I'm a tolerant person, but I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you.
My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care how much they mess up the user experience in the process. Microsoft should reassign that person.
> The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead
All Linux/BSD systems I've used can update in minutes at the most (excluding the download time); I've long since wondered why Windows update is so much slower? Even binary diffs generally don't take that long to apply in my experience. So where is all the time spent?
Also why does it need to reboot? It is the "hard" file locking that's on Windows?
In-place OS updates can be racy. Some updates require rebooting because they involve kernel changes that can't be applied to a running kernel. Then there's the WIN32 mandatory file locks issues, which prevent updates / replacement of files that apps are using.
But if Windows had anything like ZFS, they could apply updates on a fork of a dataset and then reboot very quickly into that dataset. That is the right way to do updates in general, at the price of always having to reboot, but you can do a mix of in-place updates when those don't require reboots and any races are safe, and ZFS-style updates otherwise.
> Then there's the WIN32 mandatory file locks issues, which prevent updates / replacement of files that apps are using.
I should point out that this is not actually a blocker, if somebody at windows actually gave a fuck they could abuse winsxs to do blue/green symlinks to get around the file lock issue. Meaning the update could happen in the background and take effect next boot without anything needing to happen at boot time. Most could be done by just restarting the proper system service.
Its just microsoft has decided not to give a fuck. Rather then work on why people want to deferrer and delay updates, they have decided... well, whats that meme? "no its the kids who are wrong".
Even in the Win9x days, you could always rename a binary that was in use and copy the new one in its place, at which point newly spawned processes will use the new one while old processes continue to be unaffected.
Quite frankly I find the Linux/Unix-style behaviour of being able to delete/overwrite an in-use file a bit disconcerting, but that might just be because I'm more used to the Windows way.
A complete reinstall of a modern Ubuntu on a spinning HDD takes less than 30 minutes in my experience (often less than 15).
Windows installs and reinstalls take hours more often than not -- just logging in for the first time on an up-to-date Win10 laptop recently took 10 minutes to "personalize" it for me ... and this was on an SSD. I used to have curiosity about how they made it so bad, but these days I've placed anything windows under a SEP field.
My last windows install was about 30 minutes from boot to actually on desktop (very frustratingly interactive though, blocking the last 10 minutes behind that personalizing dialog)
Some linux updates require a reboot for a kernel update to take effect; Many modern ones, if properly configured, can update the kernels without rebooting (e.g. Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle all have that as a paid option for businesses, Ubuntu also free for personal or oss use).
But I've never had an issue where something wouldn't work between the end of an update and a reboot, where that does happen on Windows. Furthermore, it has happened to me that after a kernel upgrade (on a system that did require a reboot to make it take effect), I took a couple of weeks before reboot (running long simulations), in which case I was able to apply yet another kernel upgrade or two; but you only ever need one reboot to make the latest-and-greatest take effect.
On Windows, you accumulate reboots if you wait (which requires constantly rejecting the "shall I reboot now" prompts) so you may need many; and I've sometimes needed several reboots even though I didn't delay anything.
Live kernel patching is limited though: it can update most functions and some datastructures, but not all. This is great for bugfixes and security patches but can't deal with larger updates. If you're trying to keep on the latest version you need to reboot at some point.
Some distributions are switching to a more aggressive "reboot for any system update" model, with the system built on ostree or something of the sort. For instance, Ubuntu Core, Fedora Silverblue, or Endless OS. The update is downloaded and committed to disk (in a big, git-like repo for the latter two), but you need to boot into it. Your running system is untouched. This comes with the bonus that rollback is seamless: you choose an older commit from grub and it just works.
Of course, one key difference here is the system never tricks you into rebooting, and rebooting for an update takes just as long as rebooting any other time, so mostly (pending additional work, as usual :b) it's invisible.
I seem to recall Microsoft exploring similar to ostree with some Windows version somewhere, so I'd be curious to see how theirs behaves.
> Some Linux updates also require a reboot on some distributions.
AFAIK the only time this is the case is an update of something that can only be reloaded to get the updated version by rebooting--the most common case being the kernel.
Windows 10 Pro user at work, mixed MacOS / Windows / Lubuntu at home.
I've been on my work Windows 10 PC for 60+hrs this week, and about the same each of the past four weeks, and five to six days out of seven the past couple years.
And never had it force-update.
You can bet the moment I took this computer home (I won't, but humour me) and tried to watch a movie it would force-update, crash, refuse to boot, and need a full reinstall.
Actually domain joined Windows machines tend to keep their state when they can't see their domain controller. You would probably find, depending on config, that updates stop all together.
> All Linux/BSD systems I've used can update in minutes at the most
But they naively schedule those minutes immediately after I've logged in, so the CPU and network is pegged and the disk thrashed while I'm sitting there cursing.
If I've logged in, it's to do a task. Not to wait for unattended-upgrades.py to finish its task before graciously handing the computer back to me.
Even waiting 10 minutes after login before checking for updates would be more tolerable.
Which distros have that problem? I generally stick to arch or centos, neither of which has tried to kneecap me at login time. Of course, both are fairly manual for updates unless you set up cron jobs to schedule them for you.
I use Ubuntu, and I've never had that problem. It usually checks for updates at boot, but doesn't actually download them until you manually approve it.
Laptop computers and hard disks are a big source of frustration. Either one is a hassle but combined they become a mess.
With desktops, I can tell people that they are supposed to leave their computers on 24/7 but most normal people will use their laptop and shut the lid when done. That’s what they do with phones and iPads and that’s what they expect from their laptops.
That being said, I sincerely detest automatic reboots. It doesn’t affect me anymore because I have an ssd now but an operating system that reboots the computer without explicit approval from the user is trash. There is no excuse for this kind of nonsense.
I like Mozilla Firefox’s approach on my fedora machine. After I dnf update, Firefox refuses to open any more tabs until I close and open Firefox again. However, existing tabs continue working just fine and I can continue indefinitely before I close and open Firefox again. This is actual trust in computing. Trust your users to know best.
I'm currently using Kubuntu, and sometimes the jobs that run at bootup hang the login screen and even prevent the TTY gettys (i.e. ctrl-alt-f2) from starting at all. In those cases I alt-sysrq-u and reset. Haven't determined whether it's fstrim, unattended-upgrades, a search indexer, or something else, because alt-sysrq-t is disabled in Ubuntu kernels and I can't start a task manager if I can't log in.
It's pretty frustrating, but it's still slightly better than Windows.
I had the same question, so I decided to look under the covers to see what the update process actually involves. I experienced true horror, ran away screaming, and never looked back.
There are panthers in there, lurking in the shadows.
Huh? The one thing you generally can't update is the kernel since it's the foundation of every other process. I haven't used ubuntu in several years, have things changed drastically?
There were three large patches that were integrated into the Linux kernel in version 4.0 (2014) that make it so that you can live patch the kernel easily. [0][1][2]
(Before these arrived there were already some tool's for it, for some distros. But now everyone should be able to, unless the distro intentionally cripples the ability).
They do kexec ? (And no, ksplice/kpatch, if they are using that is not booting a new kernel.) I would be kinda worried about long term system state in that case...
Mac won't literally forcibly reboot your machine though if you aren't sitting there to click "no." You can also use `softwareupdate --ignore` on Mac to shut off the notification. I'm not aware of anything equivalent on Windows.
softwareupdate --ignore is now deprecated, and will via security patches even be patched out of older versions of MacOS, in what is an enormous "fuck you" to users.
You can't have both no updates and avoid random exploits that are randomly discovered with time. Maybe experienced users know what's going on, but an average user would mindlessly click ignore until the machine is owned by ransomware.
But it's Microsoft's ass that gets dragged through the mud for decades when unpatched Windows machines cause problems for others.
They learned their lesson. Users can't be trusted.
At least now you ARE prompted to reboot if you have used the machine at all in the past 3 days or something. And if you haven't, it will still wait a week.
No one in this thread seems to be up to date on that. Everyone is complaining about the Windows 10 of 3-5 years ago, completely unaware that things have changed a lot.
So yeah I see why Microsoft does what it does, sometimes. The internet won't cut them any slack no matter what happens, so Microsoft do what's best for the user, whether they like it or not. And, again, they don't just surprise reboot anymore if you're on a recent release.
But it's Microsoft's ass that gets dragged through the mud for decades when unpatched Windows machines cause problems for others.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. But in any case, Microsoft's reputation is certainly being damaged by the long series of failures caused by bad updates to Windows 10.
No one in this thread seems to be up to date on that. Everyone is complaining about the Windows 10 of 3-5 years ago, completely unaware that things have changed a lot.
The important facts haven't really changed. There might be some small quantitative improvements, but qualitative changes are required to fix this problem, and Microsoft is still stubbornly refusing to make them because they don't fit the business model under Nadella's leadership.
Sadly, until there are viable alternatives so a large proportion of Windows users can jump ship, they'll probably continue to get away with it too. The only other potential way out I can see is if governments step in and start regulating because the damage is becoming sufficiently painful that voters/businesses are starting to send a significant number of complaints. I'm not sure we're there yet, even though plenty of people have been stung by a bad update at least once already.
This is exactly why I don't run Microsoft software, even after their rabid tendencies mellowed a bit - providing software the user wants is not their priority.
But neither commercial consumer platform is producing an OS that respects their users - it is one-size-fits-all, you must be an idiot-ware. I don't serve my operating system, it's the other way around. So I'm done with both of them.
>No one in this thread seems to be up to date on that. Everyone is complaining about the Windows 10 of 3-5 years ago, completely unaware that things have changed a lot.
Because when you have wide ranging issues like that it takes a lot of time for people's opinion to change. All it takes is for a user to be burned once by this system and they might end up remembering and anticipating these issues for decades. MS reaps what they sowed.
>so Microsoft do what's best for the user, whether they like it or not.
And over the years this builds up an anti-MS/Windows sentiment that will be very difficult to get rid of.
I tried running a weaker machine on Windows for my parents. They ended up not using the computer at all, because every time they started the machine it would do something update related. Even just the things in the background made the computer unusable. There aren't prompts for things like that. They would rather go and pay their bills in person than use the computer because of the updates. I didn't know it was that bad, but actually trying to use it myself I understood.
That is simply not true. My up-to-date Windows 10 machines frequently reboot without me telling them to do so. I'll be working on some project, leave the project windows open and put the computer to sleep over night, only to find the computer rebooted next morning. Presumably the computer woke up in the middle of the night, showed the update prompt to the empty room, and since nobody intervened, killed my programs and rebooted.
Then you've done something somehow, or I have, because none of my 5 Windows machines have rebooted without a week's notice in about three years.
If it helps, you can use "powercfg /lastwake" at a command prompt to find out why the computer last woke from sleep. With that info you should be able to put an end to those unrequested wakes.
You have probably adjusted something, though Microsoft are very good at undoing anything you do to disable automatic updates. The update system by default wakes the PC up in the middle of the night to reboot it. In my experience it more reliably wakes the PC up than rebooting it, so what happens is you just have a PC which turns on in the middle of the night and sits there idling, which is extremely irritating if you happen to sleep in the same room, and accomplishes nothing.
> when unpatched Windows machines cause problems for others
Charitably that's only half of the story. Their security model was ... not great in the past.
If as you claim their security PR problems were all due to poor decisions by users then where are all the people slamming Apple for all the vulnerable systems caused by postponement of updates? What about Ubuntu, Fedora, etc?
Interesting. I never experienced something like this on my desktop. Actually I always wondered why people are bothered by windows 10 updates at all, because for me it was maximail a bit disturbing.
My xps notebook with windows 10 OTOH, well, it's actually close to a nightmare. I bought it late 2019 and had multiple on occasions the machine decided to WAKE UP from sleep a hour after midnight and running the update Procedere without shutting down. If it was in the sleeve I was greeted by a very very hot notebook at the morning with almost no battery left.
I've had a similar nightmare on a laptop. Every once in a while it would wake up randomly to do a Windows Update. But since the lid is closed, the laptop would overheat and shutdown in the middle of the update. When I came to use it it would waste an hour or two removing the broken update. After a couple such incidents I just installed Debian instead.
Reminds me of my PS4. I only played it a couples times a month, but every time I turned it on it had 30 minutes' worth of upgrades waiting. I sold my PS4 because I was tired of the updates.
That's the reason I don't buy consoles anymore, the consoles had a simple pitch going for them, sit down and play, no waiting, no fiddling. That used to be true, except nowadays, you have to wait for endless updates every time you switch on the console.
But you can pay Sony $60 a year for the privilege of getting your PS4 to update everything in the background on its own! Clearly the free market provides the best player experience.
Mac OS X has been my daily driver for almost 1.5 decades and I almost got my parents a Mac since they had an ancient laptop and were sorely in need of an upgrade. Instead, I got them a shiny laptop from the Microsoft Store thinking that would minimize the kinds of problems I’ve encountered with terribly cheap Windows machines over the years (icky stuff installed, bad drivers, bad build quality, etc). In recent months my parents have experienced unsettling behavior which I assume is related to Windows updates: seeing it update and then turn to a black screen forever, without even being able to turn it off and back on (and then returning the next morning and it magically comes back on). Of course I had to buy them a new machine right before the pandemic, so the Microsoft Store is closed and I can’t get someone to see if there’s any other problem with it. I know iOS is defaulting to updating people without them knowing too - I’m not a fan, but maybe I’m not the target demographic. Still, they should make sure it’s more robust if they’re going to force it on people without warning.
iOS at least defaults to updating in the middle of the night when the device is plugged in and locked. It also gives you a warning hours before it happens.
If you're able to walk them through it, automatic updates can be disabled.
Yeah, I'll give that a whirl. And after posting my comment, I discovered that Microsoft is closing all their stores, so no real-life meetings with Microsoft's version of an Apple Genius will be possible anymore...
Hmm, I have both but I honestly find the Mac more annoying. For people who shut down their computer at night, the Windows updates work quite well - they download quietly in the background and apply quickly when you shut down and start up. I haven’t had a Windows machine restart at an irritating time for years. Every Mac update I’ve done, on the other hand, has taken 30-60 minutes of staring at a screen with a progress bar while the fans spin up to maximum. And weeks of nagging EVERY DAY before I finally give in and update.
sounds like apples to oranges. you shut down your windows computer at night, but not your mac - i don't get it?
mac updates do take a while, but unless i'm misremembering, they're less frequent. and some windows updates take absolutely ages, too. the difference for me is that windows update keeps breaking stuff, like bluetooth drivers -.-
Macs seem to discourage shutting down, compared to windows. I’ve always been a windows user and I literally couldn’t figure out HOW to shut down the Mac without asking someone. No power button, nothing came up in the search tool thingie for ‘shut down’, I didn’t realise the Apple logo was clickable... maybe I’m just a bit thick :) Anyway, my point is, the UI discourages you from regularly giving the computer a good time to install updates.
Because the windows shutdown option is in the start menu, which you see constantly. The Mac shut down option is in a menu which I almost never click. To me, that indicates the designers have different ideas about how often users want to shutdown/restart. Apparently lots of people disagree though since I got downvoted a lot (which I don’t think is what downvote is for, but whatever...)
That feature screws me all the time. I'll load windows to play a game and try to reboot back into linux, and the update kicks off. I always have to force shutdown and just let it update the next time I start it to play a game.
Its part of the windows as a service transition. In a commercial setting it’s even worse — I have had to keep machines vulnerable because update bundles contain code that breaks stuff and you cannot break them out.
The other fun thing is that if you run into a complex problem, there’s no scenario where it will get fixed for you. For some products, there is literally a two week window before they freeze changes.
There is no escape — this is the new way. Apple is even worse and more unpredictable.
I have had to keep machines vulnerable because update bundles contain code that breaks stuff and you cannot break them out.
Vulnerable to what, exactly? That is also the other part of the problem with these "security updates" --- if you look at the details (when they are provided, which seems to be diminishing too) the vast majority of them are local privilege escalations that assume the attacker can run arbitrary code on the machine; IMHO if an attacker can do that, you already have a much bigger problem to worry about!
My assumption is that Windows users are notoriously bad at applying updates, either because they are not aware of them or believe that they know better than Microsoft.
While I do prefer the update mechanism under my choice of Linux distributions, which allows me to initiate an update then cancel it if it looks like it will affect software currently in use, it is not suitable for most people.
> My assumption is that Windows users are notoriously bad at applying updates, either because they are not aware of them or believe that they know better than Microsoft.
That's a rather broad brush you got there.
Windows users probably gained the reputation for being update-adverse when Windows decided it owned the computer, not the user (me) who paid for the electricity that the computer definitely needs.
That in and of itself wouldn't be a thing except windows updates on multiple occasions have broken stuff and restarted computers on people in the middle of their work.
How dare MS add their own timer to MY computer. It's their software, but after Windows 8.1 (the last OS that actually passably pretends to obey me), I'm done and going to Linux. Mint or Fedora. Xfce. I may not drink much of the FOSS first cool aid, but its time.
Windows 10 (non LTSC) hates me, and the feeling is mutual.
> Windows users probably gained the reputation for being update-adverse when Windows decided it owned the computer
It is also possible to argue that Microsoft became more aggressive with updates because people were not updating their systems.
I do not agree with many of the decisions that Microsoft made with Windows updates. For example: I am of the opinion that they should have made security updates mandatory and let people decide whether they will accept feature updates. Yes, there would still be issues with that model but at least they can legitimize it. They can legitimize it since we live in a networked world that has to be treated as hostile.
As for your transition to Linux, I would highly suggest finding reasons to embrace Linux rather than treating it as a means for ditching Windows. One of those reasons includes the FLOSS "kool-aid" since the less restrictive licensing model has many benefits that trickle down to the end user. Having positive reasons for using Linux will also make it easier to stick with it when you do come across aspects that you do not like, because you will come across things that you do not like.
And please stop bad mouthing Windows. Quite frankly, a lot of Linux user look like idiots since they spout outdated information. Just as Linux has improved over time, Windows has done the same. Within a few months, there is a solid possibility that critiques of the platform will become irrelevant. Within a few years, it is virtually certain that the critiques will be irrelevant.
>Within a few years, it is virtually certain that the critiques will be irrelevant.
Really? So you're saying Driver Signature Enforcement will suddenly disappear I can run unblessed by Microsoft drivers again so I can maintain the capability to keep my out-of-support hardware configurations running?
Oh wait, that's not going away... That fix wasn't even really for me. That was so the media distribution industry could sleep well at night, and who cares if it makes a bunch of User's hardware unsupportable?
Windows will stop running reams of telemetry, and stop pushing all their Cloud offerings on my users so that they actually know where their things are? They'll stop with their user hostile UXconfiguration so I can just present them an interface that mostly workswithout having to rejigger things after every update?
Windows will stop taking a sledge hammer to my EFI partition every damn time I let it update, resetting itself as the primary boot option until I go in and reset things manually?
It is so difficult nowadays for me to get across to kids just how different computing is now and how even if you do have more "stable" or "resilient" systems, how much more difficult it is to actually be able to figure out what is going on beneath the hood because of the encroachment into the computing industry of every special interest industry or some programmer looking to obfuscate their shitty software because those sniveling lusers should be happy they're getting a machine that does anything at all!
It's no surprise at all to me that encouraging computational literacy is such a challenge, because the entire industry has gotten so bewitched by capitalization and innovation (not of computing itself but) of applying computers to enable previously practically infeasible business models that I've grown to hate the behemoth the tech industry has become.
Half the time anymore, I can't even justify to myself going to the latest, greatest, computer hardware anymore, or checking out that new game, because every damn time I look into it, the majority of the damn thing isn't about doing anything better for the user, but providing some hook through which to monetize the user.
