5 ms·

I think in this case, Microsoft has shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates. This has happened during my time working reta

I think in this case, Microsoft has shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates. This has happened during my time working retail and the mom and pops are helpless when this happens. I would never trust Microsoft to bake ai agents in..

tbrownaw 11mo ago
> shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?
- malfist 11mo ago
  Why does that matter? I should be allowed to explicitly chose the risks I want to take. Not microsoft. Especially not for microsoft to decide, no matter what I'm doing, or what I have open and unsaved on my computer, now is the time they think my risk is too great and tuesday has passed, so reboot reboot reboot.
  - rocqua 11mo ago
    The automatic reboot has made the world a better place, because too many people were incredibly bad at making this risk tradeoff. It might still be bad thing for taking away agency. But it was also a massive improvement to society.
    - malfist 11mo ago
      That's quiet a bit of stretch to equate forced update reboots to massive societal benefits
      - rocqua 11mo ago
        The point was about security updates. Without forced upgrades the whole ransomware thing would have been so much worse as just a singular example.
    - ikr678 11mo ago
      I think it wasnt just reboot inconvenience, I feel like there was a period of time where some software updates would break or make your software experience worse. I have vague memories as a teenager of running older versions of MSN messenger in compatability mode because after a certain version it was full of ads. Android phone software is also very good at this now, I still hestate to update my pixel because each update somehow makes my phone worse to use.
  - realo 11mo ago
    Well... this is similar to COVID. As long as your computer is disconnected from any network, yes you should be able to do whatever you want and decide. But as soon as your computer can be a danger for others, then your risk taking decisions can harm others, and then what? Masks during covid were a matter of public health. Regular updates are also a similar matter.
    - squigz 11mo ago
      It's truly absurd to compare "my computer might be hacked and used by baddies" to "I don't want to wear a mask during a pandemic" It's not a comparison that bears a response.
    - Krssst 11mo ago
      Masks were necessary to save lives at a stage where risks were unknown and pressure on health systems was high. Missing Windows updates does not kill anyone. Plus, installing Windows updates may cause high frustration because "feature" updates are mixed with them and may alter the OS behavior in unexpected and undesired ways. If Microsoft cares so much about security, they should allow people to stay on fixed Windows stable versions that only get security updates without pestering them. Basically, sell LTSC to normal people.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
  Not really. Maybe I'm jinxing it, but I've never had a problem caused by failure to update my PC. Servers I understand because they're exposed to the Internet at all times. Not PCs
  - p_ing 11mo ago
    Lest one remembers Win 9x or even XP w/ no firewall on residential networks.
    - AlexandrB 11mo ago
      Behind a NAT. Can't remember a single problem with the described setup and I've been using the internet since dial-up was the only option available. Getting hacked when you don't have any open ports (thanks to NAT) is and was pretty unlikely - what was more likely is some kind of drive-by exploit in Flash or IE. The biggest problem I experienced with old Windows was general instability in the form of BSODs and driver compatibility problems.
      - p_ing 11mo ago
        NAT has nothing to do with security and it was common that people had a single device on DSL or cable plugged directly into the modem; routers were not common place at home. NAT was for fancy-pants with multiple PCs.
    - hunter2_ 11mo ago
      It's interesting how much different the landscape was in that era: single-device residential environments would have no firewall at all (just a PC with a publicly-routable IP address) and dial-up kind of fueled this due to PCI slot modems, but as the outboard nature of DSL and DOCSIS modems made it easier to build multiple-device residential environments by adding a router, suddenly everyone had a firewall (as a byproduct of NAT). Then you've got malware, which was far more prevalent on PCs through that transition relative to today, but now we've got IoT stuff probably not being updated as it ought to be, potentially hosting malware that serves as a proxy to sidestep an in-router firewall.
- guelo 11mo ago
  Security is the catchall excuse for every bad big tech behavior because they know "security" professionals will defend every f-the-user move they pull [1]. Is it improved security when I lost days of work because microsoft (and you apparently) think their patch is more important then my data? Notice, by the way, that security incidents can cost big tech a lot of money but my lost data is no skin off their back. [1] It reminds me of dermatologists, so hyperfocused on skin cancer that they tell everybody to hide from the sun, completely oblivious to all the harm their advice causes to the rest of our health.
