One small "sop" to the very disruptive problem of having the Windows 10 unexpectedly randomly slam the window closed on you:

Windows 10 to offer update 'snoozes'

Microsoft will enable Windows 10 users to choose when security updates are installed once they arrive rather than enforcing them straightaway.

Users have complained that the reboots required for some updates, which cannot currently be deferred, are disruptive. ...

... said John Cable, a director of program management at Microsoft.

"What we heard back most explicitly was that you want more control over when Windows 10 installs updates," he wrote. "We also heard that unexpected reboots are disruptive if they happen at the wrong time."...



Don't you just love the positive spin on that?!

Try explaining that to a presenter when the Windows 10 laptop goes into sulk mode right in the middle of a presentation in front of a theatre of a 100 or so people... Add a mad scramble for a second laptop and to reload the presentation and get back to the right slide and so on... Whilst the first laptop is waiting for a WiFi connection with the happy message about "update in progress, do not switch off"... Quite a fantastic advertisement!


How do people put up with such silliness?...

Rule one should always be: NEVER blindly terminate a live user session...


IT is what we allow it to be,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I'm a big believer in the old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I was a very happy WinXP Pro SP3 user. Then one day, I found a utility named Connectify that I wanted to use. Unfortunately, Connectify worked only in a very kludgy "ad-hoc" mode under WinXP ... whereas under Win7, it worked flawlessly. So, that's when I upgraded to Win7 ... at a time when a lot of friends had Win8 or 8.1.

Too many people (just my opinion) are sheep who upgrade their OS for the same reason a mountain climber climbs a mountain - just because "it's there." Me? I only upgrade an OS when there's something I want to do with my computer that can't be done without the upgrade. And with all of its bells & whistles, Win10 does nothing my current Win7 computers (2) can't do (the things I "want" to do).

I've been using a Microsoft OS ever since MS-DOS 4.2. And every OS upgrade since then has been done because of a "need" as opposed to just being part of the flock of sheep. FWIW, I was a happy user of Win98 until I discovered that Win2000 had the NTFS formatting system - allowing for bigger files. And the only reason I upgraded to WinXP Pro SP3 is because I was doing work for my employer at the time that "required" an XP-or-better OS. Fortunately, they gave me a corporate version of WinXP Pro SP3 which has no need for a "key number" during the setup procedure. And, I have a few good digital copies of that installation CD which "might" come in handy - since I no longer have the need to use Connectify. Since I also have good copies of XP drivers needed to run my current Win7 systems, I could easily "downgrade" to XP. And if Win7 ever becomes "problematic" to me, I'll do it.

I actually have a 3rd computer upon which I "experiment" with Linux distros. My next experiment will be with the latest version of Linux Mint. If I ever find a Linux distro that will do everything I want to do with a computer, I'll switch all of my computers over to the OS ... divorcing myself from Microsoft OSs completely. So far, I've not found one that will do everything I want to do on my computer. But (grin), hope springs eternal.

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I actually have a 3rd computer upon which I "experiment" with Linux distros. My next experiment will be with the latest version of Linux Mint. If I ever find a Linux distro that will do everything I want to do with a computer, I'll switch all of my computers over to the OS ... divorcing myself from Microsoft OSs completely. So far, I've not found one that will do everything I want to do on my computer. But (grin), hope springs eternal.

Your experience (and outlook on OS upgrades) is pretty much similar to mine. What Linux Mint did for me that caused me to switch over all of machines was do SETI@Home twice as fast/productive on the same hardware as Windows... if one has Maxwell card or higher. I also only upgraded Windows versions before when necessary, when I hit a limitation of the current OS with what I needed it for. Conservative upgrading also prevents installing an OS with severe unpatched bugs and security holes.

