If you have the October Windows update, do a back up NOW!

[Graf Zahl]

I made it a habit not to store important stuff in any "special" folder the system may mess around with. My real "Documents" folder is on a secondary SSD which the system leaves alone.

[crazyflyingdonut]

Do you have enough space to back up to a different location on your HD? Or you could use a USB stick.

I have a couple USB sticks lying around, but I am not sure if any of them can handle 35 GB. I'll have to check later.

[phantombeta]

I'm worried about backing up my stuff because the "My Documents" folder on my computer alone contains 35 GB of files, but Google Drive only supports 15 GB, unless I pay them (I can't).

What kind of crap is on my computer? Mostly Doom files, Software files, files relating to other games, a picture of my ugly face (don't ask for me to send it to you)... Yeah, I do a lot of crap on my computer.

All the reports point to it only being a problem with "Library" folders, so move everything from the "%HOMEPATH%\Documents", "%HOMEPATH%\Pictures", "%HOMEPATH%\Videos" and "%HOMEPATH%\Music" folders and you should be safe.

[NeuralStunner]

MS has pulled the update by now, so if you weren't already affected you should be fine by now.

Overall I think it would be more worthwhile to invest in an external drive and do regular backups to that.

[drfrag]

They fired beta testers and now users are doing their job, also very few guys fixing bugs at Monkeysoft so this was to be expected. This won't change.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/window ... ty-problem

[Rachael]

I feel like Linux just whisked right past a missed opportunity there...

... if only more of its users and devs could get past the whole mentality of everything must be one way and that one way is the only way everything can be... to be fair I know non-free EULAs are scary but have you seen Microsoft's? There's more at stake than every single possible little software package in existence having "GPLv2" or "GPLv3" stamped onto it.

[Graf Zahl]

Linux will miss this opportunity, just like it missed every single one before. And that won't change unless it becomes governed by people with realistic goals for a mass-market desktop OS.

A few weeks ago I read the comments section of a Linux-centered article and the sentiments that were expressed there by the Linux zealots were just as scary as a corporate EULA. Something along the lines of "Linux becoming too mainstream to be good." With such an attitude it will forever remain a niche.

And Apple is also doing their best to scare away users. I found it interesting that _mental_ had some issues with the Mojave SDK. At work it also broke one of our OpenGL based products.

[Rachael]

I honestly thought the release of Windows 8 (the RTM version, not 8.1) would drive people off to Linux in droves. That's right around the time that Linux got the bright idea to "improve" Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments) and somehow manage to make both of them even worse than Windows 8!

Yeah, I don't expect any of that to change in the near future. People who value their data will switch to an OS that also values their data. Everyone else will consider this little incident a "one off" thing, even though it can (and likely will) happen again in the future.

Also, about Linux becoming "too mainstream" - that isn't ever truly going to happen, but it has in recent times become a much more ripe target for malware authors since the prevailing attitude is that security software simply isn't needed on that platform (and the ones that do exist are mostly a joke anyhow). I suspect that's where a lot of that comes from. You think Windows is insecure, wait until everyone's technologically challenged grandmother starts using Linux, instead...

[Graf Zahl]

Tell that to the Unix "experts". They all blanketly assume that Windows is insecure by default and any Unix-derived system superior in any regard concerning security. I wonder how they will feel when they finally have to realize that a system that had been bombarded with malware attacks for two decades will inevitably have more safeguards than one that just lay by the wayside for all that time.

But no, that "too mainstream" wasn't about security. It was about making the system more accessible to regular people. You know, GUIs are for wimps and [censored word] bullshit along the same lines.

[crazyflyingdonut]

A long time ago, I was a Linux fundamentalist. I was once scared about companies trying to invade privacy and preferred open-source software over proprietary software, and I told everyone I knew about Linux. What made me stop? Well, there was (and still is) a lot of stress in my life, life in general stresses me out. I'm not going to talk in full-detail about my stress on a topic about Windows (if you really want to know, PM me), but basically, it affected my health because I was getting so angry over things that aren't really that big of a deal for me. However, my thoughts haven't completely gone away. I still use Firefox over Chrome (I never installed Chrome on my current OS, Windows 10) and I still run Linux distros on VirtualBox. Around this time, I started believing in Karma and I realized that the companies invading people's privacy will fall on their own, I just have to deal with them for now. And I was right. The recent Facebook scandal proves that I was right. Take the Cambridge Analytica incident and multiply it by a billion.

[wildweasel]

....I don't understand what any of that has to do with the thread.

