Unrelated to that exact image but I’m gonna rant about other windows shit because I feel like it.
Windows decided my page file needed to be 80 GB. I do not want it to be 90 GB. I go to the start menu and search up “page file” to see if there’s a settings menu. First result is a random file in an application’s directory that can’t be opened/displayed by any program on my PC, then a list of other unrelated files.
So I open Control Panel, hoping to find it where I did before, and I click on System. What do you know, that menu no longer exists, and redirects to Windows Settings. Where do I go from here? Maybe the giant Installed RAM section because the page file is just a (overly simplified) method of extending your memory to your disk? No, of course not, that menu’s not actually a menu, it’s just a stat counter.
Instead, I have to go to Device Specifications, then the section titled Related links, then click Advanced system settings. Oh whaddaya know? Now I’m in the settings menu that used to be behind the original System option in Control Panel!
Now I’m in the Advanced tab of that menu. But where do I go from here? That’s right, Performance Options, and then another Advanced tab!!!
Then I have to click the Change button, where Windows has… conveniently enabled System managed size so it could choose to set my page file to 80 GB.
I edit, it, hit Ok, have to hit Apply in the other menu too, have to close out the no-longer-needed Settings and Control Panel windows that only served as a maze to get me here in the first place, and THEN I can restart my computer to reduce the size of the page file, even though it is currently not in use by any program, and all data is in RAM, and the file could reasonably be shrunk by the system at any time.
After the restart, this process begins all over again, because this is my third attempt, and Windows automatically reverts back to managing the size itself, and sets it to 80 GB. I have 5 GB of storage space left on my disk.
If my page file is set to 80 GB by default but isn’t being used by applications because my actual RAM utilization is always under 80%, and they have a dedicated settings menu for it, you’d think they could make getting to that settings menu not take a minimum of 8 separate clicks (assuming you have memorized exactly where to go from the start, and never click the wrong button or link), 4 separate menus, 2 nested “Advanced” menus, and multiple fields and checkboxes to tick off and edit after all of that, just to say “Use less of my disk for the page file”. This could literally be a slider in Settings.
The page file doesn’t cause major system instability if you adjust its size, unless you’re constantly using much more RAM than your system has, and the page file is manually set extremely small.
It just helps keep your system more stable by offloading excess data that can’t be stored in RAM to your disk. My entire computer, even under heavy load, never needs more then 2-5 GB of space on top of my RAM, and that’s when I’m running games at max settings, my browser with 40 tabs open, and multiple instances of 3D design software in the background, hardly a common enough occurrence for Windows to justify going “eh, maybe they’ll actually need 80 GB, you never know”, and never letting me change it even after I restart.
Swap is also used to offload data in RAM that’s used infrequently to instead prioritise caching data that doesn’t need to be in RAM but is nevertheless used more frequently.
If you’re playing Dark Souls and have a web browser open in the background, each time you die the game may need to re-load some level data or assets from disk (e.g. they relate to the area you respawn in, but not where you keep dying). If the computer can instead keep those in RAM, you can respawn faster. If it has to put Chrome on disk that may be a worthwhile tradeoff.
just looked up a page file. that thing should never be 80gb except under extreme circumstances. I wonder if that’s part of why dad’s laptop (what im using right now) has at max 14ish gb of free space, if you’re lucky
As I say, when you’re hunting around for something in Windows and you come across a dialog box that came straight from Windows XP… you’re getting close.
I empathize with this slightly non-ideal situation.
But can you imagine how insane it would be if you were told to do something like copy/paste swapoff /swap && truncate -s 8G /swap && swapon /swap into a terminal? TEXT? Like a caveman? The horror! The heresy! How can anyone be expected to do something so complicated! This is entirely unreasonable UX and the reason why Linux is straight up unusable.
Btw here’s 15 bazillion commands in a .ps to perhaps disable some of the ads in your start menu until the next time your computer reboots.
I agree with the sentiment, and it would definitely make a lot of troubleshooting easier, but you do gotta remember that 99% of people are so non-technical they won’t read anything going into their terminal, or if they do, they won’t know what it means.
You could just as easily replace that with sudo rm -rf /* and they’d run it just as quickly, and that’s my worry.
