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Comment by algorias | Hacker News Reader

Recently my mom ended up with windows 10, despite not intending to upgrade. No idea how it exactly happened.

Anyway, as a result all her .docx files got associated with microsoft office (yes, during the upgrade windows "forgot" her preference for libreoffice) and to add insult to injury, the files wouldn't even open, instead whenever she double clicked one of them she'd get an ad urging her to buy an office 365 subscription to allow her to see her own fucking files.

I'm done with Microsoft, forever. No matter what they do, I will never trust them again.

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Same happened to my mom just yesterday. My mom happens to be an anxious 75 year old woman who takes a long time to acclimate to anything new on her computer, and also relies on said computer for several critical areas of her life.

She called me in a panic from 6 timezones away, and I had to drop what I was doing and spend a good half a day walking her through the various transition and setup steps. Every 30 minutes she would plaintively ask me why she had to do this - she was perfectly happy with what she had and had no interest in anything new. Every time she asked and I had no good answer, vague thoughts that included the words "class" and "action" swam through my head.

One advantage to my grandmother still using Windows XP: it won’t auto-upgrade to Windows 10.

Meh. The safest and easiest migration path from XP now is to LXLE (which is Ubuntu Linux) with a similar theme (and the same set of apps); I wouldn't keep anyone on XP any more: if W7 is obsolete, XP is a rotting corpse.

Or maybe http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/windows-xp-theme-lubuntu

Haha, maybe. That's a bit over the top for me personally, I never liked the Luna theme :)

How many of the hundreds of millions of people using Windows computers are affected like this that don't have someone tech-savy to ask for help? There's no possible way Microsoft didn't think of this scenario, which can only mean that they simply do not care.

I am certainly in agreement. From what I can see they used social engineering for a few months, then dark patterned it so users would install. (Im referring to users being slowly trained to close the window saying upgrade, then that same click agreeing and installing).

Which in my opinion is exactly that. Social engineering to get them use to it (same action over and over), and dark pattern (doing something do so they would agree to something they didn't necessarily want to).

Very scummy in my opinion. I wish I could change but I am very much stuck on Windows (my only product uses windows voice recognition engine. . . .I don't have the knowledge to wrote my own).

Edit: typo

As long as changes and 'upgrades' correlate with net gains for investors and shareholders, it's all good. It's all that matters. We are faced with faceless super-agents, we can't realistically complain to anyone, nobody is responsible. I hope the era of user empowerment comes soon, and this kind of mammoth-sized digital stomping over humans ends.

Oh... They surely care! For the upgrade rate, which historically was always very low.

Well, Microsoft will parade you mum as part of the great success of the adoption rate and popularity of Windows 10!

I feel your pain, but after migration to linux or mac you'll probably be using SaaS apps to do this. And at in this case you could reinstall.

In the "future" (ie. web apps and android apps), there won't be any control about software upgrades anymore. Even, or perhaps especially when they're really more downgrades than upgrades.

Hahaha. Nope, your attempt at FUD fails: after migration to Linux, my first worry is "okay, the network connection sucks, so no cloud dependencies". Cloudcloudcloud may be all the rage right now, but tried-and-true, full-offline software didn't disappear.

Rings a bell... Same happened to my mom when Google changed their Gmail UI. For us it seems like a small change but for older people this is really a tough thing. Well, we moved to an email client since then...

This has consequences even in the medical domain!

Recently I sat in the waiting room of a general practitioner (in Germany), where all patients had to wait because their main computer was unusable. That computer started an upgrade to Windows 10 against their will and almost all patients had to wait.

They weren't running the Windows Server on their server then, which is a pretty reckless thing to do even without going into T&C aspects of it.

Why would you run Windows Server on the receptionists machine?

I think he's trying to say that they didn't have a Windows update server to prevent that kind of thing. The only people dodging this are using a utility, manually deleting updates, or are running Enterprise.

It's pretty hard to buy enterprise. I could easily see many small companies going with Pro instead and getting unwanted upgrades to Windows 10.

