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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

I'm a tolerant person, but recently I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you.

My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care how much they mess up the Windows experience in the process.

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This is exactly one of the main reasons why I switched to Linux, it doesn't do anything unless I let it or ask it to - with few exceptions.

My anecdote: I was about to have an important meeting and needed to print off some sheets from my Windows-based netbook. The power was low (<3%), so I plugged in the charger and resumed it from hibernation. It had been offline for a little while up until then because of traveling. Seeing the power was plugged in and I was shutting the machine down going into the meeting, Windows presumed that right then was a perfect moment to perform a Windows update. That night I wiped it and put Ubuntu on there.

FYI the Linux experience has been mostly great. There's been maybe a problem once a year, with some driver or package issue - but most of the time it runs great. I can safely run anything on it overnight knowing that it won't decide to do anything on it's own accord.

I switched to linux in 1998, it was much harder back then now its arguably easier to install ubuntu than to upgrade windows 10.

"The OS which you have to constantly hack upon with weird commands, just to retain basic functionality" - yeah, that's Windows nowadays.

I shifted to Linux full time this year from MacOS. The only thing I desperately need is a replacement for is MS Office. Any ideas? I'm a power user, which Google word is simply not good for.

LaTeX[0] might work for you.

[0]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

And if you're willing to consider LaTeX, I'd definitely recommend LyX.

Neither latex nor LyX is a replacement for Office.

That depends on what you use Office for - which is why I qualified my statement. I wouldn't recommend them as general replacements, but they exceed my documentation needs.

LibreOffice, ms office under wine or in a vm

May I suggest LibreOffice? Either via your Linux distribution's package manager, or as a Flatpak from https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice

It should be able to handle most use cases

I'd recommend AppImages over flatpak. They're generally more stable

Libre office is simply not good enough, tbh. The first thing I tried.

https://www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice development has been virtually stagnant for several years: LibreOffice is the actively developed version (and the one that Linux distributions support).

I know everyone is suggesting Libreoffice (and it has honestly gotten a lot better recently) but I remember once when my laptop died and all I had was a shitty old Centrino someone lent me, I ended up using the Microsoft online powerpoint tool to make a presentation that was due.

The web versions of MS Office tools are actually pretty well build and feel pretty close to their desktop counterparts.

The web version of word lacks an equation editor (someone told me this is partly due to MS loosing the source code for the one in word.)

If you have to write papers with a lot of math in them libreoffice's equation editor is way better anyway. It rarely crashes and uses it's own simple markup language instead of the finicky WYSIWYG editor in word.

The killer features missing for me

1. Word - track changes 2. PowerPoint - equation editor

Libre office is not even 10% MS Office. Don't know why people recommend it. It messes up my word formatting.

Current versions are pretty good - and while MS Office is a veritable power tool (I know no real equivalent to MS Access), most users use ~10% of the functionality; sufficient for many, esp. at the price.

As for the formatting - yeah, MS doesn't seem to follow its own document formatting standards, even for the newer documents. That puts other suites in a hard spot: a) follow standards and present imperfect documents, or b) invest immense resources into bug-for-bug compatibility?

Joel Spolsky is obviously not neutral having been an Excel manager but he wrote that while everyone uses less than 20% of Excel, not everyone uses the same 20% of Excel.

I don't know Excel but I know there are people running entire departments on Excel spreadsheets.

Indeed. I do not see a contradiction between that and what I have written.

(Having seen many Excel spreadsheets, 80% of the work is done by rudimentary means: pivot tables are Advanced Magic in this regard)

May I suggest org-mode? It can act as a pretty good replacement for Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even FrontPage. You can even use latex inside org-mode documents and it has an integration with gnuplot.

can you drag'n'drop images graphically and position them in a visual canvas with org mode and add sounds and gifs and videos and center text by pressing a button ? if not it's not a replacement for powerpoint.