  - keyringlight 11mo ago
    The other angle is that if annoying enough it gets people to make their own workarounds so it works as they want. The real trouble is when it escalates as each side wants to have authority over the other as they each think they know best, and you get things like laptops on standby waking to try and update themselves in a bag. I've been thinking for a while that windows has been going away from a 'personal computer' OS in that it isn't "mine", it's at the mercy of someone else and efforts to fight that aren't worth it long term.
- jwitthuhn 11mo ago
  Yes the security of every Windows computer was much better then, any software that automatically updates itself without user consent is obviously a massive security risk because the user is no longer in control of what software they run.
  - 1718627440 11mo ago
    This is why I still prefer to install programs as root, since then they are unable to update themself. (And also other users can't do that.)
- a2128 11mo ago
  The amount of money lost when millions of small restaurants and other retail shops suddenly become unable to accept customer payments for an unknown amount of time because Microsoft thinks Windows should force update during rush hour rather than allowing the computer owner to wait until closing time, would seem to be far greater than the amount of money lost with once-in-10-years WannaCry attacks
  - makeitdouble 11mo ago
    Don't you get out of forced updates if you set yourself regural update point ? (e.g. every Sunday night) Most users, for better or worse, don't want any update ever, unless they wish for a specific feature. We're at a state where there's only once-in-10-years massive attacks exactly because of mandatory security updates that will be forced on the user if they have no intention to install it ever.
    - WD-42 11mo ago
      Maybe the 3rd largest tech company in the entire world could spend a little time figuring out how to hot patch their OS. Heaven forbid they actually innovate on something.
    - Zardoz84 11mo ago
      You can update without locking the computer. You know... like is done in Linux for a very long time. I have a nice memory of doing a full update of Kubuntu to the next version at the same time that I was playing a AAA game without issues or interruptions.
      - kenjackson 11mo ago
        I hadn’t seen Linux do that. How do they fully do it without ever locking or rebooting the system?
        a2128 11mo ago
        When you run apt upgrade or pacman -Syu that's exactly what you're doing. The files are replaced on your drive while everything else continues running. Generally it won't affect execution of existing software, because they're all already loaded into memory, but some software might crash or get weird behavior as they try to access their files on the drive and those files have been updated, and newly launched programs will use different library versions than other programs which may cause weirdness. You still need to reboot in the end to stop running old stuff that's still in memory such as kernel or existing programs but it's a normal reboot without any extra delay. Canonical does provide Livepatch for Ubuntu Pro for servers that want to update the kernel with security updates without rebooting. Fedora decided this isn't super stable so they actually went and implemented something similar to Windows updates called Offline updates, where updates are performed after a reboot in a special mode where you can't do anything with your computer while it updates for like 10 minutes, but they give you an option to disable this and do instant updates like described above instead. I think the most interesting innovation are immutable distros, which handle updates entirely differently. They will build an updated image while the system continues running and make it ready so that next reboot will just boot into the updated image. It avoids the partially-updated-system instability entirely and it also makes reverting a broken update instant and easy because you can just boot into the old image (there's usually at least two images). This exists in Fedora Silverblue (OSTree) and Vanilla OS (ABRoot) and AFAIK Android also followed this update pattern with A/B partitions (although they now iterated on this slightly to squeeze a few extra gigabytes out of storage). I honestly don't know why Windows still sticks to their antiquated offline update system when better options exist and everyone always complains about the way they do updates and they have billions of dollars at their disposal, but I guess lack of any real competition to Windows in the PC operating system market has led to such stagnation
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago
  Are you aware that MS already sells an operating system that can install patches without rebooting? Are you also aware that Linux can do the same? Why can't a supposedly mature 40 year old operating system do the same? Do you have any concept of the number of man-hours it would save globally? The amount of lost work? The impact on patching compliance and security? My guess is they don't actually believe they have any competition, and therefore don't care to improve anything that doesn't also improve their bottom line.
  - testartr 11mo ago
    every week when I login into my Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled I see this: "system restart required". the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid
    - pjerem 11mo ago
      On Ubuntu, when this message is shown, most of the updates except the kernel are already applied so you are mostly pretty secure. And you can choose when that will happen. And it’s just a normal reboot. On Windows, IIRC, you are blocked during the whole update process which can take several minutes.
