Windows 10 may now be essential but users new and old have had a rough ride in recent weeks. And it has just gotten a lot worse after a new, high-profile Windows 10 failure has left more questions than answers and some seriously angry users.
The drama began yesterday as Windows 10 users suddenly found that Search was broken with a black bar showing where search results should be, even for those who tried to perform a local search of their files.
This is the future of proprietary operating systems like Windows, macOS and iOS as their parent companies move towards services and subscription models. More and more, they’ll use their operating systems to push their services and subscriptions, to the detriment of the user experience. It’s been happening in Windows 10 for a few years now, and iOS, too, is riddled with ads for Apple’s services.
And so, we arrive at the point where local file search breaks down due to server issues. What a time to be alive.
I manage a medium sized network of mostly Win 10 based machines, the remainder of which have been upgraded from Win 7 late last year. I keep a subset of the Win 10 machines, canaries that I usually those I associate with power users, on the fast release track.
We’ve not had one occurrence of this problem, which is odd because usually we’ll see this sort of problem days or weeks ahead of the general public!
cpcf,
Microsoft indicates that it wasn’t a windows update related failure. Instead what happened was that the windows search feature has become dependent upon phoning home to microsoft, and what happened today is that a server server side failure on microsoft’s end caused windows users to experience these local failures. I don’t know that everyone was impacted. Presumably anyone who blocks windows ads/search wouldn’t be impacted. It’s possible that only certain microsoft datacenters were impacted.
Anyways I think the reason for the anger is that many don’t even want these ad/tracking mechanics to be in windows in the first place, and now that these mechanics are causing new failure modes, it makes it that much worse that remote tracking services are causing the local OS features to break.
https://www.askwoody.com/2020/patch-lady-panos-we-need-transparency/
The key issue here is the reliance on online features. Things like local search should have local system fallbacks in the case that these online features become unavailable.
Whilst a lot of people consider the web as static and unchanging, the reality is much the opposite. Many sites come and go, and many once popular websites have since been discontinued and otherwise lost. Technologies get discontinued and companies go bust. The fact is, much of the web that was available 10 years ago has been taken down, or otheise has stopped functioning.
Online services are great for the here and now. But as soon as those services are taken down, users are left by the wayside. The issue with Windows Search just highlights what will become (and already is) an issue that we will face for many years to come.
The123king,
You are absolutely right and as the software industry continues to move in the direction of online service providers, this is only going to get worse. This is preventable, however the people ultimately making these decisions don’t have the interests of end users in mind. Our corporations want us to be more dependent rather than less.
> people consider the web as static and unchanging, the reality is much the opposite.
Why? Anyone who used computers before about 1998 should remember when “fast Internet” meant a 57.6 kbaud modem, and unless you had a second phone line, “always on connection” was a dream. Is our “computing memory” really that short?
And even if it is – you don’t have do much more than browse to see latency problems caused by browser ads, browser JS/CSS/HTML/etc bloat (a non-tech user won’t know it’s JS that’s *causing* it, they just see the results of slow-loading pages, “flashing pages” because an image in a table takes longer to load and so the layout suddenly redraws (good eample is the TVGuide app on iOS, and iAds – I assume it uses iAds).
> highlights what will become (and already is) an issue that we will face for many years to come
And heaven help us if malign foriegn actors decide to attack a piece of the Internet backbone or Comcast or something..
> people consider the web as static and unchanging, the reality is much the opposite.
Why? Anyone who used computers before about 1998 should remember when “fast Internet” meant a 57.6 kbaud modem, and unless you had a second phone line, “always on connection” was a dream. Is our “computing memory” really that short? Certainly almost any senior engineers memory today should be that old. (Well, maybe not – a Sheldon-like whiz kid born in 2000 who was programming Basic at age 2, Swift at age 6 graduated high school at 14, college
And even if it is – you don’t have do much more than browse to see latency problems caused by browser ads, browser JS/CSS/HTML/etc bloat (a non-tech user won’t know it’s JS that’s *causing* it, they just see the results of slow-loading pages, “flashing pages” because an image in a table takes longer to load and so the layout suddenly redraws A recent example I saw is the TVGuide app on iOS, and iAds – I assume it uses iAds.
All this is caused by the fact that online resources are inherently (at least a little) less stable than local resources in terms of time and availability (bandwidth usage or up-or-down status). I read an article in the Wall Street Journal [1] that Walmart is planning to move into edge computing. It mentioned the hypothetical that a self-driving car would connect to a Walmart edge server for things like complicated image calculations (it mentioned that about 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart.
I guess 10 miles is within wifi region-area-network range or something. Given enough hotspots, current-or-hypothetical current-or-5G very-low-latency wireless protocols, and lots of fiber or high quality copper. (Or a “optical-based network”? The updated version of the Beacons of Gondor?