This comment is a living example of Poe's Law as applied to Linux fans.

A perfect reflection of why Linux is a failure on desktop. If org-mode and latex are sane replacements for office for average users, may the kernel gods save us all.And this is from someone who knows how to use both.

The obvious suggestion would be LibreOffice, but if that doesn't cut it for you, there's also SoftMaker Office[1], which has better compatibility with Office documents.

1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

I'd recommend onlyoffice. Has a similar GUI to MS office and it uses the doc/ppt(x) formats internally, so it's pretty compatible. I also run MS Office in Wine for certain things.

Pandoc is definitely my favorite way to do word processing.

You can edit the markdown in vim which IMO is mentally easier to write prose in because you're not distracted with all the formatting and spelling. You use aspell for spell check and pandoc/pdflatex for typsetting.

If you're not opposed to non-free software and like quality products, I highly recommend you check out Crossover[0]. It allows you to run Microsoft Office on your linux machine.

[0](https://www.codeweavers.com/products/)

I am totally fine with non-free software. I'll check this out.

If you have licensed Windows, install Virtualbox on Ubuntu and install Windows in that. Share a drive between them and you should be able to maintain Office documents that way.

Interesting. I have a Windows partitioned. Can I use that license for a virtual installation?

I once had to leave to catch a plane and shut down my Windows desktop machine that I wanted to move somewhere first. I think this was as far back as XP days. It started doing updates on shutdown and I was concerned I’d lose data or break something if I powered it off (it did say not to!) so I was stuck waiting for updates but needing to catch a plane.

I'm by no means a low-level OS developer but I can't help but wonder, wouldn't it be possible for Windows to partition off part of the disk to copy system-critical files and then quietly stage updates in the partition (all of this with minimal thread priority so that if some other process demands resources/threads, it will pause/defer itself!). When the staged update is complete, it gives you a friendly notification "You have a new update available!" which you can then complete as fast as your disk can copy files (or even just set some flag to toggle the partition in use... The old partition then becomes the new staging partition)

Does that make sense at all or is this an unrealistic idea? EDIT: Maybe this is how updates already work, I'm not sure

I'm pretty sure this is how ChromeOS' update system works.

Are you sure? Because ChromeOS is just a Gentoo fork where google replaced the package manager to support their binaries instead.

Programs running in memory just stay running, even if you update the files that are those programs. This is how Linux works. Restart them when you need the new version.

Its clean. Its easy. I kept watching netflix as firefox compiled (~30 mins), and got to close the browser after the next episode was done, and open the latest Firefox to monkey with the new settings.

I didn't know that (Gentoo user). I suppose it has more in common with Sabayon as a binary jobbie. The full Gentoo experience is not for the faint of heart but when you have spend hours watching compiler etc output and fixing breakage that would bring most users of an OS to their knees, you lose the dread inherent in OS updates.

You are nearly (and generally) correct about programs just stay running even when overwritten but of course programs generally consist of more than one file and might run more than once and if you update part of this and something reloads or whatever, you can end up in a world of hurt. That said, it is behaviour that I have relied on more often than I can count and so have you with your Firefox anecdote. I've done some remote Gentoo updates with systems in quite the broken state - it keeps IT interesting! I once had to get Puppet to install telnetd on some systems so I could repair sshd.

Several years ago I remember reading on stack overflow about how someone had managed to rm the ls program on a Linux system. Your anecdote reminded me of the fix. I’ll do some googling and see if I can find it. If I can, I’ll post it here.

Hats off to people like you. You’re what we mere mortals aspire to, and it’s always encouraging to hear that someone else has attained a level of mastery. Makes it seem more achievable!

> Are you sure? Because ChromeOS is just a Gentoo fork where google replaced the package manager to support their binaries instead.

Yes, and that's a gross oversimplification. Android got the idea from ChromeOS.

I suspect it's possible to reload the OS in place with kexec, but haven't proposed it yet.