      - bayindirh 11mo ago
        Ubuntu's stable builds do not upgrade kernel and its close vicinity every week, AFAIK. I have a couple of servers with unattended updates enabled, and they do not greet me with "System Reboot Required" banner every week, and if that's required, the server is back with all services running <30 seconds. OTOH, I upgraded my parents' PC yesterday, after three months of downtime. It really took at least two hours and four reboots. The machine was screaming and the task manager showed a blue rectangle for CPU load (uninterrupted 100%) and a green one for the disk load (again, uninterrupted 100%) while nothing was usable all the time. Same process takes <10m in Linux (specifically Debian), and an optional reboot, without any hardware load drama.
        11mo ago
- Mad_ad 11mo ago
  i dont want a device to tell me when i need to restart it, thats my decission.
  - herbst 11mo ago
    Same on boot. Usually when I boot a computer I am not ready to wait for it to install several updates, unasked.
- bayindirh 11mo ago
  Yes. Since 199x. macOS does the same thing. When I actually sleep, when my laptop's lid is closed. I wake up. My Mac wants a password instead of a fingerprint. It says it has updated the OS when I was snoring. What's the difference? Every app, every window, everything is the way I left before closing the lid. My computer is updated, rebooted and ready for the day. Like nothing happened. Linux is the same deal. If the desktop environment is upgraded a logout and login is necessary (and KDE restores session as well as macOS for the last decade, at least), and if I updated the kernel, I reboot. I'm back in 30 seconds, to the exact point that I left. Only Windows takes 2 hours, 4 reboots, 3 blood sacrifices and countless frustration sounds to upgrade. While saturating the processor and the storage subsystem at the same time, which makes my computer create the same sounds of the said blood sacrifices.
  - jpalawaga 11mo ago
    My experience with Mac is iterm prevents Mac from shutting down so instead some days I wake up and everything on my machine has been closed and the update hasn’t been performed. Lovely.
    - bayindirh 11mo ago
      I don't use iTerm, and close everything that I don't use for the night, which is a habit I have since the beginning of time.
    - anthem2025 11mo ago
      [dead]

tbrownaw 11mo ago

> shown they don't respect the user when they force shutdown for system updates Are you familiar with the prior state of things that explicitly motivated this change?

malfist 11mo ago
Why does that matter? I should be allowed to explicitly chose the risks I want to take. Not microsoft. Especially not for microsoft to decide, no matter what I'm doing, or what I have open and unsaved on my computer, now is the time they think my risk is too great and tuesday has passed, so reboot reboot reboot.
- rocqua 11mo ago
  The automatic reboot has made the world a better place, because too many people were incredibly bad at making this risk tradeoff. It might still be bad thing for taking away agency. But it was also a massive improvement to society.
  - malfist 11mo ago
    That's quiet a bit of stretch to equate forced update reboots to massive societal benefits
    - rocqua 11mo ago
      The point was about security updates. Without forced upgrades the whole ransomware thing would have been so much worse as just a singular example.
  - ikr678 11mo ago
    I think it wasnt just reboot inconvenience, I feel like there was a period of time where some software updates would break or make your software experience worse. I have vague memories as a teenager of running older versions of MSN messenger in compatability mode because after a certain version it was full of ads. Android phone software is also very good at this now, I still hestate to update my pixel because each update somehow makes my phone worse to use.
- realo 11mo ago
  Well... this is similar to COVID. As long as your computer is disconnected from any network, yes you should be able to do whatever you want and decide. But as soon as your computer can be a danger for others, then your risk taking decisions can harm others, and then what? Masks during covid were a matter of public health. Regular updates are also a similar matter.
  - squigz 11mo ago
    It's truly absurd to compare "my computer might be hacked and used by baddies" to "I don't want to wear a mask during a pandemic" It's not a comparison that bears a response.
