Fuck Windows and Microsoft really. Today I had a meeting call through Teams first thing in the morning so I start my computer 10 minutes earlier than the call because it takes a like 3 or 4 minutes to boot and for Windows to be responsive. Windows decides to apply some past update so it takes 2 or 3 additional minutes which is fine, I am just in time for the meeting call. Well, 10 minutes into the call a notification in windows appears that the computer will restart in 5 minutes and with no option to postpone WTF. Imagine this was an important sales call, an emergency or something else critical, I might be fucked. The computer restarted I started my linux personal computer and I connect my bluetooth headphones to the it but no, they were connected to the Windows computer while it was restarting so I could not just call from it as the microphone started failing a few weeks ago. (I will just replace it, thanks Framework). So fuck my company for using Windows. Fuck Windows for developing such a nightmare OS with so shitty code. This was for sure a patch for a critical vulnerability, like always. And WTF this is Windows for a business, have a fucking super stable branch that does not need patches every other day. I don’t care about your updates to the shitty weather widget, just have a fucking working operating system that let’s me do my work. Fuck Microsoft monopolistic practices that keeps people and businesses from switching to Linux. There is no better publicity for Linux that Windows itself. Most Linux/GNU distros just let you choose when to update.
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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.
Then come up with a better alternative to office 365.
Windows isn’t keeping Microsoft around. Its their office software. (and azure)
what makes their office software so much better than, say, libreoffice? i don’t work an office job, and haven’t had the misfortune of running windows since i dropped windows 7, but when i did switch, the programs seemed basically the same. office software seemed like a solved problem by then. what new features has microsoft added and convinced people they need that foss options don’t have?
Good question. I wish I had a better answer than what I’m about to say.
It just is.
I’m a diehard anti-Windows, Linux-lovin’, FOSS crusader myself, but if Microsoft released a copy of MS Office for Linux (as a one-time-purchase), I would buy it today.
For most tasks, you’re right, there’s not much you can’t do in LibreOffice. But the interface is clunkier. Excel makes it easier to make good-looking spreadsheets. And as much as it hurts me to say, looks matter when dealing with nontechnical folks.
Plus there are some things that are just more intuitive in Excel, like certain kinds of charts and graphs. There are some advanced features of Excel that don’t even exist in LibreOffice. Like chart styles and certain team collaboration features.
Compatibility is… okay… For the most part, but having it all guaranteed by a bunch of paid devs would be really nice.
There is a more detailed list here
They are extremely integrated into the rest of the ecosystem and are insanely pervasive among 9-5 desk jockies. They aren’t gonna relearn a spreadsheet software especially when it doesn’t have all the same features as the thing they have been using for 20 years. Not to mention they dont actually give a shit about how much their company is paying for it. The majority of these people dont know what FOSS is and are just using computers because that’s what pays their rent.
Libre office is very far from being a drop in replacement for 365 and will most definitely never replace it. At the end of the day its all about userbase. Why do people still use twitter and Instagram even though there are FOSS alternatives that may be even better? Because that’s what everyone else uses and most people just dont care.
It just does more and more easily. It styles things better, makes them more professional looking with a click. It can do certain things like nested tables in Word that Writer cannot do. Excel is much more powerful than calc, it has more functions, more refined functions, it’s easier to work with, has more and prettier chart options. And oh you can create tables in Excel that are sortable. There are many other cases.
Now for the last two the die-hards will whine and whinge about how you should just use a software for creating charts and a database but sometimes you just want to make something quick, sometimes that’s overkill for what you need. Grandpa doesn’t need to learn how to deal with databases just to make a sortable list of books he’s read, he can just use excel and the Libreoffice people telling him to pound sand because they won’t add that feature to calc because it doesn’t belong there means he and many other people don’t use calc, they use MS office. Likewise the Libreoffice defense force saying of making graphs and charts to just use dedicated software, well many corporate types, business people, white collar workers don’t understand those things and may not be able to get them installed, what they understand, what they already have is MS office and it works and has lots of pretty, professional, very slick options which don’t make them look poorly in office meeting presentations.
Just on the sortable tables front, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into hobby stuff that’s based on an excel file with tables that rely on being sortable. From stat sheet creators to mini-databases (<2000 rows) on some game created by fans.
It’s useful for those who need the very bare basics of being able to open and read basic MS word documents, csv files, excel files, and to write an occasional letter. But the moment you need to start doing beyond basic formatting or dealing with files that have that, you run into issues.
You have this gulf of usability, it’s useful for people at the very bottom of the basic needs pole, barely computer literate types who think facebook is the internet and it’s useful for highly technically competent people who can and do use other dedicated software, often without GUIs to solve problems, it’s a frustration for the middle 60% of the population who are more than basically computer literate but not scientifically trained, not CS or IT.
Actually staff and commercial vendors are keeping Windows. Plus no one gets fired for choosing MS products. That IT staff are all Windows certified means Windows will always be the answer. That users are similarly trained and need certain Windows software will mean they demand it too.
I’d be so bold as to say about 90% of windows business users are only using it for office/excel/outlook
Kind of felt like that before I retired. IT put so much shit on my computer that it was about all it was good for. One reason I retire, feedup with the BS form IT.
Nextcloud and LibreOffice: allow us to introduce ourselves
Yeah have a great time supporting libreoffice across an org of 200/2000/20000 end users. Not happening. Not without a dedicated helpdesk team that ONLY supports users office troubles. The cost of that would be way more than their monthly 365 subscription.
Also theres the infinite number of comparability issues youlll run into if you need to do business with another company that only uses Microsoft.
Also nextcloud is great but it absolutely is not competition to one drive or SharePoint in the enterprise.
Idk about you but for me Libreoffice is way better than MS crapwares.
The update thing started maybe 10 years ago or was it 15. Company I worked for went from terrible patching to this BS. Why something in between was not sufficient I will never know or why it cannot hot patch.
Edit: Before the company actually did serious patching worms regularly took down the whole company for days. But why they had to go from that to interrupting presentations and calls is beyond me.
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.
How do you manage your fleet? How big is your network?
I‘d love to push for Linux at work, but have yet to see a solution with similar management capabilities than a Windows domain. And I don’t want to manage individual clients, as sysadmin I want to push templates like GPOs and the like.
Can see it work for smaller environments, but not in a company with a couple hundred machines.
Oh, hell no. We are absolutely tiny.
It’s very much a trust-based situation as we all work together and in a small team.
I would actually love to know how to handle remote shutdown of PCs and lock out and things like that, for as we do grow, we are getting busier, and starting to expand.
Canonical Landscape, RedHat Satellite, SUSE Manager and Foreman to name a few.
I think Foreman is the only one not tied to an Enterprise subscriptions and supporting more than one distro, but I could be wrong.
I work in a higher ed org that uses a mix of (mostly) Red Hat servers and Windows & Mac endpoints; the Linux-focused admins use Ansible for things I’d do with either GPOs (if it’s something tried & true) or Intune (if it’s some half-baked newness and campus IT would actually give my group the permissions) in Windows.
Oh, Ansible is an interesting starting point. Would not thought of it for that purpose, I always „only“ link it mentally to automated deployment.
Will look into it out of curiosity.
Yeah, I’d never seen it used in this way either. They use it mostly to modify config files, which gives you a lot of control over most things on a Linux box. We also use it for Macs to do things like create a standardized local administrator account (since Apple doesn’t have a LAPS equivalent). It’s a pretty tangled web but we have an old-school Linux admin who keeps it all ticking (we just worry about his ticker!).
Good luck!
In Linux everything is a file. So modifying files is all you really need. The hardest part is how to handle mobile endpoints like laptops, that don’t have always on connections. Ansible pull mode is what we were looking at in a POC, with triggers on VPN connection. Note we have a large Linux server footprint already managed by ansible, so it isn’t a large lift for us.
So I’m a total noob when it comes to business systems and I have never used ActiveDirectory or group policies, but wasn’t Linux or rather Unix originally designed as a system for many users on one big machine/network? Why is it so difficult for businesses to manage permissions and group settings on a large amount of devices? What does Microsoft/Windows do so much better there?
It was originally one computer that everyone connected to, it wasn’t a fleet of separate computers like Windows PCs.
And there is probably no simple way to set up a system that would function in a way that Linux needs I guess?
They have the management aspect of large environments down to a tee. Apart from costs it does not really matter if your domain consists of ten, thousand or more systems. The tools to manage those systems centralized by core systems is the same set for all sizes so to speak.
