Windows 11 has happened

Warning, this post is very self-indulgent and includes callbacks to a post on this blog from over nine years ago. Normal service will resume soon.

Sigh, I suppose it's time.

After nearly 10 years of Windows 10 on my desktop machine, I finally got the ominous message - "support for this operating system is about to be discontinued, click the button to upgrade or forever live in regret and pain as the worms consume your data". Or words to that effect at least.

Still, at least this time it gave me the choice.

Windows runs on the old Star Trek movie quality register - you only really want every other one - so I was expecting some kind of The Final Frontier experience. I've been putting off the update for as long as possible, but I really can't run an operating system that isn't getting security updates so with fear in my heart and after lighting my incense burner and offering placation to the Omnissiah I hit go. The trumpets sounded, the ground was rent asunder and it arrived.

It's fine.

So let's start with the Good.

The Good

Modern Windows has become an advertising and data gathering vector, but I was pleased to see that Windows 11 did actually retain my privacy settings. I was expecting it to reset everything to "on" and then have to spend hours crawling through menus to find and undo the damage, but no. It remembered where I was and the only work was finding and disabling a handful of new options - honestly I was very surprised here, and in a pleasant way.

In fact, in general the various menus have been tidied up. I found navigating them much more intuitive than Win10, and could generally find whatever I was looking for without having to ask Google. Another nice step forward.

Another nice thing - most of my setup just kept working. This should be obvious and Just Work, but even so it was a nice experience. Particularly worth noting, my printer is still working. This device is an HP1010 - an ancient laser from 2001, which just keeps on going. I realised recently it's quite possibly the oldest bit of technology I own and aside from paper I've done nothing to keep it alive through its lifecycle. Drivers have been difficult since Win7, so I was slightly worried this would be the end but no! The Emperor protects!

So this is all mostly "I was pleasantly surprised it didn't get worse" but there is one big step forward. Someone at Microsoft dusted off the sourcecode for Notepad and actually made some changes and my goodness - it's a huge step forward. Notepad now has tabs. You can open more than one pad without it trying to close the old one. Most importantly it saves the buffer when you quit, so it works like an actual scratchpad!

I appreciate this is all utterly standard for a text editor, and anyone on Linux or OSX will be rolling their eyes, but for Windows users this is a revolution. I use Notepad quite a bit, and now it has features!

The Bad

Not everything is shiny, although the gripes here are not horrendous.

Microsoft has played with the UI, of course, and some changes are ... questionable. Why are the taskbar functions now in the middle, instead of the bottom left? Easily fixed, with a toggle, but ... why? And why are there yet more widgets on the taskbar, loading data continuously to tell me things I don't want to know? Another thing to kill.

Then there is the Start menu. I disabled all the "live tile" rubbish in Win10 so I don't know if it's gone in Win11 or they kept my settings. But instead, there is a massive "recommended" section which is just another way to advertise things (disabled now) and a whole bunch of new pinned shortcuts, instead of just keeping my old shortcuts. Those are in a subfolder, so I had a "fun" time dragging and dropping everything back to where it should be, and purging the new rubbish.

What cannot be fixed though is the "shutdown" button which is now a million miles away from the Start button. So instead of Start / Shutdown at the end of the day, it's Start ... hunt ... where? oh there ... Shutdown. A small thing, but these little things are what makes a UI nice or irritating. This is annoying.

Oh and yet more rubbish on the lock screen. I don't want a widget on this page - please stop. Easy to turn off though and the new default picture is very pretty.

The other problem is for some reason it has decided the soundcard on my motherboard is a USB device. This doesn't impact usage, but it does mean it has a stupid name which makes it hard to find. Will this come back to bite me? We shall see...

The Ugly

What else? The redesigned task bar, including the fonts, is kinda ugly. I don't think it's just different, I think it's a step backwards for legibility. But this is something I'll adjust to. Same as some of the new icons, which are just a bit over-designed in places (the Notepad one is not nice).

So that's about it. Win11 is mostly fine and nothing has exploded. It is a huge step forward for Notepad and some small steps backward for the start menu. I haven't run it long enough to comment on stability yet, but we are four years since original release so I'd hope this is ok by now. As long as it doesn't eat all my data or start advertising to me I think we can get on.

Right, enough self-indulgent peeking behind the curtain. I'll write about tech leadership or ADHD again next time and follow this up in about 10 years for Windows 12...

Upgrading to the Heroku-20 buildpack and Bundler 2

I figured it's about time to start moving my various running applications and kit to Ubuntu 20, now there is a new LTS version and well before v18 totally dies. I know I'm late to this party, but I've been busy.

Today I updated an application hosted on Heroku and since it wasn't 100% smooth thought I'd capture my steps, both for myself in future and anyone else who finds it useful.

