
When did Windows turn into Linux?
About 20 years ago for me :)
Microsoft sent yet another problematic patch into the wild this week in the form of KB5034441. However, rather than deal with a BitLocker vulnerability, the patch is failing to install for some users. The patch, released on January 9, was meant to address a vulnerability that allowed attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by …
Meanwhile, Windows users will keep pointing at the tiny market share of Linux on the desktop and occasionally reminding them that FOSS very often manages to screw things up, just in different and more interesting ways. It's just that it affects a fraction of the people when it does.
Don't get me wrong: I'm no big fan of Microsoft, and I do in fact much prefer working with Linux. I'm just saying that the endless auto-snark from Linux evangelists gets very boring.
The root of the snark here is, in fact, the sub-head on TFA. It's patch-Tuesday week. Every patch-Tuesday week we'll have at least one article and possibly one or more follow-up articles on Microsoft's patches screwing up. It's so frequent it has to be regarded as SOP for Microsoft. So why pretend that it's something unusual and more typical of something else where it is, in fact unusual?
Also doesn't help when some of the mods are penguin fanbois
I posted a joke about Linus once and it was taken down almost immediately, yet you can extract the urine about Gates / Satnav etc etc and ne're so much a sideways glance. Shows a partisan approach to moderation methinks (setting timer to see how long this one stays posted).
Servers facing public since 1998: From 2% to over 80%
Most Routers
Kernel in Android and most TVs
Any tablet or phone not by Apple or MS is Android.
Desktop sales shrinking, but Chromebooks up 1% and HP Chrombooks up 69% and Lenovo up 14%. A Chromebook today is not the Web client before, but a real Gentoo Linux on a "netbook" like laptop.
Enterprise and Business is locked into Windows Desktop due to leading payroll, accounts, erp, stock etc programs being Windows only. Windows Servers witth management to support those desktops (cos the MS SW runs on nothing else), along with Exchange and Sharepoint.
PCs come with Windows and often even have a Licence key in the BIOS.
Pretty much every single machine on every desk at my place of work (thousands of machines) are Linux based thin clients - hooked up to a small pool of overtaxed Windows servers. Most commonly used apps are email and web clients... The actual number crunching and production workloads are pretty much all run on Linux (again, thousands of machines). Linux has won, Windows is clinging onto a shrinking pool of desktops while it gets swamped by Android (which already killed Windows Phone 3+ years ago).
WTF? I have been using Linux for over 10 years now without a single fsck-up needing a command shell. Throughout three different distros and unknown number of updates, it has just worked all this time.
The real question is, why do Reg hacks keep imagining Linux is no better than it was 20 years ago? I know Windows isn't, but that's not the point...
It is, and you still have good command line functionality at the back end. The GUI and CLI ("virtual terminals") complement each other. For example your file managers all have a button to pop open a terminal in your current working directory. Or dispense with it altogether and have a working shell, with actual software you can use. Even if you drop out of X down to a real TTY console, it's a far more functional environment than a Windows CLI. You could even play music with command line players, even watch videos without a GUI.
I've been balls deep since about 1999 (toes wet in 1995 with Slackware 3.5 on a UMSDOS overlay) and I use a combination of both. I feel crippled, working on a Windows system.
You could even play music with command line players, even watch videos without a GUI.
I can do that with Windows, and could with DOS, back when I was still failing to get graphics drivers to work in red hat.
I've been balls deep since about 1999
At the risk of being obvious, this is why you are only at "user" level on Windows systems.
and OSX?
For me it was 2008. And I get a nice command shell with the Mac (zsh).
One of the biggest issues I had was patches and the idiotic MS update process that you had to use. They appear to not to have learned a thing over the years. Not a surprise.
My main interactive device is an M1 MacBook Pro. I can work all day on a single charge without worrying where I can plug in. A big change from my last Intel I7 Laptop where the battery life was 1-2 hours.
My servers are all Linux (Rocky Linux).
My main interactive device is an M1 MacBook Pro
Let me see: for work I use an Intel 16" MBP (with Parallels running some Windows corporate-build VMs) and a 14" M3 MBP plus one HP 15" running Windows 10 Enterprise and for home I use a 16" M1 Pro Max MBP.