That can be on one campus, across multiple cities and locations. It’s quite frankly IMO the foundation on which the success of Windows in the corporate world is built. Standardized deployment of settings across all company systems saves administrators time which can be used for other tasks instead of micromanaging clients.
I have yet to see a similar solution for Linux clients that works the same way.
One place I worked at just gave people Linux computers without telling them and disabled the boot image. The job was mostly online Salesforce, so Chrome got them through everything. Imaging was a breeze. We even made it kinda look like windows. No one really commented on it. We didnt hide it from anyone but we didnt go out of our way to make a big deal out of it.
Linux works when people stop thinking of it as “Linux”. Its “Android” or “Steam OS” or “My smart TV” etc… All you need to do is rename it and suddenly they are ok with it.
I heard Ubuntu got some big upgrades starting with 22.04 in terms to support for GPOs.
I never tested it personally but they do have some documentation for it and they can be added to a Windows domain: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/en/latest/
Not really the way if one wants to cut ties with Microsoft completely though. And I suspect most would argue „then you can go the Windows route all the way and have less pain integrating client systems“.
If getting rid of Microsoft entirely is the goal, Samba does AD with GPOs just fine.
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.
In corporate managed fleet of PCs updates are pushed by the company internal management systems. Some companies give you a 24hours option, some others (ahem, power tripping sysadmins, I know, I was one) say “fuck you and your work, you install when I say so”. It’s not strictly a Windows thing, it’s a company policy.
That also shocked me. Then again, Windows does suck pretty bad.
Depends on the settings your IT has set up… Mine will let you put it off, but after a couple times you’re left with no choice but to let it run.
but after a couple times you’re left with no choice but to let it run.
That would be an user issue then. If I have an update I’ll try to do it asap, if I can’t then end of my shift.
Well for one, I’m not sure I consider it an “issue”… But yeah, it’s absolutely 100% on me lol…
It’s not always due to procrastination… Sometimes it’s not convenient to immediately do it. If it’s a long thing I’ll just take a short break and go for a walk or something…
I have had several, but usually you had like 1 hour. Entreprise windoze 7 a couple of years ago, happened several times. There was also some update that bricked some 50% of the dell laptops lol, mine went through but my colleagues sweated bullets.
Now it’s force restarting “outside business hours” or some crap. How stable.
Me neither, until today…
Some years ago I was working on something, and took a break for dinner. When I got back, Windows had rebooted for updates and I’d lost some work.
I run a server in my house so I set up MECM and haven’t had an issue since.
24h2 is now a forced upgrade
Afaik there’s a GPO for that
I call BS on OP, just another ragebait made-up story.
Forced restarts haven’t been a thing for years, unless the OP somehow badly setup their machine.
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
Wow, that is some nightmare fuel type shit. That’s actually crazy.
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:
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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.
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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.
One similar thing happened to me on windows 8 (except I wasn’t testing it, I lost everything on my pc that day because it didn’t just fail to update and restore…it just fucked my drive with it !), so it’s not even a new type of issue. Even windows 10 was fucked, had a friend who never used bitlocker, never even knew it was a thing, who got his pc encrypted by it after an update, unable to unlock the damn thing, every solutions failed and had no other choice but to wipe his drive. It’s crazy how bad and unpractical windows can be.
Winblows 10 did the exact same bitlocker crap to my best friend and attorney.
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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.
Sounds like you have a bad battery
Possibly, though I would be surprised. I only recently got this job so the laptop is brand new, but I have also had it long enough that it was an odd and unexpected event, before then I had not had any power issues, and not since either. Since it is not reproducible, I’m not so sure it is the battery.
Outside of this, it is either Win 11 or the Dell hardware that has other peripheral issues. Often when disconnecting from a secondary display, the screen freaks out and I have to try again. Furthermore when logging into the laptop remotely, Windows 11 for some reason decided to wipe out cleartype, making all the font textures crunchy, despite having set Remmina to connect with best-quality settings.
I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.
Or bad Dell drivers, or Microsoft software. Not my picture, take with a grain of salt as they say.
Heh that’s a hardware issue.
Go get drunk. You deserve it.
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
They asked you to install Windows on your personal machine? Do companies not give you a work laptop anymore?
No, on work laptop
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.
100% retaliatory tariff on Microsoft products when Trump enacts his tariffs. And all that money goes to switching government and education over to Linux.
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.
This. If updates are SO important, then Windows can do it while it’s shutting down.
