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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.
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!
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
laughs in Linux
Cries in arch
Laughing yourself to tears about windows, peak arch user behavior
"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!
I have no idea why a clock would need 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.
Why does a clock need more features. It tells the time. MAYBE add an alarm to it so you don’t have to have 2 apps. that’s it. It’s not a calendar, it’s not a task-tracker, and the last time I checked we still have 24 hour days.
The only updates it needs are UI updates (which should be system-side anyways) and if the time source changes, which are a few bytes at most.
tbf, there are leap seconds. I don’t know if this “update” was for a leap second, but it really needs to be more seamless.
leap seconds should be handled via the standard sync just like any normal deviation
yeah, but this is Microshaft we’re talking about. What they SHOULD do, isn’t what they do. Hence why we have windows.
The sticky note app makes my skin crawl every time it gets an update.
Yay Windows, eh?
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?
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
I installed Windows 11 on my machine a few months back because i couldn’t get Cities Skylines 2 to run properly under linux. What a fucking mess. only had it for a few hours before i went back to linux. Ahh the serenity.
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.
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.
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”.
Probably skill issue on my end tbh but here goes:
I’ll admit I’ve never tried GTK. I’ve always assumed it was specific to linux and used to make apps that look a certain way (like they were made for gnome) vs allowing you to make UIs the way you want to. Maybe I should look into this more.
Qt I’d say is “industry standard” but I’ve never been able to figure it out (so definitely skill issue here). It’s just that every time I’ve tried it, it’s been confusing where you’re even supposed to start. Also the last time I tried it I was a bit lost because I assume that I’m supposed to use Qt 6 (?) but it requires me to create an account because there’s a whole community/enterprise pricing thing (fair enough, nobody’s entitled to OSS work, especially not billion/trillion dollar companies). I plan to look again but that’s where I’ve been stuck so far.
I hate shipping chromium for every single app and it’s easy to fuck up a react app but there’s something to be said about cutting through the BS, just building, and having it work the same everywhere. Webapps won’t perform as well as native but they will perform well enough that it’s fine assuming the product owners give a shit.
Still learning but this has been my sentiment so far.
Edit:
Been playing around with iced.rs a bit and it looks promising but I haven’t done anything past beginner stuff so no fully formed opinions yet.Also there was a big push for “web first” applications, thus there’s a lot of developers with that kind of knowledge. In college, I was instructed to instead of learning software optimizations, to learn how to outsource complicated computations to the cloud, where there will be always enough compute, so I can write my code “as clean as possible, without worrying about optimizations”.
Wha? That’s a dangerous mindset to teach. The last thing you want is to add network latency to every interaction or tether an app to the internet when it doesn’t really need it (but I guess big tech didn’t get the memo on that one).
But it was the beginning of the big data hype, so in exchange you got advertising data and anyone daring to object are probably criminals because “good citizens have nothing to hide”.
Ah yes, the surveillance state argument. Classic 🤦
That explains so, so much. Not just why everything wants to connect somewhere, but also disasters like programs with >1000 npm package dependencies. Why learning the right way if you’ve always been told to go the easy way.
Not sure if joking…
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
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.
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.
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.
What happened? I can’t find New Amsterdam.
The last Windows OS I used was XP. I miss those days.
It’s just getting updated to, modern times. (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t forget the whack-a-mole of finding which ‘features’ got turned back on with the critical updates.
‘accidentally’ turned back on.
This might assist you in the windows horrors
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.
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 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.
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.
Use Windows LTSC
Modern user-friendly Linux in a nutshell:
“Hey that kernel update finished in the background, unless you were bored enough to stare at this window for the last 3 whole minutes. It would be best to your machine as soon as it repels for you, boss! 😎”
Please note however that modern user-friendly linux does not use emojis in notifications about system updates. That was just for fun.
I use mint btw
That’s the way. And thank you, Linux, for not
askingbugging me again later… ever.It would be best to your machine as soon as it repels for you, boss!
It would be best to what my machine?
