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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate on what do you mean by Windows update cycle? I have a Mac Mini, that I rarely touch to check a new release of something on Mac, and practically every time I have to use it, an update is pending.

Not sure how this is worse, than Windows.

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With Windows it feels the same way, except a lot of what Windows Update does runs silently in the background, sometimes during your most precious computing hours with no way to stop it except force quitting through the Task Manager. And half the time the updates fail. And when you quickly want to shut down sometimes Windows also forces an update...

There is the active hours setting, and I have not seen an update fail in quite a long time (several years).

This, everyone is complaining on how bad desktop OSes are now but even windows is great now, compared to mobile devices, desktop is heaven.

last i checked microsoft still doesn’t have scheduled boot times (granted this would likely be a bios setting on windows boxes) so i’d have to leave my PC on overnight to run the updates. it’s a bandaid, not a fix for the update problem.

You can use Task Scheduler to stop/start your PC at specific times.

Do you have anything to point to how to startup a windows box from cold boot using the Task Scheduler? Either I'm failing at google atm or you still have to schedule startup through the BIOS

Gah, you're right - I set it up ages ago and haven't touched it since; it's set to sleep and wake automatically, not to actually shut down. You would need to schedule startup through the BIOS if you wanted it to fully shutdown (I'd done that with my previous desktop).

Apple seems to love doing this too. It's just great when it decides to update iMovie and iTunes, huge apps which I have never used, when your battery is at 30% and you're on a terrible WiFi connection. It's hard to tell that the update is in progress at all, and seemingly impossible to stop.

Took me a while to figure out how to remove the apps I never intend to use and disable auto-updates for the ones I do use. It can be disabled yeah, but the auto-update is the default, and I have a feeling it will get mysteriously turned back on at some point, and I won't notice until it kills my battery at an awkward time again.

>Took me a while to figure out how to remove the apps I never intend to use

It took you a while to figure out how to drag an app to the trash in the same way that deleting any other file works? =/

Can you write uninstaller hooks to run when users draps app in the trash to remove caches and other stuff? I was embarassed by the fact that most applications in macs do not have uninstallers and their trash left around the system.

Developers can, yes, and, in the cases where the developers didn't do this, there's also an app called AppCleaner that's free, lightweight, and can watch the Trash for applications that are deleted. It'll pull all references to the app in the library and remove any remnants.

It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app, and will remove all associated data, including whatever links it to the App Store, and causes the store to not attempt to "repair" the app by downloading it again or something.

It does seem that the "official" way to remove some App Store apps is to long-press on them in the Launchpad, and then click the "X" button that appears.

Maybe I was overthinking things, but IMO neither of these methods seem very discoverable or clear about what they actually do. Would it be that hard to put a clear "uninstall" button somewhere in the App Store? Android does this, and Windows mostly does too, AFAIK.

>It's not clear that dragging an app to the trash is the "official" way to remove an app

How so? The "official" way to delete files on MacOS is to put them in the Trash. Support articles on Apple's site also show that dragging an application to the trash is one of the official methods of removing an application, unless it was a package installer.

it’s not clear because your thinking in the windows / linux world where you need to run the uninstalled or remove the package respectively. if you think about it, if you want to delete something what do you do? so i disagree, it makes perfect sense.

And not to mention that you can't even remove some applications

Which applications can't you remove?

it depends on the frequency of use of the mac. i’m in the same boat, just reversed (rarely touch my gaming windows pc but use my mac daily) and every time i boot the windows machine there is an update. most of the time windows needs a reboot as well. so imo the issue is the frequency of windows updates is higher, and has a higher chance of needing a reboot after the update.

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