Sorry, but I can't take these sorts of "it's not that bad.
" posts seriously. Excessive compute has largely just enabled the vices of those who build things in the first place. I see programs that fulfill the same end user use cases as programs we had 20+ years ago, less efficiently, with greater bloat, more 3rd party info leaks, superfluousnetwork connectivity, anti-user nannies/safe-guards which are less about the user's safety than aboutenabling someone else to extract rent.
Frankly, the same thing goes for most tech companies nowadays. Even some of the notable FOSS ones, who insteadofrentseeking in the traditional sense, fight over "developer mindshare".
Might have overshot my intended message, but God bless, it needed to be said.
Get off my LAN, and never darken my ports with your packets ever again!
My assumption is that Windows users are notoriously bad at applying updates, either because they are not aware of them or believe that they know better than Microsoft.
But plenty of us do know better than Microsoft. For example, I'm typing this on a Windows PC with no telemetry and no forced updates. I'm perfectly OK with determining that I don't need those privacy, security and reliability risks without any help from Microsoft.
How about a learned behavior? Windows update has burned with enough times with unusable system that I am now trained to not trust it. "up"date isn't the word I'd use for it. And before you say that doesn't happen anymore, Microsoft has been saying this and repeating it for 2+ decades.
Its not the users that are bad at updating. It is Microsoft.
I've never had an issue with forced updates with Windows 10. Might be because I use the Enterprise edition?
If you want to get it, I recommend the Microsoft Action Pack - you get a lot stuff for the money, including multiple Windows 10 licenses, 5 O365 licenses, Visual Studio subscriptions, Azure credits... It's amazing value really, but seems to be relatively unknown.
Indeed. I'm honestly surprised to read of such poor experiences here because I've honestly found that Windows 10 has given me a lot less grief than macOS has recently.
I've never had an issue with forced updates with Windows 10. Might be because I use the Enterprise edition?
For many practical purposes, the higher Windows 10 tiers such as Enterprise and Education are a different product to the lower ones such as Home and Pro.
Microsoft isn't stupid and knows that professional sysadmins at large organisations would never surrender control of their corporate networks and the devices on them to an external party, so Microsoft doesn't try to push much-criticised aspects of Windows 10 such as mandatory telemetry and upgrades in that market.
If you want to get it, I recommend the Microsoft Action Pack
Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any legal method to acquire Windows 10 Enterprise without signing up for all the other enterprise junk that no small business wants to deal with. The Pro edition of Windows used to cater to the small business and power user market, yet bizarrely in Windows 10 that edition seems to have been heavily downgraded and is now little better than Home in the negative aspects we're talking about here.
>> If you want to get it, I recommend the Microsoft Action Pack
> Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any legal method to acquire Windows 10 Enterprise without signing up for all the other enterprise junk that no small business wants to deal with
Not sure if there is a misunderstanding here, but you're replying directly to my comment that explains how you can get the Enterprise edition without a volume licensing deal or any other "enterprise junk".
That is immediately full of buzzword bull about partners and subscriptions, which is exactly the sort of enterprise junk I was referring to before. Notably missing however is any straightforward way to buy a legitimate copy of Windows 10 Enterprise, or anything resembling instructions for doing so or pricing information.
If you have indeed found a legitimate way to just buy a plain copy of Windows 10 Enterprise for use on a business PC without further strings attached, unfortunately I wasn't able to find it from the information in your previous comment.
Yes, they make it harder than it needs to be, but it's not particularly difficult either. And you're not just buying Windows 10 Enterprise, which is why there is no "Buy Windows 10 Enterprise now!" button - it's a subscription to a veritable trove of software and Azure credits.
1. Sign up to join the Microsoft Partner Network
2. Buy the Action Pack
Fair enough. But what we'd be looking for is essentially a "Buy Windows 10 Enterprise now!" button. We have no interest in commercial partnering arrangements with accompanying legal shenanigans. We don't want a subscription-based anything. We don't need to tie in a load of other software and services that we neither use nor care about.
Since Windows 10 Pro isn't really a Pro edition in the historical sense, we're just looking for a suitable replacement in the Windows 10 generation. That would have to be Enterprise as things stand, because no edition below that would currently be acceptable in terms of having full control of our own systems. But Microsoft doesn't want to sell us anything close to a like-for-like replacement to the Pro editions we've used for many years with previous Windows versions, so we won't use Windows 10 as our main desktop OS.
> We have no interest in commercial partnering arrangements with accompanying legal shenanigans
There are none, you're looking too hard for road blocks! All that stuff only comes into play if you become a "real" Microsoft partner by paying them lots of money and attaining one of the competency tiers; for the Action Pack, you just give them $400/y (or whatever it is, I don't recall precisely).
Most of the points you mentioned there were not immediately obvious to me from reading either of the pages we cited above, so I'll have to take your word that there is something relevant available even if I can't readily identify it. But to be frank, if it would cost that much just to get a useful Windows 10 licence, or even a handful of them, it's hardly going to be attractive compared to the other options anyway, even if there really are no other shenanigans.
I do appreciate your time writing these comments, but unfortunately what I'm seeing so far doesn't really look any more promising than anything I've come across in any previous discussions on this subject. If Microsoft ever decides to offer a simple licence at a reasonable price for a fully controlled edition of Windows 10, and if we haven't already got everything we need from the combination of six other platforms we currently use at my businesses anyway, maybe we'll take a look. For now, it seems their business model doesn't include having businesses like us as customers, and we're certainly not going to go out of our way to work around that and give them money anyway. After all, why on earth would we?
Fair point, while the Action Pack is amazing value, it's only worth it if you're on a Microsoft stack - it wouldn't be worth it only to get a single Windows 10 Enterprise license (I think you actually get 5 licenses, as well as server edition licenses, SQL Server licenses, Visual Studio subscriptions, 5 O365 subscriptions, Azure credits and more).
I've had it for something like 5 years now, but I think the only qualifier was joining the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), which is free, but I think you need to have a business, which I'd assume many on HN do (even a sole trader is OK, I think).
Mac is similar too. I get tired of having to upgrade my OS (losing features such as 32 bit support or having to upgrade to use new hardware) simply to stay secure.
Try this: When you see that updates are available, just install them instead of putting it off. It takes 10 minutes at most. Following that philosophy, I have never had an update interrupt me at a critical moment. Meanwhile my update-averse colleagues are constantly dodging the prompts and complaining about update interruptions.
On my games machine, yup. Generally works a treat. On the Win 7 era laptop used as a web browser by parents though? The same updates take several hours (slow spinning rust). So that machine is likely being replaced by a Chromebook in the near future, as a Windows replacement is looking at least double the cost for enough hardware to avoid the update problems.
Your assumption is not correct. The secret answer is that you (and all home customers) are simply beta testers for enterprise customers.
Worked in enterprise, windows computers there only update on the week end or when the administrator decides to force an update overnight (they send a notification firmwide that all computers will be rebooted).
Look at the release channels. The SAC for Windows and monthly channel for MS365 are used to test for the real customers which are enterprise (LTS) users.
Looking at the way MS365 does it for different SKUs makes it obvious. Less money means more frequent updates.
Any time I've had that happen, I've ignored prompts to install updates on my schedule, or even to schedule to update to happen some time in the next week. Every time I tell it to schedule the update, it does it when I tell it to.
Agreed. Windows needs to have APIs, and apps that can save state must use them, to give apps a chance to save state. E.g., hibernate running VMs, finish syncing docs to drives, save simulation state (as in your case), etc.
Many apps already have this. Your browser can restore windows and tabs on restart. Your $EDITORs save work in progress and let you restore on restart (well, VIM does). VMs can get paused and saved. These are by far the most important apps to have restored. Sure, I'd like my tmux instances and shells and stuff restored too, but I script all that setup anyways, so I'm good there. So, really, it's just a matter of integration.
Isn’t there a maintenance window that can be configured, I don’t know what the default one is sounds like something to tweak. I’m not saying all is well, i would set it and move on with my life YMMV
> Microsoft has been continually tweaking the way the Windows 10 updating process works based on "user feedback"
I... what... where... when?
Seriously, how about just giving control to users? And btw, I still see machines were the telemetry service eats CPU. If you cannot get it to work, remove it. It shouldn't be part of an OS anyway. Don't tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case.
I don't get how neglected they have treated their flagship for desktop computers. Software as a service is good for my
tax declaration, but I really hate this trend.
> Seriously, how about just giving control to users?
Have you been living in a cave since 1999? Computing isn't about empowering people anymore, it's about extracting money and data (read: more money!) from them!
I'm going to try and be not cynical for a second - in 1999 computing truly empowered a small group of enthusiasts. Yes, lots of people had access to computers, but for many it was a word processor with slow internet, and a ton of vulnerabilities and viruses. Now many many more have been empowered, but at a cost of less peak power.
I'd argue that they aren't really empowered. I don't feel empowered by my phone because everything is under someone else's control. I am only permitted to use applications as long as they don't want root access to the device. That trend is becoming more and more pervasive in other aspects of computing too.
The other side of the spectrum is that Linux is easier to use and more accessible then ever. Ubuntu, Elementary OS, Manjaro, PopOS, and Linux Mint have made linux more friendly then ever to "average" computer users, and each day more and more devices and hardware architectures are getting supported.
> The other side of the spectrum is that Linux is easier to use and more accessible then ever.
Unfortunately that isn't saying much, and as a long time user of Linux Desktops I can assure you that things are at least as complicated as they always were, they're just more usable now as long as you don't try to do something uncommon. And worse yet: to attain this goal distros have been becoming even more like appliances than computers! Consider why there are so many distros in the first place: it's really hard to take a standard base and convert it to your needs.
Linux distros have power and customizability, but it's not easy to use. That's par for the course.
Windows is (like macs) slowly becoming more walled gardened and controls removed from the user, in the name of making it more user friendly and un-breakable.
