and i thought win10 had manners (short rant)

The other day an update forced itself on my computer.

Windows update is set to always ask nicely and let me pick a date if the update is inconvenient, but as it turns out, this update was run outside of Windows Update. Which defeats the purpose of having customizable settings for Windows Update in the first place. I know it helps little to yell into the void but what are they thinking by doing so?

For the work i lost naively assuming updates will always be run through WU, i got... some social feature ("people") i'll never use pinned to my task bar (why would i want skype/email contacts there? would be a total clutter), and more weirdly got my touchpad settings reset (scrolling got reversed, left/right click division point got moved).

Microsoft has literally stopped caring about its userbase. We're now at the point where they've said "fuck it" and just do whatever they want, however they want.

Hopefully all the people who gave me shit over the years for staying with XP + not upgrading to the latest pile of junk are feeling guilty. (I'm on 7 now though, glad I never went to 8 or 10)

These attitudes, summed with constant viruses attacks (specially when used by the kids) was what made me drop Windows totally at home.
It was difficult at first, but now I'm about 12 years without the needing of reformat an reinstall the whole OS.
Since nobody here uses specific functions only available at Windows, it's a breeze!
I just keep updating, and what I think is necessary or depends of other things.
It still has some problems, but after you get the hang of the thing even troubleshooting becomes easier.

If Microsoft has released a patch for a Windows vulnerability, but you have not installed said patch, your device is still vulnerable. Automatic updates in Windows 10 close vulnerabilities more quickly than manual updates in previous versions of Windows.

For many, the problem with switching from Windows to another operating system is that another operating system other than the one that shipped with a particular laptop is less likely to have drivers for its hardware. Only Macs are compatible with macOS, and not all laptops are compatible with GNU/Linux. Things like audio, WLAN, Bluetooth, backlight brightness, and suspend are the most commonly affected, and on something like an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA, all five of these still have problems in Debian testing. And I'm under the impression that hardware support is one of the things keeping many users of GNU/Linux from trying FreeBSD.

Yes, that's one of the biggest issues I had.
Fortunatelly, since I was using a desktop the parts could be easily exchanged, wich is not possible in many (most?) notebooks.

Unless I misinterpreted FrankenGraphics's post, what was experienced was not an automatic security update, but an automatic upgrade (in this case, to Windows 10 build 1709, the "Fall Creators Update"), which invariably adds a bunch of new useless widgets, installs a dozen "recommended" (i.e. bundled) Store Apps, resets half of your settings, and adds more telemetry (and re-enables whatever you managed to turn off).

Windows performs semiannual feature upgrades in order to reduce the number of Windows versions for which Microsoft must maintain security updates.

Same here. Several years ago I also told my boss I won't use Windows again, even to save my job. I knew that might result in my losing my job; but when I was on Windows, I was angry with the computer all the time, and wanted to throw it out the window. It wasn't worth my health. I did not lose my job though, and instead, the other engineer got into Linux because of what I said, and loved it. On LInux, I can update anytime and be using the computer during the process. I have heard you cannot do that with Windows.


Our son, who worked very successfully for a managed-services provider for a couple of years (but quit because it was too much desk work and not physical enough) was maintaining networks and taking care of clients' computer problems, and according to him, finding drivers was much easier in Linux than in Windows.

*noisily munches on open-source popcorn*

The "major updates" tend to be pushed through but it does pop up a large window for the download that you can tell it "not now". However there was recently a massive flaw found in ALL CPUs, particularly Intel CPUs that NEEDS to be patched and then a bunch of updates to help mitigate the performance costs of said fixes. And if you are a person who always does "not now" it eventually gets to the point where it realizes you don't know what is good for you and applies it. Really the updates on Windows are good things, and good for you. Unlike OSX where an update will usually uninstall 3 things and break 10 programs you where using

Yeah, that's why there's an entire website run by a guy who writes for Computerworld saying the exact opposite, and has been saying the opposite for years (especially post-Windows-7). Oh, and let's not forget about this marketing-driven drivel requiring people with present-day PCs running Windows 7 to have to use this.

