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A few days ago I was visiting family, and my Mom was online Skyping relatives on her Windows 7 PC. She comes running into the other room and says her PC just restarted while she was talking, and now it says something about configuring Windows 10, even though she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade.

So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait for it to roll-back to the previous OS. I'm using Windows 10 and enjoy it, but I'm still tempted to migrate to another OS just because of these practices.

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I have mixed feelings about this. I'm with you 100% on having the explicit opportunity to opt out of updates like this. That said, a large swath of Windows users are not nearly as technically literate as you and your mother are, and automatically helping people forward (if for nothing else, security fixes and ongoing support) is a Good Thing in my book (so long as it's free, and it is).

There is no doubt there are cogent arguments against it. But when I think of the operating systems a lot of botnet computers are running on, I have a hard time not supporting automatic OS upgrades for non-power users.

I wouldn't be upset if Windows 10 hadn't turned into a telemetry botnet for Microsoft.

Edit: I see in other posts accusations of paranoia. But how can I not be paranoid when I cannot determine what is being transmitted.

^ This. It's not THAT there is telemetry and "phoning home," it's the fact that Microsoft flat out REFUSES to be up front about what it's sending home, how they're anonymizing it, and why these things can't be 100% disabled. If you say nothing then your users will (and should) assume the worst.

Where have they refused to be up front about any of this? As far as I'm aware, they have detailed all of those things except how exactly they anonymize the data, which I haven't seen anyone specifically ask them about.

There's no way to turn it off. It says it's turned off, and it's still sending shit to Redmond. That's unacceptable and deceptive. I do not use software that lies to me, period, paragraph.

I suggest you check out Spybot Anti-Beacon. It will help you in turning some of those Telemetry services off.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

You can turn it off via group policy if you have windows enterprise. If you just want to complain that the cheaper version doesn't have the feature you want, and you don't want to pay the higher price for the version that does have it, that's your right, but I don't have much sympathy for that.

Another sad example of pirates having it better than us legitimate users.

I have to pay to not be spied on? And you think that's acceptable?

You have to pay to have the option to not be spied on, because only the version designed to be used for serious business supports disabling the first-party tracking, because business users are important and home users are just another revenue channel.

I now have even less moral issue with not paying to use Windows for personal use. Seriously, they should have just made it free for home users regardless of Win7 license state (I've had terrible luck with "upgraded" versions of Windows -- clean installs only for me, and yes I know about the Insider program and the exception to this...I didn't stay up on the news and I missed the "must be installed by" deadline).

If it makes you feel better, my mother was on an insider build because we figured she would get Windows either free or at a discount, and she ended up having to buy retail anyway.

You have to pay for Windows just like any other software the creators don't want to give away for free.

This point fails thrice: - I am paying for Windows already, that we've established does spy on me - The Enterprise edition is not available to be purchased by a regular consumer anywhere I can locate - The Enterprise edition doesn't allow the disabling of ALL reporting to Redmond, only most, and only via group policy which is hardly accessible to the layman.

Your first point still makes no sense to me. You are paying for something that doesn't have a feature you like. A more expensive version does have the feature. What are you proposing instead? That you get a product with more features for the same price? Of course every buyer wants that for every product. And every seller wants the opposite.

Your second point is equally mystifying, since you've created an arbitrary definition of a "regular consumer" as someone who doesn't want to contact the sales office of the company you want to buy a product from.

Your third point is factually wrong and/or is based on a ridiculous definition of reporting. See sibling comments.

It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to be possible to buy Enterprise as a regular user, so it's not even a matter of me not wanting to spend the money as it's a matter of the company not giving me the option.

>You can turn it off via group policy if you have windows enterprise.

No, you can't. You can only set it to a lower level.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con...

You can disable utcsvc and prevent it from being re-enabled. Since doing so also disables Windows updates (which is why you shouldn't do it) you can also be sure that future updates will not re-enable it.

Where does Microsoft explain what they are sending to domains like ad.doubleclick.net?

Exactly where you would expect to find it: the data use and access section of the technet article on the feature, and in the Windows privacy statement.

I take it that you don't use a smartphone, either, since you have no way of knowing what is transmitted either, either by the primary OS or the secondary radio OS. http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste...

Or macOS (nee OS X), since Apple gathers telemetry as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11907060

Moreover, security researchers looking to make a name for themselves are crawling all over Windows. If they haven't found anything in the telemetry that makes headlines yet, most likely there's nothing to find.

Paranoid or not, telemetry is already everywhere without you knowing what's being sent and it's here to stay. Singling out Windows is ridiculous.

> I take it that you don't use a smartphone, either, since you have no way of knowing what is transmitted either, either by the primary OS or the secondary radio OS.

You know, two wrongs do not make one right.

> Or macOS (nee OS X), since Apple gathers telemetry as well.

In OSX, sending telemetry and crash reports is voluntary. It is being asked in the OOB wizard and is easily available in the Settings application.

In consumer SKUs of Windows 10, that's not the case, sending telemetry is mandatory.

> Paranoid or not, telemetry is already everywhere without you knowing what's being sent and it's here to stay.

Too early to say. It may also break Microsoft's neck.

> Singling out Windows is ridiculous.

Biggest target. They have a great opportunity to lead by example - in the positive way.

>If they haven't found anything in the telemetry that makes headlines yet, most likely there's nothing to find.

There's plenty to be found and Microsoft isn't even hiding it: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con...

That data, even at the "Basic" level, is enough to be used for 'bad things'. And since it's on someone else's computer you can't know who has access to it, so you can assume the worst.

>Singling out Windows is ridiculous.

Just Windows 10. Because it's the only mainstream desktop OS with forced telemetry and no opt-out option.

I'd rather be betrayed by N devices than N+1.

Support it if you want, but you seriously think it's OK for the PC to restart in the middle of a call? What if the user is doing something mission critical; it's acceptable to just wait an hour (or more likely several) to get back to work because "MS knows best"?? There is nothing to stop it from just doing it all over again either. I will never use Windows again because of this behavior.

I just did the Windows 10 upgrade on my laptop and at no point could I start the upgrade without explicitly clicking a button. In addition, the process starts by immediately rebooting (after downloading via Windows update and asking you to start it).

That's a really interesting story. Let me tell you another one. Both my wife's and my son's computers updated automatically, with no button presses on their parts, even after them pressing "do not update" on all the nag screens for the past several months.

You at least have accept the license agreement, which is true of almost every piece of software. I've still got half my machines on Windows 7/8 and I haven't upgraded them yet.

On this laptop I actually had it download Windows 10 but I wasn't ready to upgrade so I held it off for another week. I still had to press something to get it to start.

On the pop-ups that appear on my Windows 7 machine, there is no button they says "Do Not Update"; both buttons (Update now, update later) lead the system to download and install Windows 10. That both of your users report explicitly clicking a button that references update makes me suspicious that they in fact just clicked the wrong button.

Sneaky of Microsoft, but I'm having trouble buying these tales of the OS going rogue. I just haven't seen any way for that to happen.

Even dismissing the windows is considered "yes, upgrade". That way beyond sneaky, that's just black pattern.

But the upgrade still requires that the user accept the EULA. I agree that the system is hostile to user preference (any reports of a computer behaving in a way the user doesn't expect should be examined, whether the user "should know better" or not) but it's important to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and sometimes that requires figuring it what the user actually did, not just what they report they did. Anyone who has worked in tech support has this instinct.

Yes, it is necessary to accept EULA.

However, consider it also from the user's POV. The update will download gigabytes of data, will do everything possible to get anything from the user that can pass as "agreement" and then update the software. Then it will reboot machine and present the new EULA.

If the user disagrees with the EULA, it will restore the original system - but not right now. It will take tens of minutes (not everyone has SSD) and during this time, the users is practically locked out of using the computer. If you are small entrepreneur, this is basically time when you cannot work and it's not your fault. Some of these folks cannot afford to wait a hour or so for the system to restore.

And this will be not final - who guaranteed that the windows update will not try again in a few weeks, once Microsoft steps up the campaign again?

I wonder if the EULA is enforceable at all, given the circumstances. "Accept or I'll break your computer for hours" seems like a contract accepted under duress.

I’ve never seen this. Partly it may be A/B testing and I was never in the B group, but I think people are closing dialog boxes without thinking enough about how they’re closing them, and accidentally agreeing to upgrade.

No matter the dialog box, closing it should always mean "do nothing and go back to where I was before", not "do your sneaky crap later when I'm asleep or busy". Anything else is a malignant antipattern.

Don't Chrome and Firefox do this by default now? Automatically download an update in the background and install it without asking when you close the browser window?

There's a pretty sizable difference between chrome updates and updating from 7 to 10. The fundamentals of chrome remain the same, and for 99% of users they don't notice a difference.

Granted, they've never really done a "chrome 2" style of upgrade, and I'm curious how they'll handle it.

Do not compare an a paid OS I run a business on which upgrade one entire version, force rebooting, freezing my machine and introducing incompatibilities and spywares with an free opensource browser that I can merely swap with any competitor at a click of a button in my start menu.

I don't run my main source of income on Firefox or Android. I didn't pay a licence for a browser or a phone OS. I can't find a quick alternative as quickly for my dev laptop as I can for those.

Hopefully I got a dual boot and make sure I don't boot Windows anymore, otherwise it would be really dangerous, as I could be giving a training and suddenly get my machine locked for some undesired upgrade in from of my customers.

Hey whoa, calm down there. What's really funny is you're getting upset but then ignore all the people who do make their main source of income in Firefox or Chrome, and need the stability in their browsers to support a specific feature. Remember IE6 and how many applications were coded exactly to that browser? And then people bitched that Microsoft didn't automatically update that browser, even though doing so would have broken compatibility with a ton of business apps.