The tech

• Ruby on Rails application
• Ruby 2.5.1 (Ubuntu 18 default version)
• Bundler 1.17.3
• Heroku on buildpack 18
• Codeship for automated testing and deployment

The process

On Heroku, go to the app page then its settings. On this page you can change the stack via the big red "upgrade" button. This requires a redeploy of the application.

Back at the app, I updated by ruby version (.ruby-version file for me), installed bundler and ran bundle update --bundler to upgrade from Bundler to Bundler2. This provoked some other minor config changes, all in this diff.

Then Codeship broke. As in, it was totally down. Sigh. When this came back, the build was not working, giving me a deadlock error when running bundle install. This gotcha took a while to fix (hence writing this post). In the end, all I had to do was add gem update --system to the build setup commands before gem install bundler.

And voila, we're in the modern world and everything works.

And lo, I have Windows 10

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my gaming PC to Windows 10 for some time but it didn’t manage to be the most important thing on my todo list at any point. Partly this was fear of the unknown - I knew Win10 was going to be a shift in UX and also thought it likely to break at least one peripheral. My attitude to an operating system is that it should do its job quietly and not get in the way and, frankly, I didn’t feel inclined to invest time in adoption pains. That’s time I can spend more profitably sleeping or looking out of the window.

Microsoft, it seems, had other ideas. They pushed the Win10 upgrade through their patch management system and I fell victim to the auto-upgrade problem. It’s a dark, stormy night. The wind is shaking the windows, drowning out the drumming of the rain. I’m sitting in a partly lit room, curled up comfortably and reading something on my tablet. In the corner, my computer is on, untouched for the past hour. I glance up and a chill runs through me. On my monitor is the ominous message “75% upgraded”.

I could write extensively about the aggressive way Microsoft have pushed Win10. I could complain at length about it arriving on my computer unwanted and the abuse of trust around using a security patch mechanism to automatically install a complete operating system without my input. I could compare the techniques used in release of this system to the way malware is spread. But others have done all that. Instead, I’ll focus on my experiences now it has arrived.

It’s fine.

Sorry, that was really dull but honestly it sums it up. The installation process was really simple. I had to track down and turn off the P2P patch sharing stuff (uncharitable, but I wasn’t in the best mood at this point) and some of the information sharing stuff (Win10 is horribly intrusive) but otherwise it just loaded up as New Windows with no real fuss.

The next evening I sat down to see what had really happened behind the scenes. First step was going through the security and privacy options. The defaults here were horrible (everything seems to have access to everything, including cameras and microphones) but the menus themselves were clear and it was easy to turn it all off. I also came across some advertising options - it seems in the brave new world of Windows it’s a good idea to have (targeted) advertising on your lock screen. Fortunately, both the targeting and the advertising can be disabled (separately) and so that went too. The start menu was a mess, but simple enough to remove the new and exciting rubbish and simplify back to the applications I’m actually going to use.

Next up, there is Cortana. I like the idea of Cortana and I quite fancied playing around with her. Unfortunately, in order to be helpful she looks at everything you do and sends it all off to Microsoft HQ so they can tune her electronic brain. So she had to die. Killing her off was actually harder than it needed to be - stopping her talking to Microsoft wasn’t too hard, but that left her zombified husk on my task bar and I had to work out how to purge her from there too.

Having finished with my electronic holy water, I moved on to my own customisations. I found that Steam, Chrome and Office all worked fine which is the majority of my use of that computer immediately. Also, my automatic backups (I use Macrium) continued to work and mapped drives were still mapped.

So far, so painless. I hadn’t needed to reconfigure anything and the new interface hadn’t caused me any real suffering. Time to check the two things I feared would break - the main reasons for putting off the upgrade in the first place. My joystick and my game recording setup.

First off, the joystick. My basic fear was that the (already shoddy) performance of the drivers would be even worse under a more modern operating system. My fears were confirmed when it failed to load properly. To Google! Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person looking for help (this thread was very useful) and - much to my surprise - Mad Catz had released some beta drivers for Windows 10. The Win7 drivers were released in 2011, whereas the Win10 drivers came from August 2015. And they worked. Probably better than the older drivers (I didn’t, for example, suffer any blue screens while installing them). I’d lost some of my settings, but that was easy to replicate and it was fine.

I did notice a problem on boot. Win10 boots faster than the USB devices which caused problems with my stick. This was easily fixed by disabling Fast Boot. It didn’t seem like the best solution, but it worked.

Next up, game recording. Astonishingly, this also Just Worked. Mostly. I had to re-enable some of the output devices in the sound menus, but I got everything going just by double-checking the everything in my original post.

Windows 10 is fast, stable, not overly ugly, and very easy to install. It’s a change to the user interface, but not one that particularly gets in the way of just using the computer. It’s a pig for privacy, but you can turn all that nonsense off. So, overall a surprisingly good experience. 9/10. Would have my computer hijacked and a new OS forcibly installed again.