Eventually the kernel has to be updated, which you want to reboot for. Plus ensuring that the entire userland is running the same new versions of base system libraries isn't much less disruptive than simply rebooting.

Anyway, ChromeOS swaps the system and kernel between 4 partitions [1] - automatic update effectively installs a new system into the system partitions you're not booted from, then tells the boot loader to boot from the other ones next reboot.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

> google replaced the package manager

Google uses portage: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/packages/portage

It would make more sense for Google to be using Portage to make/install their binary packages. Emerge and quickpkg can both make binary packages: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide#Creating_b...

This is how some versions of android work. If a new update partition fails to boot, it falls back to the old one automatically.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-shut-down-a-Windows-10-comp...

So when Windows says you have an update available, the design is that it did all the work that is possible and all that's left is (in theory) the copy bit that's left.

My completely ill-informed guess is that there are exceptions to this rule by teams that aren't fully aware of how updates work under the hood and as a result upgrading takes longer than it really should. As time goes by those teams get hit with a stick and they fix things, but the upgrade team probably plays a fair bit of wack-a-mole.

> wouldn't it be possible for Windows to partition off part of the disk

This is what ChromeOS and Android do. At least on Android Pixel phones, there's A and B partitions for each of the boot, system, and vendor partitions. The bootloader tracks whether A or B should be booted. Userspace downloads the updates and writes to the opposite-than-booted partition. On reboot, the bootloader boots the latest partition. Downsize is these partitions are now double the size, so less space for the user partition.

This is also how microcontrollers like the ESP32 do over-the-air updates while keeping a "safe" factory firmware version.

This is how embedded devices do firmware upgrade - I'm not aware of any other sane & safe way to upgrade.

The original devs for WinNT and NTFS made some interesting decisions with file locking. Hard locks in the Windows world are pretty difficult to identify, much less release.

The update stage all the files that need to be change and complete the release process on boot before any system processors are allowed to lock anything.

Or maybe they can implement some overlay FS and updates will be stored in FS overlays. Writing to overlay would be possible even when Windows is running. Effectively shortening time when computer cannot be used due system updates. Basically the only disrupt would be just simple reboot to activate the FS layer due Windows file locking.

I dont think this is the problem itself. A lot of the problem is the user directory is a mess of both user created data and system data all jumbled about.

File copy speed itself is rarely the problem. IOPS, where hundreds of thousands of small read and write operations in the registry and other small files dominate the process.

"Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you."

This is, unfortunately, also true of Sonos.

I would say that more than 10% of my attempted sonos usage is blocked by an update process.

If you're just turning on the news for 2-3 minutes while you pack up your things, that's a 100% outage for you.

The distinction being that Sonos updates rarely take more than a minute or two, and I've never seen one that was actually mandatory (the controller app will bug you about it, but it usually works anyways). Would be nice if it could automatically update while idle and I never had to worry about it, but that hardly seems necessary IME.

Granted, I've also never had Windows 10 unexpectedly reboot on me or force an update at an inconvenient time, either. If you're proactive about running updates at times that are convenient for you, and don't just ignore every popup and warning that Windows gives you when it's waiting for a reboot, you'll never see it reboot when you don't want it to.

I agree I've never had Windows do an inconvenient update on me. But I'm like you, I don't ignore all the update warnings, I do it when I go to lunch or whatever. But I know lots of people who will seemingly not take note of any popups that come up and just ignore them forever. Have said that, these days it should be possible to build up a pattern of when you use your computer and do the update when it's never being used.

>these days it should be possible to build up a pattern of when you use your computer and do the update when it's never being used

This'll work for 99% of cases. The remaining 1% is millions and millions of people.

I wonder if the system could give you a few weeks grace time to update, and if you keep ignoring it the system starts slowing down (while explaining why and asking to update). Some people will try to ignore forever and there needs to be some way to motivate them to choose a time (instead of taking control away and risking choosing a very bad time).