For me, OS doesn't matter one bit. Sure, one could be more convenient with certain features, but in the long run, everything I do at work depends on the browser, and specifically depends on Firefox. The application I support at work is programmed to work on Firefox and it's the only browser it's tested on. If Mozilla made some breaking change and I was automatically upgraded, my work comes to a screeching halt. Maybe I don't even notice something is broken until I'm giving a client demo. Pretty embarrassing, huh?

So yeah, I can compare an OS to a browser, because the same purpose that the OS serves for you, the browser serves for me. I can't just switch browsers with a click of a button. I can't find an alternative. It's Firefox or nothing, a supported version of Firefox or nothing. Funny how some people have different needs, and funny how some people can dismiss those needs without even a thought, just because they may not apply to themselves.

But luckily my work controls what version of Firefox is released to our PCs. It's not pushed to our internal yum repositories until it's been tested. And funny enough, if your business really depends on a stable Windows environment, you have the tools to do the exact same thing. I recommend you use them.

First, you haven't paid for that software. Secondly, this software is an execution environment on an another machine, so you don't have control over it's update cycle, even if it wasn't auto update. Finally, version updates in browser can not be compared in any way to an OS version update, they are usually quite minor. Besides, when they do break something, you got thousand of publication telling you it's comming and what's it gona do to your code.

There is no such thing here. You are on your machine, minding your own business on something you have paid, expecting support for it. You are harassed with an upgrade you don't need and you refuse. Then you are updated against your will, sometime it reboot in a moment you need it and lock your machine for some time. And then if you do accept the upgrade (out of "I don't have time for this s*"), you don't know what's going to break. Your scanner ? Your drawing tablet ? Personnaly, my login broke, it's in a state of a perpetual guest session.

Now compare that to Ubuntu, luckily on my second partition. It's supported for 5 years despite the fact I didn't pay for it, and doesn't force me to upgrade. Oh, and it's not full of spywares.

No, I said, “how” they’re closing it. If you click the OK button, the dialog box should close but you would expect something to happen. The issue is that people are unhealthily conditioned into clicking Cancel, and Flash and Java never get updated, and everything is terrible. So, Microsoft designed a dialog that is less likely to get Canceled.

Now there are reports that Windows 10 is installing when you click the X in the title bar. I have not seen this happen. Maybe this does happen, but on the other hand, I always see people closing dialog boxes without fully reading and comprehending what they say. With the scheduled install option, your unwitting “choice” could even have been days ago.

I think the situation is sort of bad, but the situation started sort of bad. "No software project is ever done, so you are always really buying a subscription, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner you can act like it." - Neal Ford. More to the point, Windows was never yours. It was always Microsoft’s. As long as you are using something that is not yours, it’s advantageous to use the latest, best-maintained version that you are able to use.

My biggest aggravation with Windows is the pattern of unapproved restarts.

Sure, there's usually a setting to disable it, and a popup to delay it, but it's not really enough. The setting appears unreliable at best, and the popup is useless when it pops under fullscreen programs.

It really only takes one ill-timed restart to damn an OS forever, especially when the restart is chased by lengthy (and impossible to decline) downtime while a patch or upgrade is installed. Restarting on someone during a Skype interview or business call is shockingly unacceptable, no matter how sensible the average case.

The interesting thing here is that Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 all improved the Windows Update restart timing logic and made it more transparent. (There's a section that states "A restart is planned, Windows has determined the most likely idle time to try the restart is 3:43am" now, for instance.)

In this case it's Windows 7's Restart logic that is old/bad (and long has been), not Windows 10, but Windows 10 of course is getting blamed for it, not Windows 7.

It's another reason people should stop worrying and upgrade to Windows 10. ;)

That's not an excuse. Microsoft can and has been pushing updates to 7 to enable the constant upgrade nagging. They've even been continually pushing new updates that get more and more naggy. There is nothing preventing them from including an update that makes 7's restart logic less sadistic, but they've chosen not to do that.

Can you explain to me why Microsoft should expend time and effort to encourage behavior (staying on Windows 7) that increases their costs and increases fragility in their ecosystem? I'm not sympathetic to the dark patterns they use to push people to upgrade, but I'm 100% onboard with not pushing improvements to an older operating system.

What about a computer that runs a specific piece of software (say, Mach3 for CNC control) that doesn't have a win10 alternative. It only runs in windows 7 32 bit. There is no good alternative. I would prefer to make the determination that the machine will NEVER update. I just need it to remain the same until mach 3 updates or an alternative comes along.

Then disconnect it from the internet, and disable automatic updates... easy, peasy.

edit: regarding downvotes... if the software versioning is mission critical for a system, then having automatic updates and being connected to an external network is a risk to that critical system. I wasn't trying to be pedantic, but was being perhaps more terse than some may appreciate.

>Then disconnect it from the internet

this is not a solution to a problem. it's incredibly reductive and close-minded.

My understanding (I don't keep old OSes around so I can't test) is that Automatic Updates settings are still honored. Is this incorrect?

Past that, is there a reason that system should be connected to the Internet in the first place?

They should simply perform their obligations around providing fixes for the product for the duration of the advertised support period.

That they are running software on thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines that was advertised as an update but is instead advertware is a crap move on their part. It's probably not a strong legal argument, but IMO they should be paying me to use my system to run software of their choice, much in the way that I would pay to use Azure to run software of my choice on their systems.

I'll agree that the nagware aspect is pretty harsh, but disagree they shouldn't have pushed it via autoupdate... it really is an opportunity to update/upgrade to a new version... or would you expect ubuntu to not tell you there's a new version you can upgrade to as well?

That said, I'm kind of with GP, I'd rather have most people updated to the current windows, spyware issues aside, it's better for stability/security.

How about this: it's none of their business what people choose to do with their computers. It's not their ecosystem.

I disagree. Outdated and thus soon malware-ridden systems are a threat to all systems connected directly or indirectly to them, so users are obliged either to keep their systems clean and up-to-date. Either themselves or through experts, or through automated servicing.

Much like how cars must be serviced in regular intervals if they are to be operated on shared infrastructure (roads).

There is a difference between regular mandated services and waking up one morning to find they have replaced my much loved (and customized) Mercedes with a bloody Skoda.

Well, that's a reasonable point of view, but it's not Microsoft's job to make it happen. I could see a reasonable case for the idea that people should be held liable for hosting malware on their computers, and that failing to patch security holes could have some kind of secondary liability consequences. If that were the law, it might well make sense for Microsoft to offer upgrade contracts as a form of insurance. Refusing to accept an upgrade would then reasonably terminate the insurance agreement, and it would now be your job to keep your machine safe. Most people wouldn't be up for that and would probably opt to upgrade instead.

But that is not the world we live in, and those are not the rules in play, and even if they were, forcibly updating people's machines against their wishes would not be the solution.

Except MS is the one who cops the blame, the negative PR and the reputation of being insecure when malware runs rife across old Windows systems that weren't patched for years.

There's literally no way they can win this. If they force updates they're evil for rebooting PCs. If they don't, users don't update because it's always inconvenient and then they blame MS on malware.

> Except MS is the one who cops the blame

When?

They could design an OS that doesn't require a full reboot after every piddling little update.

Windows has actually gotten better at this over the years, but it's still nowhere near every other OS in the world.

Because we paid for their OS and expect it to be supported ?

Windows 8 was out in 2013, 3 fraking years ago. Even Ubuntu, which is free, has LTS supported for 5 years.

When you pay good money for an OS you use in your business, it's damn logical you want it to last you almost a decade without having to play the upgrade game all over again.

I don't have time for that. I don't have the money for that. And I don't need that. The OS is not a product I want to think about, it's this transparent thing that I'm supposed to forget while I doing actual work.

This Windows upgrade is uneeded and unwanted.

Yet it kept comming back to disturb me in my work with stupid notifications, reminding me that one day, it may reboot my computer at the worst moment, eat all my hard drive space or make me loose hours locking my computer.

What happened ? Well, one day my windows pratition broke for some reason I can't figure out and I got a perpetual guest account. I'm not even trying to fix it. I just stay 100% of my time on my Ubuntu one, because I don't want to deal with it.

> Because we paid for their OS and expect it to be supported ?

The upgrade is free. You are being supported. You can choose not to upgrade (and I think you're wrong, but it is your choice). What I don't understand the mindset behind "no, I won't upgrade, but I want a bunch of feature-change patches without making me upgrade" (as with the assertion that the auto-restart logic could/should be changed for Windows 7, not Windows 8).

Because it's a problem that should have been fixed 15 years ago.

No, forcing a version change using the excuse of security is not being supported. Ubuntu has security patches for 5 years and it's free. I pay for windows, give me my security patches.

Because it breaks screenreaders for the blind and it doesn't offer a solution to that.

IF you have enough time to push an update that causes people's computers to shut down and install a new operating system in the middle of a Skype call, then you have enough time to fix that glaring problem.

In my opinion, there is never a good time to restart. That is simply an artifact of the sad historical circumstances that led to the current state of operating systems.

I don’t particularly enjoy waking up to all my programs are closed because Windows decided that tonight was the night that it restarted.

It’s slightly better on MacOS, where programs using MacOS-specific APIs can restore their state on startup, but that doesn’t include most of the third-party applications. But MacOS doesn’t force the reboot. Yet.

For the record, Linux does not do this, and it is an operating system.

On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpectedly enough...) Fedora services that I've managed to drag along two and, respectively, three major releases. On the other hand, I can't remember ever managing to get a clean upgrade on Ubuntu after 8.04 or so. My latest attempt has been miserable, I spent half a day nursing my Ubuntu station at work back to health.

Besides, it's a trend that I expect to see reversed soon enough, given the direction in which Linux desktop is heading nowadays.

