6 ms·

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 thi

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.

jodrellblank 6y ago
> 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!
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  > It’s cheap. 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.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    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.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      > 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? Not all businesses are big.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      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.
dgellow 6y ago
> 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.
- ohyes 6y ago
  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.
jasode 6y ago
>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.
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  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.
  - jasode 6y ago
    >, 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. [1] https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-series-real-time-oscilloscopes?nid=-31885.0&cc=US&lc=eng https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-series...
peterwwillis 6y ago
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.
kstenerud 6y ago
You wouldn't build a production system on Windows 10; you'd build it on Windows Server, which doesn't do these things. Windows Server also makes a nice dev machine.
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  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.
  - dlp211 6y ago
    And no harm has come to them. I get the philosophical debate, but the practical debate should be settled by now.
- ptx 6y ago
  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.) [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-windows-diagnostic-data-in-your-organization https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...
cptskippy 6y ago
> 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.
Macha 6y ago
> Why would anyone use this platform? 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.
- amdelamar 6y ago
  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.)
  - snazz 6y ago
    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).
    - Macha 6y ago
      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)
wvenable 6y ago
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.
ksk 6y ago
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.
tester756 6y ago
>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

jodrellblank 6y ago

> 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!

charlesdaniels 6y ago
> It’s cheap. 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.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  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.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    > 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? Not all businesses are big.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    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.

dgellow 6y ago

> 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.

ohyes 6y ago
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.

jasode 6y ago

>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.

charlesdaniels 6y ago
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.
- jasode 6y ago
  >, 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. [1] https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-series-real-time-oscilloscopes?nid=-31885.0&cc=US&lc=eng https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-series...

peterwwillis 6y ago

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.

kstenerud 6y ago

You wouldn't build a production system on Windows 10; you'd build it on Windows Server, which doesn't do these things. Windows Server also makes a nice dev machine.

charlesdaniels 6y ago
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.
- dlp211 6y ago
  And no harm has come to them. I get the philosophical debate, but the practical debate should be settled by now.
ptx 6y ago
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.) [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-windows-diagnostic-data-in-your-organization https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...

cptskippy 6y ago

> 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.

Macha 6y ago

> Why would anyone use this platform? 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.

amdelamar 6y ago
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.)
- snazz 6y ago
  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).
  - Macha 6y ago
    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)

wvenable 6y ago

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.

ksk 6y ago

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.

tester756 6y ago

>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