It's funny you mention this as I had a very similar thought the other night when clean-installing an old gaming PC to try some VR stuff on.

I'm used to using a Mac, and the update notifications can definitely be annoying, but Windows' default update behaviour is another level of excruciatingly bad UX. I assume — perhaps wrongly — that you can stop windows from installing updates on shutdown/restart. However, the other night (on Windows), forcing an update on shutdown was the only obvious option available to me. I can't fathom what the rationale is to force this kind of experience on users.

When I want to shut my computer down, it's because I want it to turn off, not start a new (oftentimes looping) operation to install software that I won't immediately see (or need to see) the benefit of.

And then it wants to finish those updates after you restart. This cost my wife so much stress when she'd fire up her laptop right before delivering a lecture, only to find it busy for minutes completing the update.

Wouldn't be a straight Linux distribution the best choice to avoid anything annoying?

That really long greeting that says "your files are where you left them" that you can't speed up or cancel out of makes me want to kick puppies.

You used to be able to ctrl-alt-delete to skip it. They disabled that after a while though :(

The last time I installed Windows most of the greeting messages came off as patronizing or subtly sinister, like that one.

Throughout Windows’ history, even before I had ever used Macs, it has felt as if someone at Microsoft keeps having the wrong idea about what people adore about Macs, and tries to imitate that in a “we can do it better” way.

Initially I really wondering about the intention behind this new style of messages (casual and personal, lots of "we"), but now I think they are trying to get people used to the idea of "operating system as a service". It seems likely that this is where all these "We've got an update for you, just sit back ;-)" style of messages come from. Curiously, the bluescreen talks about "your computer" having an issue, though, with a sad smiley, no less.

Don't worry... your files are right where you left them. As long as they're not in Documents...

I can’t help but read that message in a “Would be a shame if something happened to them..” tone.

Is it trying to convince me or itself of that.

I wouldn't mind these forced updated, if they took seconds like on Linux. Why are Windows updates so slow? And why I cannot use my computer when updates are running (like on Linux). Part of the problem is that Windows locks files so they cannot be deleted/replaced when full blown system is running, but it has to be more I don't know about the update mechanism.

Very little time is spent in replacing actual files. Huge amounts of time are spend in the registry and other small IO operations. Also .net rebuilding wastes huge amounts of time.

I experienced the same when attempting to show Forza Horizon to a friend, not having played it for a bit it required a 300Mb update before launching. I could not find what was updated.

Overall my experience on Microsoft store has been sub-par, eg comparing to steam.

I switched to Ubuntu, gave up hope MS would come out with a Windows-lite with how big Win10 is getting, and how they're trying to put Win10 on smaller devices. A lot of devices that come with Win10 really shouldn't have such a bloated OS, and I mean that even if they're just going to be using Office.

Pleasantly surprised so far with Ubuntu, hardly any hacking to start coding and running databases etc.

Humble tip - You can pause updates for up to 45 days. During this period, you can enable them at your leisure. This is what I do when I'm leaving my computer for an overnight rendering.

Doesn't change the fact that you end up having to actively manage the OS not screwing up your workflow, that's not how I would define "good". Plus I would always forget.

The alternative is horrifying though. No regular user ever updates their stuff unless they're forced to, and in a world of increasingly horrifying botnets that can cripple the world economy on command, I can see why having the average user update automatically is necessary. Note that the average user (even myself, who is fairly good at keeping the latest version of everything installed) wouldn't have this problematic update with the (potential) data loss installed yet. You would have to have manually done it.

Does windows not give you the 250 warnings that it used to to postpone the restart? I turn off my computer every night, so I haven't even noticed that updates occur for ~1.5 years.

Major Windows 10 releases continue to receive security updates for quite some time after a new release drops, so force-feeding major releases to home users is not even necessary to keep users secure. As for warnings, as soon as the update is auto-applied you lose the ability to reboot without having your OS replaced and possibly rendered inoperable. Security updates are quick and mostly painless, on the other hand, but home users don't get to choose what to install.