Servers at home - 1 Supermicro and 2 Dells - two of them running proxmox and one running TrueNAS scale. VMs - 2 Windows server, 4 FreeBSD and the rest one variant of Linux or other (mostly Devuan). Plus on physical server running Windows 2016 (mostly for DHCP/DNS resilience if my proxmox cluster goes down)
Windows 3.1 was not retired until December 2001, the Workstation version didn't end until 2008, Windows 95, 98 & 2000 were run on top of DOS which you had to install separately and most troubleshooting and repairs had to be done through the command line. Windows PowerShell 1.0 launched in 2006, Windows Terminal launched in 2019 two command line interfaces that have already replaced the command line (cmd.exe) in Windows 10/11. So over the past 22+ years Windows still hasn't moved past the command line either! People who live in glass houses...?
Hacking has not been an issue for Microsoft, it's making so many users upgrade to a new version and then, when the upgrade fails, buying a new PC with the current Windows version. As a result hackers are pushing up the corporate profits, so economically corporations like hackers to keep hacking their customers.
In actual fact, the fix posted by MS does not work. It refuses to work with Bitlocker. Ironic for a security update to a Bitlocker vulnerability.
I agree, wait for MS to sort themselves out. For anyone interested my own fix, after their's screwed the machine up, was to remove Bitlocker, shrink the OS partition & then use their reagentc.exe instructions to remove the RE partition. The minimum space needed seems to be something like 600MB. A refresh reinstall with the latest download of the installation media then replaces the RE partition with a new one. ReBitlocker and run updates. The updates then installed correctly. A right rigmarole. No doubt someone can think of a simpler fix but this worked for me.
I doubt it will work with Veracrypt, either, which is how my old Macbook Pro's Windows installation is encrypted.
I did the manual resizing steps in my Win10 VM, and they worked, but I haven't yet decided to try it on the MBP, because I'd have to unencrypt first.
Edit: I did have to move the EFI partition after resizing the C: partition, as this VM was converted to EFI after initial build. I used Knoppix+Gparted for that. . . .
After that, there was enough room to make a new, bigger, WinRE partition.
The patch also does not recognize when the machine has no Windows Recovery Partition and hence doesn't have Windows Recovery.
It's a fail all the way around. Even if there's "still" a reason to have the patch applied to a system that has no Recovery Partition, whoever wrote the patch should have done the full job, not a half-assed incomplete job.
For anyone still interested, fixing a couple more machines today suggests you do not need to shrink the OS partition. Removing the existing RE partition causes the refesh install with the latest installation media to create a new one of the right size. It leaves the location of the old one as unallocated space but it is so small as to be of no odds. You do not need to turn off Bitlocker to apply this and the security update then goes on without issue.
Back in the days of the Cold War, it was entertaining to hear stories of defectors from the Soviet Union, encountering Western free-market capitalism for the first time.
They’d step into a supermarket, and be completely bewildered about why there needed to be half a dozen different brands of laundry powder, or a dozen different kinds of toothpaste. Soap is soap after all, and toothpaste is toothpaste; why do you need more than one?
Nowadays, we see the same attitude in people accustomed to living under the Microsoft/Apple regime, suddenly discovering the wide-open home-on-the-range that is Linux and Open Source. People want choice, and so we have the choice. Don’t like any of the existing choices? Or don’t even like having a choice? You know what you can do.
I think that one of the things you are missing here is that there are an abundance of choices for Linux desktops and the apps that run on them. Unfortunately most people are not techies and just want to sit down at a computer and know, pretty much, what is what. In the corporate environment they do not want to walk in and have to learn an entire new desktop environment, it is bad enough having to learn the specific apps that a company uses for it's business.
I keep telling these people that, but they just won't listen. Because, of course, they know better than the billions of [other] computer users...that aren't using Linux.
Not only do they want to sit down and use a computer they know, they want to sit down and use the SOFTWARE they know. Period. Which Linux is NOT good at. End Of Story.
That's an amazing claim to make from the viewpoint of this Linux-centric forum where you spend hundred of hours choosing between distros and desktops, never you mind working out hardware driver issues.
Er, no, actually. Hundreds of hours? No.
Hardware driver issues? No.
Install the OS and required apps and run. Simple. In 10 years of running Linux I've never had a system level problem like MS seems to have on at least a weekly basis.