Edit: empirically, what has greatly simplified my life in this matter is being old-fashioned about partitioning. I keep /home and /opt separate, so upgrading typically consists of saving a list of packages, wiping everything but /home and /opt, doing a fresh install and reinstalling the packages. Depending on what I'm installing (OpenBSD on my laptop, Debian on my desktop) it takes about five minutes of accepting defaults and waiting for progress bars to fill, then another ten minutes until the packages installs (most of those ten minutes is spent on LaTeX, to be honest).

> many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss.

You might want to try a rolling release distro, something like Antergos (Arch + Tweaks)

I used Gentoo for a very long time (2005-ish to 2009 or so) and tried Arch, too, both back then (after I, uh, toasted a power supply compiling packages for five days straight) and more recently, about a year ago. It's a very good approach, but far too high-maintenance for my taste. During my (latest) short stint with Arch, I became a walking bug tracker. Stick to Adwaita because everything else breaks, don't do that in a KDE app because it crashes, try to reboot my computer only to find out it's stuck in a loop because some process can't notify some other process through D-Bus...

There's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work on Debian, either, but at least it's the same stuff for about a year or so.

Nowadays I get to write Linux software at work so I get all the bleeding-edge stuff there, and dealing with the latest and greatest breakage is part of my everyday job. I have no desire to do it at home, too.

Edit: plus, to put it bluntly, it's really no longer fun. When I said goodbye to Windows, back in nineteen-ninety-something, I did it to get away from the mind-boggling complexity and uncustomizable blackbox blurb on my hard drive.

Nowadays, it's an order of magnitude more complex; some of it is unwarranted and much of it just isn't reliable. Windows' and OS X's isn't, either, but at least it's nicely tucked away behind an interface that works, so you're not exposed to the crap underneath. I spend a lot more time wrestling with my computer than I'd like to.

I can mostly navigate through this whole maze of thisandthatkit and systemd-everything, largely because I'm exposed to it for eight hours a day, whether I want it or not, and have seen it being developed. But I don't think it's sustainable, and I have a feeling I'm going to call it quits one day.

Best i can tell the complexity comes from a misguided idea that if just the DEs simplify and automate common tasks, Linux on the desktop will happen.

End result is that the DE people keep pushing ever deeper in the stack, violating long standing layering, that made it easier to reason about why something broke, in the process.

This type of grass is always greener answer is why the Linux desktop experience is so poor. If someone follows that advice they may fix one issue they have but in return they get a whole new set of problems to discover and troubleshoot or run away from.

They say that using Linux is constantly solving some problems, only for the solutions to produce more problems for you to tackle. You stop when the next problem you face is not annoying enough to care.

There was a point, somewhere between 2009ish and 2011ish, when that was really no longer true, except for the distributions that hopped on the PulseAudio boat really early and had audio broken for a few releases.

I have no idea what happened after that but it's really screwed up.

What happened in 2011ish that made everything go to hell again?

I wish I knew.

If with this you mean requiring a restart then arent' you wrong? Ubuntu is linux, right, so it's an operating system, and it has stuff like /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs so it's not like all linux flavors out there don't ever require reboots.

If you meant forced restarts at a given time (or whatever windows 10 does) then you're right. For now, and hopefully forever.

No, you're wrong. Ubuntu will not ever force you to reboot your machine. The most it will do is recommend a restart.

Microsoft restarts because updates are in files that are "locked" and can't be switched-out until the system is rebooted. After you install the update, but before you reboot, your system is still running the old known-buggy code.

Linux doesn't lock files; instead it creates in-memory copies of them. So the updater can update the on-disk version without any troubles. But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code.

So there's absolutely no technical reason Windows needs to reboot more than Linux. The only difference is that Linux developers decided "meh, the user can reboot when they want". But unless you reboot after installing your Linux updates, your computer still has the bugs.

> But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code.

This has not been true for some time, and not in any mainstream distributions currently that come to mind.

How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

>How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

But this is not what you suggested, is it?

I don't understand this answer, and I don't recall "suggesting" anything.

Settle down. You seem to be taking some heat in the comments, so I'll recuse myself from this discussion, as I feel we are no longer making progress in an intellectual context.

It would help to "make progress in an intellectual context" if you'd deign to back-up the claim you made, which I now strongly suspect was simply incorrect from the start.

But hey, suit yourself.

On Windows, once in a while there is a Patch Tuesday when the only update is Internet Explorer, a program that I neither wanted, nor installed, nor opened since I got tired of it years ago. Clearly, I need to reboot my computer for this.

On Ubuntu, certain packages are labeled as needing a reboot, and when you update them the control menu thing with a gear in the upper-right corner turns red, and the Update utility says you should reboot. Then you know you should, but it doesn’t force you to.

EDIT: There’s also Ksplice, which was going be a standard until Oracle bought it, and Red Hat kpatch. Those allow you to update a kernel without rebooting. Most other programs still require restarting, but Linux benefits from a saner architecture, where the web browser isn’t an “integral part of the operating system,” and the font renderer for the GUI and for printing is not part of the kernel. You need to reboot less.

Your answer doesn't really address the question.

Jameskegel said that in any "mainstream distributions", after you run an update but before you reboot, the OS is running the updated libraries. I honestly don't understand how that is possible.

It's really quite simple: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/74172/28974

Right but that very answer says:

> Newly created processes will use the updated contents, running applications will access the old version.

In other words, currently running code is still running the known-buggy version, exactly what I said originally that kicked-off this whole discussion.

No, what you said was: "until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code"

And then later in the same post (just so we're clear about what you said): "But unless you reboot after installing your Linux updates, your computer still has the bugs."

Linux does not require a reboot to update.

One of the things I thought Windows 8 did really right was trying to instill into applications the lifecycle that they could be force closed/rebooted at any time and should be good at saving and restoring state across application starts. This is good beyond just system restarts and good in general to know that applications would typically come back to where you left off after the system losing connectivity or going to sleep or unloading an application to save memory/CPU while you aren't actively using it.

The complaints about this lifecycle model from app developers is that is hard to program for. Windows 8 was also strict enough forcing this lifecycle (closing out applications sometimes seconds after minimizing and attempting to restore them quickly on window restore) that it showed how bad developers can be at programming hard things like proper app lifecycle management, so they begged Windows to be less strict about it.

(That was one of the magic things about Windows 8 that Windows 10 doesn't quite replicate: minimizing a properly built application and watching the application's memory and CPU usage quickly drop to zero.)

The problem with this lifecycle assumption is that there is no way to opt out.

I have a "metro" style SSH application, and windows regularly decides it should close it, which kills my active SSH sessions.

I understand that they removed the ability to opt-out to force developers to change to a more appropriate model, but there are cases where a task cannot be suspended (because, for example, it's interacting with another computer). Having to re-log-in to my ssh session the 4th or 5th time in an hour is absolutely infuriating.

You can opt out by creating a background process. The thing that makes that part complicated is that there is a background process lifecycle to learn (including interactions between a UI process and background process). Also, Windows wants a bit more of an explicit knowledge than say classic Win32 about what the background process is for so it can best manage it.

The support for background processes continues to improve. Windows 10, for instance, now supports a "single instance" background processing model where background processes can be seen as an invocation of the UI app (if already running) and vice versa (the UI app is presented as an invocation to the background process if that is already running) with hand-offs from one to the other, simplifying the programming of some of the interactions between background and UI for some apps.

That's the very reason I didn't use any Metro apps on my work computer. They would get swapped out of memory and killed whenever I ALT+TABbed from them. Not joking. Every time I wanted to switch to a normal app for a second and then back to the Metro one, the latter would have to "restore" itself (and guess what, it never restored to the point I last left it).

Of course I know the reason - that's because my machine is memory constrained, I routinely run on ~90% RAM usage. But hey, that 8GB of RAM isn't here for vacation, it's to be used.

Personally, I find the mobile app lifecycle - which is where they took the idea from - to be incredibly annoying. I like to have control both when applications die and when they start up (which, on Android, is utterly unpredictable).

Oh, but it's great! I can't browse most sites on my android because the LMK for some reason starts with the damn browser. I love it! /s

> It's another reason people should stop worrying and upgrade to Windows 10. ;)

Never. Microsoft has lost my trust forever with these issues.

The only reason for me to upgrade is DirectX 12 exclusivity, a practice I personally abhor, and always have. Luckily, there are no games on the PC that use DirectX12 beyond some hackjob implementations for DX11 games. I think I'll be just fine on Windows 7.

I may upgrade when the OS is "finished." For now, though, I think I'll let others trudge through the mud of a forced public beta.

Maybe, just maybe, I might take the plunge when the video games I built my PC for actually require me to.

Until then? No thank you.

Windows 7 would forcibly shut down and reboot, without warning or indication, if you delayed updates long enough. Any laptop I owned with 7 could and often did spontaneously restart, no matter what I was doing.

I'm not shy about installing updates, but if I'm busy working I would delay it a couple times. Then I'd not use the laptop for a few days (with it in sleep mode), by then I'd have forgotten about the update. I was bitten by forced reboots in 7 many times.

8 added a "Your PC will reboot in 15 minutes" and that was so much better from a laptop perspective. W10 insider builds currently tell you to set "inactive hours", and this works fairly well for both phone and laptop. My phone updates while I sleep, my laptop pings me to reboot at my leisure, for it is never awake & inactive.

Disable the "Windows Update" service. Problem solved.

Oh, frak their idea of "idle time". I went to settings to change it, I honestly wanted to give it a reasonable time window when I'm not likely to use the machine. Guess what? The "busy time" is limited to 8 hours. Because no one ever uses a computer for more than 8 hours a day? Well, but I do. Frak that.

My biggest issue with Windows Update (specifically) is that it has absolutely no clue what a laptop is. If I'm on a laptop, I'm likely to be out working from site to site, so don't force me to keep my laptop ON so updates can install! Ugh. This is just stupid-headed engineering.