But do you want your self-driving car to be dependent on ANYTHING that isn’t local for something as critical as image recognition of whether the thing coming up 10 feet ahead is a person or a squirrel? It really should slow down for either.) Injured body laying in the street, or piece of person-shaped-cardboard then. I don’t, especially if I’m potentially the person in front.
[1] “Walmart’s Secret Weapon to Fight Off Amazon: The Supercenter – Walmart is betting on a future where its giant stores will quickly get groceries to your door, replace the doctor’s office and rent out computing power to passing drones and autonomous cars” (Dec. 21, 2019)
(https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmarts-secret-weapon-to-fight-off-amazon-the-supercenter-11576904460 [paywall])
(continuation of funny under-20-senior engineer bit) Well, maybe not – a Sheldon-like whiz kid born in 2000 who was programming Basic at age 2, Swift at age 6, WWDC at age 9 or 10, graduated high school at 13, college at 16, junior engineer for 2 years, then finally made senior engineer with a month to go before the big-2-0.
Oh God sorry to the multiple post. Damn Firefox.
Jimw338,
Just because always on broadband is much better than dialup, that doesn’t imply anything that The123king said is wrong. You’re talking about two extremely different concepts. The123king was being critical of local functionality being replaced with a remote service, always on internet doesn’t imply that it must. I’m in agreement with him and it’s not because we’ve forgotten what computers were like. We’re the ones who remember computers being more than thin clients to remote servers. If anything it is newer generations who are at risk of forgetting how computers existed under local owner control. Our children and grandchildren may grow up permanently locked into microsoft, apple, google, amazon, etc.
I guess it’s time we discuss this topic, the thing is there’s so much misinformation in the media. The AI is always going to be onboard. Making a car so highly dependent on remote servers to process images in real time is a recipe for disaster. If self driving cars were implemented the way the media likes to imply, then a script kiddy with no particular skills could cause total chaos with a simple jammer even without an exploit. Instead what needs to happen is networks will be used to provide live conditions and to update the onboard AI, but constant image processing NOT going to be offloaded to remote servers as that is too dangerous and irresponsible. For self driving vehicles to be robust, we must treat the internet as a supplemental resource, not a primary resource for driving the car. Same is true for other types of vehicles like planes. AI will become more reliable and experienced than humans (eventually), but making this AI dependent on remote resources creates known failure modes that risk human life. Even if a network were hypothetically 99.9% reliable along every street and highway (good luck reaching this level of reliability with 5G), the 0.1% of the time when it isn’t could cause traffic jams, accidents and deaths.
I have basically all the tickboxes for online stuff unchecked on my work laptop…
And it still broke… a later update patched it to work again.
all of this phoneing home is why i stoped useing windows two years ago. Ubuntu, Manjaro or one ofthe other “Desktop focused” Distrobutions seems to be mor and more prudent in this age of tech phoneing home (atleast untill they get mad about us bipassing the spying and try to loock the bootloaders in new computers)
Ohioham? Is it you? Only you feel the need to spell “distributions” as “distrobutions”
Thanks, now I have another thing in this universe to piss me off!
“all of this phoneing home is why i stoped useing windows two years ago. Ubuntu, Manjaro or one ofthe other “Desktop focused” Distrobutions seems to be mor and more prudent in this age of tech phoneing home (atleast untill they get mad about us bipassing the spying and try to loock the bootloaders in new computers”
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You seen distros like Fedora lately? Unlike how they were in the past,they’re now nearly impossible to install unless you have acess to a high speed internet connection.
fedora actually works really well with slower internet. it pulls a fairly smaller amount of data and it uses available bandwidth better. it also works really well with updates via deltarpm, which really cuts down the update sizes.
I have to use Windows on my work machine but I had already given up on their search system because it was slow and basically didn’t return stuff even when I knew for a fact it was there, A manual search of the files later proved the Windows one wrong. I mean, I was searching for text in text files… It took half an hour (on an SSD) to show me no results when I know the files with said text are definitely there. I thought maybe I’m using it wrong but since installing another search system that found the files in seconds then maybe not.
I use Linux where on my personal machine these days, Yea I miss visual studio (Truth be told, I now find that bloated and slow since using alternatives) but I have learned to use other stuff and I don’t miss Windows OS, Search, Cortana, Forced Updates, The System settings mess, Un-removeable apps and the big effort that is going on now for them to take control of your computer and dictate to the user how things should be done… Screw all that noise.
Use Total Commander (Alt+F7) and you can even select how deep you want to go for you search. With the right plugin, you can even look for text in pdf files or else.