I thought the model was 18 months of support now:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifec...

Decades of force-feeding users unwanted features has trained them to not install updates. I know most people in my family flat out refuse to update software because they're afraid the developers will have decided to re-do the UI again, or move menu options around, or just break major functionality. So because we, as software engineers/companies, can't resist the urge to keep changing things and doing endless re-designs, end users are trained to not get the vital security updates they need.

As an industry we need to get better. A software update should mean things like "improved performance" and "better security", not "totally different UI" and "20 features nobody wants". If users really want the new shiny, it should be optional.

> re-do the UI again, or move menu options around, or just break major functionality.

...or reduce performance on otherwise perfectly good hardware, possibly due to the those changes or the "20 features nobody wants".

I'm a computer professional, and even I have this anti-update attitude for exactly that reason. At least I have the competence to mitigate the security risks through other means, but I can't well recommend anyone else do the same. To quote Tom Lehrer, this makes me feel "like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis".

Decades of force-feeding users unwanted features

They haven't done that for 'decades.' It started when they realized they literally couldn't give Windows 10 away.

Not just Windows they're talking software updates in general.

Well you can set group policy and disable updates... but yeah not your average user experience. Pretty much I disable updates if I can.

It's 35 days for me. There's also a nasty gotcha where I paused updates and then enabled them, and then it wouldn't let me pause again for some fairly long period.

All that is needed to make the system usable is the ability to turn off all automatic restarts; tell me to do it, even nag after a while, just don't ever do it automatically.

It's the worst when the automatic restarts kick in again, but you're stuck behind an update that consistently fails at the same point. Super frustrating.

My own humble tip - switch this shit off. Here's what I've found to work for me:

0. install whichever Windows 10 has the group policy editor - I've got Windows 10 Pro, I think. (I'm at home right now and my work laptop is at the office)

1. run gpedit.msc

2. Go to Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Update

3. Double-click Configure Automatic Updates

4. Set up as follows:

   - Overall group policy setting = Enabled
   - Configure automatic updating = 3 - Auto download and notify for install
   - Install during automatic maintenance = unticked
   - Scheduled install day = 0 - every day
   - Scheduled install time = 03:00
   - "If you have blah blah" = Every week
   - Install updates for other Microsoft products = unticked

Result seems to be that updates are downloaded, and there are notifications, but there are no forced reboots.

Three things to note:

- this works for me. Ask yourself: are you me? But even if you aren't, don't let that put you off, because you might still get lucky

- there's a popup that pops up to say something like "updates are ready, click to install" - and this actually means literally precisely what it says, nothing more and nothing less, so for god's sake don't do what I did at first and click it thinking that it means you'll get the option of saying no afterwards and then wonder why all the updates are installing. Go to the updates section of the control panel by hand to see what updates are ready before approving them

- the above settings are just what I have set on my work laptop, copied out from the dialog box, based on a screen grab. Some of the settings may be the defaults. I don't remember which

Thanks for this, it's however a little sad that it takes that much work for such a simple concept: don't fck with my stuff.

The absolutely infuriating thing is, as soon as a ”disable updates” hack gains posterity, Microsoft shuts it down. If you just follow the first Google result for disabling updates, you still end up getting reboots.

It’s one of the most anti-user policies Microsoft has pulled, and they have a long list..

My understanding is that the group policy business is 100% intentional, and it's how you're supposed to do it. If you're an IT guy responsible for a whole pile of PCs, you need a way to stop them rebooting all the time, and this is how you do that.

MS know how their bread is buttered. Who there would dare shut this down? The program managers know that if they break this stuff, there'll be a legion of angry IT guys clubbing together to pay to have them killed.

Windows 10 Education also lets you do this, and is a lot less expensive than Pro. Sometimes it's free to members of certain organizations.