I love the "We will install updates at 3:30am". I'd really like to see you try. My laptop will be in my bag in the hotel room at 3:30am. Hilton will be really happy with you burning the building down when you remotely switch on my Thinkpad with no ventilation.

I have never had a Windows laptop boot up for scheduled updates. In that event, it always waitied for the next manual boot.

Yeah, I haven't either, that's why I said "I'd love to see you try". You'd think the system would be smart enough to realize that it's literally never been awake at 3:30am.

The ACPI power spec allows the computer to set an alarm and have it woken up at a particular time... like 3:30am

If the computer is sleeping it can wake up. Not sure about hibernate.

It can't in hibernate because it's the state as shutdown. The deep sleep introduced in new versions of Windows might still be able to wakeup though.

I experience that constantly on any laptop I use because I pretty much never turn them off - they go to sleep mode when not used. Every now and then I find the laptop running with a clean desktop after logging in - because it decided to reboot and install updates somewhen during the night.

I've been an enemy of automated updates ever since, many years ago, I went to the kitchen to boil the water for a tea, and there suddenly I heard the PC speaker beeping - oh, Windows decided to count down from "5 minutes" and reboot.

I think automated updates are fine but require user's intervention to restart. Don't restart automatically on their behalf.

They are not fine. For example, Outlook (on my work PC) tends to become non-functional when an update is pending.

That's just P* poor quality and lack of care at Microsoft. When I think of automatic updates, I am thinking about automatic security updates on Ubuntu server. I'm sure canonical will screw things up at some point as well though.

I guess it is easy and tempting to say "just turn it off and on again" on consumer electronics and end user computers. :/

Why would an application become non-functional when an update is pending? Perhaps a critical security vulnerability?

Woke up one morning to a very hot Thinkpad in my bag. Windows 10 did exactly that. Extremely frustrating.

> it has absolutely no clue what a laptop is

It also has no clue what a server is. Servers with Windows 2012 R2, force the users to reboot. How stupid are microsoft, that they assume that people will be ok with rebooting production servers in the middle of the day.

> The setting appears unreliable at best, and the popup is useless when it pops under fullscreen programs

This! Anyone saying this is new behavior caused by the Windows 10 update has never been booted out of a WoW raid at 3 am because the restart pop-up didn't show beneath the game window. Windows Update has been doing this since XP.

It was either not fully thought out, or Microsoft's analysis figured that it would cost less to do it this way.

Anecdote: When I worked dispatch, the local Network Operations Center pushed out an update that forcibly rebooted all of our Windows workstations...including the machine that ran inbound emergency calls. The admins at the NOC didn't think that anyone would dial 911 at three in the morning. No malfeasance, but a simple lack of foresight.

See, this is a GREAT comparison, because thinking, "No one will call 911 at 3am" EASILY falls into the realm of destructive negligence. Like "I didn't realize these cars could be hit from the side!" or, "I didn't realize how much worse I drive when I am drunk, officer!"

In the 3am 911 case, those admins could EASILY have cost LIVES with their decision. If that inbound call handler's machine had updates waiting, or more especially had any difficulty installing those updates, you could've had HOURS of downtime in a scenario where MINUTES mean life or death!

I guess my main point is that naivete like that is called criminal negligence and is punishable under the law in many cases. There may have been no malicious intent, but in a case so potentially catastrophic, it hardly matters, and if those admins didn't get into DEEP TROUBLE, they're either very lucky or your administrative discipline system is VERY broken.

And Microsoft is straying into similar territory with this whole thing.

> and if those admins didn't get into DEEP TROUBLE, they're either very lucky or your administrative discipline system is VERY broken

Our commander talked to their commander, I'm sure at least one finger was wagged at them in disapproval.

and this is how incompetence lives on.

That's why you have change control meetings with a change advisory board. Yes they're boring and yes very often the changes don't affect you at all, but it's really nice to hear an admin say "we're taking down critical system X at Y time" and have the ability to say "no you won't, that's when Operation Z is being run".

And that's why a liaison from the "business" side of the organization should be in those meetings too.

I'm working in Antarctica and we BARELY caught one of our science systems a couple hours before it was about to kick off that stupid auto-upgrade. It would have broke a very expensive and custom box built to run these experiments, which was transported down here at great cost. If I hadn't been wandering by checking on something else I'd never have seen the window and it would've wrecked some poor grantee's years and years of work, just like that.

If it's so critical, why hadn't anybody turned off auto-updates?

This problem isn't new with Windows 10. It could have just as easily upgrade to a new Windows 7 patch which broke the product.

Do you want the real answer?

Every grantee and science group is different, and builds their boxes back in the States with varying levels of IT competence. Being a wizard in geothermal imaging doesn't mean you're a wizard in building Windows 10 boxes.

So there's all these varying groups (we support over 20 different science groups on our station alone) building their custom boxes on a variety of OS's and hardware to support all their strange sensors and equipment, and many of them are so specialized that no one is allowed to touch them. Nearly all science systems run Windows 7 or some flavor of Linux, and because there is literally YEARS of work leading up to one of these systems appearing on station, we are loath to touch them for fear of breaking some long-running or fragile science project.

In this situation I used my best judgement and determined that blocking Windows 10 would prevent more problems than it would cause for this group, and fortunately I was right.

Right; but you're solving a symptom, not the problem. It sounds like what you really need is some sort of approval process, or at the very least a checklist, to ensure these machines are configured in the way they should be. Or, at the very least, that the teams involved understand the implications of a computer sitting in a base in the middle of nowhere with auto-updates turned on.

The point I was trying to make is that the problem you're seeing isn't specific to Windows 10; it could have easily happened on Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 instead.

A computer that reboots to update to Windows 10 could also have updated to install a bug patch; it was set to auto-update.

If a computer system is so mission-critical that it should never updated, well, Windows has a setting for that-- so turn it on!

That's terrifying. Why are inbound calls dependent on a Windows machine at all?

DoD contractors.

Try being a fast-track user.

I get that volunteering to beta-test comes with some pain, but I literally went to go use the bathroom mid-day, and I came back to Windows 10 reverting to an older build. Bizarre.

Restarting and installing a new OS without intent during a call is definitely bad.

Also, restarting to install updates while in the middle of a presentation at work was disrupting and humiliating. Happened to me.

I've had various problems with running a long job, and then Windows popping up and saying it's going to restart shortly to install updates. Or I want to open my laptop to check something, and it demands the power plugged in so it can spend 10-20 minutes installing updates. I've worried about it doing this nonsense when I'm using it to do a presentation or something.

IIRC, you can specify a time of day to update, and mostly, you get an option to retry in 4 hours (or tomorrow, etc)... most corporate environments are using services to defer updates to scheduled times.. and at home, I just leave it on/auto. My understanding it's only after a few days of nagging that you can't defer the updates anymore.

If you can't reboot your computer for over two days, you may want to rethink your workflow... I tend to completely shutdown/restart at least every night/morning, and if I had critical pending updates, would probably let them run at lunch, just closing everything before that. This happens maybe once a month, and is just the cost of having a computer...

"Oh man, I have to stop my car and turn it off to get gas once a week. Or when I get my oil changed every few months..."

Ubuntu does it right. It only nags me when I log in, and I can dismiss it with a click, and I don't get nagged again until I log in again.

Edit: On Windows I often run jobs overnight that take 6-7 hours to complete. It's annoying to discover in the morning that Windows aborted my job to install some update, and I have to restart the thing for the next night. This never happens on Ubuntu.

Note, if you aren't on an LTS release, don't wait too long... my grandmother is on 14.10, and can no longer run updates (servers appear to be gone) and no clean upgrade path to 16.04, so I'll be copying her profile directory, and setting up the latest version... fortunately, she only uses the browser and a couple of old games installed via wine.

I use Windows 10 on my home workstation. Last week I was checking a few things in the morning before I left for work. Windows wanted to schedule updates, it suggested "9AM; because it doesn't look like you use your computer at that time."

That computer hosts a Linux VM which I connect to remotely from work and use for most of my development efforts... I use it every day without fail, yet Windows thinks my computer is "idle" simply because I'm not physically sitting at the terminal moving the mouse and keyboard.

I realize that's a perfectly reasonable heuristic for your average desktop user; but something about the messaging and voice of Windows 10 just really rubs me the wrong way. Previous versions of Windows seemed much less chatty, whereas now everything feels so presumptuous and autonomous all under the guise of "Cortana knows your habits better than you do."

Those technically illiterate users are going to have trouble with Windows 10. My stepfather is in his 70s, and I had to help him set up the weather app - and it took me about ten minutes how to figure out how to set a default location!

10 is different enough from 7 that they're going to have to learn a lot of new habits - and while that's just the nature of modern life, some people are going to suffer significantly more than others.

I believe there must be a better way of getting the less-literate people to consensually upgrade to Windows 10, without forcing it on them.

I believe there must be a way of allowing people to live forever without growing old or dying. Unfortunately, neither of our beliefs are very helpful since we cannot describe an exact method for achieving our goals.

Sure, but you can easily user-test and iterate changes to software without killing people or waiting 20 years to see if your changes are beneficial.

Have you tried ChromeOS? My grandfather is in his mid 80's. I've been helping him with his computer(s) for years. In the last year, I switched him over to a Chromebook, after trying and failing to switch him to Windows 10 (wasn't compatible with his old computer)... and since everything he does involves websites and bookmarks anyways.

It's the easiest time he's ever had using a computer. No random update notifications, adware popups, anti-virus subscription nags, etc. Nothing but a browser, which he knows how to use.

I'd recommend it to anyone considered technically illiterate.

I haven't, but I probably should. One problem is that they live halfway across the country, so I wouldn't be on hand to help him adjust to the new OS.

There really isn't much adjusting needed if they have used a browser before.

I'll second that.

I own a Chromebook, and it is my favorite machine to use out of all of the laptops I own. If I need Windows for something, i just Remote Desktop into my desktop downstairs.

