Windows 11 Will Let You Reinstall Your OS Through Windows Update Without Wiping Your Files (xda-developers.com) 111
An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever performed a fresh reinstall of Windows 11, you'll know how long it takes and how much effort you need to make to get it started. Fortunately, Microsoft is taking note. As spotted in a recent update to the Windows 11 beta branch, the company is working on a way to reinstall your operating system through Windows Update, and no files are lost in the process.
The newest update to the Windows Insider beta branch has added a new feature titled "Fix Problems using Windows Update." The feature is still a work in progress, so it doesn't work as it should right now. However, if you're on the Windows 11 Insider beta branch, you can see the button for yourself on the Recovery page, among the Windows 11 backup settings.
The newest update to the Windows Insider beta branch has added a new feature titled "Fix Problems using Windows Update." The feature is still a work in progress, so it doesn't work as it should right now. However, if you're on the Windows 11 Insider beta branch, you can see the button for yourself on the Recovery page, among the Windows 11 backup settings.
time and effort? (Score:1)
what? plug in a usb stick, click a few buttons, tell it where to install and walk away for about 5 min?
Re:time and effort? (Score:4, Insightful)
i guess it refers to backing up and restoring user files. most users don't do regular backups, and by today's standards it's easy to quickly accumulate gigabytes and gigabytes of data which is "personal", and which takes a while to move around on cheap removable media.
that said, i would never use such functionality on windows without a proper backup ... which makes such a functionality completely superfluous, but well ... of all "innovations" windows has brought lately, this one is probably the least problematic and easy to skip. just let them keep working on that.
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You have to wipe the whole disk to install a newer version of Windows (or reinstall it)?
That blows my mind...
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not really, one can upgrade their way from windows 3 up to 10 or 11 without ever formatting the disk ... there was a rash of youtube video's showing this a few years ago with outrageous thumbnails of some dipshit doing their best fake shocked face
though in the older versions where they tend to bloat themselves to the point of being non functional, there was a good reason, not as much anymore unless the system gets hosed (like this machine technically at one point this was a windows 7 install that got upgrad
Re: time and effort? (Score:2)
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you dont need drivers if your using IDE, or SATA in "legacy" or "IDE Mode" its handled by the bios.
One of my hobbies is fixing up old computers so I have a old tower PC in the garage, its a 6 core Phenom II with 8 gigs of ram and a 250gig SATA drive in it, I partitioned off 20 gigs to FAT32 and 2 gigs to FAT16 and it happily boots into MS-DOS 6.22 and windows 95 (with the rest of the space given to Linux Mint, though it will run windows 10 ok enough) and yea it wont recognize a lot of hardware but file mana
Re: time and effort? (Score:2)
Re: time and effort? (Score:2)
Ya assist at some point you need to change some settings shocker... doesn't mean it's impossible
Go to YouTube about 2021 and see the 1000 videos doing just ducking this
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Win 3 used FAT as a file system. Modern Windows (for want of a better word) uses NTFS and ReFS. I wont bore you with FAT16 vs FAT32 and vFAT and all that shite.
I wasted hours/days/weeks etc fiddling with himem.sys and autoexec.bat. I had a boot disc featured on Novell's Cool Solutions, which managed to get a network up and running etc. Memory management back in the day, mandated by MS was wank - really wank. That was Windows 3.x and frankly Win 95 and on wasn't much better.
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yea cause microsoft never made a conversion utility, first time I found out about it was in windows 2000 (might have been there in NT4, not sure)
hell I just checked its still there in windows 10
convert /?
Converts a FAT volume to NTFS.
CONVERT volume /FS:NTFS [/V] [/CvtArea:filename] [/NoSecurity] [/X]
volume Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon), /FS:NTFS Specifies that the volume will be converted to NTFS. /V Specifies that Convert will be run in verbose mode. /CvtArea:filename /NoSecurity Specifies that the security settings on the converted /X Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
mount point, or volume name.
Specifies a contiguous file in the root directory
that will be the place holder for NTFS system files.
files and directories allow access by all users.
All open handles to the volume will not be valid.
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There were also conversion utilities built into various versions of Windows both to convert FAT16 to FAT32 and FAT to NTFS. There are plenty of videos out there of people upgrading versions of Windows all the way from 1 to 7, 8, 10, 11, whatever is current. It ends up pretty messy by the end but technically works.
As far as memory management, while DOS was a mess by Windows 95 you could get away with not really ever touching it if you didn't want/need to. If you still had some higher-complexity DOS stuff to
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The difference here with this new feature is that it seems to also preserve Windows settings and applications. Not sure why someone would actually want that, since you are usually doing a reset because some combination of applications and/or settings is fucking something up.