Keep in mind that Windows’ tooling is very *very* basic : file explorer, image viewer, notepad editor, etc.
Just adding a plug here to … (not linking to their makers/websites ghisler and voidtools, hint hint)
1) Use Total Commander for general file management
2) Use Everything, from inside Total Commander, for everything search (and more) related
None of these tools replace just a simple “Winkey+type a few letters to start a program” though
My wife has a windows (8.1) machine, I run Linux (Kubuntu).
Every Windowsupdate is a katastrophe, my wife in stress, 3 or 4 cold starts with the power completely taken of the mainboard before everything runs normal again.
The same with my customers, about 30% having loads of trouble after updates.
It seems that Microsoft may be the cause that the “year of the linuxdesktop” will eventually really happen.
The problem is most people that are going to run into problems with Windows updates should have left Windows years ago… but they aren’t even aware of alternatives. It’s like with phones, too many people have accepted the fact that you’re either stuck being tied to Apple for the rest of your life, or can suffer at some of the oddities in the random amount of Android versions that are out there because carriers / manufacturers think you should buy a new phone every year to stay up to date…
It’s kind of maddening, and if I could, I’d just go live in a cave somewhere with my pre-internet toys.
‘leech
The problem is most people that are going to run into problems with Windows updates should have left Windows years ago… but they aren’t even aware of alternatives. ‘
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No the problem is people like you. Thanks to you and others,the once useable linux distros will no longer run on their machines which are mainly 32 bit processor machines.
What’s point of alternatives when the alternatives won’t run on their machines?
Think about it.
yoko-t,
What’s the problem with people like leech? He has absolutely nothing to do with your problems.
Almost all consumer x86 PCs sold in the past decade are 64bit, unless you go out of your way to find a legacy 32bit only machine, then odds are extremely high you’ve already got a 64bit machine already. Even phones are capable of more than 32bit. And even if your computer isn’t, many linux distros still cater to 32bit anyways (I personally use debian https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst ).
Meh, the argument would have had more weight in 2010, but not so much in 2020. There are a lot of people who might not want to run linux for a variety of reasons, but honestly the people who are thinking “boy, I’d like to switch to linux, it’s a shame I can’t because my machine is 32bits” are few and far in between. Besides, they can still in fact install linux, just not ubuntu.
[quote]Almost all consumer x86 PCs sold in the past decade are 64bit, unless you go out of your way to find a legacy 32bit only machine, [/quote]To be fair, there are a lot of 32-bit Atom devices. Atom made the 64-bit transition years after Core did.
i have no idea what you want to say. is the guy you are answering to some kind of policy maker in pc world?
linux will keep working on 32 bit as long as there is 32bit around (and it’s feasible enough, performance-wise). you can always rebuild your favorite distro for it.
“linux will keep working on 32 bit as long as there is 32bit around (and it’s feasible enough, performance-wise). you can always rebuild your favorite distro for it.”
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And people can just as soon not bother and just stick to WinXP and Windows 7.
Ha, yeah I’m not sure wtf his problem is, I literally never mentioned 32 bit anything. And I’m a huge supporter of Debian, which still (though not officially) works on 68000 processors… so yeah, not sure what his gripe with me in particular is.
Windows 10 has been garbage from the beginning, being only half there on their transition to being a flat design, and then deciding to just try to do the ‘apple’ thing and stick with a 10.x version, that just keeps updating. Good in practice, but neither of them really have held to it. Apple is just now starting their bout of ‘let’s dump all the old things again’ and have been rumored for a while to make a switch to ARM.
Windows will probably never completely drop 32bit support just like Linux likely never will.
Maybe Yoko Ono…er, T, was thinking by alternative I meant Ubuntu? I actually don’t like ubuntu in the least, and I think they were idiots for jumping the shark for 32bit stuff, also disagree with snap packages as well….
“3 or 4 cold starts with the power completely taken of the mainboard before everything runs normal again.”
That definitely sounds like a hardware problem. Linux might appear to fix that issue for a bit until the board completely fails. As for the year of the Linux desktop, well the average person would rather pay the Apple tax than tolerate Linux for more than a few weeks. Windows would have to get as bad as the Windows 95/98 days before desktop Linux had any real chance of gaining from Microsoft’s bad decisions. Saying this will cause the year of the Linux desktop is akin to the Soviets believing the U.S. was constantly on the brink of collapse any moment now. The problems are within, simply waiting for Windows and OSX to get worse is a waste of time.
Obvious troll is obvious 😉
why are you talking about a Windows 8.1 and Linux machine in a topic about Windows 10 Search?
30% having loads of trouble after updates and every about being a katastrophe…I think your customers deserve a better guy to serve them
My Windows 8.1 installation is aging like fine wine. And I can run SecuROM games too.