So either a user learns to be a power user, and go with linux, or stay as a "normal" user, and give control over to microsoft/apple/google etc. There isn't any other choice in the design space of operating systems.
> Linux distros have power and customizability, but it's not easy to use. That's par for the course.
I contend that it is possible to have both, it's just that no one is trying to anymore.
> So either a user learns to be a power user, and go with linux, or stay as a "normal" user, and give control over to microsoft/apple/google etc.
And this is why. Because people who have the ability and opportunity to build that future refuse to do so because they like having a wall that separates them from "normal users" so they can feel superior or something. It didn't used to be this way, a lot of effort used to go into making environments that were powerful and had a good user experience and helped onramp the user to programming. Unfortunately, we've basically thrown all that away now because it isn't where the money is.
It seems to me like your information is outdate & recommend trying out a recent Fedora or other modern mainstream distro. Hardly anything needs any tweaking to get working these days.
Hardly anything needs any tweaking to get working these days.
Modern Linux distros are much better at getting the OS and a lot of hardware up and running. Unfortunately, until the same can be said of applications, it's not going to be a viable alternative for many Windows users.
This chicken-and-egg problem is what is really keeping Linux off most desktops, and again rather unfortunately, it would probably need someone very well funded to start backing the effort to make it competitive enough to bootstrap a mass migration. Realistically, you'd probably need to create some Linux-based game-changer applications and/or to get emulation to the point where users can run applications written for other major platforms such as Windows or macOS to run as if native and without any legal problems. We're still a long way from either of those things being achieved without some sort of spectacular investment plus enough time for it to be turned into software.
The problem with Linux re: applications is that Linux communities are openly hostile to software being delivered directly to the user by a developer, and to proprietary software as a whole. That's the real problem. Applications will come if it becomes a sane platform to build and distribute applications for.
I don't see that as an unassailable problem, though. There is no reason someone shouldn't develop a solid desktop platform that is built on Linux, has a user-friendly UI, but instead of a typical Linux distro today where you just install everything from your distro's huge repo of FOSS, you install it directly (perhaps with some kind of handy UI to track what you have and facilitate updates) and/or get things from a potentially commercial "app store".
In fact, Google has already proved that this model can work, they just did it on mobile devices instead of traditional desktop/laptop PCs. Traditional Linux communities coexist quite happily with the Android ecosystem and largely independent of it, and I see no reason conflict would be necessary with a different style of Linux desktop either.
I get that - we've lost control of the device, but we now have ubiquitous access to computing - reliable, (relatively) safe access to the internet everywhere for nearly everyone. That wasn't a thing 20 years ago - computers were more arcane and required expertise to maintain.
I totally understand we've lost access to the devices, I'm just arguing that there's an other side to this whole thing.
> I get that - we've lost control of the device, but we now have ubiquitous access to computing - reliable, (relatively) safe access to the internet everywhere for nearly everyone.
Debatable. What makes computing so much more interesting than other tools is the ability to program them, to make the tool what you need it to be for what you want to do. 80s computer systems got this: they booted into a programming environment. 90s computer systems got this: they gave us HyperCard, VB, Delphi, etc and productivity software like Excel (which I contend is still the most widely used programming environment on earth) became programmable and extendable too. Turning first time computer users into programmers was a goal because that's what computers were for!
We don't really have computers like that anymore. What we have are appliances. Sure, they have a lot of add-on modules, but you're not encouraged to program them, to adapt them to your needs, you're encouraged to buy that from somebody else with money and/or turning over data. A lot of those "tools" seek to addict you to their usage so you can be peppered with advertisements.
We have different definitions of computing - For me computing is the ability to perform work and get information on a computer, which I think is a lot better these days.
Not everyone cares to be a programmer, and to put computers behind that wall serves to stop people from accessing them. That feels kind of like gate-keeping, especially as the modern internet is so incredibly complicated that casual dabbling isn't really good enough to get things done - where in this case "getting things done" is pulling information from web pages, paying bills, emails, etc. It can be a hobby, absolutely, but one that you need to be dedicated to, and as such, not for most people.
> Not everyone cares to be a programmer, and to put computers behind that wall serves to stop people from accessing them.
You misunderstand. I don't lament the existence of appliances, I lament that the hijacking of "computer" to mean "appliance" has lead to a lack of progress in computing environments for those of us who do care about computing.
and most people are fine with that. There's a bit of an elitist mentality that goes with being a programmer - that everybody should be as interested in tinkering as they are.
Most people are dumb, non-thinking consumers of output. Most people don't want to have to open their washing machine and tweak the wires. Most people don't want their fridge to be able to do anything other than being a fridge.
And most people want their computers to play videos and read emails and websites.
> Most people are dumb, non-thinking consumers of output.
That's by design, not nature.
> Most people don't want to have to open their washing machine and tweak the wires. Most people don't want their fridge to be able to do anything other than being a fridge.
The right comparison isn't the fridge, but Keurig. Imagine a fridge that only accepted a particular brand of packaged meals, and nothing else. Storing leftovers? Forget it. Random food bought at the supermarket? Need to root your fridge first. Medicine? Only if you buy an add-on. That's how modern computing looks like, particularly on mobile.
The elitist mentality is the one that insists things have to be this way - that you have to have a hard split between producers and consumers, developers and users. The old-era computing philosophy GP refers to didn't have a hard split here - it enabled one to progress all the way from a novice to a programmer, and also allowed them to stop at the point they're comfortable with.
There are more then million dishes available in my Fridge market, and I can safely buy/eat any of them without a practical fear of viruses and I don't care if the dish is prepared in India or Indiana. Food is always fresh.
In olden days I could have bought food from anywhere but that came with a burden of choice, I had to look for credibility of the vendor, confusing packaging, allergy info. was missing/wrong and there was always a risk of virus. Once a virus caused global outages and pandemic.
It's fine to be a consumer, I have no issue with that. But as someone who got into computing because of what computers are, I lament the conflation of "computer" with "appliance" that leads to more and more restriction and less actual computers. I'd like to see computers improve as computers, but even Linux Desktop with all its hackers trends more towards wanting to be a fucking appliance.
Someone still has to create all of that content for others to consume.
In any case, how do you know that most people only want their computers to be consumption devices? If there is no serious attempt to offer more or show most people what could be possible, you can't tell whether the current trend is genuinely what people would want or simply due to them not knowing any better.
> If there is no serious attempt to offer more or show most people what could be possible, you can't tell whether the current trend is genuinely what people would want or simply due to them not knowing any better.
anyone who wants to create can easily find out how to create. Esp. in this day and age of information availability.
As a counter example, there are plenty of creators on TikTok.
Sure, but then for example someone also had to create TikTok, and the OS it runs on, and all the other apps the user has on their phone.
I think what some of us find so regrettable is the continual dumbing down of personal computing. It's already probably 90% content consumption; 9% creation of very simple content like taking photos or writing short, plain text messages; and maybe 1% taking advantage of the flexibility to do new and interesting things.
Meanwhile, I come across many things in life where someone with basic computing skills could help themselves by automating a task or getting the computer to work something out. That doesn't necessarily have to mean writing large programs; it could just be, say, setting up a spreadsheet to do a few household calculations every month.
I see so many people wasting time and losing money and missing opportunities for lack of these skills, and to me it feels the same as watching someone who lacks basic numeracy or literacy. Worse, most of the consumer electronics we use are becoming ever more trapped inside walled gardens, the devices we could use to do useful automation and make life easier are turning ever more into these dumbed down consumption portals, and the knowledge and skills to understand the difference between what is happening and what is possible are being overlooked so most people don't even realise what they're missing and how much they're being taken for a ride, usually in the pursuit of the mighty dollar.
We have ubiquitous access to the allowed functionality, that is as reliable as the functionality provider decides to make it (reliability may be removed after the sale if the provider so wishes).
Modern machines empower people to do as they are told, and nothing else.
for many it was a word processor with slow internet, and a ton of vulnerabilities and viruses.
As far as I can tell, for the most part not much has changed. The only difference is now people write to one another via Facebook instead of mailing letters to one another.
They still complain about the speed of their connections. Vulnerabilities and viruses haven't gone away. About the only things that are different is that we now take pictures with our telephones every six minutes, and the internet has increased the ability to make people mad at one another.
I'm slowly becoming more and more convinced that people don't remember 20 years ago - systems are so much faster and stable now it's a whole new world. My system rarely if ever crashes - 20 years go it would be a daily thing.
People are going to complain no matter what. What matters is that things are actually better - people being upset about that doesn't actually indicate whether things are better.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if you're going to do forced updates then you might as well spend some time making the entire user experience nicer. I don't know what the technical challenges are exactly, but not forcing a reboot unless there's really a critical patch might be a good start.
And not mixing security fixes with feature upgrades, not forcing the latter to be installed would be nice. That would also reduce the massive breakage many windows updates cause due to poor quality and high change rate.
Yeah, maybe. I don't really know much of the Windows internals, so I try not to assume too much (hence my question in the top comment[1], which was very much a "curiosity"-question, and not a "omg, wtf"-question).
Accepting such a giant restriction ('not allowed' implies no override) would mean you are at the mercy of whoever controls the self-driving cars. They can kidnap you any time you enter a car, or prevent you from using your car to escape, or just subtly make your life very difficult.
Historically, people that allowed themselves to completely fall into someone else's hands have not fared well. The words 'slavery' and 'genocide' tend to come up when describing their fate.
While criminal botherders are in a sense "more" responsible for the damage, Microsoft also has some liability in their negligence when then wrote vulnerable software. But it's relatively easy to hold MS accountable for their part than to extract damages from botherders. So MS either covers their butts by locking down the software or pays out the nose for damages.
It's not just Windows boxes. I recently upgraded someone's phone--running iOS 8. It had to be updated because an app that was important to her wouldn't run with it anymore.