The group policy editor is not available in the home versions.

It does work if you grab one from Pro copies.

If you're on Home edition, you can try O&O's ShutUp10 tool [https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10]. I used to make manual registry entry changes on one of my machines with Win10 Home, but I use this now, and am happy with it.

On my Win10 Pro machine, I've switched to the semi-annual channel and disabled automatic installations via GPE.

Five years ago I would have bookmarked this post.

I must be getting old and / or wealthier because now I just use a (2015) Mac.

In a few more years, I have a feeling I'll be using neither Apple nor Microsoft.

I do think the market will provide something, just depends on who figures out there's a lot of us out there who have money to spend.

Not to distract from this useful tip, but remember when huge blocks of instructions like this were reserved for Linux desktops, and windows (mostly) just worked? What a wild world we live in.

Need them 100% off. Had to downgrade to Win7...

It's annoying but if uptime is critical you really need to change the settings for that. The reason Microsoft forces updates by default is because of all the incompetent computer users out there (especially older folks) who bitch and moan about how insecure and unstable their Windows that they haven't updated in 2 years is.

If uptime is critical, what on Earth are you doing with desktop Windows? There are even server variants now, if you need to have the Windows flavor.

And worse: I'm all for auto updates...unless they break the system! (See article.) No wonder people are holding off upgrades. (Not Windows-specific, for sure - but Win10 seems to be the worst offender)

This also exactly describes the modern gaming experience. It's infuriating.

Thankfully most Japanese games still seem to be free of it.

Well said kens, and those are great examples of having manual control over updates. There's a lot more examples too.

I'm still on Windows 7 and my laptop is Windows 8, where I can safely disable updates until I'm good and ready.

My understanding of Windows 10 was that there is a way to control when updates happen if using the Pro version? Is that not the case?

What kills me is that the "active hours" setting stops you from setting longer than 8 hours. I want my server to install updates between 0100 and 0500, but that just isn't possible.

That's easy enough to prevent if you peek into the update settings[0][1]. I have restarts blocked from 8AM-2AM, due to not wanting it doing it during the day when I walk away from work. You would want the opposite. Set that to 5PM-11AM and you'll never have a nightly restart again. I've used Mac and Linux but had issues with all of them, worst being desktop Linux with basic things (for a power user), and Mac software issues[2]. Windows 10 is in my opinion the best version of Windows yet, even if it's also imperfect. You definitely need to dig into the settings if you want things to be right for you, but that applies to every OS, including iOS and Android.

[0]https://i.imgur.com/ls2yNMh.png

[1]https://i.imgur.com/T4UTke6.png

[2]https://youtu.be/1AO3L-T14E0

That update option window says "max 18 hours". Doesn't help when leaving computer for 24 hours+ to render. The other thing is you might have critical work happening, and really don't want any risk of problems due to updates. So even if you're not using PC, you don't want updates to happen for a couple of weeks or longer until project isn't so critical.

The forced updates, even for advanced users, is the single reason I refuse to update to Windows 10.

If you are not going to be at the desk for 24+ hours at all, then you would hit this slider[0]. Updates don't come through that often though. A patch every 30 days, a service pack every 6 months. I run 30 days behind on patches, and 365 days behind on service packs. If your machine is used that often for 24+ hour rendering projects, you might want a non-home edition of Windows10 such as LTSC.

I do agree though that there should be a simple option, "do not restart for updates until I click on a prompt". I'm on the same page, but I'm not convinced the situation is as dire as everyone makes it out to be.

[0]https://i.imgur.com/XMTGtGr.png

So you have to buy 5 copies of windows under a volume license so your computer doesn't reboot?

That's a strawman argument, because an alternative was already offered in my post. Yes, you can upgrade your software to prevent it. I don't care what you personally prefer or choose to do, I'm just telling the facts and options with Windows.