  - Krssst 11mo ago
    Masks were necessary to save lives at a stage where risks were unknown and pressure on health systems was high. Missing Windows updates does not kill anyone. Plus, installing Windows updates may cause high frustration because "feature" updates are mixed with them and may alter the OS behavior in unexpected and undesired ways. If Microsoft cares so much about security, they should allow people to stay on fixed Windows stable versions that only get security updates without pestering them. Basically, sell LTSC to normal people.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 11mo ago
Not really. Maybe I'm jinxing it, but I've never had a problem caused by failure to update my PC. Servers I understand because they're exposed to the Internet at all times. Not PCs
- p_ing 11mo ago
  Lest one remembers Win 9x or even XP w/ no firewall on residential networks.
  - AlexandrB 11mo ago
    Behind a NAT. Can't remember a single problem with the described setup and I've been using the internet since dial-up was the only option available. Getting hacked when you don't have any open ports (thanks to NAT) is and was pretty unlikely - what was more likely is some kind of drive-by exploit in Flash or IE. The biggest problem I experienced with old Windows was general instability in the form of BSODs and driver compatibility problems.
    - p_ing 11mo ago
      NAT has nothing to do with security and it was common that people had a single device on DSL or cable plugged directly into the modem; routers were not common place at home. NAT was for fancy-pants with multiple PCs.
  - hunter2_ 11mo ago
    It's interesting how much different the landscape was in that era: single-device residential environments would have no firewall at all (just a PC with a publicly-routable IP address) and dial-up kind of fueled this due to PCI slot modems, but as the outboard nature of DSL and DOCSIS modems made it easier to build multiple-device residential environments by adding a router, suddenly everyone had a firewall (as a byproduct of NAT). Then you've got malware, which was far more prevalent on PCs through that transition relative to today, but now we've got IoT stuff probably not being updated as it ought to be, potentially hosting malware that serves as a proxy to sidestep an in-router firewall.
guelo 11mo ago
Security is the catchall excuse for every bad big tech behavior because they know "security" professionals will defend every f-the-user move they pull [1]. Is it improved security when I lost days of work because microsoft (and you apparently) think their patch is more important then my data? Notice, by the way, that security incidents can cost big tech a lot of money but my lost data is no skin off their back. [1] It reminds me of dermatologists, so hyperfocused on skin cancer that they tell everybody to hide from the sun, completely oblivious to all the harm their advice causes to the rest of our health.
- keyringlight 11mo ago
  The other angle is that if annoying enough it gets people to make their own workarounds so it works as they want. The real trouble is when it escalates as each side wants to have authority over the other as they each think they know best, and you get things like laptops on standby waking to try and update themselves in a bag. I've been thinking for a while that windows has been going away from a 'personal computer' OS in that it isn't "mine", it's at the mercy of someone else and efforts to fight that aren't worth it long term.
jwitthuhn 11mo ago
Yes the security of every Windows computer was much better then, any software that automatically updates itself without user consent is obviously a massive security risk because the user is no longer in control of what software they run.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  This is why I still prefer to install programs as root, since then they are unable to update themself. (And also other users can't do that.)
a2128 11mo ago
The amount of money lost when millions of small restaurants and other retail shops suddenly become unable to accept customer payments for an unknown amount of time because Microsoft thinks Windows should force update during rush hour rather than allowing the computer owner to wait until closing time, would seem to be far greater than the amount of money lost with once-in-10-years WannaCry attacks
- makeitdouble 11mo ago
  Don't you get out of forced updates if you set yourself regural update point ? (e.g. every Sunday night) Most users, for better or worse, don't want any update ever, unless they wish for a specific feature. We're at a state where there's only once-in-10-years massive attacks exactly because of mandatory security updates that will be forced on the user if they have no intention to install it ever.
  - WD-42 11mo ago
    Maybe the 3rd largest tech company in the entire world could spend a little time figuring out how to hot patch their OS. Heaven forbid they actually innovate on something.
  - Zardoz84 11mo ago
    You can update without locking the computer. You know... like is done in Linux for a very long time. I have a nice memory of doing a full update of Kubuntu to the next version at the same time that I was playing a AAA game without issues or interruptions.
    - kenjackson 11mo ago
      I hadn’t seen Linux do that. How do they fully do it without ever locking or rebooting the system?