Botnets can attack directly, and don't need to spoof IPs. A couple thousand residential computers doing TLS handshakes can ruin anyone's day just as fast as a few computers in a datacenter spoofing udp chargen requests.
Windows machines get forcibly update because users didn't use their personal property the way Microsoft wants. How exactly they shoot themselves in the foot is irrelevant, they have every right to do so.
> Seriously, how about just giving control to users?
"Users" as you likely remember them—"power users by necessity", people who willingly learned the arcana of computing just to use the thing—don't exist any more. They died out in the 90s, when computers stopped booting to BASIC and dialing into BBSes.
You know how it feels to use a centrally-managed corporate workstation?
That's how people now expect all computers to work. They're using it; but "someone else" is the sysadmin. They don't have admin privileges; "the IT department" does, or "their phone carrier" does, or "Google" does (in the case of something like a Chromebook.)
Corporations can still be the sysadmin for their own enterprise rollouts of Windows (and if you're a real "power user", I'd suggest going the route of pretending you're a corporate IT department managing a one-machine deployment—Windows is a lot more "submissive" in that state); but now Microsoft themselves are the sysadmin-of-last-resort.
But don't think for a moment that before this, most users were their own sysadmin-of-last-resort. Again, that died out in the 90s, when computers stopped being "business machines" that hobbyists could do some pro-am work with (in the same sense that one might build a machine-shop in their garage); and began instead being marketed to anyone and everyone.
Before Microsoft assumed the role, the sysadmin-of-last-resort for most post-Eternal-September users was either "my nephew who knows computers"; or it was "nobody"—until things got really bad, at which point they'd bring the computer into a repair shop and a random repair-tech would be the sysadmin. (It's like having no family doctor, only a free clinic you visit in emergencies!)
As one of those former "nephews who knows computers", let me tell you that I'd much rather Microsoft have the job than I.
> Don't tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case.
People like the idea of donating organs, but that doesn't mean they'll ever seek out a consent form to opt into the organ-donor program. But in countries where it's opt-out, they don't bother to seek out the de-consent form, either. It's just such a far-away concern to most people, that there's too much inertia for people to change the default no matter what it is. (And if someone comes up to them and asks, they'll default to whichever option is less trouble—i.e. continuing be either opted-in or opted-out, depending—even if it's not the option that they'd prefer. They just don't want this time stolen from their day, for something they care so little about; and since changing things can often have unexpected not-mentioned-up-front labor-costs, they put negative expected-value on switching, even if they put positive value on the switched end-state.)
> Before Microsoft assumed the role, the sysadmin-of-last-resort for most post-Eternal-September users was either "my nephew who knows computers"; or it was "nobody"—until things got really bad, at which point they'd bring the computer into a repair shop and a random repair-tech would be the sysadmin. (It's like having no family doctor, only a free clinic you visit in emergencies!)
I hated to be the nephew too, but as an adult, I think repair shops are a good idea. They're local businesses - people you can enter a normal, human relationship with, who live next to you and pay taxes where you live. I'd prefer the money to go to them that to be endlessly siphoned away by global megacorps.
Small-town repair shops (that are part of the community) are indeed great. (Though even then, the friction of thinking you'll have to pay $50 just to diagnose a weird pop-up means people won't take very much advantage of them, whereas Microsoft's maintenance-presence on your computer can be near-constant. For most users, a local computer+repair shop selling them a support warranty/subscription, that they then take frequent advantage of, would probably be the optimal arrangement. Sort of like how people with insurance visit their doctor more frequently.)
On the other hand, bringing your computer to GeekSquad every three years, when staff turnover is such that you'll have about the same level of continuity-of-relationship as with a customer-support-hotline call center, gets you none of those benefits. And that's what most users in the "nothing" category do.
It's the GeekSquad paradigm that I think is very closely analogous to bringing yourself to a free clinic only for "sudden" (i.e. chronic, but got worse) health problems. As, if you come in once a year or less, you'll be seen each time by a different college med-student freshly on their practicum, with the one you saw last time having since graduated.
Of course, there's also always OEM support, ala Apple's AppleCare / Genius Bar. That's usually better than the GeekSquads of the world, and draws more people in than local no-name shops. But it's also, as you say, another megacorporation siphoning off local profits. (Though the store itself is at least employing locals.)
> Software as a service is good for my tax declaration
Could you elaborate on that? When buying a permanent license you should be able to deduct the full sum as a cost of doing business, it shouldn't matter if it's Saas or not.
You have to depreciate permanent licenses as if they're any other durable good. With SAAS you can just write the whole thing off as a service. They get you to the same place, but SAAS does it with significantly less fuss.
>With SAAS you can just write the whole thing off as a service. They get you to the same place, but SAAS does it with significantly less fuss.
Isn't this made up for by SaaS being cheaper (at least initially) than permanent licenses? eg. office 365 personal (SaaS) is $70/year, but office 2019 (perpetual) is $250 one time. I'm not sure what the "fuss" is.
Before Windows 10 I would just disable the Windows Update service and enable it on my own schedule when I wanted to do updates. I've had my machines stay undisruptive for months on end, sometimes up to a year without rebooting, and the reboots would be initiated by me (hardware changes, power outages, or updates that I actually wanted to install.)
Since Windows 10, Microsoft has caught onto this and added a new service that checks if you disabled the Windows Update service and re-enables it automatically, and sets permissions that initially deny you from tampering with it that then makes this a little more challenging to get around, but still possible to do manually. I later found Windows Update Blocker (WUB) which does all of this for you in one click. I have been using it ever since, and have never again been nagged by any update or experienced an unexpected reboot: https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-5/
I think I killed mine with the shutup10 tool. I can't imagine having my OS telling me when to update (and potentially kill the features I need, e.g. the Hyper-V) and when to restart. I understand the need to force an Office-running, email-attachment-clicking user to update periodically, but as a dev this is way past the line I would ever tolerate. And thanks to (also) folks like you, I don't have to, so thanks for that.
Another first thing I do after Windows 10 install is killing the task scheduler. Among other things, it contains a broken task related to Xbox support, which activates on idle and takes up like 50% of the CPU. I think that people think that the machine is running a defrag or some other optimization.
If Linux got its UI business together, I would flee from the Windows immediately. I've been 10 years on Mac but we all know where that's going. Now with WebKit and Node.js so advanced, I'm not sure what's stopping us from creating a really nice Linux UI ecosystem. Perhaps the state of Linux laptop drivers, mainly the touchpad ones.
>Not sure whats stopping us from creating a really nice Linux UI ecosystem. Perhaps the state of Linux laptop drivers, mainly the touchpad ones.
Only one laptop where I use a touchpad, but I've had no issues with it. Optimus was a bigger issue, but Pop worked with it oob.
I think the bigger issue with the Linux UI ecosystem is that everyone has a different idea on what it should be. I've found that with distro's that have opinionated defaults (Zorin, elementary, Pop!_OS to some extent) almost everything is a consistent UI.
I would even say my Pop laptop has a nicer/more consistent UI than win10 oob.
Microsoft has caught onto this and added a new service that checks if you disabled the Windows Update service and re-enables it automatically, and sets permissions that initially deny you from tampering with it that then makes this a little more challenging to get around, but still possible to do manually.
Before Windows 10, I knew of only two categories of software would behave so offensively as to actively fight your attempts to control it: malware and DRM (which some would argue could be grouped into the former, but I digress...) Software that "phoned home" with details on what you did with it was also widely criticised and known as "spyware".
It's sad that such tactics have now become the norm, with the excuse of "security" justifying the means.
Around the time Win10 came out, these effort curves crossed to Linux favor for me. Running bog standard Ubuntu LTSes has given me zero issues and zero shenanigans over the past decade.
Depending on the user, the psychological result can be quite different. I mean it doesn't really matter if Windows reboots and kills your computation overnight, you can just do it again! On average over time, it probably doesn't waste your time any more than making Linux work would. But it feels rude.
On average over time, I feel that Linux definitely loses out on desktop. But it's not about rudeness, but about the choice of when you want to use the administration time. If you have a strict deadline or presentation coming up, then that 1 hour for updates or a forced restart can be much more costly than when the update happens during the weekend or while watching a movie.
Yes but I've been in a situation trying to debug CUPS because it was corrupting fonts, and urgently needed a print out of something. So, pick your poison...
My solution to this is to use a LTS type release that's reinstalled and configured once every few years for boring desktop work. Almost never add or remove any software, just apply updates weekly or so.
For dev or other technical work I find a more up to date system that undergoes frequent changes and might break on occasion to be tolerable.
By all means make the default behaviour apply security updates, but that is very different to forcing updates of all types no matter what.
In any case, for users who do have some idea of what they're doing, OS security updates are probably a relatively low priority today. Frequent robust backups, proper firewalls, and applying security updates to any applications that pull content from remote sources are likely to be more important in practice. If you get to the point where you're relying on your OS to protect you, you've probably already gone wrong at least once. Most desktop OSes won't do much to protect you against threats like data exfiltration anyway, because the security models are nowhere near sophisticated enough.
If it didn't require a reboot, an automatic update wouldn't bother me at all. I hate that my one remaining Windows machine is never in the same state I left it because it rebooted during the night.
Rebooting, and nuking settings. I’ve lost count of the number of times I come back to the PC and it’s rebooted, forgotten my monitor layout, forgotten my sound settings, etc etc.
I lean towards this too. Microsoft and iTunes can't seem to get package management right. Maybe now that they've dabbled in Linux they'll update their process.
The one that really, really gets me is I can’t RDP onto my work computer after a reboot which was initiated after an automatic update. Meaning my computer is completely useless to me until I go into the office again. Unreal.
If I had the time and the drive I would transfer my work flow over to Linux. I use it everyday, just not on my work computer. It’s getting more and more painful having to deal with Windows.
Except when you can't, because Windows will conveniently forget about your setting (or, some random OEM garbage for "maintaining" your computer will pop up a "rebooting in 5... 4..." message in the middle of the night.)