My Chromebook is set up with Crouton, so I have a full linux environment on it for development.

Storage was an issue, but I swapped the original ssd out for a 256GB ssd. Now, it is pretty much a cheap ultrabook.

I mean it covers 99% of what most people do with their computers, and in a simple, lovely way. Word? Check. Excel? Check. Photos? Check. And, most importantly, browser, check.

Best thing I've ever done was to buy two iPads for my parents. I'd strongly suggest that.

I'm sympathetic both ways on this one.

I think Microsoft went "too far" but I also agree that we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7. Effectively having 20%+ of the market on a super old OS holding back the industry and less secure.

Microsoft claim they're planning to avoid this in the future by no longer releasing named new OS's, and instead just update Windows 10 for "free" forever. Basically the same as Apple's current model with MacOS.

I guess how you fall on this topic is answered by the question: "Do the ends justify the means?"

> we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7

If Microsoft had really wanted to avoid that, they'd have made Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants, and treat the installbase as a testbed for forced updates that could easily (and have) render machines inoperable.

Windows 7 will become the next XP, and Microsoft has nobody to blame for it but themselves.

Oh come on, "spyware" is the same cloud-enabled search stuff that every OS is doing.

To me the big problem with Windows 10 is that it's simply very buggy.

> Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants

Can people stop spreading this meme? Worst case, anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware.

> Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user

It is, regular people around me love it.

> and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user.

I (and many) do, if only because it is immensely better than sticking to Win7 whose non-extended support ends next year or something.

> Microsoft has nobody to blame for it but themselves

MS made a couple missteps, but people just love to blow whatever MS does way out of proportion (the same way they do for Apple, only for other points) so instead of having reasonable discourse, all we have is a pile of knee-jerk reactions (not even flamewars!)

We get it, MS is bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad bad bad. Oh nasty corps. Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.

EDIT: not even a dozen seconds and downvotes are pouring in. Is it still possible to have some reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?

Say half a dozen disputable things, and you get a lot of folks disagreeing. To be expected.

>MS made a couple missteps, but people just love to blow whatever MS does way out of proportion (the same way they do for Apple, only for other points) so instead of having reasonable discourse, all we have is a pile of knee-jerk reactions (not even flamewars!)

>We get it, MS is bad, Apple is bad, Google is bad bad bad. Oh nasty corps. Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.

>EDIT: not even a dozen seconds and downvotes are pouring in. Is it still possible to have some reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?

Haha yeah I wonder why people have a problem with your comment?!???!?!?!?!? You're just so reasonable here!

Is it really better looking or is it simply a case of shiny and new?

> Can people stop spreading this meme?

How about stopping the meme that everyone should accept spyware?

> anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware

Without the explicit informed consent - which means opt-IN and an accurate and full manifest of what is included - then "telemetry" is spyware, by definition.

As for making the data "anonymous", have you seen the specifics of how that works? When Google claimed they made the IP addresses in GA anonymous they only masked the lowest 8-bits. Uniqueness (and the ASN) was completely recoverable.

The only way to make "telemetry" anonymous is to cook it so much that it isn't useful anymore. If you doubt this, you don't understand how easily modern methods can find correlations between data sets. But that's only about the data inside the packet. Just logging arrival times of packets that have any kind of common identifier can build a detailed picture of someone's pattern-of-life. Just because think it's ok to spy on users doesn't mean you get to make that decision for everybody else.

> regular people around me love it.

So what? It's a fallacy to extrapolate that opinion onto other people.

> support ends next year

Which means support is still available.

> Oh nasty corps.

Willfully misrepresenting the people that criticize Microsoft (et al) is never a good way to argue.

> Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.

Insults like this are why you got downvoted.

> reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?

see: stones, glass houses

The downvotes are pouring because you suggested that telemetry shipped by Microsoft being spyware is a "meme". This is seen as both arrogant and wrong at the same time - the best combination to collect downvotes.

(I didn't downvote you but I think you are very wrong).

Isn't it true that originally Win10 previews logged a lot of things, but M$ pretty much stopped doing most of that with the release versions of Windows 10? I.e. people seem to be criticizing present Windows 10 by what it was before it was officially recommended for general population.

My thought as well. If you have sneak in and force your users to upgrade, your doing something wrong.

And everyone frames this upgrade tactic like it's good for the user. In reality, this is good for MS, and it happens to have some benefits for the user. Lets quit acting like MS is being altruistic here.

It's good for the user the way rape is good for the victim: "Just lay back and let us do what we want. Heck, you might even enjoy it!"

End users and tech people always knee-jerk about anything that changes, whether it's a positive change or not.

The Ribbon interface they introduced in Office back in 2007 was a huge improvement over the mess of dialogs, toolbars and menus they had before by every metric. People still bitch about it, almost a decade later. The people who bitch about it benefit as much as everybody else from the increased usability, but that doesn't stop the bitching.

And it's not just Microsoft. People bitched at Firefox when they moved the menu into the tabs. People bitched at Chrome when it removed "http" from the URL bar (I just noticed it seems to have come back at some point), people bitch about everything all the time. Not because they genuinely didn't like it, or because it makes their life more difficult, but because they simply hate change.

The only way to keep these people happy is to change nothing, ever. Is that really what you want? It's not what I want.

Not sure I agree. Sure, there's lot of change-bitching (like people complaining about Facebook timelines), and every change breaks someone's workflow (https://xkcd.com/1172/), but quite a lot of those changes people complain about are really making the applications worse.

You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available. Nowadays I can't find the more advanced stuff I know that worked in Excel and Word in the past. Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator? I don't know, but the interface doesn't allow me to find out.

People bitched at Chrome because removing "http" was seen as a first step of removing the address bar altogether, dumbing down both the browser and peoples' perception of the Internet. The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get. Sure, it may be good for the quarterly sales report, but it's disastrous for the future of technology.

> Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability and reduced the number of features available.

I think that the ribbon design itself actually helped discoverability, at the expense of familiarity for long-term users of the old interface (OTOH, I think that simultaneously with the introduction of the ribbon, they also made it so a lot of options that previously were on the UI required customization to actually have them surfaced at all -- which they also, IIRC, did in some previous versions without changing the UI structure -- and, IIRC again, they reversed some of the most egregious of those in 2010.)

> You brought up Office's ribbon. Sure, it was a "look&feel benefit", but it also significantly hurt discoverability

That is simply not true.

In fact, the major impetus for creating the Ribbon was the Office team dealing with the constant feature requests for features they'd already implemented, but users couldn't find how to activate/use.

> and reduced the number of features available.

Also untrue, unless you're going to say things like "being able to drag a menu off the menu bar and hover around like a toolbar" are a "feature".

Or put another way, it did reduce configurability, but the number of actual useful features was not reduced.

> Is it just a discoverability problem, or did Microsoft go with that stupid new trend of dumbing down software to the lowest common denominator?

You should know I mentally translate the phrase "dumb down" to, "I don't like this because of a knee-jerk but I've never bothered to think about it long enough to express why".

> The less you demand from your users, the dumber they get.

Seriously?

How about: the fewer obstacles you put in front of your users, the more useful work they can get done.

You should watch the talk[1] by Joe Peacock of fark.com about updating the site (the infamous "You'll get over it" incident).

The solution isn't "change nothing". Instead, you involve the people that use the old (current) version in the process, keep them informed, and get some kind of buy-in. Most importantly, you respect that the user has their own schedule and needs with a migration path that allows the user to make the transition at their own pace.

What you don't do is surprise users at random times, revoke any agency they had, and force changes on them without any consideration fo the user's situation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that's Apple's approach. One of my MacBooks is running Yosemite and has been receiving security updates. My other Macbook is running El Capitan, and I hear Sierra is coming out soon. Those seem to be named updates. Maybe they've announced something new for Sierra?

Or maybe you were referring to the free updates?

They are all still named OS X.

The next release is named macOS Sierra.

Also, all Windows releases for the indefinite future will be named Windows 10.

>but I also agree that we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7"

How does Apple avoid "XP situations" without shoving system updates down users' throats? New versions of iOS typically achieve >80% adoption rates.

They're following Microsoft's example, I have iOS 9.2 in my iPad, I receive at least two nags per day...

Everything Microsoft's doing with Windows 10 is already following Apple's example. Requiring an online account to log into the OS, offering free OS updates with extreme nagging. Integrating an ad-supported software store into the OS. That's all stuff Apple had done way before Microsoft.

People just don't bitch about Apple because Apple is "cool" and Microsoft is "lame". I guess.

And Apple's raking-in of massive amounts of $$$ shows that it's exactly what people want. So it should be absolutely no surprise that Microsoft's following their lead.

"Holding back the industry"

No!

I think we, the software industry, are very irresponsible when it comes to __planned obsolescence__ [1]. Computers from 10 years ago are very capable of doing most things common users want to do nowadays. However, many modern operating systems and applications make these computers unusable.

We are forcing users to upgrade software, and because of all the layers of cruft accumulated in this software, they are then forced to upgrade their hardware too. This just adds to a spiral of consumerism that is going to destroy our planet.

Like most of us, I like developing with the latest high level fancy cutting edge stack; but we have to remember that it's not the society's duty to empower the tech industry but the other way around. It is our role to help people solve people's their problems, and in ways that are effective socially and ecologically and does not create waste. This also means, making sure that hardware does not become obsolete because of our carelessness, lazyness or selfabsorpion as software makers.

Also, alternatives do exist.

I know someone in Cordoba (Spain) that recently started a __slow computing__ cooperative, inspired by this article [2]. His goal is to bring tech experts and ordinary people together to build custom solutions adapted to their needs. They have users go to them and do an interview with them. Then, they make a GNU/Linux and libre software installation for them, often reusing old hardware, adapted to their personal needs, and do the teaching necessary. I find this a very interesting approach, that solves the security problem both by installing updated software that does not create hardware obsolescence, and educating users so they regain control of their machines.

