Reserved bandwidth??
Some sort of hidden, concealed, clandestine internal QoS implementation in Windows. Reserving a portion of network bandwidth for high priority traffic sounds like a good concept, but I don’t like the fact that this is so hidden (I’ve been working with computers for many years and I’ve never heard of it until now), and that the mechanism to determine the priority of a packet is unknown.
I love shitting on Windows as much as anyone, but that is a completely baseless, fictitious accusation. And if not, give me a credible source.
If anything, I’d keep spyware traffic as low-profile as reasonable in Microsoft’s place.
https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-limit-reservable-bandwidth/
It’s not as scary as it sounds.
It’s not, and in a vacuum I don’t think anyone would mind. It is the fact that it is concealed that is really shitty.
“It reserves bandwidth for high-priority tasks such as Windows Update over other tasks that compete for internet bandwidth, like streaming a movie”
As much as I’d like to keep my system up to date (and I really do), if I’m watching a movie then that is my priority. Any task I’m currently using the bandwidth on, should be considered my system’s priority. This is akin to rebooting the computer when it determines it is necessary, with the user having little control to stop it; it’s intend isn’t malicious, and it is meant to protect the user, but all it achieves is upsetting the user and make us find ways around it or turn it off completely.
It’s used for updates. I’m not sure if it works all the time.
I think that it used to be called superfetch in the old days. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/superfetch-service-disable-helps-to-increase-speed/3c4d5b4b-edef-4eb7-9456-52fd304e606c
If you’re using an “unofficial” license, it’s probably normal to disable updates and afferent services.
I remember from years ago when I was modding Windows XP installations with nLite to try to purge all the unnecessary bits and install some useful stuff. Superfetch was this annoying service that supposedly ruined online gaming due to lag. :)
Superfetch was keeping an index of file relationships in RAM and pre-loading files you were probably going to use next. It didn’t ping your network at all, but it could easily eat up a ton of disk resources and RAM. It was really only an issue on old 5400rpm laptop HDDs from what I remember.
Might be thinking of windows search indexing.
I mean that only matters for people like us.
99.99% of the Windows user base doesn’t give the tiniest semblance of a shit about any of that. Hell I run Windows on my gaming pc still and have never had cause to do any of that.
I’m going to be honest with you, as often as this has been memed and for as long as I have been using Windows on my work computer, I have never once been forced to restart on the spot by an automatic update.
I’m sure those who have will be quick to reply but at this point I’m 90% confident it’s a loud minority.
I’ve seen an entire factory shut down for hours because two critical Win10 computers tried and failed to update. It’s never an issue until it becomes one.
Plus a failed update is the whole reason I nuked my C: drive and switched to Manjaro (now running Arch, put down the pitchforks).
Yes, because even once is too many.
In a corporate, I spent an hour and half every morning waiting for Windows to update. Then my coworker handed me Fedora DVD and I never looked back.
Sure Windows gives you warning, but after a while it FORCES you to install, even if for whatever reason that new branch bricks your computer. I had a good 6 months of that where every time my computer got shut off, it would force the update and fail like 40 times before it finally let me revert and use my computer. There was no way to tell it to STOP UPDATING
Ive not had “must update on the spot right this very second,” but ive had countless, “we will update the second u power off or attempt a restart. If you try and restart into ur linux partition, we will somehow ensure u fail to boot right up until u got thru with our forced update.” Which also sometimes goes hand in hand with, “oops, i was supposed to update, but i shit myself instead. Youre going to need to try again at least once or twice. Dont worry, whether the update goes thru or not, itll only take a maximum of 90 minutes.”
Windows can fuck its facehole thru its ass as far as its auto updates are concerned for all i care.
Near 25 years Linux desktop user, only use Windows when for example helping out family, need to do crap on windows at work, that sort of thing. I’ve seen this so SO many times, especially when you want to shutdown or reboot now, but WAIT! THERE IS MORE! Windows is updating without asking for the next 30 minutes, don’t shut down, screw your planned date. This most have happened more than 30% of the small amount of times I touched windows and it taught me to stay the f away from that stuff, don’t want to touch it with a 10 feet pole
20 years ago, a friend said “Windows does whatever you don’t tell it not to do”. It is as true now as it was then.
90% of configuring Windows is disabling shit.
To the reader that needs it and is too afraid to ask: https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope CurrentUser -Force; ls -Recurse .ps1 | Unblock-File; ."WinDebloatTools.ps1"
Ugh, you need to use the terminal for the simplest tasks in Windows, it’s so hard, nobody will ever use it, cope Windows users!
