I generally try to avoid windows as much as possible, but I'm tech support
for my wife's computer, so I can't avoid it completely.

Today she got into some page "it seems like you haven't backed up your computer in a while...". I thought, OK, I back up my stuff every day, why
not. Then we had to either remember a microsoft account, which we've used
in like never. It wanted me to verify who I was, but somehow I could
nevder seem to get the email it said it was sending me, and then I
couldn't cancel out of it.

I was stuck, so I decided to reboot. Next thing I know it's doing updates without asking. I'm sitting there watching the spinner and I have no way
of knowing how progress is going - is this going to take ten minutes or
ten hours? Finally got to the logon, and it decided to go to the spinner
again for a while. I had no idea what it was doing, installing, or
whetever.

When I log on, I got that stupid screen asking if I wanted to upgrade to windows 11, followed by some edge thing - I never use edge either. It took over half an hour just to be able to read email.

I contrast this with Ubuntu, that asks me nicely If I want to do updates,
and gives me a choice of components to update. If I say NO it goes away
and doesn't ask me again for a while. If I decide to update I can see the progress as it goes along, no hiding anything behind the curtain.

I HATE WINDOWS!!!!!

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On Mon, 5 May 2025 22:37:34 -0000 (UTC), Peter Flass -- Iron Spring
Software wrote:

I HATE WINDOWS!!!!!

As long as you keep giving Microsoft money, they don’t have to care.

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Reply-To: slp53@pacbell.net

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:

On Mon, 5 May 2025 22:37:34 -0000 (UTC), Peter Flass -- Iron Spring
Software wrote:

I was stuck, so I decided to reboot. Next thing I know it's doing
updates without asking. I'm sitting there watching the spinner and I
have no way of knowing how progress is going - is this going to take ten
minutes or ten hours? Finally got to the logon, and it decided to go to
the spinner again for a while. I had no idea what it was doing,
installing, or whetever.

I feel your pain. I did the update last month on Patch Tuesday. I'm pretty >sure I restarted but I'm not going to put my hand on a bible. Yesterday i >was reviewing the steps to turn on the optional sshd server feature and
the download seemed to stall out. (yes, you can actually ssh into a
Windows box like a real computer. It's a feature they don't advertise >heavily).

I have one low-end windows laptop, now eight years old, that I
turn on in April to run turbotax. Takes about a week to become
usable while catching up on updates. During updates, it is basically
unusable with 100% disk activity and apparently MS never heard of
I/O priority management.


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On 2025-05-06, Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> wrote:

I have one low-end windows laptop, now eight years old, that I
turn on in April to run turbotax. Takes about a week to become
usable while catching up on updates. During updates, it is basically unusable with 100% disk activity and apparently MS never heard of
I/O priority management.

And then there are the friends of ours who are not only running
Windows, they have Norton on their machine. 100% disk activity
forever. At least my wife has a Mac.

Paraphrasing Ted Nelson in _Computer Lib_
(he was talking about IBM at the time):

Microsoft is not a necessary evil.
Microsoft is not necessary.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

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On 2025-05-05, Peter Flass -- Iron Spring Software <Peter@Iron-Spring.com> wrote:

I was stuck, so I decided to reboot. Next thing I know it's doing updates without asking. I'm sitting there watching the spinner and I have no way
of knowing how progress is going - is this going to take ten minutes or
ten hours? Finally got to the logon, and it decided to go to the spinner again for a while. I had no idea what it was doing, installing, or
whetever.

When I log on, I got that stupid screen asking if I wanted to upgrade to windows 11, followed by some edge thing - I never use edge either. It took over half an hour just to be able to read email.

My business partner for a while turned off his desktop at night, after I
showed him how much it was "phoning home" in the wee hours of the night.
But he stopped doing that after realizing that it was running a
full-drive virus scan on every reboot.


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On 2025-05-06, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

Yesterday i was reviewing the steps to turn on the optional sshd server feature and
the download seemed to stall out. (yes, you can actually ssh into a
Windows box like a real computer. It's a feature they don't advertise heavily).

