7 ms·

Yes, people still thrash Microsoft because many of their business practises and products are thrashy, even if it needn't be. Windows is a great example - force

Yes, people still thrash Microsoft because many of their business practises and products are thrashy, even if it needn't be. Windows is a great example - forced updates, forced ads, forced data-ming and spying, stupid UI changes etc. all make an otherwise decent OS a real pain to use and a must-avoid for the privacy conscious. These are easy to fix for a company like MS, but they do not.

tester756 6y ago
> forced updates I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible. "at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable. you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.
- cm2187 6y ago
  I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.
  - cubano 6y ago
    So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise. It didn't even need to connect to the internet.
    - btgeekboy 6y ago
      For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.
    - dougmany 6y ago
      Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.
      - AsyncAwait 6y ago
        From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes. I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    They've been way more stable than MacOS updates recently too. That has to say something about the processes Microsoft has in place to QA.
    - zepto 6y ago
      Have they? Or do the people they impact simply not blog about issues.
      - keyle 6y ago
        My new Mac mini was doing kernel panics at every shutdown for about a year. The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!
        zepto 6y ago
        How does that answer the question? If anything it reinforces the point.
      - bsanr2 6y ago
        The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.
    - justapassenger 6y ago
      It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features. Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.
      - 6y ago
  - shakna 6y ago
    > Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid. Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2]. All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around. [0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-damages-file-system-on-ssds-with-update-kb4592438-installed/ https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d... [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/ https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-update-after-reports-of-issues-affecting-some-pcs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat... [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1909#1513msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information... [4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1909#1522msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
- mschuetz 6y ago
  I dislike the forced windows update because they shove crap down your throat with the updates, try to force edge on you, and repeatedly try to get you to accept their privacy stuff.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  The thing that finally got me to abandon Windows was when a forced update wiped away the system settings that I had spent days figuring out to get a trackpad to work the way I wanted to.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
  >I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible. That doesn't explain forced feature updates.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Sure it does. It means you don’t need to backport fixes to an infinite number of builds.
    - MarioMan 6y ago
      But they do a great deal of backporting anyway. Enterprise and Education users can run a slow path that gets bug fixes and security updates only, for feature updates as far as 30 months back. This is not offered for any other editions of Windows, meaning feature updates are forced on them earlier than they need to be. Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/windows-10-servicing-support-updates https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...
      - webmobdev 6y ago
        General consumers are now the beta testers for Microsoft Windows. With Windows built-in spyware features, they don't even need any user interaction to collect data from your computer.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- alpaca128 6y ago
  People who are newbies at computers wouldn't be able to find the switch to turn off updates anyway, so why not include the opt-out setting for users who care? Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.
- closeparen 6y ago
  It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster. I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.
  - omni 6y ago
    Serious question, do you actually use Windows 10? I use it daily and I've never had it force an update on me in the middle of the day. I turn it off every night and it applies the updates then, as it should.
    - smitty1110 6y ago
      It happened to me a couple of times this year. It was really annoying to go make coffee, and come back to an updating screen. Even better, one of these failed and spent another 30 minutes rolling back the update.
    - mdtusz 6y ago
      I think you may be in a minority of people that intentionally turn their machine off at the end of the day. I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.
      - omni 6y ago
        That makes sense, if you've got a laptop and you never reboot it then you're creating an impossible situation for the updater. I still don't understand the constant whinging in that case, though. Of course it's going to update while you're using it if, from its perspective, you are always using it.
  - c0nsumer 6y ago
    I have. There was a Chrome version (69 IIRC) that kept it from using a proxy server that was at a CNAME and had Kerberos authentication. Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665 This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline. Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task. Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine. There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.
  - AnHonestComment 6y ago
    To concur: My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day. At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information. Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.
    - posperson 6y ago
      Microsoft fired their Quality Assurance staff, hence the regressions in reliability: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-explains-why-bugs-in-windows-updates-increased/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
      - AnHonestComment 6y ago
        I somehow missed that — thanks for sharing!
- gregmac 6y ago
  I wonder how many people who complain about forced updates also complain(ed) about having to support users running decade-old versions of the OS/browsers? It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.
- tamrix 6y ago
  Yet chrome forced updates are the greatest revolution it's modern software solutions.
  - ratww 6y ago
    They're revolutionary not because they're mandatory, but rather because they're transparent and not disruptive.
sn_master 6y ago
what forced ads? I only know the start menu candy crush stuff, but I remove those first thing after installation.
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  Comes back with every update.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Was Pinball an ad? A preinstalled game is not an ad. Annoying? Sure. Ad? No. An ad is what that one time they put an actual ad on the lock screen.
    - glandium 6y ago
      Candy Crush and Minecraft are not installed. Clicking on the items in the start menu opens the Windows Store.
    - mnahkies 6y ago
      As far as I recall pinball had no micro transactions. For what it's worth I always enjoyed the "stock" games like pinball, solitaire, freecell and minesweeper. But I liked them tucked away under the clear label of the games sub menu, and without any pressure to use them
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Micro transactions do suck, and I wish the trend of them would just die, but that doesn’t make a game an ad. You also have a point of the games being tucked away with the option of bringing them out if you wanted. Microsoft should’ve done that.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    Hasn't happened to me. My start menu always remains the same after updates. Maybe use an alternate start menu if that's the problem. There are no ads anywhere else IIRC.