You've got to be kidding. The internet stories OF COURSE bring up the worst. I'm running 7 MS desktops...without issues, for years. Seriously. Years. I have no idea how many people get affected by the 'sky is falling' stories but when your OS is running on BILLIONS of desktops worldwide, even 0.01% ends up with a decent number of affected users, which is easily reported on.
After all, what kind of news is it that millions of users DON'T have an issue with their MS desktop??
I got this on both my desktop and laptop – rebooting and retrying sorted one but not the other.
But fucking with my partitions because of their fuckup? Yea, fuck that shit in the fucking arse – like I haven't got enough technology-related pain in my life. I'll wait for them to fix it properly, thanks.
Yes actually "Disk Management" is a pretty good GUI partitioning utility. It might be a little confusing with a raw disk, it will need to "initialize" it first (write disk signatures and stuff). I think that's why a lot of media comes pre-initialized these days. When I bought a NVME drive, I had to delete them before I could partition it (Linux fdisk). You can choose "Basic" disk or "Dynamic" (volume management) and you can still choose MBR partition tables vs. GUID. I haven't looked at that since Windows 7, but it even has limited resizing capabilities. (more limited in terms of shrinking... running a third party defrag utility that has a "consolidate" operation instead of clever optimization beforehand helps with that. Better if it can also optimize and consolidate the MFT too)
Last time I installed Windows (10) there were still good partitioning facilities during setup too.
The command line diskpart utility has a lot of functionality, but it's not very nice syntax.
It would be easier if Borkzilla stopped with "one disk for all" mentality.
Linux is a world where the OS can be on one disk (HDD or SDD), and the user space on another. Borkzilla has not only never understood that, it has actively refused to understand it. Otherwise it wouldn't be so difficult to move a user's data to another disk.
In the Borkzilla world, the C: drive is everything, and anything you do to change that is filled with command prompts and technical barriers. That way, when your Windows is stuffed (which happens, even after Win7), well you have the joy of erasing your entire disk, all your data, and reinstalling from scratch. All that because Borkzilla can't be arsed to understand that the OS and user data can be two seperate things, and reinstalling the OS does not necessarily mean erasing user data.
I guess it will take another century and massive market loss before Borkzilla gets the message - which, in practical terms, means never.
In the meantime, whenever I install a new PC, I split the disk into two partitions (or I get another disk in) - one for the OS, one for data, and I go through all the hoops to try and make that a reality. Even if Borkzilla does its damndest to make sure that c:\Users\whoever\AppData gets filled with gigabytes of stuff I wish I could point elsewhere.
But Nadella doesn't give a flying fuck about that, so I'm left pining for the day I can retire and wipe that Registery abomination from my computing world.
Linux is a world where the OS can be on one disk (HDD or SDD), and the user space on another. Borkzilla has not only never understood that, it has actively refused to understand it. Otherwise it wouldn't be so difficult to move a user's data to another disk.
It's not difficult; you just don't know how to do it because your Linux power user and don't know how to use windows to any significant degree more than I understand how to do the equivalents in Linux.
On windows open the Microsoft Management Console, (start->run MMC works) open the local users and groups snap in, click on the user to modify, select the profile tab and then change "profile path" to the desired location.
And, um that's it. I've had user data on a separate drive since Win98.
You still need to drop to the command line tools to do fundamental things like changing between GUID/MBR boot partitioning. Like how you would need to change a thumb drive to install your OS in EFI mode. Because nobody ever wants to do that right.
It still can only re-size the END of disk objects, can't move them at all, and will often just stubbornly refuse to perform operations with no feedback as to why. It's also lousy about shrinking things.
Of course the current windows installer is hot garbage as well and compounds all these problems. It installs utility partitions both before and after the main data partition, ensuring senseless pain if the underling storage is easily expanded(like a VM). For bonus points M$haft also has been shipping .iso install media that no longer fits on common optical media. You have to shrink them yourself, and difference in space is taken up by stuff you either will not miss or could have been in a bonus .iso
Windows installers haven't fit on common optical media for a very long time. Dual-layer DVDs were never really popular due to limited need by the time they were readily-available and much higher cost, and half the speed of single-layer DVDs, much slower than even a cheap USB 2.0 flash drive, so 4.7GB was the max for most people. MS probably tried to keep the installers below 4GB for a long time so that flash drives of that size could be used, but once they reached the point that it wasn't enough, there was no longer a need to try very hard because they just moved to requiring an 8GB stick and had plenty of room to be inefficient AND include a lot more garbage.