IMO we should just have settings menus alongside commands for most things any normal user might have to encounter, since that’s just a more user-friendly interface in terms of preventing accidental bad command execution and also just letting people find things on their own without having to look up a command every time if they don’t want to learn a short book’s worth of terminal commands.
remember that 99% of people are so non-technical they won’t read anything going into their terminal
That’s a bit ambitious. People don’t like to read anything on their computer. I’ve had people call me over to help with a “computer error” when Word is asking them if they’d like to save their document.
The kind of person who blindly runs commands also blindly runs any .exe or .bat they download from github which is not any better.
Of course in an ideal world there’d be a perfect GUI for everything, and we’ve gotten a lot better at that in the last few years. But it’s not like windows is lacking in things that are only configurable through CLI or the registry (which is even more opaque). I’m not saying Linux is perfect, just pointing out the hypocrisy.
While true, copying and pasting is much easier to exploit, especially since websites can alter your clipboard. Not to mention that people are already more wary of downloadable executables, but less so for commands.
For example, I’m not sure if you saw the newer attack vector a lot of scammers are using, but essentially they’ll have a 3-step process saying “Press Win + R” and “Press Ctrl + V” then “Hit Enter”, as a fake captcha, and the site automatically copies a malicious command to their clipboard, which then gets run when they paste.
A similar attack vector could take place where a user copies a command that looks legitimate, hits paste and enter, and only then is it clear that the site copied a new command to their clipboard that isn’t the one on the site they thought they checked.
I do agree that Windows is still pretty shit in this regard though. I just think we should seek to not emulate that as a requirement for users to edit certain settings if we can help it :)
The attack vector of convincing users to do stuff exists regardless of whether a niche GUI exists somewhere to do <the thing>. The only proper defense against social engineering is a) training and b) following the least privilege principle (which neither Windows or traditional Linux desktop’s permission model properly, as the current user in either case has full permissions to retrieve extremely sensitive credentials such as browser cookies without interaction).
Trying to defend against this from the perspective of de-normalizing the CLI is like defending against drunk driving by adding a bittering agent to Guiness beer exclusively.
As for clipboard highjacking, I am well aware, which is why any decent modern terminal emulator should a) strip escape codes by default and b) support bracketed-paste, to prevent immediate execution of a pasted command. If yours does not, please consider switching to a safer alternative (such as kitty).
IMO we should just have settings menus alongside commands for most things any normal user might have to encounter, since that’s just a more user-friendly interface in terms of preventing accidental bad command execution and also just letting people find things on their own without having to look up a command every time if they don’t want to learn a short book’s worth of terminal commands.
THIS. As a lifelong Windows user I’d rather deal with layers of shitty GUI, than having to memorise terminal commands and always pay attention not to mistype them lest I fuck my system up.
I can’t switch to Linux yet due to lack of support from my essential programs, but even if it wasn’t for those, I’d still be annoyed if I had to use a terminal to change settings in my system.
Hmm… Not sure how Linux’ terminal is any better than this, tbh.
Even ignoring all the wacky command names - you have a billion different commands, each doing everything in its own way.
PowerShell is uniform and standardised. This makes learning things super easy. Like, you can’t tell me that you don’t know what’s going on by just looking at the code I posted.
It’s not that bad in the GUI as well, as long as you don’t try to angrily fight against change, like OP did.
Go to Settings -> System -> Advanced -> Advanced Settings. You’re already on the old-style dialogue known from the Control Panel days. Two more clicks and you’re in the spot where you can change the page file settings.
People love to shit on Settings, but that’s just weird dudes being angry at change. Control Panel was a chaotic mess. As a guy who worked as first line IT support at the time when Win10 came out, I could not be happier when Settings happened. Everything had a super neat, super easy to follow “route” I could describe to the user over the phone. No need to start describing the difference between the side-bar links, and tabs, and having to click “OK” six times to ACTUALLY save the change you made, because the setting you changed was buried six pop-up windows deep…
Unrelated to that exact image but I’m gonna rant about other windows shit because I feel like it.
Windows decided my page file needed to be 80 GB. I do not want it to be 90 GB. I go to the start menu and search up “page file” to see if there’s a settings menu. First result is a random file in an application’s directory that can’t be opened/displayed by any program on my PC, then a list of other unrelated files.