tester756 6y ago

> forced updates I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible. "at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable. you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.

cm2187 6y ago
I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.
justapassenger 6y ago
Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.
- cubano 6y ago
  So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise. It didn't even need to connect to the internet.
  - btgeekboy 6y ago
    For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.
  - dougmany 6y ago
    Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes. I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  They've been way more stable than MacOS updates recently too. That has to say something about the processes Microsoft has in place to QA.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Have they? Or do the people they impact simply not blog about issues.
    - keyle 6y ago
      My new Mac mini was doing kernel panics at every shutdown for about a year. The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!
      - zepto 6y ago
        How does that answer the question? If anything it reinforces the point.
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.
  - justapassenger 6y ago
    It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features. Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.
    - 6y ago
- shakna 6y ago
  > Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid. Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2]. All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around. [0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-damages-file-system-on-ssds-with-update-kb4592438-installed/ https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d... [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-deleting-peoples-files-again/ https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-update-after-reports-of-issues-affecting-some-pcs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat... [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1909#1513msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information... [4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1909#1522msgdesc https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
mschuetz 6y ago
I dislike the forced windows update because they shove crap down your throat with the updates, try to force edge on you, and repeatedly try to get you to accept their privacy stuff.
bosswipe 6y ago
The thing that finally got me to abandon Windows was when a forced update wiped away the system settings that I had spent days figuring out to get a trackpad to work the way I wanted to.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 6y ago
>I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible. That doesn't explain forced feature updates.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Sure it does. It means you don’t need to backport fixes to an infinite number of builds.
  - MarioMan 6y ago
    But they do a great deal of backporting anyway. Enterprise and Education users can run a slow path that gets bug fixes and security updates only, for feature updates as far as 30 months back. This is not offered for any other editions of Windows, meaning feature updates are forced on them earlier than they need to be. Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/windows-10-servicing-support-updates https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      General consumers are now the beta testers for Microsoft Windows. With Windows built-in spyware features, they don't even need any user interaction to collect data from your computer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
alpaca128 6y ago
People who are newbies at computers wouldn't be able to find the switch to turn off updates anyway, so why not include the opt-out setting for users who care? Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.
closeparen 6y ago
It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster. I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.
- omni 6y ago
  Serious question, do you actually use Windows 10? I use it daily and I've never had it force an update on me in the middle of the day. I turn it off every night and it applies the updates then, as it should.
  - smitty1110 6y ago
    It happened to me a couple of times this year. It was really annoying to go make coffee, and come back to an updating screen. Even better, one of these failed and spent another 30 minutes rolling back the update.
  - mdtusz 6y ago
    I think you may be in a minority of people that intentionally turn their machine off at the end of the day. I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.
    - omni 6y ago
      That makes sense, if you've got a laptop and you never reboot it then you're creating an impossible situation for the updater. I still don't understand the constant whinging in that case, though. Of course it's going to update while you're using it if, from its perspective, you are always using it.
- c0nsumer 6y ago
  I have. There was a Chrome version (69 IIRC) that kept it from using a proxy server that was at a CNAME and had Kerberos authentication. Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665 This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.
michaelmrose 6y ago
People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline. Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task. Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine. There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  To concur: My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day. At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information. Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.
  - posperson 6y ago
    Microsoft fired their Quality Assurance staff, hence the regressions in reliability: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-explains-why-bugs-in-windows-updates-increased/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
    - AnHonestComment 6y ago
      I somehow missed that — thanks for sharing!
gregmac 6y ago
I wonder how many people who complain about forced updates also complain(ed) about having to support users running decade-old versions of the OS/browsers? It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.
tamrix 6y ago
Yet chrome forced updates are the greatest revolution it's modern software solutions.
- ratww 6y ago
  They're revolutionary not because they're mandatory, but rather because they're transparent and not disruptive.

sn_master 6y ago

what forced ads? I only know the start menu candy crush stuff, but I remove those first thing after installation.

turbinerneiter 6y ago
Comes back with every update.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Was Pinball an ad? A preinstalled game is not an ad. Annoying? Sure. Ad? No. An ad is what that one time they put an actual ad on the lock screen.
  - glandium 6y ago
    Candy Crush and Minecraft are not installed. Clicking on the items in the start menu opens the Windows Store.
  - mnahkies 6y ago
    As far as I recall pinball had no micro transactions. For what it's worth I always enjoyed the "stock" games like pinball, solitaire, freecell and minesweeper. But I liked them tucked away under the clear label of the games sub menu, and without any pressure to use them
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Micro transactions do suck, and I wish the trend of them would just die, but that doesn’t make a game an ad. You also have a point of the games being tucked away with the option of bringing them out if you wanted. Microsoft should’ve done that.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Hasn't happened to me. My start menu always remains the same after updates. Maybe use an alternate start menu if that's the problem. There are no ads anywhere else IIRC.