windows and turn your monitor off, Microsoft for whatever reason resets your desktop - utterly re-arranging your windows and icons on your desktop. Windows only does this with DisplayPort, not with HDMI or DVI.

So a few months back after an update - not sure if it was Windows or nVidia - my graphic card drive starts crashing. And even though in the event log it shows the driver recovered, the display would never come back and I’d have to reboot the machine. Swapping cards solved the issue so I figured it might be my 1080ti or perhaps my power supply was starting to fail and not supplying enough power (others with the error I was getting reporting replacing their power supply fixed it).

I was all set to get a new power supply when for whatever reason I decided to test Display Port. It worked! Well, with the annoying behavior for why I didn’t want to use Display Port under Windows in the first place.

Sigh.

Bottom line - no vendor or platform is perfect. They all have their issues. In general I find I have far fewer problems with Apple; as it should be - they have far more control over all the variables at play.

Also if we ever had 100% trouble free computing what would people on the Internet have to complain about?

Don't think I'm blindly all-in on Macs - I have Windows here, multiple Linux flavors running, etc.

This is more about Apple's continual decreasing quality level unless you do buy all-in (and as much as they are pretty, I get what I need from these 2 LG monitors, and don't need the Pro Display XDR). I mean, it seriously appears as though they didn't bother to test DSC on anything but the Pro Display with Big Sur, when this stuff worked just fine.

You misspelled Ubuntu.

Edit: I don't know what I expected.

You misspelled Archlinux.

You misspelled Arch with a Debian install on another partition in case an update breaks everything.

Arch with a btrfs root, and automatic snapshots before updates.

You misspelled c++.

which is the best linux distro?

This is like asking "Which is the best automobile?"

It depends a lot on personal preference and what you want to use it for. (Families with a lot of kids need something like a minivan, some people need a truck with huge towing capacity, some people want good gas mileage, etc.)

My personal opinions:

* Ubuntu - when you want something well-supported and everything usually just works out of the box

* Pop!_OS - same as above but gaming is more important to you

* Debian - when you want stability rather than the latest features

* Arch - when you want control over every aspect of your system

* CentOS - when you want a rock-solid server platform (though this has changed very recently)

And there are dozens of other flavors of Linux with different strengths and weaknesses and different levels of support.

So it depends on your goals!

Is Pop!_OS better than Ubuntu for gaming? Given that the officially supported distro for Steam is whatever the latest LTS version of Ubuntu is I would assume that would be the way to go.

(FWIW I'm using Arch and have found Steam support to be pretty seamless, apart from needing to install PulseAudio as bare ALSA had issues.)

I've never used Pop!_OS but I've heard that it takes the "Just Works" polish of Ubuntu in general and extends that to proprietary video card drivers.

For an absolute beginner, it's probably better for gaming. For people who already know what they're doing, it's probably not a noticeably better gaming experience.

Whatever one _you_ aren't using yet.

You misspelled whatever is here https://xkcd.com/378/

You misspelled PalmOS

The parent comment was edited. That might explain some of the responses feeling "out of sync", so to speak.

Yeah used to say something like "That's why professionals use Windows 10".

I threw Pop_OS! on a Thinkpad for work and it's the best out of the box OS I've ever used.

How many professionals need 144Hz to get work done?

I certainly don't. However, I absolutely have noticed a reduction in my eye fatigue after a day of working. It's also very nice to move things quickly, scroll quickly, without tearing.

Need, though? No.

I'd also like it if Tidal could play without popping and hiccuping on a 12 core Xeon at idle under Big Sur (this also worked fine on Catalina, but I've not found much on this so I'm reserving my blame). I'm getting flashbacks to my 486 trying to play 320kbps MP3s...

The conversation is not about need.

How else can we cook up a perfect powerpoint for the executives to marvel over!

ChromeOS. And I'm not even kidding. Everything you loved about switching from XP to OS X, or Blackberry to iPhone, all over again. And arguably better *nix support than Mac.

What if I want my computer to not tell Google every single thing I am doing?