3 more years of freedom. Then we ‘ll see.
Add me to the list of people plagued by Microsoft’s updates. My Windows Explorer Search broke in November and I haven’t been able to restore it yet. The icons for my images have mostly been replaced with space holders. My DOWNLOADS folder is now grouped by date no matter how many times I change that setting. I was able to stop Outlook from grouping all my folders by date – thankfully but why should I need to search for a fix every time MS releases an update? I’d rather use my PC to keep working on my tasks instead of chasing problems caused by updates. Switching to Linux is sounding better all the time. I much prefer the “classic desktop” of Windows 95/XP to anything I’ve seen since. I detest hunting through ribbon bars to find that feature that was so accessible with Office 2003. The more I upgrade/update, the less I’m liking it and the more time I’m spending looking for fixes. It just shouldn’t be this way. Leave those of us that like the older platform continue with it and save your updates for new users. Classic Shell proves it’s possible.
“This is the future of proprietary operating systems like Windows, macOS and iOS as their parent companies move towards services and subscription models. More and more, they’ll use their operating systems to push their services and subscriptions, to the detriment of the user experience. It’s been happening in Windows 10 for a few years now, and iOS, too, is riddled with ads for Apple’s services.
And so, we arrive at the point where local file search breaks down due to server issues. What a time to be alive.”
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Spare us please.
Weren’t you one of the people who not so long ago were insulting the Windows 7 Users who didn’t and aren’t going to upgrade to Windows 10?
Looks like they were right not to do so,and you wrong for doing so.
Running an insecure, out-of-support operating system on main machines is irresponsible. That has nothing to do with this story.
Unless you pay for the extended support, running Windows 7 is irresponsible, and the computer equivalent of drunk driving.
Windows 7 isn’t insecure the day after its end of support, like yogurt doesn’t turns non edible the day after its expiration date. Windows Defender is still maintained, AV are updated, etc. Don’t spread the FUD, Windows 7 has been perfectly capable up today, so did Windows XP, that I still use from time to time. The switch will happens during a span of months, if only Microsoft wasn’t messing with Windows’ users. From experience I wait a bit before jumping in the band wagon, but unlike XP that became reliable starting SP2, or 7 starting SP1, Windows 10 is still a pile of whatever you dislike. Of course there’s the Windows 8.1 legacy, but they screwed it over anyway. IMHO.
Wow. Dude, I usually agree with your comments but this is some of the most outrageous hyperbole you’ve ever committed to text.
BTW I tracked down the source of osnews intermittent outages. It turns out it’s an intermittent but ongoing DNS issue over at cloudflare.
Lookup from root DNS servers.
These resolve to cloudflare’s servers, and unfortunately aren’t 100% reliable throughout the day. Besides causing slow DNS resolution, sometimes they don’t respond at all making it look like osnews is down when it isn’t.
But a few minutes later…
I tried again using cloudflare’s DNS IP address directly…
And literally just a few seconds later…
My connectivity to cloudflare is excellent, their DNS daemon is the problem.
My assessment is that cloudflare’s DNS servers are overloaded. And if you look at the TTL value I highlighted on the A record, it’s only 300 seconds, which does nobody any good because it means our DNS servers and operating system caches have to throw away the IP and refesh it every 5 minutes. It should be one or two hours at a minimum especially for a static IP that never changes to keep navigation fast and improve reliability.
If I were a paying customer (I assume osnews is) I would file a ticket because the no response fault has been happening on a regular basis and the TTL being served up by cloudflare is responsible for bad access times on osnews, which has been bugging me for a while now.
“[email protected]
fedora actually works really well with slower internet. it pulls a fairly smaller amount of data and it uses available bandwidth better. it also works really well with updates via deltarpm, which really cuts down the update sizes.”
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You missed the point,moron. With the older versions of Fedora…..
*YOU DIDN’T NEED INTERNET TO INSTALL IT*
yoko-t,
Don’t be a bully man, you can say your piece and still be respectful.
You don’t need internet to install Fedora now either. You only need it for updates…. do you have a mental imbalance and have nothing better to do than to read into people’s messages that which they aren’t saying?
Literally the part you quoted simply states Fedora uses less bandwidth (I assume compared to windows? since Windows will have all sorts of extra crap going on in the background that a typical Linux install does not (like analytics, force fed ads, etc). And that DeltaRPMs reduce bandwidth use while doing updates because it’s only logical to use them (they should be used everywhere anyhow, in my opinon, er Deltas specifically, as they are awesome).
No where does he say anything about the need to install Fedora. you can still right now (I’m doing this as I’m typing this very comment!) download an ISO and burn it to a DVD or onto a USB stick, and then install without needing internet access on the machine you’re installing on.