So I open Control Panel, hoping to find it where I did before, and I click on
System. What do you know, that menu no longer exists, and redirects to Windows Settings. Where do I go from here? Maybe the giantInstalled RAMsection because the page file is just a (overly simplified) method of extending your memory to your disk? No, of course not, that menu’s not actually a menu, it’s just a stat counter.Instead, I have to go to Device Specifications, then the section titled
Related links, then clickAdvanced system settings. Oh whaddaya know? Now I’m in the settings menu that used to be behind the originalSystemoption in Control Panel!Now I’m in the Advanced tab of that menu. But where do I go from here? That’s right,
Performance Options, and then anotherAdvancedtab!!!Then I have to click the
Changebutton, where Windows has… conveniently enabledSystem managed sizeso it could choose to set my page file to 80 GB.I edit, it, hit
Ok, have to hitApplyin the other menu too, have to close out the no-longer-needed Settings and Control Panel windows that only served as a maze to get me here in the first place, and THEN I can restart my computer to reduce the size of the page file, even though it is currently not in use by any program, and all data is in RAM, and the file could reasonably be shrunk by the system at any time.After the restart, this process begins all over again, because this is my third attempt, and Windows automatically reverts back to managing the size itself, and sets it to 80 GB. I have 5 GB of storage space left on my disk.
Would you recommend MS make it easy for idiots to fuck with the page file?
Yes?
If my page file is set to 80 GB by default but isn’t being used by applications because my actual RAM utilization is always under 80%, and they have a dedicated settings menu for it, you’d think they could make getting to that settings menu not take a minimum of 8 separate clicks (assuming you have memorized exactly where to go from the start, and never click the wrong button or link), 4 separate menus, 2 nested “Advanced” menus, and multiple fields and checkboxes to tick off and edit after all of that, just to say “Use less of my disk for the page file”. This could literally be a slider in Settings.
The page file doesn’t cause major system instability if you adjust its size, unless you’re constantly using much more RAM than your system has, and the page file is manually set extremely small.
It just helps keep your system more stable by offloading excess data that can’t be stored in RAM to your disk. My entire computer, even under heavy load, never needs more then 2-5 GB of space on top of my RAM, and that’s when I’m running games at max settings, my browser with 40 tabs open, and multiple instances of 3D design software in the background, hardly a common enough occurrence for Windows to justify going “eh, maybe they’ll actually need 80 GB, you never know”, and never letting me change it even after I restart.
Swap is also used to offload data in RAM that’s used infrequently to instead prioritise caching data that doesn’t need to be in RAM but is nevertheless used more frequently.
If you’re playing Dark Souls and have a web browser open in the background, each time you die the game may need to re-load some level data or assets from disk (e.g. they relate to the area you respawn in, but not where you keep dying). If the computer can instead keep those in RAM, you can respawn faster. If it has to put Chrome on disk that may be a worthwhile tradeoff.
just looked up a page file. that thing should never be 80gb except under extreme circumstances. I wonder if that’s part of why dad’s laptop (what im using right now) has at max 14ish gb of free space, if you’re lucky
at this point arch linux is more user-friendly
unironically this
maybe even… what’s that one harder than arch? forgot what its called, think its artix?
copilot fuck off I’m already outsourcing some memory to google (don’t have to remember everything) I’m not outsourcing creativity to you.
As I say, when you’re hunting around for something in Windows and you come across a dialog box that came straight from Windows XP… you’re getting close.
All this yes. If you’re actually looking for help, you have to also click “set” after changing the page file settings.
Had to go through this the other day. At the third consecutive “advanced settings” menu I wondered if this was some kind of sick joke
I empathize with this slightly non-ideal situation.
But can you imagine how insane it would be if you were told to do something like copy/paste
swapoff /swap && truncate -s 8G /swap && swapon /swapinto a terminal? TEXT? Like a caveman? The horror! The heresy! How can anyone be expected to do something so complicated! This is entirely unreasonable UX and the reason why Linux is straight up unusable.Btw here’s 15 bazillion commands in a
.psto perhaps disable some of the ads in your start menu until the next time your computer reboots.I agree with the sentiment, and it would definitely make a lot of troubleshooting easier, but you do gotta remember that 99% of people are so non-technical they won’t read anything going into their terminal, or if they do, they won’t know what it means.