[Rachael]

As a note, Microsoft has begun re-deploying the update - allegedly without the "bug". (insert nervous laughter here)

[Chris]

I honestly thought the release of Windows 8 (the RTM version, not 8.1) would drive people off to Linux in droves. That's right around the time that Linux got the bright idea to "improve" Gnome and KDE (the two most popular desktop environments) and somehow manage to make both of them even worse than Windows 8!

People always complain about those kinds of updates, though. KDE4 was worse than KDE3, KDE5 was worse than KDE4, KDE6 will inevitably worse than KDE5. While there are certainly gripes to be had with those updates, I wouldn't say it's any worse than what any updating system goes through when a big one hits.

Incidentally, I thought the release of Windows Vista and DirectX10 being exclusive to it would bolster OpenGL adoption since improvements would remain compatible with WinXP. But wouldn't you know, that just happened to occur during Khronos' attempted rewrite of the OpenGL API for 3.0 or Next or whatever it was called, and by the time they realized what they were doing was dumb and reversed course to make OpenGL 3 an iteration on OpenGL 2, nobody cared anymore because the consoles were entrenched as the target systems that wouldn't benefit. Then OpenGL 4 and D3D11 continued the same old fight that had already been decided a decade prior. Hopefully things have a chance turn around now with Vulkan vs D3D12, but who knows.

Similarly, Valve's recent attempts to stand by Linux with Proton and the like, is coming at a time when big publishers (EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda) are moving toward their own distribution services and forsaking Steam releases, and we have Microsoft buying up indie studios and no doubt making their games exclusive to the Windows Store for PC releases. Plus GOG, who's Linux support is token at best (still waiting on the Galaxy client (no current plans for it, despite "coming soon" for the last several years), a number of games with Linux releases are missing it on GOG (e.g. the Metro games), no investment in Proton, etc).


Incidentally, Linux isn't free from this kind of bug, either. I remember a case from a couple years ago where a typo in a particular package's uninstall script caused it to do rm -rf / during uninstall, which was usually done as root. Goodbye disk. Luckily most people used a package manager which have their own uninstall methods that don't rely on the package scripts, so most people weren't at risk, and the bug was quickly fixed. But some did get stung.

[dpJudas]

People always complain about those kinds of updates, though. KDE4 was worse than KDE3, KDE5 was worse than KDE4, KDE6 will inevitably worse than KDE5. While there are certainly gripes to be had with those updates, I wouldn't say it's any worse than what any updating system goes through when a big one hits.

Things get a lot more complicated when it comes to UI toolkit upgrades as a lot of the UX behavior of a platform actually comes down to how technically a toolkit works. For example, Windows 95 to Windows 7's UI is essentially based around the Win32 common controls. Even the cross platform toolkits like Qt 3 and 4 were built around the same basic principles for how you build up an user interface, what the responsibility of the toolkit is and what the application developer needs to do. How things resize, layout, paints itself, handles input events, theming.

Windows 8's infamous metro UI is WPF/XAML, a complete redesign of how those things works. Likewise, Qt 5's new toy Qt Quick and the resulting desire for KDE5 to build itself on top of it changed what is easy or hard to build. When you look at websites with HTML 5, technically you can do almost anything that a desktop UI can do, but you almost never see it in practice because it requires too much work. By the same token, WPF or Qt Quick seem to suffer from the fact that while an application can do things far more freeform now, they also have to do a lot more work for stuff that used to be easy and quick to do before. As a result most applications don't bother to do half of what older apps did, usually defining themselves out of the problem by being more "modern". Less is more, supposedly.

TL;DR: not every technology rewrite is an upgrade. Sometimes the old toolkit actually was better.

[Rachael]

People always complain about those kinds of updates, though.

And with good reason. MATE proved that the GNOME 2 desktop was quite viable in its own right and did not need to be replaced. Even Ubuntu, which in recent versions eventually did adopt the GNOME 3 desktop itself, also proved that vanilla GNOME 3 is just garbage and that it needed a lot of its own customisations in order to be usable.

I don't know what crack the KDE team was smoking with KDE 5. I've used it, I despise it, and I remember and long for the days of KDE 2/3. That's what I was using back more than a decade ago when I was almost exclusively using Slackware Linux when I was outside of Windows. I remember how much more responsive the older KDE versions were (in fact - it was even faster than Windows itself, in its day!), compared to now where they are slow as heck with gimmicky visual effects - which, ironically, look like a cheap and crappy knock-off of Windows Vista without even bothering with the fancy blur and transparent window border effects.