Something seems odd here because we can't find the update in our WSUS or SCCM servers and microsoft suggest it's not released via these channels, but it is released via windows update (but not the update catalogue website either) - what gives? Why the odd release pattern? Don't enterprise customers or small businesses deserve this update too (in theory)?
I've also noticed that it's not in WSUS,
Howver, if you log into a WSUS-managed W10 or Serevr 2022 machine, go to settings, update & security, and click 'Check online for updates from Microsoft Update' it then finds it, tries to install it, and fails. I've not encountered a single W10 or Server 2022 installation yet where it has actually worked, and I am not going fiddling around with the recovery partition size, especially on servers which are in use!
It was consistent, easy to use and relatively "friendly looking" for a newcomer.
On top of that, you could switch out the GUI for a more utilitarian style if you wanted - and the whole thing did so.
None of this "3 or four entirely different styles, even within the same window"
In addition to the non-installing updates, there's another one this month which appears to be faulty - KB5034129 for Server 2022, which in some cases completely breaks Edge (seems to only happen in a minority of cases, and I don't know what triggers it). When this happens Edge just gives a blank white screen, and the only solution I've found is to remove the patch.
Yes, it is a problem given that assorted parts of Windows and Office have hooks into Edge, so even if you don't use Edge as the browser it still causes problems.
I get that you don't like Edge (I don't either), but any major part of the OS (which Edge is now, in various non-obvious ways) stopping working is definitely a problem.
I disagree. I have physically deleted all of Edge's files from my hard drive (yes – even the sneaky, non-obvious ones), and if anything, Office etc. seems to be running smoother than before because it can't do the annoying things that I don't want it to do. It certainly doesn't harm any of the actual productivity tasks in any way.
(Anything in my OS that's called an "experience" – or even worse a "connected experience" – can fuck right off. Especially Word's "Modern Comments", which are utterly terrible and shit and awful: they totally break my workflow and can go insert themselves into the arse of whoever decided that trying to copy Google's "live" collaboration bullshit was a good idea.)
You can disagree all you like, for but some use cases it is a problem. Specifically in this case, new Teams and Outlook don't work at all without Edge being functional, and old Outlook (latest subscription version, fully patched) works but gives trouble (they must presumably have added Edge hooks into it).
It does seem to be a Reg commenter trait to assume that because an issue doesn't affect their specific use cases, that means that it's not a problem to anyone.
We're talking about WIndows here, not MacOS. I don't know how they've implemented Teams / Outlook on MacOS, but unless Edge is a prerequisite (and from a quick look at the documentation it doesn't appear to be) they have presumably done it differently to how they've done it on Windows.
You can 'suspect' whatever you like but I've actually tested this and and observed what happens.
The most up-to-date and recent version of Outlook is working just fine for me. It doesn't surprise me that Teams doesn't work, though: it barely works at the best of times (I haven't tested it of late, but thoroughy killing Edge has never caused problems with it in the past). I'm guessing you're somewhere that insists you use it, as I can't think of any other reason to work with that monstrosity. Jack of all trades, master of none, and a massive background resource hog in the mean time.
In any case, I wonder if that patch actually broke several different things including Edge, and the Edge problem was a just symptom rather than a cause.
In Edge's defense, I find that some Google tools don't work on Chrome, but do work on Edge. (They would probably work on other Chromium derivatives or on Firefox, but I don't have those installed.)
And for the snobs out there who are judging me for using Chrome, it's usually the best tool for the job, and too many support teams will ask for you to check on Chrome when you run into issues.
"too many support teams will ask for you to check on Chrome when you run into issues"
Yes, and by capitulating, you're part of the problem. We're dangerously close to going back to the old "works best with IE6" days. Standards should be standards, and websites should be written to work according them rather than according to the whims of specific browser makers.