Yeah, Windows updates are good things and good for you. *blank stare*

And as I've pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere, Meltdown and Spectre v2 don't need to be patched (the performance hit can be quite severe, up to 30% in some benchmarks) if your system isn't a shared machine, and/or is on a private network, isn't a guest VM, and you actually know what applications you're installing + trust those applications. This applies to every OS and not just Windows (for example, on my home FreeBSD stable/11 box, I specifically disabled PTI (Meltdown mitigation) and IBRS (Spectre mitigation) as the machine is single-user, on bare-metal, and on a private network). Intel has botched these themselves once or twice already, as have enterprise vendors (HP I believe did, Dell rescinded theirs and re-did it), blah blah blah. Yes, I suppose for generic end-users, the best thing to do is to apply BIOS updates (specifically for CPU microcode updates that allow for IBRS capability) and apply OS updates, but a large percentage of the users here are tech-savvy, not generic. Use-case, environment, and demographic all matter.

*offers Rahsennor some open-source sauce*

Perhaps it's easier for desktops than for laptops, particularly compact (smaller than 12") laptops.


What evidence do most people have that they can trust the applications that come with each feature upgrade of Windows 10, or any other proprietary application for that matter? Their source code is not available to the public for review. And I can't tell what you define as "on a private network", in particular whether you intended to include the common case of a network using private network IP addresses (RFC 1918) that has a network address translation (NAT) gateway to the Internet.

Can't say I've ever been much in love with Windows, but 8 and X really make me want as little to do with Windows ever again. We recently had to put together a new PC to work on a contract for a PS4/XBone game, and Windows 10 it was. I kinda hate that computer. It had a couple hardware/driver issues, and on top of that Windows X was much more annoying than I had expected.

1a) You can't turn off the real time virus protection. Just schedule it to be off for a day.
1b) They moved the button for it several times already.
1c) The realtime protection seems to kick in any time the system is busy, and waste an entire CPU core doing it.
2a) Updates that apparently happen whenever they damn well please.
2b) Ex: Go to a short meeting, tell the boss "yeah, I'll make a quick build with that", walk back to your computer and to find it installing updates for the next half an hour in the middle of your workday. -_-
3) "Get Windows X" Do I really need to say anything more?
4) For a while, it would ask me several times a week if I wanted to sign up for MS's DropBox clone. NO THANK YOU ALREADY!
5a) Relatively huge install size. We were rushed putting it together, and opted for a 256GB SSD because the 512GB we wanted was out of stock.
5b) To make it worse, the installer screwed up the partitioning, and 5GB of the SSD isn't even partitioned somehow!? By the time I noticed, it was too late to fix it without a lot of work.
5c) As a Unix guy, a compiler seems like an inseparable part of the OS, and VisualStudio's minimum install is also huge.
6) Configuration for what I've come to expect as basic features in other OSes seems to be a paid feature for Windows Professional.
7) Several instances of "Pop-up ads" in the OS itself trying to convince me to turn Contana back on. NO THANK YOU ALREADY!



Say what? I mean Apple does drop support for stuff at major versions. Ex: OS 9 compatibility, PPC or 32 bit support, etc. I can't say I've ever heard of more than the rare problems from minor upgrades.

My biggest beef with Apple nowadays is graphics. You can't buy a Mac at any price with a particularly great GPU, and they dropped the ball on API support. Metal is a really nice API, but it's not Vulkan, and it's missing functionality that even modern GL supports.

It's true with many devices, but has lots of exceptions.
For example, most HP printers I plug on a Linux PC are automatically installed.
The ones that need to get one or other file to work fine do this very quickly.
It's like a printer nirvana!!

But as Tepples stated, many notebooks (netbooks?) have problems and some PCI devices also do.
On the notebook area I had lots of bad experiences with the ones with SiS and Via chipsets.
As an example of problems with PCI devices are the soundcards.
I got 5 different cheap PCI soundcards that simply had problems reproducing audio with Linux, while they worked fine on Windows.
In the end I have to stick with an USB soundcard, wich wasn't that bad.