I just disabled Windows Update completely (by disabling the service) after 3 such incidents.

I'm aware it's a security risk, but I also keep nothing of value on that machine nowadays.

Why don’t they let people set a certain day in the week for major updates (E.g. Sunday), and only the most important micro updates are force-installed immediately?

Some major updates replace other broken major updates.

I guess they could make an exception if booting up failed.

You should blame your simulation software vendor (which could be yourself, lol). Windows gives software a way to tell, that computer is busy, and if your software did not do that, I am not sure how is this fault of Windows?

Without that, computer might go to sleep, which would happen on any other OS too under default settings.

See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/winbase...

The onus should not be on the user or the user's application to tell the computer "don't do this thing". It should be up to the user whether some thing gets done. The user is supposed to command the computer, not the other way around.

One counterargument could be that users who ignore updates too often will lose control to malicious software over time.

There is a setting for sleep timer, which people disable on desktops. It seems pretty ridiculous to suggest to call an api, to not randomly do things that the user didn't instruct.

It never stops to amaze me how unwilling most people are to explore the latest Win10 options to always defer updates by number of days (eg stay a week behind on feature updates to let others be more on the cutting edge), or even temporarily freeze the windows update service by up to a two digit number of days.

If I ever wanted to be sure that no updates took place I'd use the freeze.

Switching OS might be a solution, but it is worth having a look at these first. The upside is never being behind on patches, and there are actually some bloody useful fixes coming down the pipeline especially as far as security is concerned.

If you have to go into the settings to get a good behavior, it's useless for 95%+ of users.

On the projects I've worked on, most people never open the preferences or settings menu.

Even deferring updates is not really good about being in your face enough about having a pending update ready, so eventually it's going to update by itself anyway.

Regarding switching to Mac, it never ceases to amaze me all of my colleagues who opted for a company Mac when all the productivity tools they need run natively on Windows, and sometimes not on Mac at all. So they set up a Windows partition which is never big enough and they always have problems with. Their choice was purely out of fan-boyism, and they all regret it.

They regret choosing a Mac? Or they regret that they were offered a Mac by a company whose productivity tools only work on Windows for some reason?

Have they tried VMs like Parallels or “translation layers” like CrossOver [0]?

[0] https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-mac (don’t mind the old style website.)

Just one note, once you pause, you apparently cannot pause again until all deferred updates have been installed. So yes it helps, but only for so long. The other deferment options seem like a more reasonable way to just purposely lag behind major changes.

I routinely use Linux (Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, CentOS, several others) Windows (98 - 10 (yes, really 98), server 2000 to 2016) and I speak quite a few other OS dialects (NetWare and FreeBSD fex).

The worst for updates, by far is Windows 10 and server 2016. I'd better qualify that. Gentoo can take a really long time to crunch through say 1GB of source code if not updated for a few months. Firefox can take an hour or so on its own and LibreOffice is a whopper as well. Older Windows versions, say 2008 R2 can take a good hour some months. NetWare updates need a skilled surgeon (or someone who can read a manual). pfSense (FreeBSD for me) upgrades can be a bit fraught but generally not. However all of those will get you there eventually.

W10 and 2016 are different beasts altogether. They do a pretty decent job of hiding the nitty gritty away from you and I actually like the auto "just do it already" approach and can set "active hours" to tailor the experience. However, it takes bloody ages to run and often needs more than one reboot - sometimes three (ie update, reboot, something doesn't work, reboot, still doesn't work, reboot, now it works).

The error messages you get are awful and generally need forensic analysis elsewhere - a naiive Google will get you to some MS forum and a suggestion to reinstall Windows.

Switching OS is not really a solution but whining about the update experience within potential hearing (HN) of those that might be able to do something about it is a good idea 8)

Though my range of operating systems isn't anything like as wide as yours, but still across a pretty broad range of systems, Windows, especially 10, comes out by far the worst.