Unless I've been smoking something the comment I replied to originally said "main server."

My dentist – after having issues with this, and also hearing about the Snowden papers in the news in the past years – told me she was discussing with her IT guy to move to a Linux based system, as she’d just want it to work.

I’m not sure how far Wine has come, or if dentist software for Linux already is a thing, but I’ve heard more and more people discuss these things recently.

Windows 10 might finally be the time for Linux on the Desktop.

It's not just MS pushing new stuff on people without much warning. A similar thing happened to my mom with the iOS 6 => 7 update that overhauled the UI. People (understandably) freak when you move their cheese. Apple seems to have gotten more of a pass for it than Microsoft is here though.

If you read the actual dialog box, it reads fine. Really. It's not a trick. The big change is Windows 10 being classified as a "recommended" update. Turn off recommended updates (only take "critical" updates) if you don't want Microsoft changing functionality on your computer. It has been like that for a long time. This is a very extreme example of it though and MS knows that--that's why the box exists, I think--they don't "warn" you about other upcoming recommended updates. Yes, they could do more on that box to guide you towards cancelling the upgrade, but if they mean what they say that the update is "recommended," your dialogs should be guiding people towards getting it rather than away from it.

Again, the bigger thing to question here is the choice to make it "recommended," not the dialog box.

An as yet undetermined critical update just rechecked "recommended" for me yesterday when I specifically unchecked it before manually updating a fresh 7 install. Once the 1st round of 170 updates finished w/ a couple fails, I unintentionally/fortuitously clicked settings and saw the box checked. *This was updates before 3/27/2015, btw, I now need to vet the remaining ~170 of the 40 known/unwanted Win 10 malgrades.

Thanks for the warning. I'm not sure if they're being sleazy or just unthoughtful and incompetent. I already lost an afternoon with family, which I don't get to see that often, because I was forced to fix things that went wrong on their devices after the unexpected update. I had told them to "Just click the red x for now,if a message about Windows 10 pops up".

My brother's laptop (Dell Ispiron 15z) was upgraded to Windows 10 without his consent. After booting into Windows 10 wireless networking was non-functional. Dell themselves were fantastically passive-aggressive (and simultaneously useless, but at least I expected the latter):

"Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected."

The laptop is only three years old! If I were him I would have returned it for a refund, but he doesn't have the time to migrate to another laptop right now so we eventually gave up, downgraded to Windows 7 and now he has to operate his laptop defensively, with Microsoft and their relentless upgrade treadmill as his adversary.

His next laptop will be a Mac.

There is always the option of Linux.

Better still, there's dual boot; and with virtualization, you could even run both at the same time :)

Had that setup for a while: Win7 as the host - had some proprietary sw there that wouldn't run in a VM - and Kubuntu with the usual office apps on a separate partition, where I could either physically boot into it, or run it as a VM. Since it didn't share any partition with Windows (data was shared via VBox Shared Folders), all was OK.

(Tried the other way around, but Windows - and the programs I was using - were really picky about HW changes and paravirtualization; didn't work so well.)

Install Linux Mint on it and you'll never get another phone call about using the computer again

I wanted to write the same line. Mint looks, feels and works as a good windows XP, but with up to date security and drivers, and is perfect for anyone who's using their computer for generic activities, eg. browsing, watching movies, etc.

Add a Google Chrome and you have Netflix & the rest, Skype works out of the box on Mint, and it has an 'app store' - also known as package manager for a decade in linux terms -, so there really is nothing missing from Mint for generic scenarios.

( No, you really don't need full back-and-forth MS Office compatibility in generic life and Libreoffice is doing a good job on compatibility. You also don't need Photoshop for generic, everyday users; there is Digikam, Gimp and Inkscape and countless others for the non-professionals, all of them are more than enough for someone who's not making a living of this. )

Yeah until the users ISP drops them because of the kaiten sending outgoing DDoS.

