Comment by pier25 4 days ago
> You had unsaved work? Too bad, it's gone, get bent.
This has happened to me a couple of times. I put the PC to sleep and the next morning I discover it has decided to close everything to install an update.
Not using Windows ever again to do any work. Say what you will about Apple but at least they don't do crap like this.
While my instinctual reaction is the same, that's only because I've been hurt by losing work the same way presumable everybody else has. But that's all because Windows hasn't elected to solve this problem.
Macs (largely) don't have this problem, so it's clearly solvable. There isn't any inherent law of computing or the universe that says it should be this way.
I still press CMD+S on Macs every time I'm done typing in something, but that's only because I've been hurt and live with the trauma, so to speak. There's no reason to hurt others to learn a lesson that doesn't actually have any value.
I installed Windows Update Blocker (AKA "WUB") and i've stopped the nonsense shutdowns late at night.
That helped stopping the aggravation, but lets see how long I last. I do feel my next computer will be a Linux OS ... but i'm not a programmer and I wince at having to do all the wine installs fresh...
Correct. Windows is not a serious operating system. It really never has been. I've been on desktop linux for decades now. Linux is a serious operating system. Nothing happens without you asking it too. My linux computers are never turned off, since they day I turn them on, except for the occasional kernel upgrade. Otherwise, all upgrades are live. Even most kernel upgrades can be avoided if you use one of the modern patch frameworks
I literally cannot count the number of times I put my Linux computer to sleep and it just doesn't wake up, and I have to hard reset the power to get it to do anything. I would never leave anything unsaved open for an extended period of time on a graphical Linux system.
Happens 90% of the time on my standard Elitebook laptop when I run windows. It just crashes and has the fan going crazy. On Linux it's been fine since day one, some 5 years ago.
But this is a bug, and it's very different from the OS voluntarily rebooting without your consent.
Actually no. Linux pretty closely follows the ACPI standard. The issue is that ACPI implementors specifically work around bugs in Windows, which does not follow the standard well and has its own quirks. Thus, in order to make Linux 'work' with the broken hardware, they'd have to add bugs. Again, we see the issue with Microsoft dominance. A serious OS would implement the standard as written, not demand that others follow its bugginess.
the flip side of this is I can't count the number of times that cropping a screenshot in paint and leaving it in the background has partially stopped my PC from rebooting, and I've discovered the following morning that "you have unsaved work" on paint interrupted the shutdown and i need to do the shutdown _again_.
The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part.
Why though? On Mac, I have tons of unsaved work: many TextEdit windows which keep their state for many months, even through reboots. And it has been working like for at least 10 years. It's such a simple, little quality-of-life thing. And Microsoft just doesn't care.
This is what a computer should be doing: helping the user to get their work done, without the user having to worry about insignificant details about saving files. E.g. does Google Docs ever ask where to save a file before closing the browser or shutting down the computer? No you just get an untitled document that is automatically saved. If I want to rename it or save it in a different location, I am free to do so. But as long as I don't, it doesn't get in the way and just persists stuff automatically.
I don't disagree, but you have to know which applications reliably keep their state across restarts. You can't blindly rely on it on any desktop system. The Microsoft Office applications actually do auto-save documents since a couple of years ago, even though the recovery UX can be a bit awkward.
What Microsoft doesn't care about is that you may have applications running that don't do that, when Windows reboots for updates.
On macOS the feature is baked into the OS's APIs, the app developer just opts into using them. If they don't, quitting with unsaved work will prompt the user modally, and block the restart to the point where the OS will timeout the reboot process and give up. The only way to purposefully lose unsaved work in almsot every app I've ever used on macOS is to yank the power cable or hold the power button down.
Window locations and app state are written to plist files, again, using OS libraries and APIs for app resume. I can reboot my Mac and not even realize it happened sometimes it all comes back the way it was.
Yep. On Mac (and Linux, actually) I know of some applications that do that. I also know that on Windows most applications don't do that. I would also never leave un-saved work open on Windows.
I was replying to: "The fact that you leave unsaved work overnight is the actual crazy part". As long as you know which apps auto-save and know you can somewhat rely on them, it's not so crazy.
> Macs have other apps besides textedit, do all of them preserve unsaved docs across restarts?
Every Mac app I’ve ever used does.
I don’t really care though, I reboot at most once ever six months
Of course, everyone has their own workflow. I won't tell anyone to adjust their workflow. But the exact point I was trying to make is that it's not random apps. It's specific apps that one knows about and how they behave. And once you know those apps (like TextEdit, Google Docs, etc) you can pretty much rely on it to survive reboots and power outages.
There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.
Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.
I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.
I aspire to have your level of confidence in anything that amounts to leaving unsaved work in any sort of shape or form.