Take some meds and calm down dude.
You don’t need internet to install Fedora now either. You only need it for updates…. do you have a mental imbalance and have nothing better to do than to read into people’s messages that which they aren’t saying?
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Really? You can install the curent crap versions of Fedora just like you could Fedora 14 and below from a DVD set with no internet?
I don’t think so…..
You, definitively, can do it with openSUSE.
Anyway, care to explain what is your anger at? There are still 32 bit distros and you still can install some of them without an Internet connection.
Myself, the only thing that bonds me to a spare installation of Windows on machines I use is Autocad, and looks like Autodesk has no interest on modifying this situation. I had some experiencing with Bricscad, but on civil engineering, where we just can’t take the risk of incompatibility on exchanged files, it feels like I’m cornered.
My other needs are perfectly satisfied with Octave, Libreoffice and, frankly, it is by now way easier to integrate numerical libraries on Linux than it is on Windows.
First hit on Google: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/
So yes, just like before you can get Fedora without internet. Of course you need to have the ISO/DVD first which you can get from anyone just like before
“avgalen
First hit on Google: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/
So yes, just like before you can get Fedora without internet. Of course you need to have the ISO/DVD first which you can get from anyone just like before”\
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Nice try,but not the same install process that fedora 14 and the older versions offered.
They had install sets of 2 or more DVDs of at least 4 gigs you could download that pretty much contained *everything* you could want, not some crippled live 1.8 gig DVD like the one you pointed to…..
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It’s highly unlikely some Linux workstation revolution will occur, unless people like me switch the dependant users on our networks across to thin clients. Most users can barely use Word or Excel, LibreOffice isn’t even a viable alternative, don’t tell me they can dive into CUPS or run a build to fix a compatibility problem!
Which is the irony of those calling for a mass migration, they continually speak like Linux is free of issues and is user friendly! Wallet friendly maybe, and only wallet friendly for someone technically skilled, but not user friendly for the average office worker!
1) Cups is seriously superior than ANY windows printing solution I’ve ever used. Windows printing… typically you take the printer out of the box, insert the CD that came with it (if you’re lucky, they might just have a piece of paper with a URl to download the drivers) and then you have to install a driver that may randomly stop working to the point where you have to do some magical ritual of uninstalling and sacrificing goats to get it to work again. Cups pretty much just works. I say ‘I want to add a printer’ in Gnome, and assuming it hasn’t already went out and detected one on the network, it already added it via direct connection, then I can tell it to add the printer looks at what is connected, or is on the network and it magically appears! At least this is with the past few HP printers I’ve used, and even my older Samsung one, it was just ‘there’ in my printer options when it’s turned on.
2) I can use LibreOffice just fine, but damned if I can use that overly ‘loud’ interface that Word/Excel/Outlook, and I have been using various GUI based computers since 1990…modern office is a freaking mess.
3) we know Linux isn’t free of issues. But it generally doesn’t magically just break if you’re using what is supposed to be a stable distribution (well at least I have rarely had Debian stable break on me. in fact, I don’t think I ever have, and I’ve ran basically the same install with updates for about 15 years, with the only time I re-installed was when I upgraded from 32bit to 64bit. Yup, same install since I ran it on dual 466mhz celerons with 384mb of ram! And now it’s running Buster 10.3 that was released this weekend.)
Also, It can be argued that Gnome itself is not only perfectly user friendly for office workers, but is a lot simpler to use than Windows or macOS. How hard is it to tell someone ‘okay, push this key, or go to activities in the corner. Now type what you want to use.’ ‘okay, browser’ all the browsers show up, and will even list ones that aren’t installed if you’d rather use one that currently isn’t. I mean seriously, how can you even make it any simpler?
On a similar note, one of my inlaws was having problems accessing a wireless HP printer from a chromebook. He didn’t check for explicit compatibility, but it did work from android and we were able to install the HP app from the google app store on the chromebook. Furthermore the HP app as well as local applications did see the local printer on the chromebook. It’s just that every time we tried printing, it went into the void. We ended up calling manufacturer tech support, but according to them chromebooks only support google cloud printers, not android compatible printers. We ultimately had to give up. What a mess.
I admit having difficulties with linux on occassion, but I’ve had just as many with windows. I feel that linux complexity for day to day usage is often exaggerated. Although not always, as Thom Holwerda’s GPU acceleration experience demonstrates. IMHO the biggest obstacle for people isn’t that any specific thing is too difficult, but just the existence of a learning curve in general when things aren’t where users are accustomed to having them. This isn’t strictly a linux problem, I have this problem on macs and even windows and office when they change control panels and interfaces for no reason. I went in for an interview at a company where all they had were macs…I was so out of my element, haha.