What irritates me is all the fanbois who keep insisting it's "the successor to VMS". VMS was notable for its verbose error messages, intuitive and consistent CLI and its extensive online help, as well as the (in)famous wall of manuals. Windows just goes "hurrdurr, I done an oopsie lol" and even if you look stuff up in Event Logger and can find anything relevant buried in the reams of crap, it's all obfuscation and hex codes and stuff. Trying to look them up usually ends up on the Micros~1 support site full of helpful remarks from Hello My Name's Dave asking if you've gone back to the last known good version or perhaps tried reinstalling Windows. argh. Though of course Poetterware has tried so hard to drag Linux in the same direction.
Given Windows log and storied history of updates borking the OS I am assuming (yea, I know that one too) this is sarcasm. The last time I had a Linux update bork itself was when I was trying out PCLinuxOS about 15 to 20 years ago. It used RPM and often had huge updates, sometimes over a hundred packages, that always had multiple dependency problems.These usually caused a complete failure to boot afterwards. After a couple of those I switched to Debian (and now Devuan and Linux Mint) and have had only a few dependency problems that prevented a package from updating but never stopped it from booting. The package dependency problems were easily fixed although it did usually require using the command line (OH, the humanity!) with the needed fix information displayed in the error message. And none of these packages were system critical. Live and learn, a quick check of PCLinuxOS to make sure I got the time line correct shows that they are now using APT and Synaptic like Devuan and Linux Mint.
In 2020 I did an update and when it updated elogind, it killed my X11 session & xterms, which killed the update. The elogind update also killed the console, and I couldn't ssh in, so I rebooted.
And got "kernel panic: can't find root filesystem" - it had installed a new kernel but hadn't gotten around to updating initrd yet.
Of course that's something GRUB could deal with, but it was still a pain in the ass. I did "dpkg --configure -a" and everything was happy.
So one screwup in about 15 years? Yeah, I can live with that.
I bork my Linux box from time to time, but at the moment I run Gentoo and use unstable packages that aren't in the main repository, leading to occasional problems with conflicts between different software packages which need different versions of the same libraries.... So any problems are self inflicted.
When I stick to a stable version of Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE etc, I never have these problems, they tend not to bork themselves without the user doing something they shouldn't do.
I have a number of SSD's that I wanted to sort the over provisioning on, so to do that you need to allow said app do a strink (or manually). A new fresh install and for whatever reason, Windoze had put a file or two at the end of said partition. Shrink did not work as there was that file. Optimise does nothing as it is an SSD.
I at least had an old defrag that would move files on an SSD and was able to fix
(moral of the story for me, always create a far smaller windoze partition that you need and then extend once done)
As it will tack some extra system partitions AFTER your reduced windows volume which it will then refuse to move for you.
How are we even using hard partitioning in 2024? A modern disk should be one big piece of space with a root directory full of .vhd files by now.
Microsoft has now published two "sample" PowerShell administrator-privileges scripts, which require that we first download from the Windows Update Catalog the particular Safe OS Dynamic Update (Compatibility Update) package for our version of W10 and pass the download's location to the script. The sighs of relief from home and SME users around the world are not yet audible.
Yep- Except they spel it KWALITY. /sarcasm
My beef is with whoever decided that a recovery partition of that size was 'large enough', given that the smallest, cheapest drives anymore are 128 GB drives, and more recently, 256 GB drives; given the hassle with resizing the main partition and rebuilding the recovery partiion, a prudent engineer would have asked for at least a full GB, or better, 2 GB. the end user won't miss it, and the enterprise users won't care anyway,.
...when MS screw up so comprehensively with an update, that the only Windows machine on the entire planet still working will be some guy in Vietnam using 3.1 to run his looms.
Maybe then they will get fined and forced to start testing their poopware before they shovel it out the door of the stable.
This is something that we run into regularly because of Microsoft's decisions about how these partitions are created. For a long time they were putting this partition at the beginning of a disk with a small size, and then updates would require that volume to be larger so they would fail or have other problems. They eventually started putting it at the end of the desk, but every update still ends up needing to make it larger, so user disk space also slowly gets smaller. They don't just make it a reasonable size one time and leave it, or *gasp* come up with a better solution that eliminates the problem completely. And that causes problems for users who know that an SSD needs to have overprovisioned space for long-term health. It's "640KB should be enough for anyone" over and over again.