Of course, if Windows had a decent system backup/restore feature built in, one users could easily use
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Yeah gotta give Apple credit on that front, I remember doing Time Machine restores and doing OSX reinstalls with no extra devices like a decade ago (just go into boot manager and it downloads the OS).
Of course they have an advantage of "If you own a Mac then you own the OS" but even today Microsoft's amalgam of various tools is nowhere as clean cut as Apples method for restores and reinstallations.
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sfc
Dism
Dism
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/repair-a-windows-image?view=windows-11 [microsoft.com]
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If I had to guess based on nothing but speculation, this probably basically wipes the driver caches of driver updates/third party installed ones, forcing the system to use included (or maybe only fully vetted) drivers, resets dlls and other libraries to known-good versions and refreshes the WinSxS setup, and maybe resets some core part of the registry. A large part of Windows issues are drivers getting screwed up in some way or system files getting mixed up. Probably something to make sure malware is taken
What about apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personal files are no biggie. There are only a few directories where one has them, and a USB drive is your friend.
The part everyone hates about a Windows clean install or getting a new computer is reinstalling your application programs. That your apps don't transfer over is a feature, not a bug, I guess to the people selling you those apps.
Nowadays, it is nothing like olden times when I had dozens of specialty programs purchased on CD-ROMs or gosh forbid, floppy disks, with authentication keys crammed into my sock drawer. Free software has replaced most of those.
But still, when I buy a new computer, I will have to keep the old box for 7 years, which is the time you may be asked to correct a tax return with your paid-for tax software.
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You can make it less painful using Chocolatey to manage the software in your machine (it's a Linux style package manager). It's not perfect, updates are often slow, but it mostly gets the job done.
In theory your settings should be preserved as they are part of your user profile. I wonder if this feature manages to keep them.
Re: What about apps? (Score:2)
WingetUI is even better, as it can pull from multiple repositories, including Chocolatey.
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Thanks. I looked at Winget but it seems to have fewer packages than Chocolatey. On the other hand the model they use seems like it will get updated faster.
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WingetUI is separate from Winget. It's a GUI interface for Winget, but also ties into Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip, and NPM.
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Sure, but then I'm paralyzed by the indecision of which one to get the app from :â-â)
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But wrangling Windows into a useful state takes an absurdly long time. It takes hours to unfuck everything, delete all the useless crap that gets installed and change all the settings needed to actually make Windows work properly.
I've been doing this for years (Score:1)
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There are several great 'Windows debloater' scripts out there that you can use after an install to remove all that cruft and crap. Running a debloater script is literally the first thing I do after installing Windows.
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth ... (Score:3, Insightful)
where people try this and it fails and deletes files. I can hear now users saying "I thought that it meant that I did not need to do a backup".
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I can hear now users saying "I thought that it meant that I did not need to do a backup".
You don't need to do a backup, it's just that if you don't then you won't have your files afterward. So technically they're correct.
pretty nice (Score:2)
I mean iOS and Android have been doing clean updates without needing to do anything complicated. But that's to be expected since they aren't based on a 40 year old microcomputer operating system design.
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Linux is based on an OS much older. And yet we have been updating to new versions with no file loss for ages. So it isn't really about age, just design.
But the article is about RE-installing the same version of MS-Windows on top of itself to "solve problems." I have no idea if Linux distros do this- but I have also never had or seen the need.
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You can verify packages with rpm -V or dpkg --verify
The following command will reinstall all of the packages.
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'
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Linux is based on a minicomputer design, not a microcomputer design. There are some real compromises made 50-60 years ago when you had to build a computer from a one or two chip control processor instead of something like a pricey PDP-11. (although not expensive like a Burroughs mainframe)
Linux distros that can reinstall themselves very easily exist. Flatcar and a few others have a read-only root file system. Everything has to be created as overlays on top of the base system. And you can, with some caveats,
Re: Old OS? Neew version? (Score:2)
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Indeed. MS is, as usual, grossly late to the game. Why are we using this crap?
Your question is probably reh torical but I'll answer it anyway. I think it's because average computer users don't realize they have a choice, and/or they're afraid they don't have the wherewithal to learn and move to a new OS, and/or they don't appreciate what's really at stake.
I can't blame them, really. Social pressures to conform are strong, and the educational system has been largely a tool of the corporations for a very long time. 'Resistance is futile' is a pretty strong mindset, especially when you'
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You're not wrong but social pressure I would say is not a big factor in PC OS selection, especially in regards to Windows vs Linux (if anything where that effect I would expect to be strongest is in Apples favor)
Intertia is definitely a huge factor but also the fact that computers are tools, people use them to get shit done and if it performs that task, why change it, especially if you are not tech inclined already.