Or for being a part of any other botnet. Oh wait, it's you: all those Windows zombies are nonexistent, because "shouldn't happen = doesn't happen, Windows is secure, Linux suxx0rz, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia".

Too bad Mint is done by cowboys.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-...

Until the next LTS dist upgrade?

Linux doesn't solve the dist upgrade situation any better than Windows here: there's still a lot of cheese that moves around between dist upgrades. Sure, if you stick to LTS dist upgrades you restrict the amount of change to roughly once every two years, and if you use a particularly conservative distribution like Mint you can count on, for now, a fairly decent track record of trying to stay in a "Perpetual 90s" of GUI choices.

But even with Mint there are lots of little differences between dist upgrades, and especially if you stray conservative and only do LTS dist upgrades then your relatives also don't benefit from the slow gradual updates and are forced into the changes more jarringly.

(And yes, Windows 7 to Windows 10 is an LTS dist upgrade.)

Yes. Until the next upgrade: which happens with me at the console, at a time which I choose (which includes "oh look, at least I made a complete image before starting an upgrade"), not at the whim of some abstract schmuck trying to fill his KPI quota of systems upgraded.

(And TBH, I think it does solve it better: went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 to 16.04, and still running well; the upgrades were polite, didn't interfere with normal system use except for one restart each for new kernel, and most importantly didn't break the system. Maybe I was exceptionally lucky, but I dare you to do this from Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10)

This is so strange. It's like the OS team is in another universe. The rest of the company is nailing it.

Nailing their own coffin, I agree

You mean the phone team killing nokia, the legal team suying linux based companies or the Web team wanting to create a gigantic censorship database or the game team creating a console always online with an always on microphone, effectively creating the biggest spyware of all time ?

But the PR team nails it, I agree, because despite everything microsoft does, people keep forgetting.

I've been working with .NET, Xamarin, and Azure for a while. Those Microsoft products really are a pleasure, I have very little to complain about. Shame that it's only these 3 MS products that justify that statement.

Xamarin is hardly a MS product, and they shut down RoboVM pretty much immediately after purchasing Xamarin.

If they start annoying the developers they are lost. So they don't do stupid things there. But it looks like they never cared or plain stopped caring for the end users.

What they want is to go to developers and say "Look, we have millions of users, cross platform(PC/Phone/XBOX), and great developer tools. All you need is to develop for Windows 10 and forget those other platforms". And they think they can just force 1 & 2 which may actually be true...

I must say .net is a bit of an exception in this sad sight of microsoft's decay. Pretty much everything they have done in the past 3 years in the .net space makes sense and is nice to Microsoft's customers (open sourcing .net, finally delivering on platform-independence, visual studio community being pretty much a complete and fully functional IDE, buying and making xamarin free, etc).

For the other divisions. Windows has become an absolute shit show. Every time I go on the Azure portal I get lost. My xbox one is blowing like a leaf blower. They stopped developing Office 15 years ago (ah no, they changed the color from blue to green) and my surface pro is reminding me of my Windows 98 BSOD days.

Ha not, their mouses are still pretty decent.

Personally I had a horrible experience with Azure. It seems they spent too much time on the UI and too little time on making it usable to understand billing. I was amazed billing could be worse from Amazon.

I used their IaaS which was a pain to setup and constantly rebooted but maybe that's just because of Windows which is pretty problematic to begin with...

MCP=Microsoft Certified Peddler

Marketing is what they are, and always have been, best at. They still overwhelmingly dominate despite the worst efforts of the last 2 CEOs.

Reminds of the days when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

I've never thought much or Microsoft's PR or marketing. Not to the public at least. There's no coherent brand unlike Apple and Google and they still can't shake the haters and this is just another reason to hate.

To enterprise and devs the likes of Scott Hanselman do a brilliant job but they seem to be fighting against MS's bad tendencies.

It's like the OS team is in another universe

I'm sure it's not the entire team, engineers usually aren't sociopathic assholes.

No, this is undoubtedly marketing or management. Maybe even top management. Maybe Nadella?

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