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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, why is this a big deal? We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago. Obviously better, compatibility improves and security issues are easier to push out and fix. To me the browser is as important as the OS, I spend the vast majority of my time in it.

Why should MSFT not do this? It's a free update. They're not charging for it. On many aspects, it's a lot better than Windows 7/8. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but Windows 7 is nearly 7 years old now. From what I can see it performs better on older hardware than W7.

We accept that Android fragmentation is terrible and Google should be doing more to fix it. Yet it seems the complete opposite reaction when MSFT tries to fix their desktop fragmentation.

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I'm glad that you've had a good experience with Windows 10, but this is still a big deal. There are a lot of reasons this is different from Chrome and Firefox updating, or even from Microsoft automatically delivering updates to Windows 10.

Windows 10 is not just an update: it's a completely separate operating system, illustrated by the fact that you have to accept a separate TOS. And while the upgrade may be free, the OS is not. I have never heard of an involuntary OS upgrade, and it's ridiculous that Microsoft is trying to impose one now. No rational user of Windows 7 would suddenly expect to be force-upgraded to Windows 10.

Yes, Chrome and Firefox will force you to update when you restart your browser. Yet although they might nag you, they won't forcibly restart your browser for you. This is what Microsoft is doing to users' computers: the upgrade might take hours and download gigabytes of data, even if the user never asked for it. This is effectively holding computers hostage. If a computer is being used in a safety-critical situation, even if it shouldn't be, that's a recipe for disaster.

Finally, Windows 10 has downsides that Windows 7 doesn't. First, the upgrade itself might not succeed, as I learned the hard way when the upgrade process simply... stopped. Additionally, depending on your configuration, the upgrade could render your software or hardware unusable: not all hardware may be compatible, even if Microsoft thinks it is. And Windows 10 has more invasive tracking than Windows 7 did, with little or no option for ordinary users to disable it.

Why is this a big deal? Why should MSFT not do this? Here are a couple of reasons why...

Perhaps the machine hardware is not Win10 compliant

Perhaps a machine hosts software that requires significant regression testing before permitting an upgrade to Win10

Perhaps the machine's software is not Win10 compatible and needs to be rewritten before a Win10 upgrade

Perhaps the machine in question has specific greenzone periods and should not be upgraded without an agreed outage schedule between IT provider and user base. (Think banking, power generation, healthcare, airline sectors, etc.)

Perhaps your Mom owns the computer and you want to personally manage the upgrade when you visit at Christmas instead of having to spend 6 hours on the phone with her.

MSFT has no idea whether or not its SAFE to automatically roll out an update for their OS users. They make no effort to check hardware compliance status with all hardware manufacturers. They make no effort to check the compliance status of 3rd party software. They make no effort to ensure that critical infrastructure systems (power, health, banking) individual greenzones are followed to prevent unplanned outages.

The upgrade notification system does make the effort to check against known-bad hardware and software, including 3rd party software, and will warn and/or block the upgrade if it's known to be incompatible.

As for managed machines, most won't be eligible for the upgrade to begin with (domain joined, Windows 7 Enterprise), and the upgrade can be blocked entirely via Group Policy or WSUS. Any sensibly managed machine in the environments you mentioned won't be automatically upgraded.

Yes, the compatibility checks aren't perfect, and yes, making sure the update isn't rolled out to managed machines requires that they actually be managed, just like any other update Microsoft publish. But it's unfair to say they make 'no effort' to support these scenarios.

My small sample of machines, manufacturer says machine not compatible, MSFT still prompted me to install win10. If they are actually checking HW compatibility they are doing a shitty job. Which means they shouldn't be rolling anything out in this fashion.

On Reddit I read about medical devices getting automatically upgraded when needed for a procedure. Maybe the hospital network was badly managed but that does not excuse MSFT's auto rollout.

My point still stands that MSFT should not be automatically upgrading the OS without significant user oversight, agreement.

It is fair to say that as they cannot know that upgrading to a new major release of their operating system will never lead to non-functioning systems they should never have attempted a forced major upgrade of Windows.

If they know that there are cases where their compatibility checker won't detect setups that have problems then they shouldn't iPad automatically. Full stop.

>We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

Your argument starts off with a wrong assumption. I manually update all my software and only when I see fit. Sometimes feature removal prevents me from updating. http://i.imgur.com/u3qVwBS.png

W10 is completely incompatible with my workflow/customizations I've made to W7. There are registry tweaks everywhere and custom DLL's because I'm reliant on a few bits of software that keep me anchored to Windows instead of moving to greener pastures (Gentoo). Much of my software is completely incompatible with both W8 and W10.

Updating is a no-go for me and if I'm going to move away from W7 it is going to be to move to Gentoo. I've had the auto-updates disabled for ages - and it looks like I can't even trust security patches to only contain security patches, so I've disabled those too now.

Oh - and it bricking incompatible devices and losing people's files is a big reason why this is a bad idea. How happy would you be if you lost all important data on your computer?

I sympathize with MSFT, but the main reason they shouldn't unilaterally force the issue is because it won't always work. The upgrade process is pretty reliable, but not completely, and there are all sorts of compatibility problems still lurking (Windows Media Center is gone, lots of hardware doesn't have Windows 10 drivers)

Google is taking the longer view; they want to fix fragmentation, and are moving towards it step by step, improving matters on tomorrow's devices, without bricking today's devices. MSFT is trying to make it happen sooner by forcing the issue instead of gradually migrating.

> We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

I have not accepted auto updates that I can't turn off for anything, ever.

> We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

Enabling automatic updates from outside organizations SHOULD get you fired in any and every business where security is important. I've never seen it done in such environments, and certainly would never do it myself.

That's an understandable motivation but it has to be balanced against the risks of keeping your users vulnerable for longer periods of time. It's rather expensive to have a 24x7 security team to review & push updates.

For something like Chrome that's probably a net loss because the Google team is very good and browsers are both Internet-exposed and generally self-contained. For something like Windows, the reverse is true because there are a lot more things to test, many with local apps or settings which have a lower chance of being tested upstream in the exact combinations which you use.

>It's a free update. They're not charging for it.

I'll shit in your dinner for free

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