No matter if I hide it from the Windows Update list, it comes back as it just did.
I ruined one installation with this shady update and I've started checking every single update something I used not to do in the past.
I was born in a Mac OS household. By the time I was born, my parents used Apple II clones and Macintoshes for over a decade. I have used Macintosh my whole life, except for the time before I was computer literate.
There was a time when I played Lord of the Realms on hand-me-down Windows 3.1 greyscale laptop I got for free in 2005, and a time when I played Age of Empires on another hand-me-down Pentium I desktop I bought for $99 in 1999. Those were the best times. I also used PowerPoint during primary school and high school.
Having no other experience with Microsoft software, I cannot emphatically say Microsoft has spent my trust.
On the other hand, I have a huge degree of trust in Apple software, which, I must say, has been slowly eroding in the years since the passing of Steve Jobs.
But somewhere around the start of the Win 10 malware i decided to bite the bullet and moved my work environment to Linux for good.
Looking at where MS was going it would have happened anyway, so better sooner than later.
Yes, they spent my trust. I switched my settings so updates aren't installed automatically because now I can't trust them not to perform some unwanted upgrade. Running "Never10" (disables Win10 update) seems to have fixed the immediate problem but not the lost trust.
However, my little bit of trust in Microsoft was spent after I bought their hardware, in particular the still-running Surface Pro 3 Battery-gate[1] (I'm the person who started the thread in Microsoft Answer forums.) Microsoft lied about battery replacement cost, keep treating that the battery problem didn't existed, and insist it's a $560 replacement instead of the promised $200. I'm lucky that media outlet picked this up otherwise I probably won't even get the "we're aware of the issue" response.
That pretty much stop me from ever thinking about being their customer again, for anything ever.
[1]: https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/73079/surface-pro-3s-simpl...
Haha... Right.
(I'm not going to recount the man-hours and lost revenue we got from "admit it, you know you want WinX, and we'll give it to you NOW; it's not like you actually use the computers for anything")
I use both Windows and Mac. I have no problem with both of them. Also, C# and VS rocks.
That's the trust-killing dick move, not the Win 10 itself.
I don't feel like repeating why this became an actual, real-world problem, so here's a link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12115470
Letting me decide what I want to do with my computer. "Force" is exactly what's wrong. It's my computer, not Microsoft's.
I don't understand how anyone can say that forcing a customer to do what you want is OK.
Long story short: do not force-update a system if you are NOT DAMN SURE it works as expected, or at least decently.
It works all flawlessly with win8, win8.1 and win7. And basically any linux distro I used in the last 5 years.
I still haven't switched to Windows 10 on my home PC. I won't use Windows for anything work related but I need it for gaming. The day Linux is good enough for gaming, I'll say goodbye to Microsoft forever.
In this universe, I actually have less concern about Microsoft doing something creepy with my keystrokes than I do about Canonical doing so. I run Ubuntu and it wants to send my keystrokes to Amazon and whichever search engine has the current paid placement in Unity. At least with Microsoft it's not continuous direct monetization.
If Windows 10 was a big concern, I wouldn't install it or run it on any of my computers. But that's just me. I run Ubuntu for other reasons. The machines I've upgraded to Windows 10 have had most of the crap turned up except for the peer to peer upgrades. It's right there in the install.
Plus, the "privacy and anonymity" angle is just one of the facets; "unconsented install of whatever" goes beyond privacy (availability, anyone?).
The part that goes wrong is that you don't have to view a Privacy Policy behind a tiny poorly colored hyperlink before clicking "I Agree".
For last 2 years I have been using macOS (osx) and no crap of activation there and most importantly once you understand the abstractions of UNIX you wouldn't want to use any other architecture :)
I guess some major problem with Windows is the business model of OEM around the OS.
The police coming to take away a stolen macbook after you buy it from a dodgy site is going to make you mad at apple?
After that Microsoft release Win8 with its insane UI that make me loose time compared to previous versions and it was mandatory to develop for WP8. Then it release WP8 with no upgrade for existing phones. It purposely "uglify" VS 2012 removing all color and using CAPS menu which I found more difficult to use.
Things got even worst with Win10 where they actually didn't listen to feedack and release an OS with start menu not really usage. And forced people to migrate by changing their whole system! Also bugs, bugs and bugs with both the system, new version of Visual Studio. And on the phone side they kill the entire Nokia line-up and still no manage to release a usable version of Win10 for phone in on year. The insider builds each broke more stuff than they fix even to the point you cannot even deploy an app.
I franckly tired of this cr*p. Promises not kept. And the fact Microsoft had cards to do great stuff but self destroy them. Many times. I'm still using VS and C# because that's awesome but I will not change my system for Win10. That's why the .net core stuff is interesting.
Never buying anything Microsoft again.
I will begrudgingly continue to use W10 as I am a heavy-duty PC gamer but I've locked that shit down as tight as is humanly possible.
All my personal computing and development will be done solely on Arch from now on.
I don't mind the mix of app styles these days. I realize it will take a lot of effort for developers to modernize some old applications and there are many old applications that will never be modernized due to disinterest from developers or no active development or too big of a code base.
(I also like that modern apps can run on all my devices, including my phone, as I'm one of the few weird Windows 10 phone owners.)
And yes, this is exactly what "spent trust" is: orders came from On High to take off, nuke the site from orbit, repave with Win7 images, and never ever let Windows Update touch the boxes again (!): MS is now, by executive fiat, considered rogue ("we literally cannot afford another Windows X infection, WU is now an attack vector"). Everybody loses (except for that guy at MS whose bonus hinges on number of finished WinX installs; btw if he's reading this: you are, personally, a reason why we can't have nice things): security is undermined by no more patches, man-months are wasted on getting stuff to work again, there's plenty of MS-directed anger, customers are angry at company, not to mention we won't get WinX anytime soon, if at all. Whether anyone is willing to convince the mgmt that they've overreacted over MS's overeager installer is left as an exercise to the reader.
(The "close-as-yes" is also not "an issue", it is not mere "bad UI" - that is black-hat UX (and oh, very much against MS's own UX guidelines, hello hypocrisy!); deception, plain and simple.)
((The mix of app styles is but a minor quirk; and for really oooold apps, there's Virtual PC anyway.))
I don't attribute that to malice but an honest mistake. I think there was a combination of engineering pride involved ("Why wouldn't people want to upgrade as soon as they could?") and engineering obstinacy ("We don't want another XP!"), perhaps even more than that marketing metric everyone thinks they were focused on.
As for the anecdote of the business outage. My condolences. It sounds like the HW vendor should have done a better job at messaging to Microsoft that their existing hardware driver was not testing compatible with Windows 10 (and maybe a better job at their driver in general). Also, companies had the options to use System Center and Group Policy to drive GWX away, and admittedly that's not an easy admin task, but generally something companies should do for mission critical PCs anyway. (Not to mention that GWX is/was different on Enterprise SKUs and possibly a sign your anecdotal company was using not properly licensed Home or Pro SKUs on mission critical machines.)
Anyway, doesn't matter now if the GWX fiasco was malicious or not. Damage is done.
Windows is a huge ecosystem and there is a lot of blame to pass around in every direction. I admitted that it was an MS problem, but I was also trying to point out that it was an ecosystem problem too. (There hasn't been a major driver architecture change between Vista and 10 and it blows my mind how many drivers needed new releases every Windows version between Vista and 10 and weren't just magically compatible.) Apologies if that point did not come across well.
- Linux-only since 1999.