If you mean by disabling the scheduled task, this doesn't stick. Even if you delete all the scheduled tasks, or otherwise mess with them, they always come back
You say "delete", but are you actually overwriting the task executable with garbage, unlinking it, then creating a folder named "stupidshit.exe" (or whatever the executable was called) so that re-creating it will fail, or just removing it from a list?
It works by killing and disabling the windows update service every 10 seconds, so it should be resilient to pretty much any aggressive changes ms makes. It does allow manually updating when you want to too. I want to have it handle some other nasty behaviours too eventually, but its enough for me to use for now.
It’s so sad that is has come to this. It’s one of the reasons I’m a Mac user for the most part. Although since Mojave they have gotten more and more annoying with updates.
My biggest issue is windows server. I’m worried if I disable updates it will break it.
I thought about that, but it would require maintenance. This can be a mostly fire-and-forget method, which is especially valuable to me because windows is not my primary OS.
As an outsider (someone who doesn't use any MS products) looking in... why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform?
Windows 10 has, since it's inception, been a privacy nightmare, which simply does not respect the user or administrator. There might be some hacks to let you turn some of these behaviors off, but it seems like they aren't likely to survive an OS update.
I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.
>why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform?
Because companies often have a portfolio of software apps that only run on Windows os. No Linux (or even macOS) options. Yes, if a company can do _all_ its business processes only with a web brower, then it can conceivably have all employees use Linux desktop with Firefox.
But many companies have critical apps like business analytics, CAD modeling, warehouse inventory management, legacy apps, etc that have no Linux options. These companies had Windows XP, then upgraded to Windows 7, then upgraded to Windows 10 -- so they could maintain Microsoft's continued support. Even for home use, my friend who sews has an embroidery machine and that software only runs on Windows. She can't run the embroidery software in a VM inside of Linux because the USB security dongle doesn't work through the vm's USB emulator. She's "stuck" on Windows too.
A new YC startup with no historical baggage of legacy apps can "choose their destiny" by being a 100% Linux/Apple shop but mature Fortune 1000 companies will be running a flavor of Windows for decades to come because it's too expensive to switch off of it.
I suppose like it or not, this is the real answer to the question.
I do wonder why companies continue to write new software for the Windows platform. I guess more and more is moving to the web, but it seems like I still see relatively new programs that are Windows-only.
>, but it seems like I still see relatively new programs that are Windows-only.
Yes if we think of well-known software like Photoshop (Windows or Mac) and MS Excel/Word (Windows or Mac), etc. ... or cross-platform apps (Slack,Skype,Discord) using Electron ... then it seems like avoiding Windows is possible.
However, a lot of the "invisible" or "dark matter" of the software universe is LOB (Line Of Business) apps and they are overwhelmingly written for Windows instead of macOS/Linux. As random trivia, I also noticed that the newest high-end oscilloscopes from Keysight have embedded Windows 10 instead of Linux as the underlying os.[1] I'm not sure what the technical reason was for building the scope's ui on Windows because their older scopes already used Linux. Maybe it was better graphics SDK with DirectX or some other Window's dependency.
Can confirm that Tektronix is using Windows also, though I think they had been for quite some time. Seems like a really odd design decision for an appliance. I would probably tend towards like FreeRTOS (or at least some variation of an RTOS). On the other hand the EEs I’ve worked with also use their scopes as workstations with external monitors and everything, so maybe that’s part of it.
Momentum. A software company's target market dictates their target platforms, and companies buy equipment that best meets their business needs. A typical company can only afford to change a small part of their IT landscape at a time, so IT management must be careful to never break their web of dependencies.
Companies write Windows programs because that's the platform most people have. Most people have that platform because it's what people are writing software for. It's a vicious cycle.
Apps that ran on Windows XP/7 will probably run just fine in Linux under Wine. Windows-specific drivers for stuff like embroidery machines, dongles etc. are a different story altogether.
For non-games (which benefit from Vulcan and non-ancient OpenGL), is Wine substantially better on Linux than on macOS?
I haven't tried the Linux iteration in years, but on Mac it still fails 8 times out of 10. (Mind, it can still be tremendously useful when it does work.)
> why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform?
Long term stable backwards compatible, cross compatible with other popular tools other people are using, familiar to a large pool of employees, supported by large numbers of third party software and hardware vendors. It’s cheap.
> I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.
Not buying any electricity from the grid today? Or any internet or cloud services, or any rented office space?
or just ignoring the group policy options and the months of time you could choose to update, ignoring the “update at times I’m not using it” options, ignoring the bandwidth metering options, not restricting its internet connectivity, and on the last possible day instructing all your employees to hit the “defer updates” button by hand and ... by gosh it’s gone!
Until you cannot use your system at a critical time because MS decided you needed an update. Then the cost may be anything between what you paid, and the total value of your entire business.
> Not buying any electricity from the grid today? Or any internet or cloud services, or any rented office space?
There are regulations to protect people from arbitrarily loosing access to those things, and to provide them a means to dispute bogus eviction / cut-off notices. You cannot simply walk into a space you have leased and tell everyone to pack up and leave that moment. Except for the cloud services bit, but I contend that many businesses could avoid the use of cloud services if they so choose.
> or just ignoring the group policy options and the months of time you could choose to update
If I paid for it, it should be my prerogative to never update if I so choose. The fact that you can use an obscure GPO that may or may not work on this weeks minor revision doesn't sound very compelling.
> ignoring the “update at times I’m not using it” options
I have read many reports of Windows and it's users disagreeing what constitutes "using it".
> ignoring the bandwidth metering options
If I am not on a metered connection, I should not have to use settings relating to that to manage when my computer updates.
It’s been standard since the days of windows 2000 if not NT to manage business installs of Windows with group policies. There’s no way a business choosing to run Windows should be calling GPO “obscure” - how else are you setting policies on your business windows machines all this time?
> Until you cannot use your system at a critical time because MS decided you needed an update. Then the cost may be anything between what you paid, and the total value of your entire business.
Which could also happen if you put off a year’s worth of updates and get exploited.
> it should be my prerogative to never update if I so choose.
MS released a feature update a year ago, you’ve been unable to find a time to install it all year, now it’s being pushed on you. This is a reaction to the previous state of the world where windows machines all around the world never installed updates and we all suffered when they got malware and became spam bots, DDoS sources, bot farm members and worse. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
> If I am not on a metered connection, I should not have to use settings relating to that to manage when my computer updates.
No you shouldn’t have to. But whining “there’s no way to stop it this could cost me my entire business!” Then given a way to stop it you say “I don’t want to” is ridiculous.
There are many small businesses that have a handful of machines with local accounts that used to be on Windows XP, Vista or 7 (Professional/Business editions) and worked fine for a decade.
They do not need, and don't have the resources to install and manage an Active Directory domain and Windows 10 Enterprise licenses, and yet still deserve their workstations to work predictably and not get in their way.
Accepting the idea that you need to invest in Active Directory, Server and Enterprise licenses and an entire IT team to manage all that just to have the privilege of your computers not constantly getting in your way is nuts.
Lots of things which worked fine for a decade, don't work now, or aren't good ideas now. If they want to reject the present, and in this context reject updates, they can still use XP.
It's also a bit weird to say Windows 10 which is on something like a billion computers worldwide, doesn't "work fine".
And it's a bit weird to suggest that a small business with a handful of machines, is extremely disadvantaged by having a Windows Feature Update once a year, after being prompted for it and ignoring it for months.
> "don't have the resources to install and manage an Active Directory domain"
If they have an internet connection, Azure Active Directory[1] starts at $Free.
> and yet still deserve
They deserve more and different than the contract they entered into says?
> their workstations to work predictably
What exactly is unpredictable about this? It's not voodoo or random, feature updates have come out every Spring and Fall for the past five years, as it was documented that they would, and the Autumn one is a long-term-supported one.
> "just to have the privilege of your computers not constantly getting in your way is nuts."
Describing a predictable, short, /controllable/ reboot once in months as "constantly getting in your way" is nuts.
Has Microsoft really done nothing else worth frothing at the mouth about that it's come down to "they install updates" these days?
> a bit weird to say Windows 10 which is on something like a billion computers worldwide, doesn't "work fine"
A operating system that spies on you, constantly nags you to use Edge/Login to a Microsoft account/etc is not one that "works fine" in my opinion.
> If they have an internet connection, Azure Active Directory[1] starts at $Free.
And now you're introducing a third-party dependency, a dependency on the network, a dependency on a service that might be shut down or the pricing model changed, and turned a single local computer that worked fine for a decade into what is essentially a distributed system. Not to mention the admin overhead of setting all of it up.
> What exactly is unpredictable about this?
I'm talking less about updates in this case and more about the other nasty features such as the spying/telemetry, random bugs that weren't there (start menu search is broken despite being fine in Windows 7), advertising/Candy Crush in the start menu, constant nags to use Edge, etc, and whatever else the new update might bring (if it doesn't outright make your system unusable or delete your data).
> Describing a predictable, short, /controllable/ reboot once in months as "constantly getting in your way" is nuts.
Look at my previous point. But regardless of all the other features, if the user has a reason to not install updates, it should be his right to do so. He paid for that computer & Windows license, he's paying for the power and bandwidth. It should be up to him to control how his hardware operates.
> There’s no way a business choosing to run Windows should be calling GPO “obscure” - how else are you setting policies on your business windows machines all this time?
We finally got a product team to move off of Windows because of stuff like this. We had a ton of performance problems that ended up being Windows Update churning the CPU and RAM (on Windows Server, on a VPC), and it took us 3 months to figure out how to turn it off in the latest releases. It could easily come back on again in a future update.
Windows Server does do these things[1] - but don't worry, it's all for our own good: "Windows and Windows Server diagnostic data gives every user a voice in the operating system’s development ... For our enterprise customers, representation in the dataset ... is a real benefit."