Also some folks really think Windows is still in the XP/Vista era where the case on usability
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I disagree in the security state. Yes, you need to add the MS "application" landscape, but it is still entirely possible to get blown up by clicking on an email attachment in Outlook or by opening a word document. That crap should have stopped 10 years ago, but MS is uncaring or incapable. Add that basically all of Azure and o365 was apparently compromised recently and that MS did not even notice, and I think that the MS cloake (well, "ecosystem" seems inappropriate somehow) has become a massive, massive ri
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That's true but user stupidity and bad security policies is a security problem independent of OS. Now if you said Linux is better at putting up roadblocks around stupid user, I'd be inclined to agree and by selection bias Linux users are going to be savvier then your average Windows user. That said it is perfectly possible and not that difficult to use or administrate Windows without getting "blown up".
If you give someone a Linux box and they get an attachment that tell them to run as root and after 3 or
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Clicking on attachments or links is not user stupidity. That this is dangerous and at the same time very easy to do is a complete and utter safety-engineering failure. Dangerous actions must _always_ be difficult to do and always significantly more difficult than safe actions. At the same time, the need for dangerous actions must be _rare_. That is the only way to make things safe and there is enough industrial history to show that conclusively.
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A statement so un-disagreeable as to be meaningless. Nobody would argue with that but it addresses nothing of what I said, just cherrypicked one thing.
It is not easy in 2023 to just download and run executable attachments. Most webmail services don't even allow them to be sent. If you are using desktop outlook you are either in a business with Exchange where they should block executables or you are connecting to webmail where you cant send them much the less the multiple warnings Windows puts in front you
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It is not easy in 2023 to just download and run executable attachments.
You really have no clue. In some environments that may be true, but in many it is not. I get to read current attack analyses.
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My Dad brought home a PC clone because they finally got cheap and he was familiar with using them at work. I think people using IBM or Compaq at work, and their inevitable familiarity with Microsoft's DOS was a big factor in the growth of PC's in the 1980's the cheapness of clones especially once Taiwan started pumping out chipsets in 1990's is what made the platform ubiquitous.
That's ancient history now, and there is no way to MS to recapture that growth. They're pretty much going to either pivot to someth
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That's ancient history now, and there is no way to MS to recapture that growth. They're pretty much going to either pivot to something new or fade away.
Indeed. Android and iOS together have more installations already. MS tried to get into that market repeatedly, but their products were just way too bad compared to the alternatives. Turns out if there is competent competition, MS products just go under. The problem is that there is no real competition in the PC desktop market. On the other hand, that market is getting less and less relevant. Now we need somebody to break the MS office monopoly, and the only thing MS has left is a specific segment of the gam
Like macOS (Score:2)
Nice to see Windows add this. macOS has offered such for quite a few years and it certainly comes in handy at times.
Why reinstall at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and why would a reinstall even touch your desktop and user files? This shouldn't be an issue.
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its generally not an issue, I can't remember when I did a total reinstall on my daily driver
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quick check, um running 2% cpu load with this chrome window open and 3 tabs with 36% of my 16 gigs in use... all my critical temps are in the mid 30's and its been a couple months since I blew out the fans
I am sure the difference would be negligible
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Indeed. This is still apparently pretty common. Stone-age quality level software.
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Oh, and why would a reinstall even touch your desktop and user files? This shouldn't be an issue.
Right!?!?!
Linux: /home and you're done.
* Why would you ever need to do a reinstall of the same version over the existing install!?!?!
* Regardless, you can do it in one command: sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'
* Retain user files? Simple. Don't reformat
I'm still shocked there are so many windows fanboi's posting on here. Their existence is understandable, but continuously opening themselves up for ridicule by defending shit like this? Wow
(referring to other posts, not the parent, of course)
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Barring catastrophic hardware failure (which usually results in "Well, maybe now I'll upgrade the OS too"), in 30 years I have never done a reinstall of Windows on my own hardware, and have had some installs (most of them, actually) that were daily drivers or heavy lifters for over ten years without a single crash. (And some with uptimes measured in years, too.) However, I don't run it on crap hardware. Windows is very much canary in coal mine for shit hardware/drivers. If it crashes a lot, throw out the PC
Nope. Fool me thrice, not gonna get fooled again (Score:3, Insightful)
No way on this planet, of any planet in the universe, would I trust Microsoft not to screw up or delete personal files when doing an in place reimage. We've all seen the horrors of this company and its botched updates which only target a small percentage of files. Imagine how bad an entire reimage will be with your files on the line.