That’s what most people in this thread sound like. But for Linux.
I am currently dual booting and trying to get feature parity in my Linux install as a reletave newbie.
So far the largest hurdle I’ve been able to solve was getting my RAID array recognized. That sent me down a rabbit hole.
To get it working in Linux I needed to:
- switch from LMDE to Mint proper
- add a PPA repository
- install the RAID driver
- manually edit my grub config file to ignore AHCI
- run a command to apply the change
- reboot
- format the volume
To get it working in Windows I needed to:
- format the volume(Windows gave me a popup with a single button to do this on login)
You’d normally use a software raid implementation these days, and Linux has a number of those. But yeah, dual booting can expose some quirks and filesystems and disk setup in general is one of the most prominent.
This. How an advanced use case is accomplished is not a point against a system’s usability.
The point I was trying to make is that if you ever want to do something that is not covered with an out of the box install, it’s typically far harder to do in Linux than in Windows (although my ~15 years as a windows sysadmin probably bias my opinion)
Windows is turning into a telemetry nightmare because about 10 years ago Microsoft figured out that they could sell ad space and monetize user data, so I’m trying to get off the platform before my LTSC install hits EOL. But I have to admit it’s a hard path.
Are you using hardware RAID? yeah, that doesn’t go too well with Linux… works perfectly in Windows though, cuz their softraid solutions are shit.
Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn’t. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn’t work great on Linux, but it’s also hot garbage that’s software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you’re dual booting, you’d have to do it that way since I don’t think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It’s still not great.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn’t work great on Linux
That is what I actually meant.
I guess if you’re dual booting, you’d have to do it that way since I don’t think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It’s still not great.
That’s why you don’t do RAID at all on a daily driver. You make/buy a NAS for that kind of thing. Maybe just RAID1 in hardware, cuz that’s easy to set up and generally just works, even with low end hardware solutions.
Why have I never thought about this? Dual boot and bit by bit work on feature parity while still having an OS that’s my daily driver.
Beware of the W̷̞̬̍̌͘͜ĭ̴̬̹̟͕̒̆̈́n̸̢̧̙̈́̅̂̆̕͜ͅd̵̟̟̪͎̀̀ő̴̼̺̺́̐̂͘w̵̨͊̀s̵̡͎̭̊ ̸͔̬͔̜̊́̈́̌̈́ͅŬ̴͉͚̳̌̉͘͝p̸̼̅̆͐̃̑d̸̜͂ǎ̵̛̯̏͝ť̷̰é̸͇͝ as it can screw up/overwrite your other bootloader completely.
Kinda sucks, when you’ve got a meeting/work and you find out that forced update made your system unbootable/partially unbootable and you now get to live boot in and go fixing the EFI partition manually, in the CLI.
That happened to me once and that’s when I decided feature parity was less important than a reliable system that “just works” for getting things done on a schedule. (I removed windows completely, in case that wasn’t clear)
Anyhow, make sure you install windows to a separate drive that can’t see any others during the windows install, then will keep the bootloader separate.
After a while, you’ll hit a point where parity is impossible going the other way.
I’m running a striped partition and a mirrored partition with only two drives, and using an SSD to bcache the whole thing. I’ve even got snapshotting set up so I can take live backups.
I have no idea where to start with that setup on Windows.
I had a hell of a time just trying to get Mint to write to an external drive, including unmounting and remounting the drive countless times trying to get it to mount as rewritable (adding it as a mount option wouldn’t work in terminal or in “Disks”), it would just refuse to let me write to it, I could still read everything fine. I finally quit, got a second drive, backed all my stuff up and reformatted the first one, which Mint now sees and writes to just fine despite being configured exactly the same way it was before.
That is a massively condensed story, and if I ever have to look at fstab again I might just have an aneurysm. Y’know how hard it is to write things to an external drive in Windows? You plug it the fuck in.
Anyone who says Linux is ready for the masses is deluding themselves. It’s fine for nerds, people who like to work on their computer, but it is absolutely not ready for people who like to do work on their computer. Not when something as simple as “yes I’d like to save this to an external drive please” turns into a days-long rabbithole of bullshit that culminates in me buying an extra 8TB drive off Amazon.
I mean, you don’t HAVE to do any of that stuff in Windows, it’s just helps a bit.
I’m sure there are plenty of windows horror stories. But almost every Windows computer I’ve had in the last decade, both custom and OEM, has worked pretty well out of the box. And almost every Ubuntu computer I’ve had over the last decade has had problems that weren’t trivial to fix.
I like Linux, but when people compare these problems like they’re the same just are missing the point.
