Is it actually measuring progress of anything as it's happening, or do they just update the percentage when it passes certain milestones? So many progress bars are just straight-up lies that slowly increment a number until the real process finishes and it shoots to 100% from wherever it was at before.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 5 months ago

Relevant TomScott https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZnLZFRylbs

There are definitely better and worse progress bar systems but there are no "good" ones.

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

They do not generally reflect time passed but amount of task done.

For example, let's say you have 100 files to configure as part of an update or installation. 99 of them are really small files that fly by, but the last one is a few gigabytes of data that needs to be configured. The bar might hang on that one really large file, then fly by the rest of the process as these files are very small and go quickly.

[–] shoki@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In this case the progress bar should show the percentage of processed data, but just using the amount of tasks or number of files is quicker and most often than not works fine

[–] bountygiver@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago

even then it would not be accurate, difference in file systems and storage medium would cause performance difference of processing many small files vs few large files. In TWRP when backing up, it would just straight up show you both progress and neither of them would advance linearly.

[–] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 7 points 5 months ago

Windows update is definitely milestones. 30% is the "reboot milestone" so if it shows less, it needs to reboot to finish applying.