I don't play games anymore so it was an easy switch, including the machine I actually use. I need a modern, standards-compatible browser (Firefox is built-in and Chrome is a very easy install) with Netflix a bonus (Chrome does as default with HTML5), file sharing to LAN (SAMBA is integral to Linux), office suite (LibreOffice is built-in), image editing (GIMP is built-in), video playback for the widest variety of formats/containers (VLC is built-in), audio playback (Audacious), onscreen OCR (Tesseract and some support utils. via a batch file), backup (FreeFileSync). Also installed Blueman for better Bluetooth (I could never get it working in Windows properly). So Mint does everything I need. Hope your experience is as good.

(And what is this thread doing in Politics anyways?)

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(And what is this thread doing in Politics anyways?)

That's a good question (grin).

One other point about OS upgrades. A lot of friends have used the typical "Microsoft scare tactic" to encourage me to upgrade ... namely to suggest that the older an OS is, the more at-risk users are to malware. Actually (and I could be wrong), I think the truth is the opposite. Malware creators and hackers tend to follow "the flock." So, the newer the OS, the more likely you are to run into such problems ... which is why, no matter how new an OS is, it has to be continually updated to protect against newer threats (threats that might not affect an older OS). Here's an example.

When I first put Win2000 Pro SP4 on my computers, I did an "experiment." I manually created a "Windows" directory. Hint - Win2000 didn't have a WINDOWS directory, it had a WINNT directory instead. Anyhoo, after a few months, I noticed some "new files" in my self-created Windows directory - files I'd not put there myself. These files came to my notice because my antivirus software caught them and tagged them for removal. So, I think some malware creator or hacker had "assumed" I ran a traditional Microsoft OS that had a Windows directory - and deposited the files there to do their dirty work. Thing is, after a while, these kind of files stopped being deposited in my Windows directory. The malware creators & hackers had "moved on" to the newer more prevalent OS.

Also, one other thing. My favorite quotation is, "Microsoft support plus 10 cents won't buy you a cup of coffee." Over the years, I've noticed that the best support for Microsoft OSs came from users of the OS ... not Microsoft. And when Microsoft's end-of-life removal of support occurred on a prior OS, users seemed to come out of the woodwork with helpful sites to fill the info gap.

One other point about OS upgrades. A lot of friends have used the typical "Microsoft scare tactic" to encourage me to upgrade ... namely to suggest that the older an OS is, the more at-risk users are to malware. Actually (and I could be wrong), I think the truth is the opposite. Malware creators and hackers tend to follow "the flock."

Absolutely... install base is everything. Another plus for Linux; I dunno if it can be said to be "more secure" anymore as Windows has vastly improved over the years, but there's simply almost no (platform-specific) malware for it because there are so few desktop installs. It seems logarithmic ie 1/10 the install base = 1/100 the malware, as they only target the most popular platform. If it catches on this will change; we have already seen cross-platform malware based in Java and Python so that Linux and Mac will get infected.

Also the fake honeypot folder to catch the last distro's malware is a great idea.

Edit: Also I shouldn't really imply that since I don't game anymore that Linux is a good fit. In the last year it's progressed tremendously... Steam and GOG have hundreds of Linux games offered and video driver updates are now automatic (for NVidia at least.) I'm betting that gaming availability is what is going to drive desktop Linux into the mainstream, and what has been holding it back thus far.

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Microsoft did announce that they are going to allow windows 10 users to decide when to install their updates, instead of doing it in a forced fashion and causing restarts in the middle of a user's session. So good news there.

And this thread is sadly in politics for two reasons: 1) Discussions about OSes very often take a political turn and lead to a lot of argument about what is 'right' or 'better'. and 2) There is no 'computers and technology' area in our forums, and has never been enough support to add such an area, and since the reason mentioned in "1)" will still persist, I don't think the mods want another area in the forums that requires regular attention.

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#resist

When my un-updated win7 boxes quit being useful, I'm done with microsoft. Linux Mint is #1 in distrowatch and has been now for several years. I'll use it for general computing activities and at least two other specialized linux distributions for some special activities (other than seti) I'm involved with.

I used Linux Mint for years on two desktops. Both of its main desktop flavors are terrific. Of course as with any linux based OS it helps if you can manipulate linux well (use command line, understand basic differences vs a windows OS etc).