Ugh. Fixing the partition doesn't fix the issue. My recovery environment was somehow disabled although the partition was there and I was getting this error. I deleted the recovery partition (partition 3 with my C and D volumes AFTER it as well as 300GB of unpartitioned space), which had 600MB used, and recreated the partition using the instructions, which created a 300GB recovery partition at the end of the disk. Brilliant! Exactly what I expected. Creating a partition using interleaved free space with diskpart is a pain so I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to make it unformatted, then used the rest of the instructions to turn it into a recovery partition and format it. But then enabling WinRE failed still because the WinRE.wim file was missing so I had to go into the Windows ISO to find the install.esd file (using 7Zip because Windows doesn't open that format and SOME ISOs use the esd file instead of a wim file) and inside that find the WinRE.wim file. Enabled WinRE and everything says it's working, but still get the error, even after a reboot. And I noticed the recovery partition only showed 11MB used. The WinRE.wim file was deleted since that data is supposed to move to the partition so I dug it out again, disabled and re-enabled WinRE, and now the partition show 333MB used. But I still get the error.
It's really quite amazing that anyone is able to just use a Windows machine and never run across completely unfixable problems.
I definitely do NOT think we are getting a straight story from Microsoft. After being hit by the update install error on Windows 10, I read through the proposed fix to create a larger WinRE partition and checked the status of the existing WinRE partition on the box the update failed on. The box has a functioning WinRE partition and as shown by 'reagentc /info' it is already 509 Megabytes. (almost double the size Microsoft is now suggesting will fix the problem...)
Explain to me how partitioning to "Manually Increase the Size of the WinRE Partition", to the recommended 256 Megabytes, will make any difference whatsoever on a box where a fully functioning WinRE partition of 509 Megabytes already exists?? Care to guess-again MickeySoft?
Even more curious, this Windows 10 Install was from a brand new Retail Windows 10 DVD, not an upgrade from Windows 7 or 8. So the 509 Megabyte WinRE partition already present was created by Windows 10 itself during the fresh install.
The current explanation by Microsoft and proposed fix somehow seem as half-baked as the update that originally caused the problem.
The instructions are for increasing the partition size by 250MB, not to make it 250MB in total. The recovery partition is supposed to be at the end of the drive with current versions of Windows, so when you shrink the C drive then delete the recovery partition and recreate it, it will be 250MB larger because the instructions use all available unallocated space. The assumption is that no matter what the current size, it's full because of all the cruft that builds up with updates, but another 250MB will fix it. Until the next time it's not big enough because this is a stopgap solution. Disk management won't tell you how much space is being used, as it isn't marked as a "valid" partition type with a filesystem, but diskpart or other disk utilities can tell you. However mine is 82% free (1.6GB) so that is just as likely not the problem as being the problem.
The instructions are for the "standard" situation and don't take into account systems that still have the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive, between the EFI partition and C drive, or if you have your drive partitioned with anything other than a C drive, or if you're trying to leave unallocated space on an SSD for overprovisioning. If anything exists other than the default configuration created by a fresh installation of a current Windows release, you have to figure out how to do it on your own. If your installation is from a Win10 DVD from like 7 years ago, then it created the WinRE partition size which that version of Windows needed, but every major update/version since then has created a larger partition during a fresh install, but they don't increase the size of it when you update one by one, and now the most recent versions can't function with that original recovery partition size. And with buggy updates like this, even sizes beyond what is required don't work properly.
I have a recently-made Win11 VM that created a 625MB recovery partition which is already 538MB filled.
Showing an unhelpful error message and then requiring a user to delve into the world of the command line to fix things. What is this? Linux?
(No, Linux hasn't done that for 15 years)
This is the exact error I had. But Win10 doesn't ask me (like win7) if I want an update nor explain what it's for. Even though Win10 Pro.
Less user / local admin control than earlier Windows NT.
I manually did the CLI stuff and it turns out I didn't even need the update as I'm never ever going to use bitlocker.
It's a test laptop never leaving the house and bitlocker reduces chance of data recovery if there is a fault. I also don't use TPM. I've recently disabled Intel SGX on all computers (mostly Linux) as it seems pointless and depreciated.
I also turn off Windows Firewall, but this version of Win10 keeps complaining even though notifications turned off in 3 places. No Mobile on it and never used away from my router, which has a better firewall.
