From 3 decades of operating system development, yesterday Windows shat itself (for the so many'th time) with the ACPI power button (how one can possibly fuck up interacting with a goddamn fucking pushbutton, I have no idea) and this morning I got back to my PC, only to notice that the USB driver (again one of the easiest and most ubiquitous protocols out there) shat itself as well. So wiggling the mouse to activate the screen? Of course, no says Windows. I can't possibly do that much, even though I'm developed by a team that could easily outnumber most distributions' development teams, and am part of a company that turns over fucking billions of dollars each year.

I feel that Microsoft offends the words "operating system" to the point that it should be changed (call me SJW 🙃), just for Windows. Shouldn't be too much of an effort considering that Microsoft never follows common standards anyway. I'd like to introduce you to the term "operating shitstain" 😜

Yesssss

On another subject... Do you sleep?
You post at 4 am, 8 am... Neo?

@GyroGearloose I do, but I don't sleep regularly.. that's the issue. Sometimes I sleep at 7pm like yesterday (had only 4h sleep night before that, so yeah), sometimes I sleep at 7am. Or anything in between 🙃

@Condor I remember when I could do that...
Ahhh 20 hours straight programming... Sleep f
4 hours and wake up fresh...
Now if I sleep 4 hours only a bucket of cold water wakes me.

Strangely enough none of your described failures happen on roughly 91 Windows machines here in house.

Maybe you shouldn't always directly blame the OS. I mean Windows has plenty things I could complain about, don't get me wrong.

But why do people always tend to flame it, even when it's most probably their hardware or their nescience that is to blame?

@Makenshi Obviously it's a hardware issue, it always is. But the only hardware issue that I can imagine with a pushbutton is a lost electrical connection. Which would also disable me from killing the machine entirely by keeping it pressed for a hard reboot. Which funnily enough always does the job. But obviously it's a hardware issue and cheap hardware. It always is a hardware issue.

I'm glad your 91 Windows PC's work without a problem, but blaming these issues on hardware may just have been the most ridiculous thing I'll have and will read this week.

@Condor Well, all I did was to reverse your line of thinking here. So yes, instantly blaming the OS for a malfunction is indeed as ridiculous as instantly blaming your hardware or your knowledge. Especially as third party drivers often play a major role in problems associated with power management and usb.

And just between you and me.... I don't own 91 Windows machines. : - )

@Makenshi Don't you think that USB and ACPI drivers are developed by Microsoft? Matter of fact is, they do and it can be verified through the Device Manager. My knowledge (or lack thereof) aside, I highly doubt that this is a hardware (which I explained in my above comment) or a driver issue (this machine used to have a Btrfs driver but I got rid of that after I moved most of my storage into my server and configured it as Samba resources instead). This machine has pretty much everything bog-standard, minimalistic, no malware, no antivirus (because I've got an actual brain in my head), no nothing. By exclusion of other factors I then (quite logically) determine that it's very likely that it's a Windows driver that got tits up.

Also mind that I'm a sysadmin and that I've got a reasonable amount of experience with electronics as well.

@Nanos I fully agree that sometimes it is a hardware issue, it's just that the average Windows user (which jump on my Windows rants quite often actually) jumps to that conclusion way too quickly, because obviously it can't possibly be Microsoft's fault... Almost like those people who say "use Lenox" every chance they can get. I use Linux on everything else but this machine unfortunately refuses to boot up any of the distributions I've thrown at it so far...

@Nanos I've found that unfortunately 100% working stuff can't really be bought anymore.. the only things that I find to be working about 99% of the time or more, is the stuff I've ended up building myself. Quite disheartening actually that everything in tech over time got replaced by cheap garbage, with planned obsolescence usually as an added feature.

/edit: Old hardware is what I usually go with as well. Usually they're a lot better than the new ones (no webcam in old laptops, usually better quality hardware etc etc) and they often last well beyond 10 years of use! My Lenovo Thinkstation S10 for example I've got from a sysadmin friend of mine, works here for about 2 years already and got about a decade of use at the previous owner's home. Never had any serious issues with it, aside from the temperatures and noise maybe, but nothing that crashes the system or degrades it significantly. Same thing with this HP business laptop that I've got a while back, a Compaq nx7010. Takes a while to hammer out the quirks in modern software to get it to work as it should, but after that it actually works really well. I quite like this machine. Only issue that's left is what I think is a race condition between resolvconf and NetworkManager on the domain resolution part. Quite often I find /etc/resolv.conf to be unpopulated because of it.