My windows desktop does not have that. It is a Windows 10 Home edition.
I suspect that the "Server Manager" app that is the GUI way to do this
only exists on a Windows Server edition. And using the command-line
incantation they tell you to use in PowerShell yields:

PS C:\Users\lpoul> start-service sshd
start-service : Cannot find any service with service name 'sshd'.
At line:1 char:1
+ start-service sshd
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (sshd:String)
[Start-Service], ServiceCommandException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : NoServiceFoundForGivenName,
Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.StartServiceCommand

Of course, there are 3rd-party server implementations. I suspect even
PuTTY has a server mode.

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On Tue, 6 May 2025 20:41:21 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I suspect that the "Server Manager" app that is the GUI way to do this
only exists on a Windows Server edition.

This is why I keep saying, Linux (and other *nixes) is a “workstation” OS, not a “desktop” OS.

The distinction between “desktop” and “server” OS products is an artificial one which was created by Microsoft (and other long-gone
proprietary OS vendors) as a way to segment the market and boost their revenues.

Whereas a “workstation” includes both “desktop” and “server” functionality
in the same box, with no artificial barrier between them.

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On 2025-05-06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 6 May 2025 20:41:21 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

I suspect that the "Server Manager" app that is the GUI way to do this
only exists on a Windows Server edition.

This is why I keep saying, Linux (and other *nixes) is a “workstation” OS,
not a “desktop” OS.

The distinction between “desktop” and “server” OS products is an artificial one which was created by Microsoft (and other long-gone proprietary OS vendors) as a way to segment the market and boost their revenues.

Whereas a “workstation” includes both “desktop” and “server” functionality
in the same box, with no artificial barrier between them.

It is particularly galling, since - like Linux - the desktop and the
server edition of Windows are pretty much the same build.

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On 2025-05-07, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On Tue, 6 May 2025 20:41:21 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

My windows desktop does not have that. It is a Windows 10 Home edition.
I suspect that the "Server Manager" app that is the GUI way to do this
only exists on a Windows Server edition. And using the command-line
incantation they tell you to use in PowerShell yields:

I think the Windows 10 process is similar. In Settings you can find
Optional Features and then search for OpenSSH Server in the View Features dialog. Check the box and it will download it. It worked in my Windows 11 Home.

I didn't use the PowerShell stuff. After it was installed I brought up services.msc to start sshd and set it to automatic and checked that port
22 had a incoming rule.

On my Win10 systems (Home edition), "Optional Features" is an empty list.
"Turn Windows features on or off" sits in "Please wait..." forever.
"Services" does not have anything SSH related except "OpenSSH
authentication service", which is disabled.

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On Wed, 7 May 2025 12:49:33 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-05-06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Whereas a “workstation” includes both “desktop” and “server”
functionality in the same box, with no artificial barrier between them.

It is particularly galling, since - like Linux - the desktop and the
server edition of Windows are pretty much the same build.

I don’t think that’s been true for a long time.

With early versions of Windows NT back in the 1990s, somebody discovered
that an “NT Workstation” installation could become “NT Server” just by changing a registry key.

Microsoft soon fixed that.

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On 2025-05-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Wed, 7 May 2025 12:49:33 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 2025-05-06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

Whereas a “workstation” includes both “desktop” and “server” >>> functionality in the same box, with no artificial barrier between them.

It is particularly galling, since - like Linux - the desktop and the
server edition of Windows are pretty much the same build.

I don’t think that’s been true for a long time.

With early versions of Windows NT back in the 1990s, somebody discovered that an “NT Workstation” installation could become “NT Server” just by
changing a registry key.

Microsoft soon fixed that.

I recall when first installing RedHat, you could choose between a
"Server" install and "Workstation", which really only differed in the
set of packages those configurations installed.

Windows cannot be coaxed into a "server" install any easy way today, can
it?

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On 06/05/25 7:07 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 5 May 2025 22:37:34 -0000 (UTC), Peter Flass -- Iron Spring
Software wrote:

I HATE WINDOWS!!!!!

As long as you keep giving Microsoft money, they don’t have to care.