There’s a fun linus tech tips video about this:
“Mac vs PC – ROLE REVERSAL”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thc9iLZf0HQ
(aside, I’m surprised that after all these years LTT hasn’t hired any linux experts to feature on the channel)
It takes time for people to become proficient. From an employers point of view that costs money so sticking with the windows & office defacto standard can make sense for that reason. However microsoft isn’t doing employers any favors and I think that most employers hate when microsoft pushes changes to the UI that nobody was asking for.
How to install a printer on Windows 10:
1) Attach the USB…wait a few seconds…done, it automatically shows up
2) Connect the printer to the WiFi…wait a few seconds…done, it automatically shows up
3) Connect the printer to the wired network…sometimes it shows up automatically already, othertimes I have to ask Windows to add a printer and find it automatically.
No driver installation or CD/DVD is needed (and very much unwanted actually in my opinion). This isn’t Windows XP anymore
LibreOffice works just fine on Windows as well. On a modern Office I highly recommend the “tell me (Alt-Q)” interface for quickly finding advanced commands that aren’t shown in the UI
Your example about “push this key or go to activities in the corner now type what you want to use” is exactly the way it works in Windows (and what this topic is about)
So all your complaints are completely out of sync with how Windows actually works
***How to install a printer on Windows 10:
1) Attach the USB…wait a few seconds…done, it automatically shows up ***
For most printers, not all. Granted, Linux does have the same problem with CUPS and some printers.
r_a_trip,
That’s true. Another issue with windows update drivers is that they’re sometimes limited and not as functionally complete as the manufacture’s own downloadable drivers. I had a scanner/printer combo where they officially stopped providing downloadable windows drivers on the basis that they were now part of windows update. However the windows update drivers were incomplete and the original CD drivers would no longer install leaving the scanning functionality completely broken after upgrading windows. I went on the forums at the time and everyone else had the exact same problem. It was just so frustrating to have to throw away good hardware due to the lack of software support.
I’ve also found that windows update drivers can become stale compared to those you download directly from the manufacturer. I was experiencing WiFi issues with my windows laptop and I thought the hardware was just bad until I manually installed newer drivers and the problem completely went away. Windows update would have probably gotten new drivers eventually, but in the meantime the manufacture had already fixed the issue.
From microsoft’s point of view, they don’t want windows update to be too bloated, nor do they want a chaotic free-for-all with no oversight. There’s good reason for this, however the process and expenses of certifying new drivers for windows update means that windows update isn’t necessarily the best place to get the latest and greatest drivers for windows.
I use Linux also and have had no real problems for a long time. My main machine and my multimedia machine both run distro’s built on Debian Testing and don’t skip a beat no matter if playing a game (including Windows games via Wine or Steam Proton) or playing music and films. The biggest problem I had was last year when the repository for testing was changed, I had to update that which took all of 3 minutes on each machine! I agree also that Cups is better than Windows printing, it’s also a lot more configurable than Windows if you need it to be. I use both a Kyocera Monochrome Laser printer and a Epson Expression Premium all-in-one and both are discovered and set-up automatically by Cups, couldn’t be simpler! The scanner part can be a pain to set up, but once its done there is no problems at all.
I also run several 32 bit machines and have no problem finding 32 bit distro’s to run on them. Puppy Linux and Antix are two of my favourites, Q4OS is my next to try.
Most folk would have no problems moving to Linux from Windows, in fact they would probably find some things easier than Windows. I use both and Linux is definitely easier and quicker for most things.
Interesting that you mention people for whom Windows is getting too arcane and complex, and then the comparison with phones. In my experience, people who have been fighting Windows for years are simply switching to their phones and tablets for everything, since they don’t get slower with time and don’t have malware. People always assume that the computer/device itself is the problem, and are usually not interested in the alternatives when I offer to install Linux for them. I’d personally rather use a well maintained Windows laptop and/or cut off my hands rather than trying to do productive work on a mobile device, but to each their own…
In my experience, even moderately progressive organisations will find that an OS mono-culture is almost impossible to achieve as it quickly becomes dysfunctional. I suppose if an organisation is regressive needing no or minimal interactions with the rest of the world beyond the web-browser it’s possible, but even then I doubt it’s easily achievable.
I think this a key difference between Linux or Win XP and Win 10. In the bad old days, everything was about drivers built or installed, Linux and XP remain that way, manually micromanaged. Somebody unplugs a printer or shared device and plugs it in elsewhere and things just stop working. Most of that has been eliminated under Win 10, it just works in virtually all those circumstances with pretty much every device you can imagine. So I encourage more and more of our staff to give it a try, I don’t know anyone who has gone backwards from adopting it.
I do have associates who fall into the anti-Win 10 category, but I have to say in my experience most of their pain is self-inflicted.