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Trust Microsoft? That would be a sign or a serious mental defect!
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I've done this many times, and it works perfectly.
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I've had to do in-place re-installs on W10 for a few customers.
Regardless of assurances, I always backup the entire user profile.
But IME the re-install either works as intended (with user data unaffected), or (rarely) not at all, i.e. it fails very early in the process with a vague error message "something went wrong", so instead of hunting down the error logs and trying to fix it, it's easier and faster to do a clean re-install - and I've already got the user data backed up.
I've *never* had a re-install th
Car analogy (Score:4, Funny)
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"We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it so that we can replace the engine without destroying the stuff in the trunk"
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Manufacturer: "We heard your feedback that our car's engine stops frequently, and we've now improved it to restart FASTER".
That's not actually a bad analogy.
/. but these days whenever I see a Windows install beyond use it's because
Frequent engine issues are usually the result of a bad owner.
In the Olden Days of Windows XP, you did have to regularly re-install to recover from Win rot (the OS slowing down significantly), since Win 7 the state of Win rot has decreased to the point where I buy a new PC before feeling the need to re-install Windows. Yes, I know we don't like to admit that MS actually did something properly on
Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
There's already been an option to reinstall Windows with "Keep My Files" since Windows 10. It doesn't wipe the disk, but you do have to reinstall your apps, which takes a few hours of manual effort. I guess this does even less, and leaves your apps intact? That would be nice, if correct.
If you use a Microsoft account, you can even do a full wipe and just let your profile folder restore itself, or (re)install Windows on another PC and your profile folders will redownload there. This is what I do every year or so.
Begging the question (Score:2)
There's thing called "Begging the question". It doesn't mean "this requires asking the question". It means "there is a question BEING IGNORED and we're GOING TO IGNORE IT going forward."
This discussion has two begged questions.
1. Why on earth would you re-install an OS on a working system?
and
2. Why on earth would you wipe user files as well?
Answer:
Microsoft has always produced a pseufo OS that doesn't clean up after itself. In time it gets slower and worse in performance. A "reinstall" is the "solution"
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1. Why on earth would you re-install an OS on a working system?
You wouldn't.
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It means "there is a question BEING IGNORED and we're GOING TO IGNORE IT going forward."
Begging The Question means you are assuming as true the very point in question rather than building a convincing case to prove it.
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1. Partially working system.
2. Cleaning an infection.
Not making excuses for Mickeyshit, though. It is indeed crap.
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It is perfectly normal for a desktop system, with heavy use, to become less stable over time (especially if you use a lot of development tools).
Windows has never become totally broken for me in less than 18 months, but dev tools are far more to blame than the OS. Deteriorating hardware is probably even more to blame. And yes, you can mess your system up just with personal configuration in your profile/user directory.
Windows DOES have one design issue that causes slow downs and issues over time, which they
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You've never really tried to reinstall Windows, have you?
Last year, someone brought me a Windows 11 laptop that refused to boot. I've worked with almost every version of Windows since 95, but this was my first time touching Windows 11. Blue screen every time, even when trying Safe Mode. The USB recovery media insisted that there were only two options: repair or reset. When I tried to repair, it just told me, "unable to repair" with no further info. When I tried reset, it explicitly told me it would not
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Your experience is unusual. I do know what I'm talking about.
There IS an option to "wipe, but keep my files," and it's been there at least since Windows 10. It sounds like there was a hardware issue going on on that machine, probably the SSD was failing. If those recovery system files are accessible or corrupt it would explain why you had fewer options.
Almost right... (Score:3)
Doesn't help you when app installs get corrupted (Score:3)
Sometimes, the reason to reinstall the OS, is really due to an app install that went awry. Apps often update random registry settings and OS files everywhere, sometimes affecting other apps. This can require wiping the hard drive and starting over. This feature from Microsoft won't help in such cases.
Windows 10 already does this (Score:2)
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It only restores Microsoft stuff and not any third party software.
Old is New Again (Score:3)
Huh? Windows has done this for years, since Windows 8 actually. It's called "Windows Refresh." I actually used it once to solve some driver issues, and it worked well. Is this something new?
Fix Problems (Score:4, Interesting)
Fix Problems by reinstalling the problem over and over? How does that work?
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According to Einstein it's the definition of insanity.
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Cheaper than getting tech support to help you. If it saves the company time and money, it's a proper fix.
Excellent news indeed! (Score:2)
Dear Valued Customer. We are sorry that something in the breakfast we just served caused you to flee to the washroom, racked by violent contractions of the muscles controlling your stomach and bowels. When you return from the toilet, please accept this identical meal, provided free of charge by us.