There is no valid excuse for Microsoft here. Your argument is the perfect example of how proprietary software puts end users as servants to the interest of owners of the proprietary code that control their machines.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Planned_obsolescence [2] https://newrepublic.com/article/121832/pleasure-do-it-yourse...

Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue. The case for encouraging users to move off of Windows XP is the same as the case for encouraging users to move off of older GNU/Linux distributions: security updates.

Even in a slow computing initiative, outside invention will continue. Take ASLR, DEP, and other memory corruption mitigations. The architects of the legacy, fixed-address systems didn't expect the large amount of vulnerability due to buffer overflows in programs that handle external input. The authors of these programs failed to write tests that exercised some edge cases of malformed input. While long/malformed input unit tests might seem germane today, they weren't then.

Custom software initiatives make sense for people who have a high aptitude and the time to undertake them. This use case doesn't fit the vast majority of people who use computers.

While Microsoft certainly deserved the $10k judgement against them, software authors have the duty to help mitigate past imperfections, errors, and lack of foresight in their software. Authors of free and proprietary software share this responsibility.

> Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue.

The OS being proprietary is an important issue. With libre software, lightweight forks that still work in old hardware can be maintained. Also, the software stack can be customized. Note that it's not security patches what makes software slow, but the zillions of layers of indexers, UI frameworks written in three layers of dynamic languages, etc that are included in a desktop environment. A modern GNU/Linux distribution function decently on old hardware as soon as you swap the desktop environment. With either you upgrade to a 20GB OS with a desktop environment that requrires 2 gigs of ram and so on, or you are stuck with an unsupported Windows XP.

> Custom software initiatives make sense for people who have a high aptitude and the time to undertake them. This use case doesn't fit the vast majority of people who use computers.

The average american watches 4 hours of TV a day [1] and they spends more time on Facebook than taking care of their pets [2] and takes weeks of training in order to get a driving license. I think the average person has the time to spend one or two days, when they upgrade their computer, pairing with a technician to get to understand the software they have and how it works and how to protect themselves. It's a matter of priorities. Sadly, for a lot of the software industry, an empowered userbase is not in their best economic interest.

[1] https://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-23/americans-...

My friend sent me the link to the slow computing/technology sobereignty project:

http://tianguis.cordoba.cc/que-hacemos/soberania-tecnologica...

Upgrading software isn't (or shouldn't be) planned obsolescence. There's nothing inherent about software that means throwing away hardware. The only reason a Windows 7 machine wouldn't be able to run Windows 10 is if the hardware maker chose to not update their drivers, and at some point you have to stop blaming Microsoft for that.

There is no such thing as planned obsolescence when it comes to software. "Throwing away" software creates no pollution and Windows 10 runs on basically anything Windows 7 ran on.

>There is no valid excuse for Microsoft here.

There is no valid blame for Microsoft here. Windows 10 will run just fine on 10 year old hardware, as long as the device drivers are compatible.

How about 100% everything instead of "basically anything", without serious "if's" like "as long as drivers are compatible" ?

If a machine is running, say, windows xp, and it does in a manner that satisfies the owner's need, then it should be able to keep running forever in the same manner, provided that hardware lasts and/or is replaced with adequate spares, not necessarily anything newer.

It's ok if that computer becomes incompatible with newer software because of that.

It's ok if that computer becomes incompatible with newer outside/network services because of that.

It's not ok if that computer stops being able to execute exactly the same process that it could do 10 years ago.

Because Microsoft didn't write the drivers for 100% of hardware... and tbh, if a company wants they can pay Microsoft to write those initial drivers, and provided the hardware for testing, iirc, they tend to maintain those drivers between versions. There are plenty of drivers that are written by MS, it's pretty common with Printers iirc, and works pretty damned well.

Because foo pro-audio, or bar cnc-board didn't want to update their drivers, or for that matter, more often than not, had a weird installer that simply didn't follow proper practices, doesn't work in the new version of Windows isn't MS' fault.

Nevertheless, because the chance of something like that happening is clearly higher than 0.0000000001%, Microsoft should simply never do such a drastic upgrade automatically. (So, even within Windows 10, they should not automate all upgrades, because occasionally they will have to include bigger changes.)

Also, users will not understand this, and will, rightly, blame Microsoft.

Any trivial update has a higher than 0.0000000001% chance of failure... if you need that level of specificity, you should disable updates, and network connectivity altogether.

That's exactly how it exists. What you're describing here is reality. If you have a machine running Windows XP and you never change anything, then nothing will change. Software doesn't magically bloat over time, those changes happen with updates that add new features. If you never update things, you'll stay on the same software revision and it will run the same as the day you bought it.

A company I used to work for in 2012 had a Windows 3.11 workstation running some ancient software to support an auxiliary system. Many banks run COBOL on mainframes and haven't changed anything since the 70s.

I'm really confused as to the argument here. If you never update your software and don't expect to browse the Internet, old software works exactly like it did in the past. How do you expect it would change?

The whole issue is that some machines been force-upgraded to windows 10 despite users explicitly (or so they thought) responding multiple times that no, they do not wish to upgrade; and then failing to work correctly because of e.g. driver issues.

This is not acceptable behavior - I can understand automatic upgrades that are fully backwards compatible, e.g. a security patch; but upgrade to windows 10 isn't like that.

Upgrades aren't always entirely painless and without cost.

If the UI significantly changes, for instance, there will be a time investment needed to re-learn what you need to get work done. (This was a particularly nasty issue for Windows 8, not quite as bad for 10 but there are a few changes for sure.)

If the upgrade fails in any way, there may be significant time spent getting the computer back on-line. Sometimes this takes a very long time.

Software upgrades may actually introduce bugs. In the worst case scenario, some OS software upgrades have actually "bricked" devices (see: Apple iOS 9.3.2). These further impact productivity / take time to work around.

Some very old legacy programs may not work at all. It takes time to implement a new solution for the problem in a new tool. (This isn't a big issue for 7 to 10 from what I've heard, but you do hear this about other upgrades in the past.)

This cost in time is not nothing. If there is no real net benefit, it could end up being a big waste.

Even if people want to upgrade, IMHO the way Microsoft is pushing out the upgrade is quite bad. Usually in the enterprise world, IT departments tend to test new OS releases (and even patch updates) to make sure everything works, before rolling out the updates in the wild. They don't want a patch to break some mission critical software. The cost of that could be huge in some cases.

Even for Windows 7 retail to Windows 10 retail, I could see many people preferring to be cautious. Perhaps they are wanting to wait for a slightly more stable OS (usually the first release of a Windows version is a bit buggy). Some people also might want to test things out first, to make sure there are no problems. Of course there's those that don't want to update because change bad, but I don't think that's all cases.

Furthermore, a fair bit of Windows retail I'm sure is businesses - these tend to be even more cautious than overall consumers. A software update going wrong could cost them money, after all, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I honestly don't think the "rolling updates" model being pushed works for enterprise... even small ones.

If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates. Let's take that as an inviolate law of nature:

If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates

This isn't a proprietary vs. open source thing, this is a "level of effort" thing. Microsoft right now, if they discover a security bug, has to create a patch for:

* Windows XP SP2 (thanks to all those "extended support" buyers; the US Navy has purchased support through June 8, 2017, they are not the only ones)

* Windows Vista (yup; also "extended support" for another year)

* Windows 7

* Windows 8

* Windows 8.1

* Windows 10

Why does that matter?

* It requires (up to) 6 times the development time to develop a fix for the bug

* It requires 6 times the QA time

* It makes Microsoft far less responsive to bug reports because of the time required to come up with a fix

* It makes Microsoft set the bar higher on what bugs are "fixable" because of the cost of coming up with a fix

It makes life difficult for everybody, and it wastes a ton of time Microsoft could instead be spending making their product better instead of constantly digging-around in 17-year-old code.

Let's say you're Ubuntu, you're all open source-y and have that warm fuzzy feeling. You want people to use their 10 year old OS installs, no problem. Let's be generous and only include the long-term support versions, because I want to save on typing:

* Dapper Drake

* Hardy Heron

* Lucid Lynx

* Precise Pangolin

* Trusty Tahr

* Xenial Xerus

That's also six versions you have to update every time a security fix comes in. (Potentially) 6 times the code to create the fix, definitely 6 times the QA time, etc. All the same problems Microsoft has, but this time in your open source dreamland.

That's a huge, huge, waste of effort that could go towards actually making the OS better.

You really don't understand Linux.

They could keep patching XP to avoid the security issues.

This is more about taking control away from users than anything else.

And I could keep fixing my 92 Toyota Corolla to keep it on the road, but at some point it becomes more effective to just move on. There are some things inherent in older software that go beyond a simple patch, design decisions that may have made sense at the time but don't today. The only real way to go about that is how Apple does it, releasing a huge service pack that makes pretty major changes to the OS. And at that point, it's hardly any different than the changes Microsoft makes in different versions of Windows, except for the GUI.

Toyota doesn't get to come to your house and tow your Corolla away when they think you ought to move on. You get to decide that: it's your car, and it's your choice.

If Toyota feels so embarrassed by the fact that you are driving your Corolla that they want to spend some money trying to convince you to replace it, they can certainly make you a trade-in offer. But maybe you like your Corolla, or you don't feel like dealing with all the paperwork; for whatever reason, you decline the offer. Does Toyota get to come haul your car away and give you a new one regardless? Hell fucking no. It's your car.

If Microsoft wants people to stop using XP they have every right to try to tempt those XP users with a better offer, but some people just won't want to, and that is their right. Their computer, their choice.

If they offered me a 2016 Corolla in trade for a 2002 Corolla, I'd probably do it.

edit: If they had a recall/replacement on the car because it was unsafe for other drivers on the road, people would probably agree as well.