But I’m not a totalitarian micro-manager, Marketing can have their Macs, Accounts their Microsoft and Engineers whatever they please! We’ve no problems with that as long as the customer gets what they want when they want it!
cpcf,
I definitely agree with you about windows xp (and windows 7 for that matter), but linux really is not in the same boat as those. Drivers are generally bundled with the OS. In fact the lack of stable ABI makes it impractical to distribute drivers separately. Admittedly some vendors, nvidia in particular, want to have the kernel load a shim for their proprietary driver, which is a source of headaches 🙁 But the bulk of drivers supported by linux distros don’t do this and are loaded directly without any special steps required from the user – it’s plug and play.
Contrast this with windows where a fresh windows install would require hunting down drivers from manufacturer websites. Sometimes this would be a challenge in and of itself because nvidia’s site was so difficult to use at low resolutions! Technically windows update existed and would search for drivers, but frequently none would be found. The worst case scenario was when the network drivers were unavailable and you couldn’t go online and download the drivers directly. This is absolutely no joke: I’d pop in a linux live-cd to download the windows drivers, haha. Another benefit was that linux livecds supported hi-res vesa graphics out of the box (I’m sure many of us remember being in windows VGA mode after install). Obviously the “normal” procedure back then was to install windows drivers off of floppy or cd, but many times these weren’t available and linux was a lifesaver! This coming from a windows sysadmin at the time 🙂
I will not claim linux is always trouble free, I’ve had my share of problems with it and I don’t blindly suggest it for everyone! However I will say that at least through windows 7 linux did support a lot more hardware out of the box without having to manually install drivers, a fact which surprised me at first. Alas, my involvement with windows has faded after windows 7 so I can’t really comment much on 8 or 10. If you say these versions have caught up to or surpassed linux in working “out of the box”, then I’ll take you at your word, but not for windows 7 and below. Unless you had an OEM windows CD preloaded with OEM drivers, the need to install drivers manually after a standard windows install was the norm.
OOTB is always an interesting debate, what I’ve found is that Linux will support a subset of device functionality OOTB, you still have to go online to get full featured support if it’s available. But I appreciate and concede that it’s nice to see a gadget works on a fresh install even if it is only partially.
A lot of the time my Linux systems seem to remain in beta though, in effect some are eternally in beta, and applying patches or updates can be beyond the scope of general users! As a result I’m usually happy to see a engineer with Linux, because I know he’ll be looking after things himself, but when they become Linux Apparatchiks and up-sell to a receptionist or clerk I’m not a big fan, because generally they’ll walk away when the affected user’s problems exceed their personal interest or experience.
On Windows. I wouldn’t extend my conclusions about Win 10 and device support to Win 8 or 8.1 Pro. To me there is a significant jump in compatibility, support and performance on Win 10. I couldn’t consider replacing most of my legacy Win 7 machines with Win 8 / 8.1, not from the want of trying because general users quite liked 8.1 Pro, but it wasn’t until Win 10 Pro was relatively mature that it became possible to upgrade. Once online with default MS drivers which seem fairly robust in a Win 10 Pro install will connect and download all the specifics for most long term support hardware, obviously bleeding edge hardware might be an exception, but it’s an exception on all OSes.
It was interesting to read your comments related to Win 7, because when I read a lot of the vitriol(not yours just in general) the first thing I think is that this person is still on 7 and making relative commentary.
cpcf,
Regarding windows 10, I do see some technical issues cropping up here and there for windows software that I still support, but honestly my main gripes about windows these days have more to do with microsoft’s general direction. From what’s I’ve heard the linux subsystem has made a lot of progress, this must be so much better than cygwin and mingw that I used to use. I always managed to get it working, but IMHO it was a bumpy road.
I do some visual studio development for windows too, but only when the client provides everything (windows 10 and licenses) as I no longer maintain windows machines for personal use and I’ve lost interest in perusing windows development. IMHO microsoft shot itself in the foot with it’s obnoxious ‘we know better than our customers’ attitude that went into high gear around windows 8 and persists. They should have shown “pro” users more respect and left us out of the corporate BS. Their actions ended up repelling an awful lot of talent that ms couldn’t afford to loose to linux. Not necessarily so much on the desktop, but undeniably in the server and embedded spaces. Of course I still see the windows development shops too, but these are way less prominent than they used to be. It’s funny though, technology-wise, I preferred the .net framework to the relatively unorganized chaos on linux. I’d be be quick on the bandwagon to abandon all the legacy C/C++ codebases & libraries if these weren’t so integral to my field. Oh well.
Anyways I’ve gotta go, nice chat!