WOW! Thank you Microsoft. (Score:1)
In-place upgrade substitute? (Score:3)
If Windows Update is able to just do this on its own with a button, that's actually a useful addition.
In-place reinstall? (Score:3)
This functionality can be obtained just by sticking a Win 11 install disc in a drive and doing an update (no drive wipe) rather than a full install.
What I really want is my Win32 program installs (Office, Photoshop, Firefox, Games) to stick around through an OS reinstall. If that's what this means, it is a welcome relief.
But keeping user files/profiles on reinstall has been around since forever. Definitely back to Windows 8. The only thing I'm seeing here is you don't have to put in a DVD or Rufus iso drive. I bet it just sticks a current iso into the recovery partition. It is a mild convenience at best if this is the case.
Re:240 million PCs going to the landfill (Score:4, Insightful)
my windows pc is a gaming pc (you insensitive clod). there is no alternative.
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https://github.com/ValveSoftwa... [github.com]
You're welcome.
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Not really. If your gaming needs are simpler, then yes. But too much stuff does not run or does not run well.
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Hence why I do not read email on my gaming PC and browse the web only for gaming things.
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interesting, cause I have an 8 year old HP laptop where linux still doesnt know what to do with a basic standard issue realtek wifi card that was used in millions machines for the better part of a decade
go grab a penitum4 and just try to install a modern mainstream distro on it, just see how far you get fanboi
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As an avid user of ubuntu and suse linux since 2005, using hand me down machines, I came here just to say this. I have never had good hardware support for most of my life on most mainstream laptops.
I have had troubles updating, sometimes even within the same version number, but it was basically 75% chance that going from one major release to another caused a kernel level driver failure or a meltdown in the update scripts such that I would have to spend HOURS researching how to fix it.
Linux has always been a
Re: 240 million PCs going to the landfill (Score:2)
Not to mention, with Linux, you're basically fucked at update time if you're dependent upon any binary-only kernel modules. Windows might *grumble* about using old drivers, but if you're absolutely *hellbent* on doing it, you can sometimes even coax 64-bit Windows 11 to use a 16-bit parallel-port SCSI interface meant for NT 4 (by rewriting the .inf file, and doing some registry-hacking). If co
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Of course it comes at a cost. Your 16-bit driver for NT4 likely isn't signed, so you have to disable driver signing globally to use it, and do so every boot because that can't be set to always do it. There's an extremely elaborate workaround if you have Enterprise or Education Windows for self
Re: 240 million PCs going to the landfill (Score:2)
It looks like I accidentally deleted a chunk of the last paragraph. My main point was that with Linux, closed-source kernel binaries aren't even compatible between adjacent versions of the same kernel, let alone years later.
The way I understand it, Windows kernel modules use dynamic late-binding & virtual tables, while in Linux, everything is monolithic & hardwired at compile time (after autoconfig first by the build system).
Put another way:
Windows: the kernel consults a virtual lookup table, and ju
Re: 240 million PCs going to the landfill (Score:2)
(goddamn it, Slashdot! Give mobile users fucking preview-then-post! It's way too easy to accidentally submit when typing on a phone using Palmsource Graffiti!)
Anyway, Windows bends over backward to treat kernel code like a big DLL and allow old code to work in newer Windows. Linux goes to the opposite extreme, and treats every kernel-build as a 100% new and 100%-incompatible monolithic hardwired blob.
I *believe* Google (as of Android 13) is now working towards a "middle way" for Android Linux kernels that a
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My main work laptop at home is an Asus from 2008 running Slackware 15.0 from last year.
My travelling work laptop is an HP 510 from 2007 running the same Slackware 15.0.
Granted, i didn't stick long with the stock kernels; i configured and compiled my own soon after i got the OS running and i knew exactly what hardware the two boxes had.
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Would love to ditch MS, and while it is possible (with a great deal of adjustment) at home, it's impossible in the workplace because so many companies write bespoke software that runs ONLY under the Windows environment.
Saying "Just install Linux!" misses the point of having to run Windows in the first place....the VAST software base.
Sincerely:
I huge Linux fan of 30 years.
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WINE does not really solve the problem (Score:3)
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Assuming the anti-cheat software package of the day doesn't freak out about it. At work (gov't lab) plenty of software will refuse to run if it detects VMs or Wine, or the like. When you hit the world of bespoke business applications, all rules go out the window sadly.
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Yeah, nope. Try running Bungie's HALO under Wine and see how far you get. Anything that's pre-ASLR is basically tits-up under Wine because of its crappy memory manager.
Are you required to run Bungie's HALO at work???