Key point being, "offered."

Microsoft is making an offer that most non-technical users can't refuse. That's not ethical. The ends don't justify the means.

There's actually precedent for that in the world of cars. The GM EV1 was leased out and later 100% recalled and destroyed. Under the license agreement with GM, they did have the ability to take away your car, much for the same reason Microsoft pushes OS upgrades: their inability or unwillingness to support the platform any further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1#Program_can...

At some point Microsoft has to make breaking changes to Windows XP. Simple service packs won't suffice. Airbags, three point seatbelts, electronic fuel injection, variable valve timing, these are all modern conveniences that people expect in a car these days. Things that are very hard to retrofit into an old car without redesigning the platform at a core level. Sure, a 2016 and a 1992 model are still Corollas but it's hard to argue that Toyota should still be selling the 1992 model retrofitted to include all of our modern needs.

The argument here is "Microsoft should still be patching Windows XP." Should Toyota keep retrofitting modern safety features into their old car?

Except I didn't lease Windows 7 for a limited time, I licensed it for use without a time limit. If GM hadn't disclosed that the EV1 transaction was actually a lease -- meaning if they had gone into peoples' garages and towed 'their' EV1s away at a time of GM's choosing -- there would have been serious legal consequences. As there should be here.

You'll probably respond by saying that Microsoft is only doing what I authorized them to do on page 34, paragraph 8(c) of the EULA. At which point the only response I can offer is, "Fool me once, shame on me."

Sure, if I've leased the car from Toyota, maybe the terms of the lease obligate me to bring it in for service, and allow them to replace its carburetor with a fuel injector, fit it out with ABS, or whatever else. Depends on the lease, I suppose. Who owns the car, in this case? Not me, clearly.

I'm not arguing that Microsoft should be selling 1992 Corollas retrofitted with 2016-tech-level features; I'm arguing that it's the owner of the '92 Corolla who gets to decide whether, when, and how it should be upgraded or replaced. Toyota doesn't get to make that choice just because they manufactured the car; the owner of the car gets to make that choice. That's what ownership means.

If I own the computer, I get to decide what software I'm going to install on it, and that means I get to decide whether, when, and how to update it. Neither Microsoft nor any other OS maker gets to make that decision, because they do not own the computer in question.

> Toyota doesn't get to come to your house and tow your Corolla away when they think you ought to move on. You get to decide that: it's your car, and it's your choice.

Depends on where you live. In Germany TÜV has to regularly check your car for complying with street regulations, and if it doesn't pass, you don't get to drive it.

The only way to keep it is to keep it of the roads, and there's a nice :caranalogy: to keeping your insecure-via-age OS by keeping it offline.

That might well be a reasonable way to regulate the use of computing machines. I am not rejecting the idea of collective responsiblity! But Microsoft cannot grant themselves such governmental powers just by wishing to have them. If such a collective decision about safety and liability were to arise, it would have to be established democratically.

Toyota doesn't have to keep paying for your maintenance, whereas MS does keep having to pay for their time to develop patches for XP.

A better :caranalogy: would be whether, as emissions standards come in, you lose the ability to drive your old car unless you upgrade it. Except even then, Toyota doesn't pay for the new ECU instead of your carburetor, but you expect MS to keep maintaining an outdated seucrity model.

Moreover, if you don't upgrade it you DO get forced off the roads, namely by legislation prohibiting its registration.

But I can fix problems with a '92 Corolla. If Microsoft were to open source XP or Windows 7, perhaps the community would relieve Microsoft of the maintenance burden.

They are patching most of Windows XP as we speak. And not just for customers in the special extended support program. They are pacthing POSReady 2009 until 09/04/2019, and that's really a streamlined XP Pro with very slight differences, as most (not all) of the patches in POSReady won't cause any problems in a regular XP installation and it has "XP Professional" strings everywhere.

They simply decided that it was time to end support for regular customers and moved on.

They also removed most of the XP patches in the Microsoft Download Center a few months ago. I don't understand why they had all of them there for two years after support ended and suddenly they were gone without notice. Microsoft used to be more friendly, at least you could get their old files from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/. Not anymore. BTW, this helped in my decision to start migration from their ecosystem after 20 years of Registry tweaking.

The "XP situation" happened because Win7 sucked. You do not get to release an awful, backwards "update" to your software and then expect that people pay you for it on the grounds that you also can't be bothered to keep updating the old, good version.

We have lost sight of the fact that software, operating systems included, is supposed to serve the consumer. Users choose to upgrade because there is a better version available. Developers demanding that users upgrade because, well, gosh, that's just what you do, is backwards.

Microsoft's decision to not charge for the Win10 update was a step in the right direction, which they promptly reversed by nagging and abrupt, involuntary updates.

The "XP situation" was not because Win7 sucked. Win7 has always been considered a successful and better upgrade to WinXP. I think you are thinking of Vista.

Possibly so.

it is self serving on both ways.

There's tons of ways they can make windows 7 continue to be safe. But pushing out w10 is easier/cheaper/more profitable for them.

I'm not sure that it's entirely fair to force MS to maintain N forks of Windows until the end of time.

And yet Windows 7 is supposed to keep getting security updates until 2020. Computer illiterate users are the last group you should upgrade to a new system in an automated manner, because they are the most helpless if drivers/applications break from it.

This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. My friend was trying to upgrade to Windows 10 last week but it kept denying him saying his "display is not compatible". I logged into his machine and saw he had an old GoToMyPC monitor driver installed that was causing him grief, uninstalled it and away the upgrade went.

It's not perfect by any means, and "compatibility" checks often never will be, but I think it does a good enough job to prevent breaking a working system that isn't ready for the upgrade yet.

See my post above. Windows thought my father's touchscreen laptop was a tablet, and put him in tablet-only mode by default.

And? I said the Windows 10 installer makes efforts to avoid breaking working systems and does a decent job at it, Windows 10's confusing tablet-mode switching is a different issue entirely (my wife turned it on by accident on her Surface Pro just the other day and couldn't figure out what she did).

That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines.

I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of Asus machines.

The usual story is that rapid adoption of Windows upgrades is basically volunteering your machine as a guinea pig, to the point that a lot of people won't adopt a new version until after Service Pack 1. Compatibility checks don't really stand in the way of pushing broken upgrades on people who can't fix them...

I didn't say it was perfect, but I would be surprised if it didn't block more potential issues than it missed.

Is a 51% success rate really good enough to justify unleashing the OS upgrade right now? Why not make the upgrade opt-in, continue improving the migration wizard over the next years, and start the upgrade campaign in two or three years when it becomes both stable and more pressing to migrate people over?

It would be less of an issue if more vendors submitted drivers to Windows Update. As much as I am "happy" with my cheap TP-Link 802.11ac NIC (I use a lot of TP-Link gear in my house, my TG1600-24TS switch is great for the price too) I literally cannot reinstall Windows without having the driver disk at hand or plugging in my powerline network adapter to download the drivers from their website. A lot of these issues could be mitigated by this alone, as the first thing that the Windows installer does (if you are upgrading from a running system) is check windows update for updates to the installer and compatible device drivers.

I agree that maybe they shouldn't be so persistent on trying to get people to upgrade this early, especially if you have a NIC that isn't supported out of the box or has a driver that isn't on Windows Update (because I know the first thing I do when unboxing new hardware is throw the damned CD away, the only thing I use the DVD drive in my PC for is ripping movies).

I seem to recall similar issues for OSX users wrt wifi, and also smb/cifs support. Nothing is seamless for everyone, as it's impossible to test every system... The fact that Apple doesn't get it right on their very limited range of internal hardware is a testament to that fact.

I'm actually stunned by Apple's wifi connectivity issues.

I don't know of OS X breaking updates as acute and widespread as Windows, but the space of Apple machines to test is small and predictable, where Microsoft faces an essentially impossible testing task.

Beyond that, though, Apple laptops seem to just have shitty wifi connectivity. At a guess, it's one of the downsides of metal unibody design (along with godawful native speakers), but it seems almost universal. Things have improved, but strength, speed, and range never seem competitive with non-Apple machines at a similar price point (or half that price point).

Fortunately, I tend to lag for months usually before updating major osx versions (I don't use my personal laptop much, and at work it's farther behind still), so didn't experience the wifi issue, but did with the cifs/smb change away from samba.

I haven't had connectivity issues, other than it takes a while to switch networks... At home, my macbook has about the best connections of any of my hardware, though my Nexus 6P may be better. I've been able to reliably copy files at 200Mbps+ over wifi. Worth noting I've got fewer than a dozen devices on wifi, and neighboring signals aren't that bad where I live.

At work, it's a bit noisier.

> This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade.

Which would be nice, if it worked 100%. But it doesn't, so that's a problem for non-technical users. In fact, the Win10 upgrade on my Win 8.1 laptop "helpfully" rolled-back the touchpad driver from the latest driver designed for Win 8.1 -- which works fine with Win 10 -- to the original Win 8 driver, which doesn't function at all under Win 10. Now, I'm not non-technical user, and it was straightforward for me to hunt down the installed version of the touchpad driver, realize the problem, go to the manufacturer's website and download the latest Win 8.1 version, install it, and go on with life. And I had an external BT mouse which didn't have a driver problem to use while I was doing that, and enough proficiency that I could have probably done what I needed to do with the keyboard anyway. But, had I been a nontechnical user...

I had this exact problem as well. I had to download the old version of the driver just to uninstall it and then I installed the latest Windows 10 driver. Problem solved. But it was the one thing that went wrong with it.

Exactly, I have two notebooks on which Windows 10 Update claimed "everything's OK" and one is completely unusable under Windows 10 because the WiFi card driver is unsupported by Intel and crashes the whole system, and another is unusable because the touchpad doesn't work anymore.