A lot of Windows bashing in this topic, but nobody actually questioning Microsoft on the basic premise that “because a cloud service broke a local feature stopped working”. It would literally take just a few seconds to turn off your network connection, perform a search and see that this works just fine without the internet. Conclusion: There was more going on here!
I personally didn’t suffer from this problem, but my coworker that sat right next to me (same network, same registry settings for Cortana/Bing) did have this issue. We were both on the same Windows.PatchLevel as well. I completely agree with the article: “She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum ‘Pinocchio score’ for a lack of trust. “, “Microsoft owes users a better explanation than this”, “That’s Microsoft’s underlying tactics all along: sneak questionable mechanics into Windows with updates, backtrack only if someone noticed them, reported them and if that creates a big enough public outcry,”
So yes:
avgalen,
I think many of us do express concern of that actually. Nobody wants microsoft to redesigning local OS functionality around data collection and ads, which is what this is all about.
Anyways, my guess is that the online search functionality works something like this.
The failure mode likely occurred because the windows 10 was online and phoning home properly, but microsoft was returning bad results due to server-side failures. Also, in order to handle load, microsoft services need to be distributed across many servers, and much like HTTP load balancing, it can be important that a single user’s traffic reach the same set of servers every time (so that user profile and session data remain coherent). This is likely why some users experience the problem while others did not, the botched deployment or failure was isolated to some of these servers.
Obviously microsoft will address the server related failures, but I doubt they’ll remove or fix the windows mechanic that’s responsible for delegating to microsoft’s servers in the first place. These data center hooks are core to microsoft’s direction now.
We are both programmers, so of course we both thought about the “online detection”. But for people that had this problem it couldn’t be solved by going offline! So clearly more than “something online interfered with something that should have been local” was going on.
Is Search dependent on an internet service? No, because it works while being offline as well.
Was Search broken because of a malfunctioning internet service? No, because when going offline it was still broken.
Conclusion: something “local” was changed/interfered with. As I mentioned before, my co-worker and I were running the same Windows.PatchLevel with the same Bing/Cortana registry settings on the same network. One of us had this problem, the other one didn’t.
The only reason I can think of for this to have happened would be that something “remote” broke the Windows Search Index and that modifying the mentioned registry keys (+rebooting?) caused a rebuild or ignore of that index. Microsofts explanation so far doesn’t add up
avgalen,
I’d like to know more of the specific details too. I don’t have any first hand facts. The thing is microsoft specifically said it was a network outage on their end, you seem to be suggesting that this isn’t true and the cause is local to the machine…well I don’t have the facts to refute that, my guess was based on what’s been reported.
I don’t really know what technology microsoft uses to implement its windows 10 interfaces these days, do you know? If it’s scriptable like HTML/javascript, then I wouldn’t be surprised if windows 10 downloads these scripts from microsoft servers for local execution much like a browser and for all I know windows’ search UI might actually be an embedded browser page. So taking your claims into account, if you happen to be online while microsoft’s servers were broken, windows would succeed in downloading & caching a broken version of windows search, which could persist even after you go offline. This is not strongly correlated by by microsoft’s story of events, but could be plausible based on what you’ve said.
“Start” is actually an app: “C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.StartMenuExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\StartMenuExperienceHost.exe”. Mine was “last modified 15/09/2019”
Windows Search is a Windows Service:
C:\windows\system32\SearchIndexer.exe /Embedding. Mine was “last modified 21/01/2020”
Both seem to be compiled with Microsoft Visual C/C++ 2017 v15.8
The only strange thing I could find by simply looking at the files is the “thisisasitethatdoesntexist” uri part in this section in c:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.StartMenuExperienceHost_cw5n1h2txyewy\AppxManifest.xml
Does no one remember ubuntu search having similar properties?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.en.html
I think they made it disabled by default, but there will always be that temptation. I don’t trust gui searches. find and grep are all the search tools I’ve ever needed.
Am I the only one who thinks combining local search and online/web search into one is just stupid to begin with? If I want to do a local search only, I don’t want an online search involved in any way, and vice-versa. And no, I don’t think `cloud` storage should be treated as if it’s local storage. It’s not.
I agree, for what its worth. But I don’t think those that want to sell services and things to us agree.
So much drama, meanwhile I’ve never used Windows Search which is just horrible.
You have to laugh sometimes about the MS bashing. I read today some Apple fans are bashing the MS Duo which has apparently been seen in the wild crashing, more Windows rubbish apparently, except it’s Android!
“[1] “Walmart’s Secret Weapon to Fight Off Amazon: The Supercenter – Walmart is betting on a future where its giant stores will quickly get groceries to your door,”
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And you had better realize you’re going to get the oldest fruits and veggies the store can get away with shipping being sent to you,and then it will be difficult to prove that they did so.