Windows 10 and its forced updates are the best things that happened to Linux in last decade.
After using W10 for a while now, I've recently been working in a W7 environment again, and it's terrible. There are many little details that have been improved from 7 to 10, and they add up, making the once-so-great 7 feel like Vista or XP.
(No, I'm not paid by Microsoft, this is my real opinion. :P)
The thing that marked my Windows journey as over was exactly this: an automatic upgrade...
...while I had people waiting for me to give a presentation.
And it lasted for longer than 20 minutes, at which point, I had to force shut down my computer (which of course, broke the Windows install), boot into the Linux distro I was dual booting, mount the Windows partition from there as read only (because starting from Windows 8, "shutdown" doesn't mean "dismount the partitions" in the Windows world), find the presentation and open it in LibreOffice. And the presentation went as smoothly as it could!
From that point on, I'm completely Windows-free.
So yeah, you can say that forced updates are a good thing, but once they interrupt you while you're doing something important, you probably will not want to touch Windows ever again.
0 - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wak...
I remember people saying that about the GPE methods a few months ago...
Anyway, it's about two years too late to give me any recommendations about Windows. I couldn't be happier without it.
But when people say that automatic updates are a good thing, I have to intervene and call it bullshit.
It should also notify user a new/unknown program is attempted to connect to internet and allow user option to allow/block. Not the way it does now where every programs are allowed by default. However, that will be in conflict with the new biz model of win10 which is convert itself into a big Ad machine like Google/Android.
BTW, in my win10 configuration, I only allow Firefox, Chrome and Window Defender to connect to internet with Window Firewall. It works well, stable, reasonably fast and long uptime.
Best of all : No more force update from Windows.
Pause the presentation, get out my MacBook and continue while cursing the Gods of timing, the computer, and everyone involved who thought that they knew better than the person actually trying to use the damn thing.
The start menu is supper fast and search is actually usable for me now.
To much time is spend in the update while nothing else is possible. One update after the other. The amount of work done by the update procedures while holding an exclusive lock on the whole PC is deranged.
Also, win10 can't be skinned (colours yes, design no) - I actually liked the old 'glass plate' look and tried to find themes online. Nope, sucks to be me. Stupid flat design has to be preserved.
Then there's all the phone-home stuff spread around that you need to disable.
I miss my old Win7 box - it Just Worked™.
Similarly, by the way, no Windows version had supported custom theming since XP - if you wanted the XP themes back on Vista/7, you were SOL too.
Also, telemetry has been a thing since at least Vista, and any version since (including 10) let you disable most or all of it as a choice during installation.
Fair point on the theming, but the telemetry thing is much more pervasive in 10 than in 7.
But most of all I miss Windows 2000 where the Win9x UI met the Win NT kernel. It had some annoyances (Find tool used to be fast and not require indexing to find by name - that went away in 2000 and never came back) but it was relatively lightweight. It supported the graphics card, USB devices,and applications that I used. Most importantly it didn't do a bunch of shit without telling me.
Just give us the good stuff without the crap! Is that so hard?
But to be fair, also great stuff emerges out of this. For instance, I really liked flat UI when they introduced it, and a few years later other large companies adopted it too.
It's a privacy nightmare, which takes substantial effort to address.
It now forces shutdown for automatic updates in various circumstances, including throwing away your session while in standby, which can be extremely inconvenient.
Settings are now split between the simplified "Settings" app, which has many options missing, and the old Control Panel.
And of course, solitaire is now an ad ridden resource hogging piece of shit that you have to install from the windows store, instead of the perfectly adequate version that existed in W7. (Not really important, but representative.)
I bought newer computer for him and installed Windows 10 on it after all the last-version-of-Windows marketing speak. It was not very smooth, but I thought that he must have time to switch. Some strange Windows quirks aside the update mechanism filled disk completely. At that time my dad wanted to have Linux back, because it may have been not entirely smooth, but it was reliable. Windows was trying to update on each shutdown and boot-up and each time it failed, because of lack of space. Every time it took around 10-20 minutes.
My dad bought external HDD and moved all his media files to it to make more space. It did not help. So he went through restoring to defaults or however it is called. But of course more updates came. Now it is somehow broken again. When I will visit him this Christmas I will install Ubuntu on there.
The best update mechanism is on ChromeOS. It is totally hassle free. I am working on a Linux distribution that would also have updates in this way. Two partitions for read-only rootfs. You get new image on the second partition and after restart bootloader tries to start the newer image. If it fails system will be booted-up from the previous image.