800
Progress Bars
(sh.itjust.works)
They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.
But really it’s just how it will always be. How do you estimate transfer speed? Use the disk speed / bandwidth limit? Can’t do that since it’s shared with other users/processes. So at the beginning there is literally zero info to go off of. Some amount of per-file overhead also has to be accounted for since copying one 100gb file is not the same as copying millions of tiny files adding up to 100gb.
Then you start creating an average from the transfer so far, but with a weighted average algorithm, since recent speeds are much more valued, but also not too valued. Just because you are ultra slow now doesn’t mean it will always be slow. Maybe your brother is downloading porn and will hog the bandwidth all day, or he’ll be done in a few seconds.
So to put it simply, predicting transfer time is pretty much the same as predicting the future.
I like rsync's progress: speed and files left
I detest the needless line chart windows 10 had
You got me again, progress bar!
It's 100% done, but I need you to keep waiting...
Still 100% done. Keep waiting...
Okay, actually done now.
It’s 100% started.
This is the only thing I can't forgive. I accept that it's hard to say how long something is going to take. But when that bar reaches 100% something should happen pretty fucking snappish.
Windows gets around this by sitting at 99% instead. it's the "I'm not touching you" of file management.
Linux: wait, I've copied but not yet synced!
Gotta love waiting 5 minutes to detach your thumb drive because your OS straight up lied to you.
Shouldn't be 5 min, but that's what you get if the drive don't have both enough RAM and capacitors to hold a decent write cache to extend it's lifetime. Then the OS have to either wait for drive to report it's done, or complete the sync from the file system driver's cache. Or else you simply deal with it being both slower and dying faster...
I was being hyperbolic, but the OS shouldn't report the transfer as complete if the drive hasn't reported it's done.
The fact that the system is able to tell you the transfer isn't complete when trying to safely remove the drive means the information exists for the file transfer dialogue to utilize.
A simple "finishing things up," message in the transfer dialogue is all that's needed. Especially since unplugging a thumb drive without safely removing it (which tons of people do) while a transfer is still ongoing can corrupt the data on the drive.
The main issue here is that there's a mismatch between userspace perception of state versus that of the kernel driver, and no standardized way to push that information (unless you make your desktop environment add that info by polling the filesystem driver)
Users definitely don't want blocking dialogs if the userspace visible state is already updated enough to keep working. And ideally your software would check what kind of drive you're using and report to you when it's actually fully done as you close the program, but like I said this isn't standardized
Then it is not 100% done, now is it?
I remember when Netscape (the browser) back in the late 90s or thereabouts came up with the "innovation" of having a progress bar that would go left to right, and when it got all the way to the right it would reverse and go in the other direction. The whole thing would just go back and forth until the action was done -- not a "progress" bar at all, just a "well, maybe something is happening, it'll be done when it's done" animation. Later replaced by the ingenious shit going around in a circle that is ubiquitous today, that creates no illusions of it being a progress indicator at all.
What's the point of a progress bar if it can't display progress in a meaningful way anyways? It being at 90% often says nothing about how long it will take still. Might as well use a spinny thing to let you know it's not frozen.
I was a programmer and I wrote lots of applications that showed the progress of long-running tasks with a progress bar that was reasonably accurate. It just took a little bit of extra work is all, plus knowledge of how to do it. Every time I put in a spinny thing instead (and incidentally it's still possible to have the main task frozen while a little spinny thing on a separate thread happily spins away) it was because the managers and designers were too cheap and/or lazy to do it properly. Admittedly, adding a reasonably accurate time-remaining estimate is more complicated, but that's also the part that is less important.
FYI, that circle is called a throbber
Some cylinders have that name too
Obligatory Tom Scott video on why progress bars are impossible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZnLZFRylbs
Progress bars aren't really impossible, it's the time estimate that is.
Yeah you are right, but i wanted to clickbait people into watching the video because its cool :3
That's very good. Thanks 😊
As a developer I hate these values and estimates, but I also agree that there is no good way to calculate the future. The honest would be "working" - but everyone asks for percentages and estimates.
You could write "estimating" for about a minute or so and then give a reasonable estimation.
I made once a download estimate infinity. Suspended the pc and over 20 hours later turned it on again. Since it calculated 20 hours no download it assumed it would take infinity to download it all
This is a very Scotty thing to do.
OneDrive
TwoDrive
OneDrive
TwoDrive
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
800 points (100.0% liked)
Comic Strips
20539 readers
3508 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS