Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

My dad called me recently to tell me that while in the middle of using his computer, it rebooted and installed Windows 10 without giving him any way to cancel. I figured that he may have accidentally clicked to schedule the upgrade. But when I looked into it more, I discovered that Microsoft had changed the upgrade popup to default to install (my dad had become used to just clicking the X to close the window after numerous times).

This article mentions that this behavior is being replaced by the full-screen upgrade reminder, which I guess is an improvement. However, I have to admit that for me Microsoft's actions with Windows 10 have destroyed all the good will that they had earned through their open source efforts. Obviously Microsoft's actions with open source have some profit motive, but previously I had also believed that maybe the company had experienced a change of heart.

It's a shame because I'm sure the teams behind things like TypeScript and Visual Studio Code are great people who have nothing to do with this mess. But after growing up with the Microsoft of the late 90s and early 2000s, dealing with MSIE 6 and the antitrust lawsuits, and now seeing this stupid behavior with Windows 10, I feel that I just can't trust this company at all.

I understand that my reaction here may be overly emotional and unfair to the non-Windows divisions of MS that are doing good open source work. But I feel that the company as a whole will only take notice if they are punished as a whole. We in tech should consider this whenever we use MS products, whether they are free (in the temporarily free Windows 10 sense) or open source.

To be fair, if Microsoft had taken the same stance towards upgrading old IE users as they are with old Windows users, web development might have been a lot less annoying.

I still don't really get why people would not want to upgrade. As far as my experience goes, Windows 10 is superior to 7 and 8 in almost every conceivable way.

Apple manages to get quick and extensive uptake on their updates without resorting to this sort of nonsense. If it's really better then all you have to do is show that to people and they'll upgrade willingly.

Really? My iPhone bothers me every single day about upgrading the iOS version. I should've never upgraded any major version since it is now quite unusable (iPhone 4S). But I get an intrusive and annoying popup every day when new upgrade comes. And it is the same thing: install now? no! schedule an upgrade maybe? no! stfu apple!

What you're saying is: you wish to stay with the original iOS 5.0? With hundreds of vulnerabilities unpatched?

I think what he's saying is that he would like the option to turn off the nagging and do it when HE would like to.

Not asking much imo.

I'm on iOS 7 and I get the same constant nag-screens. And I'd say if those hundreds of vulnerabilities are unpatched on iOS 7 too, that's a problem in itself.

That's the reality today. Everything is vulnerable. Your choice is to upgrade, stay vulnerable, or buy a different product.

I'd take my chances with vulnerabilities if that meant my phone would work. With recent versions of iOS it is to slow to open mail once the conversation thread gets too long (30+ replies). But that's beside the point. Nagging about upgrade is not something MS invented. Apple did

They do not get those quick, extensive numbers on their desktop OS.

In no small part because Apple's median user age is so much lower than MS and their higher price point selects for more educated consumers. That, and the Win10 forced upgrades are mostly for managing and trying to convert unpaid copies.

My iPhone is far more aggressive about nagging me - I get pop up modal on my iPhone every day, and about once a week it tells me to enter my passcode to allow an upgrade overnight.

Hardware that can't run it, yet for some reason passes the minimum requirements function.

Fear of new, or having to learn new. Some people may have only just adapted to Metro.

For others, justifiable privacy concerns; having to run third party scripts and manually vet and select updates to avoid telemetry while keeping security is just not feasible.

Because they don't want MS to spy on them under the guise of product improvement and the previous OS version still works fine. Simple as that.

Why are customers expected to accept all changes pushed down their throats?

Compatibility with software, hardware, services, etc. For example my Netgear router got an upgrade lately that was basically "fix the admin panel to work with windows 10".

There's also question of policy. I don't have the company laptop upgraded, because win10 has not been tested with everything yet, so it's not approved across the domain at the moment.

They just applied the approach that browsers have to the OS. Now everyone is freaking out, which is largely legitimate, but it is hard to argue that there is not a non trivial positive result for everyone to standardize on a Windows platform if you use Windows.

In my experience, having installed Windows 10 on 7 computers so far, Windows 10 has been unstable and full of small bugs. From blue screens and freezes to missing drivers to blurry fonts to the File Explorer failing to open or taking a couple of minutes to open, there seem to be common bugs at all levels and not much movement on Microsoft's part to fix them. The design is opaque, with settings scattered between two quite separate areas (Control Panel and Settings), and the start menu is less functional than the one in Windows 7 (for example, the frequently used programs don't really seem to be your most frequently used programs, and the tiles are a waste of space and hard to organize). The upgrade advisor will recommend that you upgrade even on machines where crucial components will be missing drivers after the upgrade. In several cases the upgrade has taken me from a stable, functioning machine to an unstable machine with some non-functioning hardware. Windows 7, by contrast, has felt stable for years, and even Windows 8.1 felt more stable than Windows 10. Add the concerns about MS's spyware and it's not hard to see why users don't want to upgrade.

I would upgrade, if it wasnt for the extreme disregard for user privacy in windows 10. Basically you have to go through a mile long checklist just to get to what I would consider should be the default baseline(see https://fix10.isleaked.com/). I would rather pay for a non-spyware version of their product, than be the product.

> web development might have been a lot less annoying

That's not a concern most of the people resisting W10 have.

> I still don't really get why people would not want to upgrade.

For lots of people, Windows has been good enough since XP SP2. For those people, Windows 10 is better in ways that are mostly irrelevant to them and the benefits are less than the cost of changing. They use their computer for four things and that's about all they know or want to know about the computer. In other words, if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

I wish there was a universe where Microsoft just a version of their OS that is exactly like XP SP2, but with the latest security updates and a browser that from then on updates independently and Chrome-style. Most people I know who use Windows would happily use that OS. To be fair, my environment is Apple-heavy and most of these Windows users are of the "put all my stuff on the desktop because I don't understand folders" variety, but this is a pretty huge group, and I suspect, also the group most bothered by this upgrade evangelism.

EDIT: and that's not even getting into the privacy issues of Windows 10.

I'd be fine with a perpetually updating XP as well. For that matter Vista, W7, W8.1, or W10 are all fine. For me, operating systems are a solved problem. It's boring infrastructure (IMHO) for which I value stability and security over any new feature that has been added in a long, long time.

I'm glad Microsoft has decided to settle on W10 for the long haul. I just wish their LTS operating system were a little skinnier. I'd rather have things like Cortana be an installable (or at least removable) application rather than a core part of the OS. I don't want it or need it so for me, it's just using resources and lowering the security of my machine and network.

Exactly this for me.

I simply don't want to deal with new interfaces. I feel that Windows has reached its interface peak around Win7 and Office around version 2003. Everything since has been driven by the need to justify having a team which develops new interfaces for each platform.

Incidentally I feel the same way about OSX - I stopped upgrading my machine with 10.9.5. Don't like the new look and feel that there isn't anything worth upgrading to in the new version that will make me look at that candy-store like design all day long.

Will hold out as long as I can - probably until I get a new machine.

On that, the idea that Windows 10 is more secure is a fallacy. What Microsoft refers to when they say it is more secure is that Windows 10 supports Windows Store apps, which follow a similar model than iOS apps, limited access to local resources. But as most people know, the Windows Store is pretty much empty and the vast majority of the applications you will run on a Windows 10 machine will be the same applications you ran on a Windows 7 machine, particularly if you are using Windows 10 as a result of an automatic upgrade. The firewall is the same. The app model is the same. It's not "more secure". In fact because it has more new code, it also probably has more attack surface.

I'm super skeptical when a company claims their new product is more secure. That seems like something that only be determined with the passage of time.

Two control panels with settings scattered all over the OS, privacy invasion, in-OS advertising, frequent forced reboots, and more generally, inability to turn down future OS features. Keep in mind the "geniuses" who came up with Windows 10 are also the idiots who came up with Windows 8: contextual menu at the bottom of the screen, very very far from where the mouse is when it clicked, full screen everything (at the age of 4k monitors...why???), hiding the option to create local windows account behind several layers of non obvious opt-out buttons, etc. If these guys take the same moronic design decisions, they will flow through your OS update whether you like them or not. And if Microsoft wants to launch Candy Crush Soda on every start up, there might be nothing you can do to prevent it.

Fully and 100% agree. I've said as much before and I always get shouted down (on reddit, mostly, but sometimes here). You got my upboat.

> Two control panels with settings scattered all over the OS

I still don't understand this. What's the point of a UI refresh if you're going to do it really half-assed.

I have the feeling it is more half-baked than half-assed. I have no doubt they will unite them at one point. I just find surprising they would ship a half finished product like that, particularly given that it wouldn't take very long to an intern to redesign these few forms.

It's by far my biggest complaint. There are even issues where one control panel does one set of features and the settings window does a whole different set.

I also had a sticky problem where it was convinced I had a Canadian French keyboard even after deleting it from both keyboard control panels. I ended up having to solve that with a registry modification.

The new CP doesn't offer enough granularity to be fully useful. I'm guessing this was not addressed in time, so they threw in the classic CP to appease users.

