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It's a bit disconcerting to see the apparent narrow mindedness of educated, technical people in regards to the forced windows update system. Linux's way of manu

It's a bit disconcerting to see the apparent narrow mindedness of educated, technical people in regards to the forced windows update system. Linux's way of manual updating is better than windows, only because the only people using Linux are capable of understanding security issues and will update as soon as is is convenient. The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so. Microsoft had to make a hard choice, and they made the hard choice. That hard choice is the reason 98% of wannacry infections were on windows 7 and barely 1% on windows 10. If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it.

RandomBK 9y ago
The key issue is one of control. I don't mind having an automatic update system, so long as there is some way of telling the os "I know what I'm doing - let me handle this". In a similar vein, updates should respect explicit configuration choices made on the system, and not re-enable things like Cortana without permission.
pritambaral 9y ago
> If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it. If that happens, don't be surprised when a fork of Ubuntu comes out without the forced updates. > The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so. The choice doesn't have to be between 'update now' and 'update never'. There are more polite ways of pestering people into doing something good, than completely hijacking their system. The choice doesn't have to be between 'security updates AND feature updates, together' or 'nothing at all'. The "feature" updates don't have to include ads and auto-reinstalled Candy Crush. The "security" updates don't have to auto-enable explicitly disabled telemetry settings of users. All of the development machines in my office either auto-apply security updates or prominently nag us to manually apply updates that can/could not be automatically applied. None of them reboot in the middle of a development session. None of them auto-install feature updates or ads or sponsored apps. All of them run Kubuntu LTS.

RandomBK 9y ago

The key issue is one of control. I don't mind having an automatic update system, so long as there is some way of telling the os "I know what I'm doing - let me handle this". In a similar vein, updates should respect explicit configuration choices made on the system, and not re-enable things like Cortana without permission.

pritambaral 9y ago

> If ubuntu somehow ends up replacing windows in hands of the general public, don't be surprised to see the same update system to appear in it. If that happens, don't be surprised when a fork of Ubuntu comes out without the forced updates. > The majority of the windows user base is of people who do not understand and maybe do not want to understand the security issues. Windows had the option to manually control the update process in windows 7. The HN demographic updates on time, grandma and the guy in accounting don't. They won't update until a major security issue reaches the mainstream. Even then the majority don't update simply because unlike us, they do not have the knowledge to do so. The choice doesn't have to be between 'update now' and 'update never'. There are more polite ways of pestering people into doing something good, than completely hijacking their system. The choice doesn't have to be between 'security updates AND feature updates, together' or 'nothing at all'. The "feature" updates don't have to include ads and auto-reinstalled Candy Crush. The "security" updates don't have to auto-enable explicitly disabled telemetry settings of users. All of the development machines in my office either auto-apply security updates or prominently nag us to manually apply updates that can/could not be automatically applied. None of them reboot in the middle of a development session. None of them auto-install feature updates or ads or sponsored apps. All of them run Kubuntu LTS.