At this point I believe that it is our moral obligation to pirate
Microsoft Windows. There are specific open-source solutions such as Massgravel's Microsoft Activation Scripts (linked at the bottom of the
post) to "properly" activate Windows Pro, and remove all of the garbage
and restrictions that come with Home or Starter Editions.

<https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts>

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On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 09:37:40 +0530, Not Necessary wrote:

At this point I believe that it is our moral obligation to pirate
Microsoft Windows.

Don’t do it. Think of your loved ones.

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On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:41:01 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Microsoft is not a necessary evil. Microsoft is not necessary.

The mind says that, the heart‡ is still too heavily indoctrinated with
those multi-million-dollar PR campaigns telling everybody how wonderful Microsoft is.

‡Or maybe somewhere lower down.

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On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 00:06:29 -0000 (UTC)
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

The mind says that, the heart=E2=80=A1 is still too heavily indoctrinated with those multi-million-dollar PR campaigns telling everybody how
wonderful Microsoft is.

Nobody has ever thought this,* despite the campaigns. They've *always*
gotten by on omnipresence engineered through business tactics, whatever
the merits or demerits of any given product/version.

* (Aside from the occasional actual MS employee.)


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On 2025-07-01, Jan van den Broek <fortytwo@xs4all.nl> wrote:

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:41:01 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> schrieb:

[Scnipp]

Better still, find a way to live without Windows. Promote the
use of replacement products such as LibreOffice, or emulation
solutions such as Wine. If they don't quite meet your needs,
find ways to improve them until they do. To paraphrase Ted Nelson:

Microsoft is not a necessary evil. Microsoft is not necessary.

This is a more positive approach.

As an increasingly bitter cynic, I appreciate your endorsement.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Growth for the sake of
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | growth is the ideology
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | of the cancer cell.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Edward Abbey

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:
On Wed, 02 Jul 2025 01:13:09 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

On 2025-07-01, Jan van den Broek <fortytwo@xs4all.nl> wrote:

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:41:01 GMT
Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> schrieb:

[Scnipp]

Better still, find a way to live without Windows. Promote the
use of replacement products such as LibreOffice, or emulation
solutions such as Wine. If they don't quite meet your needs,
find ways to improve them until they do. To paraphrase Ted Nelson:

Microsoft is not a necessary evil. Microsoft is not necessary.

This is a more positive approach.

As an increasingly bitter cynic, I appreciate your endorsement.

Please correct the spelling error in the title; it should be Windows Rent.
ITY.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

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On Wed, 02 Jul 2025 20:05:49 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-07-02, Kerr-Mudd, John <admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:

Please correct the spelling error in the title; it should be Windows
Rent.

Good one. That makes them one of the most abusive slumlords in history.

Real-life slumlords only get away with it because the tenants cannot
afford to move elsewhere.

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On 06/05/2025 00:37, Peter Flass -- Iron Spring Software wrote:

I was stuck, so I decided to reboot. Next thing I know it's doing updates without asking. I'm sitting there watching the spinner and I have no way
of knowing how progress is going - is this going to take ten minutes or
ten hours? Finally got to the logon, and it decided to go to the spinner again for a while. I had no idea what it was doing, installing, or
whetever.

Yeah those Windows updates are a real pain. One of my computers is
dualbooted with Windows, and if I boot Windows I always get an upgrade
screen. And those fullscreen Windows 11 ads are also a hinderance.

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On 3 Jul 2025 18:33:10 GMT
rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

Typically Windows updates are available after Patch Tuesday, the
second Tuesday of the month. I updated the Fedora box yesterday.
Today it says updates are available. The Ubuntu box pops a dialog
offering to upgrade to 25.04 at odd intervals. Just saying...

On the other hand, it's fairly trivial to turn those *off.* The same
can *definitely* not be said for Windows Update.


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In article <103t2i7$1ftgf$2@solani.org>,
Not Necessary <not@necessary.invalid> wrote:

At this point I believe that it is our moral obligation to pirate
Microsoft Windows.

While Linux is my daily driver, I find a Windows machine useful so I can
have the same environment my CS students do (which makes it easier for
me to get them set up and help when things go wrong).

So I bought a $150 used W11 machine. :)

--
Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall | beej@beej.us

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