(.NET, which you might run on a Windows server, also has telemetry enabled by default unless you set DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT to 1.)
I get the feeling that there are many small to medium businesses where production systems do run on Windows. Maybe not the type of "production" that we on HN would think of, but nevertheless important systems without which business cannot be conducted.
I dual boot Linux and Windows. These days I need to boot Windows a lot less, but I still occasionally run into problems related to games. Usually anti-cheat systems picking a fight with Proton, but also some examples like Terraria 1.4 running in a 1080p canvas in a 1440p window as they updated a library which their Mac/Linux guy had patched to fix window size on those systems to a newer version, but not new enough that it incorporates the patches to actually fix the problem.
I've used Linux at home for 2-3 years now. Most of my games library works fine or is tolerable with certain issues, e.g. Terraria I run in windowed mode 1080p, because full-screen mode is weirdly cropped where the mouse can move to. Besides that, I've considered dual-booting just to play the few remaining games with friends that keep pressuring me to join them and "just get Windows". Its very tempting, but I first need to buy a larger SSD to do it. (My Small FF case doesn't have room for 2.5" Drives.)
Does Steam fix the Terraria issues? When I used to play video games, I never noticed that it acted weird on Linux (even in Wayland or with a tiling window manager).
Terraria's full screen and high res screen support was only broken by the most recent major patch 1.4 which released 1.5 months ago. It worked perfectly prior.
You can run the windows version with proton via steam but you need to use proton tricks to install dotnet into the proton environment and it's worse than the native 1.3 (annoying flickering if the cursor leaves the window for example)
> Windows 10 has, since it's inception, been a privacy nightmare
I know that's not necessarily what you would like and that you're surely talking about the general issue of privacy, but you can actually block telemetry and other stuff you don't want at the DNS level. A pihole is quite effective at doing so.
The default should be opting out of these things. I paid hundreds of dollars for the operating system and word processing suite, why do they need to extract more money, and why do i have to opt out of a huge company creeping on me.
These are not problems you face on production systems. We use windows exclusively (vaccine r&d), and our IT is easily able to control when and how updates are deployed on all of our systems. I have a W10 test box in my office that has been running without a reboot for 600+ days.
>Why would anyone use this platform?
There is no other system that takes backwards compatibility as seriously as Windows. Most companies like to keep their investment when they purchase high-value software. This is especially true for us when some of the software we use costs as much as a car.
Pretty much all the replies miss the point that the business versions of Windows (not just the server but workstation) can and are centrally managed by the business down to what patches are installed (and when), when reboots occur, etc.
It's consumers who have no control over the process.
>I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.
then get enterprise license
Over last 2 or 1 year I had to wait like _once_ for update when I powered the pc at the beginning of the day
> Windows 10 has, since it's inception, been a privacy nightmare
Windows 10 is the evolution of Windows, so it's inherited 30+ years of cruft.
It's easy to compare it to Android or Chrome and say "Look how bad this is...".
That being said, if you're calling the Telemetry a privacy nightmare then you don't know what you're talking about. The privacy issues in Windows 10 aren't with the Telemetry and go back way before Windows 10.
There are a lot of comments on this thread which ignore one important point. Windows updates are totally centrally controllable to an enterprise user. They can be made silent, and force rebooting can be incredibly rare. On the other hand I get lots of calls about mac problems which are caused by not updating! That is not really the Unix stability that people argue for, is it? We answer Mac calls with a 'have you tried updating, then turn it off and on again'
I'd love to hear about the long list of issues that require updating on Mac. I have many old Macs and I've never seen an issue that require updating other than new software (especially from the App Store) requiring a newer OS or the inconvenience that Safari updates are tied to OS updates.
The idea that Mac is unstable and requires a lot of updates and reboots to just function is news to me...
'I can't send emails'
'I have not received any emails today'
'I can't save a file I have been working on all day'
These are so common from my Apple using user segment that they are running jokes in our IT team. I have a feeling abou tthe root cause (below)...but they are exacerbated by the user base beleiveing some myth that Mac's somehow do not need updating and rebooting. And before anyone asks, I have actually heard the words 'I don't need to reboot I'm on a Mac.' come out of a users mouth. I have been watching our remote management tools and Windows users seem to see shutting down at the end of the day as normal behaviour, whereas my Mac users tend to restart when they have to. (before anyone says anything, my experiments have shown that left on for days on end both Windows and Mac show performance degradation, ususally from the classic memory hogs of Excel, Adobe CC and Chrome.)
I think the answer to why so many systems are troubled by updates is that your average Mac or PC does not exist in isolation, and are really semi-dumb terminals for a bunch of cloud services from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. The clients need to stay up-to-date with the service. The typical, 'Linux user running a simulation over multiple days' that are posting about not having to update below are existing in isolation form those other services.
You’re saying they can’t send emails or save files because they are behind on updates? I’ve never once encountered these issues and they frankly sound like problems that people have when they aren’t used to using computers.
I don’t use Adobe and Microsoft on Mac much. Chrome is obviously a huge memory hog due to tab sandboxing but realistically you just need to shut down the browser and/or most of your tabs once in a while. Updating the OS (or even restarting) sounds like overkill when the same result is likely obtained from restarting the browser with no tabs open or switching to Safari which is more RAM efficient
Too many users were using options to hit the 'defer updates for 365 days' button.
Microsoft can't let them do that ("...Star Fox!"), they NEED the newest features, security updates, and telemetry.
Cynical: The stupid users don't know what's good for em, that's for MS to decide now, not the users.
However, there is an opt out via GPO for now. Of course if that gets used enough it will be ignored.
"If you wish to continue leveraging deferrals, you can use local Group Policy (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Windows Update for Business > Select when Preview builds and Feature Updates are received or Select when Quality Updates are received)."
next they'll hook the camera and microphone into the telemetry service
(sounds far fetched, right? if you told me 10 years ago that the 2020 version of Windows Pro had adware, spyware and reboots whenever it wants I would have laughed at you)
I may be a cynical, and lets face it angry, old man, but I am quite confident they do know why and just don't care because their priorities do not lie with making the user experience good.
Counterpoint: A critical security bug in Windows led to the power grid going down due to a worm. Maybe security updates shouldn't be dismissible for weeks and weeks?
Counter-Counterpoint: if Microsoft made updates painless, users would notice them less, and defer them less, and be more up to date/secure.
Updates are highly disruptive. An update happening at the wrong time forever taints a user's view of updates: an unexpected reboot and hour long install the night before a term paper is due, a reboot to fix a crashing program unexpectedly installs some lengthy update, update progress bars are bigger liars than politicians, an update fails so Windows has to un-apply the update which takes $ages for some reason the user doesn't care about. The way updates happen on Windows is anti-user so it's not surprising so many users go out of their way to avoid them.
To extend the counter-counterpoint: there are at least two types of updates: feature updates, and security updates. I don't think people would mind the latter all that much, but they often mind the former. As long as they're not put on parallel tracks, many people will refrain from updates entirely.
> Counter-Counterpoint: if Microsoft made updates painless, users would notice them less, and defer them less, and be more up to date/secure.
But it is painless, at least for me. Just install it a few days after patch tuesday before you go to bed and you should be fine. Sure, you can probably make the experience even better (eg. hotpatching), but the current process doesn't seem hard or demanding.
Windows 10 will literally auto reboot while you are playing game, ignore the fact it's a game and think of it as high resource usage. People probably don't care if their machine reboots in the middle of the night, they do care when it decides to reboot right in the middle of usage.
>Windows 10 will literally auto reboot while you are playing game, ignore the fact it's a game and think of it as high resource usage.
I feel like we're missing some context here. Is this happening the week that the patch was released? Or was the system unpatched for weeks/months, and the user clicked "delay" multiple times?
>People probably don't care if their machine reboots in the middle of the night, they do care when it decides to reboot right in the middle of usage.
The grandparent comment was complaining exactly about this.
> I feel like we're missing some context here. Is this happening the week that the patch was released? Or was the system unpatched for weeks/months, and the user clicked "delay" multiple times?
Hotpatching actually used to exist in Windows versions prior to Windows 8, but it was removed because few updates were made to support it. In the 12 years of support for Windows Server 2003, only 10 updates were released that supported hotpatching. Additionally, malicious software has been reported to have taken advantage of the feature. [1]
Your parent comment, and all of their ancestor comments, are talking about updates in general, and not about security updates specifically.
Here over on the Linux side of the world, we have enjoyed the separation of security updates from feature updates for such a long time. We even voluntarily turn on automatic updates on our servers because of how much confidence we have in the stability of the system and that the updates shall not compromise that.
In a corporate network full of critical systems, absolutely! On a home PC used to check email or play games... no way should updates be forced upon an end user who specifically opts out. Note this update applies to Win10 "Pro" versions, not just enterprise or volume licensing, so developers who need to test/support older versions will also have problems.
I think you have it backwards. It's the home users that you have to force updates on. Corporate users will have their own patching schedule that's usually on a 1-2 week delay from patch Tuesday.
Like it's wild to me that people want to leave their boxes unpatched for a year because it's annoying.
Getting your pc compromised as part of a botnet or malicious code keylogging or uploading your data online through an exploit is something a lot of power users feel they are immune to.
The corporate users I know are rather 1-2 years delay...
A lot of system I see are left unpatched because no one has time to fight bugs in windows update stuck at some random update. If updates didn't take 1-10 hours to install and still fail 1/4 of the time uptake would be better.
That should be up to the organization, because the other side of that coin is the power grid going down because a critical process was disturbed by changes brought in the update.
Counter-Counterpoint: The features allowed you to specify different delays for feature and security updates.
Why not just take out the security one and leave the feature update, especially since 2004 has been, once again, a complete trainwreck that left many users without a functioning system until they manually blocked people from updating. I've been lucky enough that by the time my PC found out about 2004 it was already on the blocklist, but friends of mine haven't been so lucky.