Also the lock screen comes on if laptop idle. This used to be under screensaver/power options but now allegedly under Accounts Settings > Sign-in Options. Which is blank window.
At least WinME could be replaced by Win98SE and till Win7 arrived you could at least disable almost all Vista Stupidity.
So much junk that can't be uninstalled. So much stuff added to Network Interface setting, which is almost hidden.
Win10H22 Pro. A pile of poo unless you have corporate management and want flat dark mode.
Worst task/start bar and File Explorer yet.
Using NT since 3.5 and non-NT Windows since 3.0
MS has lost the plot. Win11 isn't going to even get a VM or test machine.
"...Showing an unhelpful error message and then requiring a user to delve into the world of the command line to fix things. What is this? Linux? ®"
You have just displayed a considerable--some might say, "unbelievable", for a technical publication--lack of knowledge of modern Linux distributions, and of their developers.
Disk partitioning was one of joys (not) of yore.
If you were lucky you got partition start and length in sectors (512 bytes.) Otherwise you had to fiddle with cylinders, tracks and sectors - usually pointlessly as the (scsi) disk was lba but you took the total sectors and used 'factor' to come up with a plausible total cylinders, tracks/cylinder and sectors/track. You had to ensure your partition started on a cylinder boundary (and was divisible by 4) and check for overlapping and/or active partitions. Enlarging or reducing a file system was simple if tedious - backup and restore :)
By comparison HPUX 10 lvm and vxfs was a dream (DEC OSF advfs and lvm/lsm not so much.)
Character building...
How long until Microsoft trot out the proposed fix of "You know, updating to Windows 11 should solve this issue".
This issue is so catastrophically stupid that I am almost starting to think it was deliberate. I mean - a brand new install using all default settings and their latest ISO from their website creates a recovery partition that is too small.......
This will fist enterprises to death this week, our patching pilot group showed up the issue and we'll probably have to pause the patches via inTune as we can't fuck off this one patch like we could with WSUS.
I mean, for fuck sake Microsoft......i normally try to defend them when things go wrong because MOST of the time it's OK but this really takes the biscuit.
"This will fist enterprises to death this week, our patching pilot group showed up the issue and we'll probably have to pause the patches via inTune as we can't fuck off this one patch like we could with WSUS."
I'm going to have the same problem with the client machines, but it's this sort of situation which reinforces why I have so far stuck with WSUS for the servers (despite WSUS being a pain in the arse in various ways).
Reading this reg article on my phone whilst waiting for my windows laptop to reboot, as part of my trying to fix a broken print spooler. And suddenly the dreaded "configuring windows updates" blue screen of doom is on. And this despite all my best efforts stop Windows update ever happening. Not optimistic that this is going to end well for me.
Linux 20-25 years ago was not intended for the everyday user. It was relatively new, not very mature and needed a fair bit of Unix knowledge to work out what problems were and how to fix them. (To be fair, though, anyone who's grappled with a Unix reinstall on something like a Sun workstation around that time will know that its not really a Linux thing, its what Unix users were expected to put up with.)
Windows 20-25 years ago worked. It wasn't particularly sexy but systems like NT4 and 2000 did the job and were reliable and practical.
But we're in a different world now. Contemporary Linux distributions are a lot more reliable and easy to use than their Windows counterparts. Modern Windows is a mess due to corporate imperatives taking precedence over engineering -- you get a lot of half-assed 'fixes' that introduce more problems than they solve, 'features' that serve only to tie the desktop ever closer to Microsoft's marketing with the entire creaking pile of odure held together primarily by inertia, an unwillingness or inability of corporate IT to break free of acquired habits.
I'm utterly fed up with Windows; I need a new computer but there's nothing that would persuade me to get one with Windows 11 on it.
... come up with a distro labelled 'Windows', with a compatibility layer sandwiched in, and finally leave behind the wreckage of the last twenty years.
No one need know; payment for upgrades/subscriptions can continue as normal.
On second thoughts, bin all the above—the shambling zombie is much more entertaining.
I just freshly set up 2 virtual machines last night, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro using the default setup from the latest ISO, no BitLocker and they created default recovery partitions of 522MB. Got them progressively updated until just now, when both of them gave this error message. So stupid.