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Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Same here. I don't know what people that have all these issues are doing, but none of my systems or those of my friends and family have these issues.
We also aren't fucking around with the various random guides to "debloat", mess with telemetry, eetc. however, so I can only assume that it's things in those guides and programs that cause issues. For the people with enough technical knowledge to look for the guides but not enough knowledge to know what they do, or care enough to find out.
The longest update I've had took about 15 minutes. My system never restarts in the middle of use to install updates, with the only exception when I was actively hitting the delay button for several days to see if I could force it to. And it finally did, after several days of it asking and me telling it no, and it still gave me a countdown to save my work. It did not randomly restart while in use without warning.
Programs like candy crush, that had install links that were preinstalled (it's not the full game, just a link to install it) I uninstalled like any regular app and they never returned. I use my system like a regular user, not mucking about blindly in the registry, and never run into these weird issues people complain about. I block telemetry I don't want at the network level. The OS never knows and I don't have to blindly trust random guides telling me to mess with things that aren't intended to be messed with. The OS seems to work just fine with telemetry connections working but failing to connect, as would be expected and tested by MS. People messing with those things manually is not something they'd likely spend much, if any, time on testing.
From my experience, many so-called "power user" complaints are caused by the user doing things they don't understand, outside of what would be expected and tested.
It's people who had a single bad experience 15-20 years ago, or heard second hand of such issues. Or if they've experienced it recently then they were probably running a very slow hard drive rather than an ssd.
My friend needed to reinstall Windows because it broke after the update, and he is using a ~5-year old PC with an SSD. Windows can sometimes break, even if you are not messing with debloating scripts and etc. It was and it will always be the case. But Linux can unexpectedly break itself too. I suppose it can be the case with MacOS too.
The more important thing for me is the possible options for troubleshooting and, if the situation is really bad, how fast can you reinstall the system to have a fully operational PC again. And in that case, Linux wins, because even if it is harder to troubleshoot, it's very often possible to just insert some commands, where on Windows, most of the time, the best solution is to reinstall the whole OS. And even reinstallation is faster on Linux. It's even faster if you have /home on a separate partition.
The problem with windows is it's one time it's installing ads that you have to disable for apps, a different time it's installing ads by re-enabling Cortana and forcing local searches over the web, a different time it's adding ads by installing a bullshit weather app, a different time it's adding ads with a bullshit news app, a different time it's reverting all your settings limiting ~~spyware~~ telemetry, a different time...
It's not one thing repeatedly. But it's constantly whack a mole to figure out how to disable the newest hostile anti-feature it installed without your consent.
Yeah, I have never had Windows 11 undo anything I've changed or reinstall anything I have uninstalled.
You all are doing something that is causing these issues.
Every single one of those things happened on Windows 10. No, I absolutely did not do anything to instigate it.
Microsoft is malicious and has an extremely long history of being shitbags adding aggressively invasive features for the sole purpose of spyware and advertising.
Microsoft being shitbags aside... no argument there.
You say you didn't do anything... but if not everyone has the issue... then something is being done to cause it, whether you want to admit it or not.
Most of those were major "feature" additions. If you didn't experience them you weren't using windows.
If you didn't have settings reverted, you didn't have sane settings that blocked Window's obscenely invasive data gathering. Pretty much every single one of them had articles written at the time, because they absolutely did happen to everyone. You just weren't paying attention. None of them was in any way obscure.
Asking someone to take 15 minutes out of their work time to do updates is exactly why people DON'T want to update. Even 15 minutes is insane. That's a whole standup meeting, that's a whole presentation, that's work disruption for a bunch of people.
Linux updates in a minute. That's the kind of performance we SHOULD be expecting in the modern age and that Microsoft refuses to deliver.
So don't update in the middle of your work day. It literally pops up in the corner saying it needs a restart after installing what it can while the system is running, and you can delay it. It only forces a restart when you've delayed it several times already over multiple days.
Most updates on my system are handled overnight, outside the active hours I've set in the settings. So it doesn't affect my usage at all. I get on in the morning with a freshly updated system, and if I left apps open overnight, they are reopened where I left off. I only see updates when I tell it to update manually.
I can see you don't use a laptop.
Not everyone leaves their computer on draining power. I always put it to sleep when I am not using it. If your argument is that, yeah updates aren't a problem, you just let your computer run and chew on it for a long time, that's still a problem...
There is nothing it is "chewing" on for an extended period. I know the updates take at most 15 minutes (on an NvME drive, a SATA M.2 or HDD of course will take longer), because I manually update my systems most of the time. I can see it perform the update right in front of me, most of the time in less than 5 minutes. IF I instead leave it on overnight and it updates and restarts automatically, it is ready to go in the morning where I left off.
Never updating your system manually and never leaving it online outside of your set active hours to perform maintenance when you aren't actively using it (like installing updates automatically), then getting angry at the system despite you never giving it any downtime to do so, is a YOU problem. Same for the users that delay the restart for multiple days after the updates are installed, and then get surprised when it finally needs to restart like it's been requesting for 2+ days and being ignored.
Wtf is this crap? How is it MY problem when other OSes do a much better job with the update process? You talk about 15 minutes or leaving updates running overnight as if that's decent. I can do a Linux update within 2 minutes and get my system back up by minute 3. That's the kind of performance I am expecting and I don't even need a super fast NVMe drive to do it.
The fact that you're okay with putting up with Window's comparatively slow update speed and then have to make excuses for it by saying that the USER needs to constantly baby it or waste power by leaving it overnight is honestly hilarious. To be quite frank, you just don't know how updates could be better because you're just used to what Windows has always offered you.
Don't put the blame on users for a problem that Microsoft can definitely solve but never does.
I'm sorry but as much as I hate Windows, the only updates that take this long are feature updates that happen twice a year. The vast majority of windows updates take less than a minute for me and don't require a restart. Even the ones that do finish in under 5 mins
Not true. Cumulative updates also take a while, so do the .NET runtimes. Maybe you have a system with a super fast NVMe drive and a new CPU so you don't realize it, but other OSes can do much more with much less powerful hardware.