My desktop was WinXP until I had to move and couldn't take it with me, because Vista and onwards were gimped, heavily, due to DRM (I didn't knew it was DRM-related until a month ago).

Vista removed 3D Sound Card support (because it could be used to circunvent HDMI audio DRM), and made many CRT features unusable to incentive people to use HDMI cable and DRM-supporting monitors (CRTs, because they are inherently analog, doesn't work with DRM at all).

Vista also doesn't supported parallel port properly (thus anyone using parallel port to contorl stepper motors, be it parallel-port scanners, CNC machines or hobby hardware had to stick with XP).

When I had to buy a laptop after moving, Linux-based machines were usually 120 USD more expensive, even when they had 100% identical hardware, I bought a Win8 laptop, wanting to replace WIn8 with Linux, but my laptop has buggy UEFI and even disabling Secure Boot it keeps preventing boot of anything that is not the OEM windows.

Win8 is terrible, and did something that REALLY annoyed me, upgraded to Win8.1 forcefully when I was busy, it just showed a dialog box written it was going to update now and reboot, and a "reboot" button, but no way to re-schedule, cancel, anything, not even a "X" (it showed a metro-style modal box, over my desktop environment).

When Win10 was announced, I liked what was described, and wanted it badly... but then I learned of the extremely hard to turn off telemetry and update policy, and other shady policies, and became suspicious of it, then MS started to nag people to install it, this made me not want it.

Then I had to install Win10 on some of my parents business computers... and then I learned how nightmare Win10 is.

1. On Win10, the only software some of the users use for e-mail, that is Windows Live Mail, doesn't work properly, MS even made an update in december that deliberately sabotaged it. (update, as you remember, install mostly mandatorily, specially if you don't have windows 10 enterprise, or a windows 10 server to control windows 10 pro with policy).

2. Win10 updates frequently break random shit, usually banking or tax related (my country is heavily moving toward online-only bureaucracy, and is also the world leader in bureaucracy amount...)

3. Printers randomly stop working on Win10, when they work fine on Win7.

4. Tested some games on my Win8.1 machine and Win10 machines, and older DirectX is very broken there, depending on your hardware the broken DX + Hardware combo make some games completely unplayable.

5. MS promised 3 or 4 years ago to fix the broken DX emulation, and has an employee in the official forums gathering all bug reports in a thread, but released not even a preliminary fix.

I had to build a new PC (the laptop was failing, and I couldn't use a WinXP era machine anymore...), since most new games doesn't work on WinXP anymore, then I finally installed Win7 for the first time...

Almost best Windows ever, so far (I installed Win7 a month ago, thus I don't used it much yet).

I am hoping Linux people will stop some desktop-user hostile behaviour and that Linux will be actually useable on desktop before Win10 become "mandatory" for hardware reasons, so I don't have to ever install it on my personal computer.

Of course, MS can attempt to get goodwill again by reversing all their crappy policies, but they did that (crap policy, reversing it, unreversing it) now so many times (example, launch Games for Windows + Xbox 360, that was terrible, kill it off, only to "relaunch" it in the form of Xbone + UWP + DX12 Win10 only) that I doubt I personally will trust them again.

The flip side of this is that much of the reason the internet is a dangerous place is because MS didn't force or even acknowledge the vast number of illegally obtained installs of older, unmaintained OSs.

Owning a network connected computer is something more than a consequence-free. Like car ownership, it affects the world around the owner in many ways.

As much as I find the approach crass and poorly explained, the world of allowing users to pass on updates for network security has to come to an end or the internet will continue to be an economic resource for criminals on a grand scale.

As frustrating as that is for your relative and as typical as it is that it passed the minimum resource check, I can't help but maintain two minds on the subject. Emissions laws are a good analogue. They do disproportionately affect the poor and are often poorly enforced on the rich, but maintaining and strengthening them is essential. I wish we had similar laws for network connected computers running commodity os's.

I appreciate your view. However, I think it may be a false dichotomy to say that the only way to keep Windows secure is to require updates that bring along privacy concerns, software and hardware incompatibilities, and radically different UIs.

Furthermore, we should also consider the responsibility that _Microsoft_ bears for releasing vulnerability-laden operating systems in addition to users who decline OS updates for the above-mentioned reasons.

The privacy co concerns are not specific to Microsoft, just fashionable to reference with them in this venue.

I see these upgrade policies as Microsoft taking responsibility. They're not inexpensive and do not help with consumer protection. But modulo messaging and fairness, it sorta has to be done.

Could have sworn that MS have done the exact opposite, by allowing any Windows install to get security patches.

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