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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

> Windows already tries to track active use times for the user, and is capable of waking a machine up in the middle of the night, install updates, and then go back to sleep. Improvements to session restore makes this almost seamless.

Except for all the work it destroys in the process. Many productive workflows can't just be closed and restarted at random - pretty much anything in a terminal, for example. This new one seems great, but it can't be any different in that regard, as it has to run the same command line tools.

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Reboots are a reality and they are never going to go away on this architecture.

Effort should be spent on resuming where you were after a reboot.

Some things cannot simply be resumed, I know. However, some things can.

There is an attitude at my workplace which I can only summarize as "I automate anything that helps my customers, and I will not automate anything that helps me."

We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?

Too few people have heard of the "screen" command maybe. I was using it 20 years ago to reconnect to terminal sessions. I'm told that tmux does similar things, but I don't know if that's true.

> We're smart people. Why are we simply giving up and throwing in the towel when it comes to reboots?

Because if I leave something running over night, and Windows reboots without asking me because it thinks it can resume the task, and Windows is wrong, then I have to wait until the next evening.

I would have no problem with any of this stuff if Microsoft gave the user control. They don't, and the steps they've taken so far don't go nearly far enough.

The latest features I see in Windows Update seem to give the user total control. Am I mistaken? Maybe it's because I'm running a more expensive SKU? I can defer updates for 7 days, get extra notifications for reboots further in advance, and put myself in a channel that sees very few updates.

For a while now, users have been forewarned about a reboot being needed because of an update for at least a day, in my experience. Most of the time it is multiple days.

It's not like it hits you without warning. You also have the ability to manually reboot whenever you like(!) and prevent surprises that way.

It doesn't give you a warning if your computer has been turned off for an extended period beforehand (for instance, if you're dual booting and Windows isn't your main OS.)

It does for me. Updates are no surprise for me, and I honestly don't understand what the big deal is. They're literally never a surprise to me and I am given many days notice.

http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/

Stage 2.

In macOS, apps tell the OS whether they're capable of perfectly restoring their state after a reboot.

If you, or the system, initiates a reboot/shutdown, and all apps that you have running are such apps, the reboot will just happen, with no further confirmation.

If, however, any app that you have running does not assert that it can be perfectly restored after reboot, then the OS will pause the reboot process and prompt the user to confirm that they want to shut down said app. If the user says no, the reboot is aborted. If the user does nothing (or isn't there to respond), the computer just stays stuck on that prompt forever.

I don't see anything wrong with such a "conservative" auto-detection system, personally.

Oh, I'd have no problem with that. It works fine on macOS, as you say.

Microsoft would have to actually implement it that way, though.

Windows offers that capability as well. Applications can be "reboot-aware" and relaunch after a reboot in their pre-reboot state.

Not many apps take advantage of that, however.

My browsers do, my IDEs do, and my productivity apps do.

All in all, not too shabby.

But Windows will reboot for an update even if an app isn’t “reboot aware”. So I can be encoding videos or downloading a large game and it will just reboot, and I’ll wake up to the task not done.

Windows implements it in exactly this same way though. If all apps report that they can handle it gracefully, it reboots, otherwise you get a similar prompt.

Problem is, apps can lie.

Apple has no problem with the rate of people updating their phones and laptops, but still respects user choice. It's a simple thing to do, MSFT just chooses not to do it in a paternalistic manner. Not to mention how MSFT doesn't respect user privacy to the same degree as apple does.

The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.

So your contention is that Microsoft decided to deliberately annoy its customers, and presumably many of its own employees, by forcing updates for no good reason?

Sorry, but I don't buy that. If Microsoft did this, I think it was for a reason. It's very easy to sit on HN and opine about how Apple can persuade iPhone users to upgrade. But we're not the ones at Microsoft with the job of dealing with the reality of millions upon millions of desktop computers that simply aren't ever being patched, no matter how hard we prod our users, with the result that they are being exploited en masse, used for criminal purposes, and as a result our reputation is getting trashed and governments and other powerful actors are demanding we do something to fix this problem.

Microsoft has caused me more damage with their paternalistic attitude than any malicious software ever did.

They may have all the reasons in the world, but Windows is objectively worse for me (and I believe other power users) in this regard than other OSes.

I'm not sure why you think it's a good idea to defend a company that takes away _your_ control of your computer, and how the other computers having been exploited makes you feel better about losing _your_ work (when you are presumably qualified to avoid and/or detect being exploited on your own). Perhaps you're lucky to not have had trouble with this yet?

> The iPhone does get annoying about updates, but it always is still up to you when it happens.

Hah, say that to my iPhone - every time there is a new update it automatically downloads it (further crippling my already low storage) and keeps asking me for my passcode every few hours. One wrong tap and there goes my phone for the next 10-15 minutes.

Still a choice

No, on my iPhone, it will insist on downloading the update, and the ONLY way to stop it (as confirmed by the "geniuses" at the Austin Domain Apple Store) is to immediately go into storage management and delete the update. This will only stop it until the next time (usually no more than a week or two) that iOS decides to download it again and ram the update down your throat. I'm getting really tired of doing this, especially since Apple's updates have a solid history of slowing performance, so I really just don't want them, in most cases. (I don't have a newer model iPhone, so most of the fixes, which address newer hardware, are meaningless to me...)

If you picked "not now" and gave it your passcode, it would install the update while the phone is plugged into power and not in use.

To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.

> phone is plugged into power and not in use

A) When it thinks it is not in use, not so easy to predict.

> To be fair, how could you have known that? It only says so when asking for your passcode, after all.

Yes, but it actually presents the prompt twice, and one wrong tap reboots the device with no way of aborting the process which on a good day takes 10 minutes on my phone.

Screen and Tmux can help a little, but not much (if my work involved stable configurations of tabs, I could save maybe 2 minutes of setup per reboot). Unless you're proposing running all command line tools only on remote servers, which won't work with local files.

I think the problem already has a solution: no automatic reboots. Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.

> Tell me it's needed and I'll sigh, do what I need to to save my state, then do it myself.

That's EXACTLY what it does now. I have never been surprised by a reboot on any computer I log into and actually use.

My Windows computers still surprise me ~every 3-4 reboots, Pro and Home versions.

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