You could just as easily replace that with
sudo rm -rf /*and they’d run it just as quickly, and that’s my worry.IMO we should just have settings menus alongside commands for most things any normal user might have to encounter, since that’s just a more user-friendly interface in terms of preventing accidental bad command execution and also just letting people find things on their own without having to look up a command every time if they don’t want to learn a short book’s worth of terminal commands.
So like KDE
That’s a bit ambitious. People don’t like to read anything on their computer. I’ve had people call me over to help with a “computer error” when Word is asking them if they’d like to save their document.
The kind of person who blindly runs commands also blindly runs any .exe or .bat they download from github which is not any better.
Of course in an ideal world there’d be a perfect GUI for everything, and we’ve gotten a lot better at that in the last few years. But it’s not like windows is lacking in things that are only configurable through CLI or the registry (which is even more opaque). I’m not saying Linux is perfect, just pointing out the hypocrisy.
While true, copying and pasting is much easier to exploit, especially since websites can alter your clipboard. Not to mention that people are already more wary of downloadable executables, but less so for commands.
For example, I’m not sure if you saw the newer attack vector a lot of scammers are using, but essentially they’ll have a 3-step process saying “Press Win + R” and “Press Ctrl + V” then “Hit Enter”, as a fake captcha, and the site automatically copies a malicious command to their clipboard, which then gets run when they paste.
A similar attack vector could take place where a user copies a command that looks legitimate, hits paste and enter, and only then is it clear that the site copied a new command to their clipboard that isn’t the one on the site they thought they checked.
I do agree that Windows is still pretty shit in this regard though. I just think we should seek to not emulate that as a requirement for users to edit certain settings if we can help it :)
The attack vector of convincing users to do stuff exists regardless of whether a niche GUI exists somewhere to do <the thing>. The only proper defense against social engineering is a) training and b) following the least privilege principle (which neither Windows or traditional Linux desktop’s permission model properly, as the current user in either case has full permissions to retrieve extremely sensitive credentials such as browser cookies without interaction).
Trying to defend against this from the perspective of de-normalizing the CLI is like defending against drunk driving by adding a bittering agent to Guiness beer exclusively.
As for clipboard highjacking, I am well aware, which is why any decent modern terminal emulator should a) strip escape codes by default and b) support bracketed-paste, to prevent immediate execution of a pasted command. If yours does not, please consider switching to a safer alternative (such as kitty).
THIS. As a lifelong Windows user I’d rather deal with layers of shitty GUI, than having to memorise terminal commands and always pay attention not to mistype them lest I fuck my system up.
I can’t switch to Linux yet due to lack of support from my essential programs, but even if it wasn’t for those, I’d still be annoyed if I had to use a terminal to change settings in my system.
There are - PowerShell.
Changing the size:
Disabling automatic sizing:
we do, but better ones would be nice…
yeah this is why i want to never touch windows again
Hmm… Not sure how Linux’ terminal is any better than this, tbh.
Even ignoring all the wacky command names - you have a billion different commands, each doing everything in its own way.
PowerShell is uniform and standardised. This makes learning things super easy. Like, you can’t tell me that you don’t know what’s going on by just looking at the code I posted.
i meant on graphical versions like the settings app could be a lot better
command line/terminal depends on what youre used to and whatnot
It’s not that bad in the GUI as well, as long as you don’t try to angrily fight against change, like OP did.
Go to Settings -> System -> Advanced -> Advanced Settings. You’re already on the old-style dialogue known from the Control Panel days. Two more clicks and you’re in the spot where you can change the page file settings.
People love to shit on Settings, but that’s just weird dudes being angry at change. Control Panel was a chaotic mess. As a guy who worked as first line IT support at the time when Win10 came out, I could not be happier when Settings happened. Everything had a super neat, super easy to follow “route” I could describe to the user over the phone. No need to start describing the difference between the side-bar links, and tabs, and having to click “OK” six times to ACTUALLY save the change you made, because the setting you changed was buried six pop-up windows deep…