On the former, even rolling back to Windows 7 turned bad, as all tasks (created by Microsoft, not by me) became somehow invalid.

Well if it doesn't work 100% of the time, they shouldn't bother to try at all. Let's just curl up in the basement and cry instead.

I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible. Namely, the Roland REAC Driver.

That driver acts as a network protocol that you attach to a particular network adapter, so when I upgraded, the adapter showed up as having no protocols. Totally Roland’s fault, waiting until the final release of Windows 10 before even starting to work on upgrading their drivers, but Microsoft also gets some blame for thinking that only Microsoft network protocols matter.

The rollback worked, so no lasting harm that I’ve noticed, yet.

> I installed Windows 10, and then discovered that the third-party driver that I needed for work was not compatible

Similar. I KNOW that my wifi adapter's driver is not compatible with Windows 10. So were I to upgrade, I'd have no Wifi until I buy a new adapter, which I don't want to do for that machine. So the constant harassment to upgrade is frustrating.

But this only supports creshal's point about computer illiterate users. If you hadn't been there to help, would your friend have been able to resolve this on his own?

My friend wasn't illiterate, this was more a UX problem of the installer (your display isn't compatible). He had gone and cleaned his system of all but the essentials and had uninstalled GoToMyPC months ago, he just couldn't figure out WTF the installer was talking about (he assumed it had something to do with his video card, a R9 290, which he made certain he was using the most recent drivers for - and our entire group of friends uses the same card and upgraded with no issues). If the installer just clearly stated that the "GoToMyPC Display Adapter" wasn't compatible he would have quickly whipped open device manager and removed it - hell, it even took me about 10 minutes to figure out WTF it was talking about and I am the go-to guy for fixing PC problems.

Honestly, that is a lot of the problems with the Windows 10 upgrade experience, poor UX (something which Microsoft has rarely been known for during install/upgrade time). I have never seen a machine just randomly upgrade itself to Windows 10, but the way Microsoft presents the damned pop up has a big blue "Yes, please!" button that most people are just going to click to make it go away - then come back shocked that their system "upgraded itself". It's entirely anecdotal, but there is 6 computers I manage for myself and my family, out of the 4 that don't live in my house (some random Dell AIO, a Lenovo Yoga, Lenovo IdeaPad S405, Dell XPS tower) between the time I last worked on them and the next they had been upgraded to Windows 10 without any issue and without any complaint. To be fair, they were all running Windows 8.1 already, so there wasn't a bunch of shocking UX changes outside of Cortana.

All of these systems were owned illiterate users, my grandmother, mother and aunt. To be fair, there wasn't any odd hardware configurations, but nonetheless I was shocked that these systems were upgraded without me even getting asked in "why does this look different" questions.

It does a compatibility check, then upgrades anyway. I rely on a VNC client that Microsoft decided won't work in W10. Microsoft helpfully uninstalled the VNC client.

After W10 started, it did tell me what it had done. I was able to just reinstall the exact same client it removed and it works fine.

This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade

It fails. My father was forced to buy a new scanner (Canon I believe, one with an inlay for scanning photo-negatives) and a new soundcard (Xonar DX) because of lack of support. The soundcard itself still worked though, but none of the supporting tools (equalizer, multichannel processor, softvol control).

It's a "Good Thing" when it's done using open source software, not necessarily when it's done by a closed-source company with different priorities than your own.

It would be better if Microsoft hadn't stripped features out of 10 in order to ship it. For example, I use Windows Media Center in Windows 8. If I upgrade to Windows 10 it'll disappear and suddenly I won't be able to watch TV any more.

CABLECard is dead and until the FCC gets sabers rattling against the cable conglomerates for cable box reform (again) and (presumably) universal cable apps, it's tough for anyone to support TV on the computer. (Yeah, that leaves broadcast and broadcast is still open, but broadcast alone has never been a priority for Microsoft and there are still vendor/OEM apps that work with broadcast tuners in Windows 10, at least.)

The apps that Media Center was split into are getting better in Windows 10 and with the Anniversary Update and the Xbox One in mind are getting better support for running on couch screens again, but TV viewing is something that currently seems like it will take a while to sort out thanks to the cable conglomerate stubbornness and also the Xbox One needing to pivot and meet gaming stubbornness first over the fight to rebuild a modern Media Center (aka "OneGuide" now).

Apple manages to get rapid uptake of their new OSes without resorting to these shenanigans. But apparently making an OS that people want to upgrade was too difficult for Microsoft.

I mean, not too much changes with apple upgrades. Sure, someone in the know can pick out generations, but I (and most people) sure can't. Win10 is a drastic change.

I bet the vast majority of the devs complaining in here hate supporting old versions. Or are web devs.

>so long as it's free, and it is

It's free if you only consider the cost of licensing the software to the end user.

It's not free if you consider that there is a value to the user's time spent dealing with the upgrade, dealing with consequences like drivers or programs that no longer work ( and in the case of OP), rolling back to the previous OS.

For me, "free" or not, this is the biggest cost: the daunting prospect of investing an unknowable number of hours of my time.

As a web dev I'm definitely in favor of keeping people updated. However, MS should never never never fucking never interrupt somebody to force an upgrade.

Doesn't that end up with tons of machines fragmented across security patch levels?

I'm in favor of automatic updates for users if it's competently executed, explicit, and stoppable. So it's not the principle, it's the execution.

> so long as it's free, and it is

There is no such thing.

With this attitude, we might as well not even have personal computers. You're calling for the return of the mainframe priesthood, essentially.

Something very similar happened to me + my old father (not tech savy). My parents have carefully written down steps on how to accomplish various functions (seems very unnatural to me but that is the only way they get things done on PCs).

I went to his place yesterday and as part of the usual tech support, he said he couldn't open his email and was confused why. Turns out, his machine had upgraded to Windows 10. What was horrible was that Windows decided to be in tablet-only mode (completely unfamiliar to me since I left Windows after Win7.. the Metro UI sucks when forced on non-tablet users). His printer/scanner all went kaput. It really made the entire day crummy. I say shame on you Microsoft. I've got my father an iPad but it isn't a PC replacement. He refuses MacOs because of the stupid touchpad. It is sad.

>He refuses MacOs because of the stupid touchpad.

Huh? You can hook a mouse up to any Mac. Also, in what way are Mac touchpads different from Windows touchpads?

Scrolling direction?

Though I'm sure you can change that in the parameters somewhere.

Of course you can. You can also, I think, reverse trackpad scrolling on Windows.

However, I dislike the fact that on MacOs they call the setting "natural scrolling" and that they enable it by default for any trackpad you hook up.

Moreover, since the "Magic Mouse" is basically a mouse with a trackpad for a scrolling wheeel, they also enable reverse scrolling by default for any mouse.

It's unnatural for anyone that grew up with mice and trackpads.

It's 100% natural for phones. Most people don't realize "natural scrolling" on OSX is phone scrolling.

Makes sense when you realize they ripped the magic trackpad code out of iOS's touch screen event handler.

Yes, you can reverse it on Windows. I should know, Windows 10 activated 'natural' scrolling on my touchpad when I upgraded. I'm really not sure why.

ChromeOS. Easiest OS to use. It's just a browser. Does he have a real need for native applications? Can he get everything he needs accomplished inside a browser (Google Docs, email, etc)? How much of what he's doing now is in the browser anyways?

I switched my grandfather over to it this year and he loves it. No more notifications / nags for updates, adware, and such. All extraneous pain points from windows are stripped away.

Just works.

Bought Surface Pro a while back. Happy. Charger broke one week after warranty expiry. Keyboard broke a little later. So only way to reboot is hard reset which takes about 15 seconds of holding power button and volume up button, twice, and doesn't always work first time. Pretty unhappy but just about workable.

With Windows 10 latest version I was unable to disable a particular update which fails every time. So Windows will reboot regularly, including waking from sleep to do so, and fail to install, leading to 30 seconds plus reboot time at best to get it to wake up. For a tablet.

Since bought a new laptop and installed Linux on it as my main operating system for the first time (dual booting) and am pretty happy so far. Updates no longer reboot the computer for the most part. Missing a few features (especially hibernate), but most things work as well or better than Windows so far.

You're missing the point. Your computer is there to update itself. Your use is purely secondary. ;)

You are now the product. Your use of the computer is enticement to provide more actionable data.

It happened to a DJ at a club I was at about a month ago. Middle of his set, his Surface Pro decides it's a great time to restart and "upgrade" to Windows 10.

Somebody at Microsoft seriously needs to be fired for that "feature".

I wonder if stories like this are why Skype is so completely broken on Linux. If it worked, far more people would be comfortable switching.

I'm friends with a dev I respect that recently took a job on the Skype team. Skype is completely broken everywhere, because the code is a nightmare and people are scared to make changes - any change will break something. Linux is probably just low priority on a very long list of things that are terrible/broken about Skype.

I was about to say the same thing, is there any platform Skype is actually reliable ? I had problems with Linux, Windows and Android.

Hmm--I've had no trouble with Skype on Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04. I only use it every few weeks, though.

My parents media center pc did a forced upgrade despite the onboard graphics being unsupported. The result was an unusable output. After a few hours attempting to get the drivers to work until downgraded. Windows is still asking me to upgrade!

Windows is just not ready for the desktop.

>she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade.

Why? Why would you NOT want to upgrade? I get that restarting in the middle of a skype call is shitty and ridiculous, but it has been a year now.

Because the upgrades add technical debt without removing many of the problems of the previous systems.

My non-tech relatives all agree that windows 2000, vista, and 7 are all the same. Why make them move to something else the same? Security - what is that, when this was working fine before? ME was a disaster we would all like to forget - where do you expect their confidence to come from, in win10, when the past hasn't inspired any?

Edit:

>Why would you not want to upgrade?

Because they have been burned before.

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