      - a2128 11mo ago
        When you run apt upgrade or pacman -Syu that's exactly what you're doing. The files are replaced on your drive while everything else continues running. Generally it won't affect execution of existing software, because they're all already loaded into memory, but some software might crash or get weird behavior as they try to access their files on the drive and those files have been updated, and newly launched programs will use different library versions than other programs which may cause weirdness. You still need to reboot in the end to stop running old stuff that's still in memory such as kernel or existing programs but it's a normal reboot without any extra delay. Canonical does provide Livepatch for Ubuntu Pro for servers that want to update the kernel with security updates without rebooting. Fedora decided this isn't super stable so they actually went and implemented something similar to Windows updates called Offline updates, where updates are performed after a reboot in a special mode where you can't do anything with your computer while it updates for like 10 minutes, but they give you an option to disable this and do instant updates like described above instead. I think the most interesting innovation are immutable distros, which handle updates entirely differently. They will build an updated image while the system continues running and make it ready so that next reboot will just boot into the updated image. It avoids the partially-updated-system instability entirely and it also makes reverting a broken update instant and easy because you can just boot into the old image (there's usually at least two images). This exists in Fedora Silverblue (OSTree) and Vanilla OS (ABRoot) and AFAIK Android also followed this update pattern with A/B partitions (although they now iterated on this slightly to squeeze a few extra gigabytes out of storage). I honestly don't know why Windows still sticks to their antiquated offline update system when better options exist and everyone always complains about the way they do updates and they have billions of dollars at their disposal, but I guess lack of any real competition to Windows in the PC operating system market has led to such stagnation
mapontosevenths 11mo ago
Are you aware that MS already sells an operating system that can install patches without rebooting? Are you also aware that Linux can do the same? Why can't a supposedly mature 40 year old operating system do the same? Do you have any concept of the number of man-hours it would save globally? The amount of lost work? The impact on patching compliance and security? My guess is they don't actually believe they have any competition, and therefore don't care to improve anything that doesn't also improve their bottom line.
- testartr 11mo ago
  every week when I login into my Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled I see this: "system restart required". the hot patch feature you mentioned is paid
  - pjerem 11mo ago
    On Ubuntu, when this message is shown, most of the updates except the kernel are already applied so you are mostly pretty secure. And you can choose when that will happen. And it’s just a normal reboot. On Windows, IIRC, you are blocked during the whole update process which can take several minutes.
    - bayindirh 11mo ago
      Ubuntu's stable builds do not upgrade kernel and its close vicinity every week, AFAIK. I have a couple of servers with unattended updates enabled, and they do not greet me with "System Reboot Required" banner every week, and if that's required, the server is back with all services running <30 seconds. OTOH, I upgraded my parents' PC yesterday, after three months of downtime. It really took at least two hours and four reboots. The machine was screaming and the task manager showed a blue rectangle for CPU load (uninterrupted 100%) and a green one for the disk load (again, uninterrupted 100%) while nothing was usable all the time. Same process takes <10m in Linux (specifically Debian), and an optional reboot, without any hardware load drama.
      - 11mo ago
Mad_ad 11mo ago
i dont want a device to tell me when i need to restart it, thats my decission.
- herbst 11mo ago
  Same on boot. Usually when I boot a computer I am not ready to wait for it to install several updates, unasked.
bayindirh 11mo ago
Yes. Since 199x. macOS does the same thing. When I actually sleep, when my laptop's lid is closed. I wake up. My Mac wants a password instead of a fingerprint. It says it has updated the OS when I was snoring. What's the difference? Every app, every window, everything is the way I left before closing the lid. My computer is updated, rebooted and ready for the day. Like nothing happened. Linux is the same deal. If the desktop environment is upgraded a logout and login is necessary (and KDE restores session as well as macOS for the last decade, at least), and if I updated the kernel, I reboot. I'm back in 30 seconds, to the exact point that I left. Only Windows takes 2 hours, 4 reboots, 3 blood sacrifices and countless frustration sounds to upgrade. While saturating the processor and the storage subsystem at the same time, which makes my computer create the same sounds of the said blood sacrifices.
- jpalawaga 11mo ago
  My experience with Mac is iterm prevents Mac from shutting down so instead some days I wake up and everything on my machine has been closed and the update hasn’t been performed. Lovely.
  - bayindirh 11mo ago
    I don't use iTerm, and close everything that I don't use for the night, which is a habit I have since the beginning of time.
  - anthem2025 11mo ago
    [dead]