Linux

Our work is the opposite. As soon as a new machine arrives we go straight to BIOS at boot, switch the settings and install Linux immediately. Windows never sees the light of day. I do feel for you as we do do sales calls and in the middle of sales calls the people that we are calling have their computers reboot on them, do an update, or I've just got to restart and on restart it does an update and huge amounts of time are wasted on those people.

Windows probably costs the world millions a day in wasted, for time for shit like that.

I’m no Windows fanboy but I have to use it quite a lot, at home and at work. I don’t know what versions or settings you guys have set up but I’ve never had a Windows update I can’t postpone, ever.

Windows also used to show me the ugly face of Trump in the start menu even if I didn't ask for it. That was more than 4 years ago. Recently was accidentally hovering over some 'copilot' button in Edge of a friend. And again - pop-up with Trump. So yes: fuck Windows, fuck Microsoft

Windows fr thinks that getting updates done is more important than getting work done.

I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I've used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven't touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

• After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, "what do you mean, it's a fucking jpeg." Then it did the same thing for a .zip.

• I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. "No worries" I thought, "I made a restore point!" I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it's own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

I agree.

I find the Teams app works great on Ubuntu. The Microsoft apps work OK in browser, until you have a lot of collaborators.

I rarely need to switch to windows, so when I do switch I expect to spend an hour doing updates.

Go get drunk. You deserve it.

I unplugged my company issued Windows 11 Dell laptop from its charger yesterday so that I could go ask a manager a question in their office, and the entire computer just shut the fuck off despite having full charge. I'm so glad I moved all my personal stuff to Linux.

my boss told me today if we moved to literally any non-microsoft platform or software, i'd be out of a job.

and he's right. most of us only have careers because microsoft can't push out a software that's more than barebone functional - and everyone use them even if there are far superior alternatives out there literally only because of familiarity.

i'm not planning to stop giving microsoft shit of course. they should be criminally prosecuted over their exchange service even and how it's blacklisting competitors to force businesses onto the platform a la microsoft classic tactics. but eh.

"Tell me it's Friday without saying it's Friday" ;)

But to the point, yeah, my current job tried to convince me to switch to Windows. I tried, it was miserable experience, it broke in 3 days and all that was even before the current Windows ludicrousness

I'm assuming the windows machine is a work PC and the Linux is yours right?

Because what you describe doesn't sound like a "windows" issue but rather an IT management issue.

You can put off updates and reboots a very long time. And always be able yo postpone them.

Applying updates on boot daily sounds dumb to me. But I'm also figuring your IT dept has poor (or no) sense in managing their inventory well. Most updates can be applied silently at a scheduled time.

Also, your machine sounds old and/or poorly maintained the way you describe it. If its more than 5 years old your company is just cheap.

I'm all for griping about Windows but this seems off to me.

luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point...), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company's funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we'd all save money.

This. If updates are SO important, then Windows can do it while it's shutting down.

because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot

What kind of PC is this? Does it have an SSD?

I also use Windows at work, and it is driving me insane. The updates can be annoying, but it is mostly just how fucking slow it is. Directories routinely take mulitple seconds to load, and I don't understand why. I also just prefer Gnome in general, but I do think the Window's user interface as a whole is pretty good when it works. I will say, WSL works well for the things I want to run "in linux", and it integrates very nicely with VS Code.

I can actually install Linux if I want. They provide instructions for how to roll it in to Intune etc, and I will probably try it, but keep a dual boot to Windows available for when I really need it. The problem is that my job is married to Office, which doesn't have native linux support at all. We ues OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and collaborative Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Most of these probably run okay enough in browser, but especially for big Word documents where we need to make sure formatting is okay (a nightmare in Word even without multiple users editing the document at once), I am not sure if it works well enough. Rclone can be used to sync to OneDrive. For now I just try to avoid making office documents whenever possible, sticking to markdown, latex and csv files etc., store as much as possible on our i.e. our GitLab instance instead, and hopefully it will it will be easier to switch over time.

I also wonder what would happen if Donny wakes up one day, decides he wants to invade Europe or something and all our Office 365 licenses suddenly stop working. We would have a lot of other bigger issues of course, so it's not the most critical issue.

I've only worked at one software company where devs where allowed to install Linux as their OS. It was awesome... except when there was an update and then you had an urgent request from management while you where fixing what the update broke

Your complaints are certainly valid, but the IT of your company should be applying Group Policies to address some of these!

Enterprise version is also more stable than the goddamn "you are the guinea pig" spyware Home and Pro versions. O&O ShutUp10++ for those... Hilariously, they are a Microsoft Partner according to their website; some partnership that is when an automatic update from Microsoft can undo anything their software does. 😂

I'm by no means an expert but a power user... I saw the writing on the wall years ago and now have only one Windows machine explicitly for some hardware that have no Linux drivers but is otherwise very nice and useful.

If you’re stuck with Windows for corporate-issued computers, the next time this happens you can abort shutdowns in Windows.

Command Prompt:

shutdown /a

Saved me several times over the years.

I actually would really prefer for companies to just provide us virtual machines and I can connect to vpn and then to the work hosts. This way I can use my own setup.

At work we have everything windows. When getting my work laptop with windows, I just intalled PopOs on it. I do have the problem of not able to use AOVPN, so I can't work from home. But since I need to go close to work, why even work from home.

I have a channel on my team's Slack were I just vent off on these kind of situations 😬

#windows-is-the-best, inspired from #gitlab-is-the-best, the chan were everyone vents off when the CI refuses to pick up workers 😅

This sounds like a problem with your organization. I use windows at the hospital where I work, and we don't run into these kinds of issues. Yeah it is rife with other issues like goading you into using microsoft edge, one drive, and more, but updates are handled by IT.

Too many times I've been at the very limit of failing to deliver an assignment. I used to have classes from morning to night (used to get home at 23:00) and sometimes I did homework at uni and scan/upload in my computer since camera-scanned documents don't look as good, so I had to deliver them ASAP, but Windows would take a LOT of time to load Teams and sometimes it started applying updates at startup, so it would be SLOW AS HELL.

Just some days ago it happened again (the homework was assigned a day before) so I booted up windows and what a surprise (/s) it started applying updates, so Teams wouldn't even open. I had to send the files from there to my linux computer (I love you, KDE connect!) because I still had to add some things to the document and Teams for Linux loaded in a second lol

Paragraphs...

Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.

Windows isn't keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)

You want to use Linux and yet you don't know what a newline character is?