My other pet hate on Windows that's been out of control since 7, and getting worse with each generation, is the insane hidden wastage under /Windows that simply constantly grows.

After it's a year old, between winsxs and the various installer and update folders you can easily burn 50-100GB of space under ./Windows for an OS that took say 3GB to install. You can clean up only some of it.

No other OS gets anywhere near this idiocy.

I think the problem isn't just that Windows updates happen immediately by default. It's that Windows updates when you boot up your computer.

See, turning on a computer is an explicit declaration that you want to use it. Windows updates ignores this declaration by taking that time to itself. It doesn't matter if I can defer the update by how many days if one day it will stop/delay me from using my computer when I want to. Almost no one outside of IT Administrators turns on computers solely for updates and maintenance.

Contrast that with Linux (Ubuntu distro in mind) where updates happen when the computer is shutting down. In contrast with turning your computer on, shutting down is a declaration that you no longer need your computer. That's the OS' cue to chime in and perform some routine maintenance.

I wonder how much of this is an architectural problem. The first time I remember being frustrated with this Windows behavior was in Vista. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall that 95, 98, and XP used to do updates on shut down. I know Vista isn't fondly remembered but, gee, did they deliberately make it so that it updates when you start your computer? Why couldn't a company who takes pride in backwards compatibility keep the old update behavior?

To wit, people make a big deal about how immediately can you use your computer (i.e., start-up times) but all your fancy-schmancy SSD + hyperthreading set-up is useless if Windows decides to update just before that one presentation you've spent weeks on. Updating on shut down is the user-friendly way.

Fair enough, and thanks for that info. I haven't really looked at it from the starting up point of view as the shutting down one.

For whatever reason it hasn't impacted me, and that's also having a laptop that only gets irregular use as well as my regular desktop, but I'll be more observant about this going forward.

For posterity, I realise I have been bitten by this.

Updates may have an "on startup" component to them. If you shut down, currently you are forced to install updates on the shutdown - this happens silently, without permission. But: It will just do the shutdown side - so that the next time you start, you're stuck there looking at the "startup part" where updates continue to install.

MS ought to fix this, either by changing how updates are installed in two phases, or to incorporate an automatic "shutdown/install"=>"start windows, run updates"=>"shut down" option.

Also they should let you just shut down the PC without having to install updates, especially if you don't have time to do so.

Currently, as a user, the only really safe thing to do would be to "update and restart" followed by a shutdown.

My memory might be wrong, but I don't think Windows 95 had automatic updates at all. They were tacked on when Windows security vulnerabilities became such a big deal in the late 1990s. Automatic updates felt like a hack in the beginning, and it feels like they still are.

Yeah my bad. 95 definitely didn't have automatic updates. Had to come in the form of the 95 Plus! CD-ROM.

Maybe even 98 didn't have automatic updates, but I won't be surprised if 98SE already had this capability in some form.

> Automatic updates felt like a hack in the beginning, and it feels like they still are.

iOS made them pretty seamless and second-nature, and I can’t recall macOS ever ruining my day because of forced updates.

Well the attitude was that they are now "proud" of there updates and the new features they give away, so they want to shove that into the users face on starting up.

With a little creativity, one can redecorate routine maintenance into a parade of glorious futurism. And of course that parade needs to be the first you experience on the computers return to conciousness.

Something similar happens on Surface updates.

>Contrast that with Linux (Ubuntu distro in mind) where updates happen when the computer is shutting down.

Since when?

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think updates should happen when the user commands them to happen, not when the computer (or operating system vendor) decides when they should happen. If the user affirmatively commands the computer to update at a certain time, or on start-up or shutdown, fine. But why are we letting the operating system run the show?

Because most users would never set this and thus would never update.

It's not about that. Advanced users don't even have the option any more. MS could hide it deep in settings to disable update with 10 "are you sure" security risk dialogs. "yes i know the risks" etc, but no.... None of us can be trusted.

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