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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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.
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!
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?
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.
Windows fr thinks that getting updates done is more important than getting work done.
“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
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.
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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.
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.
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’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.
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.
Heh that’s a hardware issue.
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 😅
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.
What is AOVPN?
Allways On VPN
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.
If you’re stuck with Windows for corporate-issued computers, the next time this happens you can abort shutdowns in Windows.
Command Prompt:
shutdown /aSaved me several times over the years.
Also Windows has a button similar to “don’t update this week” or similar.
Come work at Meta, we have Fedora Linux laptops :)
Edit: Maybe we should crowd source a list of companies that let you use Linux. I’ve worked at startups and straight up told the CEO “I’m installing Linux” and that has worked, but corporate companies you can’t get away with that
No thanks
Does using fedora help manipulate teenage girls into eating disorders or is that an unrelated team?
Unrelated :P
