image caption: A Microsoft Windows screen showing "Active Hours" with start time set to 12 AM and end time set to 12 AM and an error that says "Choose an end time that's no more than 18 hours from the start time".
You know. It's interesting. I've been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.
...but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don't get me wrong. I'll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I'm comfortable, but... I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.
I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I'd just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE "start" menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app's icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.
So I went, "ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I've seen this work for decades," so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.
Then I went and saved and launched another application.
GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, "he's dead, Jim."
Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the "start" menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn't the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)
I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as "no I can't parse this," and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.
Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn't glitched since.
It's shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.
With respect, you can screw up Windows by doing things in a non-standard way too. That's not the fault of the OS.
Don't use snaps.
Seriously.
It's not safe, but some people just wanna dance with the bear.
I was installing a Snap app for the first time.
That's a mistake. #SSoT #WET
Just to mention also, I've been running Debian for much longer than I care to think about (since my teen years, I'm now in my 40s), with config file requirements that make arch look like lazy mode by comparison.
If you have to use something, flatpak wins, but personally I'd lean away from any of it as much as possible. The Debian stable repos are stable, so what's in there will work. Add flatpak to KDE Discover by installing plasma-discover-backend-flatpak to get that option in there.
But snaps should be strictly off limits. For everyone, tbh.
The only way to stop having an abusive relationship with your computer is to ditch the OS for something that isn't Microsoft.
Another person discovers that big tech has taken control of our computers without asking permission.
Well, your computers. I run Linux. It only does what I tell it to, not the other way round.
I'm not saying Winaero Tweaker kinda breaks the updates (if you try to open the update page it just does show an error) but it does exactly that
That annoyed me with Windows too, however, Active Hours adjusted to the times that I actively used my PC. As I kept my PC up to date and never kept it running while not in use for too long, I've never been threatened with a forced restart randomly. That being said, a user should have full control over their PC. They will though in turn be responsible for any poor outcomes due to making poor decisions.
I ended up choosing a Linux distro over Windows because I have absolute control over my PC at all times. Freedom to modify, to potentially break, but also easily recover my distro if I truly fuck up.
Is there not a registry setting you could use to disable it?
There is, pretty sure there's a GPO too. There is an option in this debloat tool for it too.
Hey thanks. I’ve starred the repo for later reference.
I was thinking it was in the registry somewhere, so I could write a program that moved it about every few hours to prevent a restart.
However, I can't find it. Presumably to stop me doing exactly that.
Do what you want instead of what we want? Lol, no. And if you find a registry hack or something to do it, we'll 'fix' that in the next update.
The real solution is to set it so it starts just before you are supposed to wake up, and ends 6 hours before that. That gives you the active hours as intended, and it won't reboot the system in the middle of work ever again.
Doing this gives big bow to the machine energy for me, I don't like it.
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