Also, there are some "things" I can do easily on Linux and didn't found an easy way to do on Windows.
An example is the multiseat, I only found paid solutions for Windows and was not very happy.
There are some cases that the opposite is also true, like the Autodesk's AutoCad, that many engineers put as a unrreplaceble piece of software and costs a huge amount of money.

Also, is it just me or Cortana sounds like a female pimp's name?

I too am grateful for HPLIP. But for many, the possibility to reuse a printer after having switched to GNU/Linux doesn't justify the extra expense of HP ink over other printer brands' ink.


Tell that to the designers of Halo: Combat Evolved. I imagine Microsoft reused the Cortana brand because it already owned the trademark, which also happens to be why the Quake series is so misleadingly named.

I do get why security updates need to be done. But they're doing the UX related to these updates all wrong in a way that's inconvenient and insulting.

It could be as simple as this:
-Run all updates/"upgrades" via WU.
-If they won't support an old win10 build anymore, clearly show a deadline with a date a week before it happens. Don't just sneak-force it outside of WU.

Clearly, there is a date. They just won't show it to the users. The scenario where you open up your laptop only to see the blue update screen without it being announced properly with a clear deadline date should never happen.

I'm not even opposed to the idea that you should have a windows pro license to be able to forever-block updates (it probably does a lot of casual users good to not have this option while the pro license will let you seal a station (say, a music studio DAW or a terminal used for process control in a factory or something).

Meanwhile, all visible traces of this update have been mildly annoying and time consuming. Ranging from combing through settings to getting everything in order to removing bundles, figuring out what to do with the telemetry & if i'm affected, to the little annoying interface changes. For example, the task manager is now obfuscated (see attachment) behind the requirement of an additional click. (Important note to microsoft UX staff: Stop overthinking. Don't fix what isn't broke).




I have quite the opposite experience actually. With the introduction of Vista, my workflow was swamped and it felt a bit feverish using windows on a bad day and there were always troubleshooting elements. Windows 7 was better, but both 8 and 10 marked significant improvements to my workflow, and that's really important to me.

Microsoft claims that forcing the update like that was an accident. Whether you want to believe that is up to you.

Myself I didn't see any advantage of switching to Windows 10 when the "opportunity" was given, and I've yet to see any reason why I'd want to run it instead of 7.

Microsoft has announced plans to end security updates for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020. So you're likely to see a bunch of zero days dumped in the first quarter of 2020.

... were a bunch of vulnerabilities in WinXP reported shortly after April 2014?

Looks like Microsoft indeed relased some updates for Win XP last year.
Does older (than XP) Windows users still exists??
I remember have seen some patches to Win98's kernel done by some programmers, but I have no idea how well they work.
Also, I've being using an Win98 on a VM to communicate with my N64's Gameshark, since it's the only thing I didn't figured out how to do in Linux yet.

Back in early 2016 or so, Chrome on Android forced an update of around 40+ mb over data connection, bypassing both "only update applications manually" and "only update over wi-fi" settings. I hadn't been using Chrome as my default browser, but I absolutely disabled it afterward.

Okay LOL well I'm not "upgrading" to 10 now to avoid whatever you think's going to happen then. Call me in 2020 and see how I'm doing. If my laptop kicks the bucket before then I'll probably have 10 from a new one anyway.

I just use Linux, it work much better than Windows. (I used to have Windows but got rid of that computer due to a hardware problem, so I acquired a new computer with Linux instead.)

There is also FreeDOS if you want that; it boots much faster than Windows or Linux do.

Regarding drivers: windows 7 was really solid, but of the 6 or 7 machines I own/maintain, about half being windows 10 and half being Linux, I have as many or more driver issues with windows than with Linux.

3 or 4 years ago this wasn't the case... It seems like driver support on Linux gets better every year while windows actually gets worse.

Aren't these MS attitudes somehow violating the EULA?
I don't know much about it, but maybe someone with spare time (and money) can try to take MS to court because of this, or not...

A few months ago, I tried the disabling automatic updates using the method from this article:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-rebooting-after-installing-updates

I was tired of Windows restarting itself during long-running processes. It seems like it worked as far as I can tell...

Good find! Thanks, zutano! Wouldn't want that to happen mid-rendering or batch processing...