In order to clarify for those unaware: '2004' here is not referencing a year, it's a version/release number for Windows 10 (with a build number of 19041, just because Microsoft likes to confuse people).
Similar to Ubuntu releases, it's last two digits of year followed by two-digit month (though the actual release isn't always in the nominal month, IIRC, but it's usually close.)
Yeah. I see both sides of this argument, and don't really know where to stand. Probably some middle ground. But I think that this isn't as straightforward of an issue as some people are making it out to be, and pretty much any decision is going to piss off someone. But I also see the points of separating security updates and feature updates.
After my GPU drivers were force updated by MS and caused blue screens, after my local admin account was disabled by an update, I decided to switch my network connection type to metered in windows settings. Now I am in full control of updates.
While I had no blue screens, the WU NVidia drivers for my GTX 670 were causing visual tearing on both desktop and in games. So I had to look up for a solution that turns off drivers delivery via WU, then uninstall drivers, clean up all the mess and install last working version before NVidia decided to fix the issue. IIRC that was around 1703 and gave me so much fun.
Want us to be more tolerant of updates? Set things up with much better support for shutting programs down cleanly and ideally restarting them as they were. Add a Windows message that says "shut down for restart" and don't do a forced restart until every program has honored it. (Obviously, older programs won't support it.)
That's actually very close to what happens in Windows 10 2004. UWP apps, store apps, and any app updated reasonably recently (so, ime, Chrome) will absolutely reboot and resume state after a machine restart. Try it out, it's cool.
Shutdown is currently two-phase, and has been since 7. Programs receive a shutdown notification, and then can handle it, and the machine doesn't shut down until all are handled... or until 2 minutes pass, because occasionally programs misbehave, and one program shouldn't be able to hold up the entire shutdown process.
The request isn't for it to be two phase, it's for auto-shutdown to cancel if any program can't fully restore itself.
If there's going to be a forced shutdown, to make sure everyone updates, it should come after half a week to a week of having a big warning on the screen. Windows should never be forcing programs closed when the user is on a coffee break or gone for the day or asleep.
Also chrome will reopen pages, but if you were doing something on that page it's going to be gone. So unless they improve that, it's not a great candidate for auto-reboot.
For Chrome, that's going to be a fix on Chrome's side - you can't simply suspend/unsuspend like with hibernate because libraries are going to be changing, so it's up to each program to figure out how to restore. UWP handles it for you but, well.
As for waiting for ALL programs to be ready: No. Not going to happen. There are programs written in 1996 still running on Windows PCs today that don't comprehend the event model, nevermind listening to the shutdown event to save state. And they will forever run. And the system is going to have to reboot at some point.
The alerts were tried. People didn't like being told their computer was going to restart, so the alerts went away.
If you only check programs that are in the task bar, you'll find plenty of computers where every running program is restart-aware and able to mostly save its state.
> The alerts were tried. People didn't like being told their computer was going to restart, so the alerts went away.
And those programs handle a two minute window fine. This is two literal, wall-clock minutes. The problem is never the head. The problem is the long tail (not even that long!) - notepad, LabVIEW, Blackberry Storage Manager don't handle the event; Hexchat, Photoshop, and Mathematica opt not to restart.
I'm trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen every 6 months, but I don't see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they have to be so massive (several GB downloads)?
And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels and an overall inconsistent UI and plenty of bugs. The whole OS is like a permanent work in progress.
They definitely need to be that frequent, because the less often your upgrade the more risky and painful it is. It feels like most the OS X releases are despised as buggy and breaking everything, since they try to do too much in a year. And then you have the occasional release that stabilizes things and mollifies the users. ChromeOS releases every couple of months. The changes are so incremental that it's hard to notice they even happen. And if there are breakages, they're hard to notice since it's just a couple of things rather than everything. Also, they can be fixed or rolled back quickly, since there isn't a year of other feature work built on top of whatever caused the breakage.
Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different?
Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens twice a year.
Releasing too often is just churn for the sake of churn. Debian issues one stable release every two years, and it takes many months to get a release into shape after the freeze on major (system-wide) updates.
Debian is not Windows. Debian is a well-tested collection of frozen-in-time packages that receive backported security fixes (an approach that does not scale to applications the size of Chromium and Firefox). Debian doesn't have to do any marketing; stability on servers is of the utmost importance.
Windows, on the other hand, "needs" to have new features annually or biannually for marketing purposes. Same with macOS and iOS. Windows is an integrated system, not a collection of packages.
While I agree that constant releases are annoying, I do understand why modern software is released frequently. Companies that make money off of ad engagement (like social networks) do A/B testing to make money. This usually requires frequent updates.
>And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels
I'm not saying that this is good, but what's wrong with that?
You cannot kill/significantly change the old one, meanwhile you want to add something more user-friendly with easy access to probably frequently used configs, what would you do?
All these never ending stories with Windows Update in W10 is like walking around the problem that is caused by lack of proper QA team that was pushed onto users and removal of previously perfectly working feature of selective updates installing - which was obviously great because in case of problems user could just skip the bugged patch and wait till a fixed version is released. The old way of delivering patches in Vista/7 style should return - even by a price of patches "weight".
I get it: they want people to stay up-to-date to avoid problems of zombie-machines but Windows isn't OSX that works on narrow set of hardware and software configurations - these differ much (duh) and that affects how updates work. Expecting that users will ditch their workflow to report all issues on forums (or these will come from the "enthusiasts" testing grounds), will want to play countless reinstallations, backups and restoring is just wrong. This leads powerusers who want to have more control over their machines to disable (temporarily or permanently) WU along with associated processes which by the way, seem behave in a very malicious way.
Windows updates have another feature: you wake up in the morning, and UI has changed, the feature set has been updated, things can no longer work. This happens on Android as well. Infuriatingly Google Maps decided to update itself during the day, between two car trips. I'm driving on a freeway, realise I don't know where I'm going, and fire up maps to tell it the address and am confronted with a new UI that is going to take some real concentration to decipher, the sort of concentration that can not be given while driving down a freeway. I yelled a few things at the maps developers that day.
Compare that to Debian. Updates are backports of bug fixes to the existing source code base. It is the absolute smallest change possible to fix the defect. There are literally 10 of thousands of updated to Debian packages over the life time of a single release, and yet you noticing any change over it's entire lifetime is very unlikely. [0] Calling Debian Stable "stable" is an understatement. It's a rock. Bedrock even.
On Debian big changes on happen when you move between versions. Versions are currently supported for 6 years. The timing of moving to a new version is at the compete digression of the user.
[0] That's a bit of a lie. Web browsers in particular are so big and complex the manual work of backporting fixes has overwhelmed the Debian Developers. For those packages only, they stick with the closest upstream provides, which is the ESR version for Firefox. But they only last a year or so, which forces Debian to move to a new version occasionally.
I am honstely surprised that businesses and other organisations have come to accept this constant 24/7 "updates" scenario from Microsoft without some intelligent business people calling them out on it.
Imagine if every month, every week, or even every day someone from an office supply company came around to your office and collected all your pens, pencils and other office supplies and replaced them with "updated" versions. Meanwhile you could detect no meaningful difference from the "old" ones. After a while, you would just tell them to go away: "The supplies I have are working just fine. Thanks."
A happy Ubuntu users here for the last 15 years, I guess I don't really understand what Microsoft is messing around anymore and I'm just glad that I do not need Microsoft at all for so long.
If you must run Windows 10 I strongly recommend the Enterprise LTSB (Long-Term Servicing Branch) version. You have much more control and can strip out most of the garbage.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to get a single copy of Enterprise LTSB. Hint: windows 10 enterprise ltsb gen2
What pisses me off is that a windows machinea spend so much time downloading and installing the OS and just a few Microsoft apps.
Linux machines update everything including hundreds of apps you may have installed (and some are updated very often) and you barely notice it happening because it's so damn efficient.
I genuinely don't understand why people buy the "New Microsoft" marketing line. They are adopting Linux because they have no other option. Where they're strong, the desktop, they're still the same old Microsoft.
It turns out that there are multiple groups of people at Microsoft and these factions aren’t all in agreement all the time.
I’m sure that there are plenty of those at Microsoft that disagree with telemetry and updates that you can’t opt out of. I would bet that many of them are in the developer division.
It doesn't matter that there are multiple groups with differing opinions at MS or at any other organisation. The organisation acts as a organism (or, if you prefer, as a set of emergent behaviours). It is, for all practical purposes, a single entity. So ascribing a behaviour or a wish or a bias to "Microsoft" is an entirely valid generalisation. Generalisations are only bad when applied to isolated/differentiated components/constituents of a compound body.
So which other group on the same order of magnitude of Microsoft's 150,000 employees do you know of that exhibits the same kind of decisiveness that would normally be attributed to a single entity?
All the groups and individual ultimately have to take orders from the top, so if we decide to trust some particual group full of wonderful people, that group will be powerless to stop management from later (when it becomes profitable) betraying that trust.
This is just going to cause technically-inclined people to configure their networks to MITM all calls to the Windows update servers and block updates network-wide.
WINOS >> a work in progress since the 1980's
WINDEVS >> don't touch what is working unless your boss told you to do so.
WINUSERS >> don't update unless your boss tells you to do so if you have no boss don't update. REALITY >> you need two computers which can do the same work if one goes down.
Purchasing Enterprise is definitely super annoying but it's not out of reach for an individual.
You can only purchase Enterprise through Volume Licensing and you have to find/choose a reseller (VAR in msspeak). But you buy one license of Windows 10 Enterprise and 4 cheap user CALs and you're done. You don't actually have to have a business or anything. Any reseller will just put your own name as the business name.
(If your machine didn't come with pro then make that 1 Pro license, 1 Enterprise license, and 3 user CALs.)
So probably the best next step for MS is to prepare something like a "dev" license, i.e. an Enterprise license for the individual that knows what he is doing.
My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care how much they mess up the user experience in the process. Microsoft should reassign that person.