While I still think Linux Mint is a great OS, for a couple years now I've been using my own highly customized setup built on top of minimal Debian or Ubuntu installations. At idle my custom OS uses 300Mb or RAM and virtually no CPU usage. Good times.

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#resist

It is annoying that Microsoft have to work to the lowest common denominater.

Trouble is I can remember the many times when helping out "non technical" people with their computers I would find it hadn't been updated for months and months.

Personally as I play games Windows is the OS of choice for my main machine.

I have tried very hard to like Linux, tried it on several machines, but I guess I am just too much a "Windows Generation" person, I never felt really "at home".

...

Edit: Also I shouldn't really imply that since I don't game anymore that Linux is a good fit. In the last year it's progressed tremendously... Steam and GOG have hundreds of Linux games offered and video driver updates are now automatic (for NVidia at least.) I'm betting that gaming availability is what is going to drive desktop Linux into the mainstream, and what has been holding it back thus far.

Yessir, while I still consider Windows kind of a necessity for gaming PCs, you can certainly do a lot on that front without it. If you use a linux distro that's Ubuntu-based (like Ubuntu itself or Linux Mint) then you can for sure run Steam and many of its library of games on linux. In addition yes GOG games often run well in WINE. Good times for sure.

And yes, for Linux gaming you NEED NVidia... AMD/ATI support is abysmal especially on current generation Ubuntu based OSes... 'AMDGPU' driver is hardly beta and even 'AMDGPU-pro' is not very good at all.

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#resist

I like Linux Mint :-)

Got on well with 13 (with some great help from Ex, especially in getting Boinc running).

Had no end of resolution issues with 14 (no hardware changes) which I could not understand as 13 had not needed any assistance in installing & using as an O/S.

Experienced the same with 17. :-(

If Linux can get it's hardware detection sorted similar to Windows, then it could be on a winner.

Have downloaded a copy of 18.2 so will look at that soon.

I teach "UNIX" using OpenSUSE.
If I can't do it using Linux, I don't want to do it.

Teaching "UNIX" seems odd.
When I'm using OpenSUSE or other Linux based OS's I use POSIX.
UNIX, OS X and iOS use POSIX as well.
POSIX defines the application programming interface (API), along with command line shells and utility interfaces, for software compatibility with variants of Unix and other operating systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

If I can't do it using Linux, I don't want to do it.

If I do it often and Linux can't I don't want Linux.

Oh yes and I HATE command lines!!! :-(

If I were Martin I'd now ask you what it is that you can't do with Linux, then I'd suggest softwares to fill that gap (with GUI where possible)
;-)

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#resist

If I were Martin I'd now ask you what it is that you can't do with Linux, then I'd suggest softwares to fill that gap (with GUI where possible)
;-)

Taxes. And Martin didn't have an answer.

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UNIX, OS X and iOS use POSIX as well.

Thank you. There are so few who actually understand what O/S there are in the world. Linux <> Posix and that causes no end of frustration.

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UNIX, OS X and iOS use POSIX as well.

Thank you. There are so few who actually understand what O/S there are in the world. Linux <> Posix and that causes no end of frustration.

Don't you mean Linux != Posix? (Oh same thing).
UNIX (Such as SUN Solaris) and OS X (Remember NextOS?) however confirm to Posix or perhaps vica versa.

POSIX is a standard of compliance having to do with API (and yes command line functions too as a part of that). Linux, UNIX, and yes Mac OSX are all POSIX compliant. This does not mean UNIX, Linux or Mac OSX are compatible with one another as they are all different beasts.

EDIT: this *does* however mean you can write a clever neat script that uses all POSIX compliant commands, and said script should be able to run on any POSIX OS.

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#resist

If I were Martin I'd now ask you what it is that you can't do with Linux, then I'd suggest softwares to fill that gap (with GUI where possible)
;-)

Taxes. And Martin didn't have an answer.

Ah, I used to have that problem too. My only solution was a VM running inside Linux. Nowadays it's not an issue cause I do my taxes through my web browser, which is supported on either family of OS in my case.

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#resist