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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for harsh language, but this is not a bug. This is a complete brain damage of those who decide to implement such behaviour.

That's not "harsh", harsh is what happened to the unlucky users who lost data because no one on the development team bothered to call it out. It should be an implicitly understood rule that you NEVER remove a file you did not create, unless the user explicitly asked to, but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.

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> but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.

This. Once you get in the mindset that you know better than the user, it's not a big jump to "I know these directories should be empty, any content is leftover garbage, let's remove them".

> you NEVER remove a file you did not create

Absolutely this, with a followup of "and if you're 'helpfully' deleting an unused folder, check that it's unused first!"

Given that this was (stupid) desired behavior, making sure Documents didn't have stuff in it should have been a screamingly obvious step. It would still have been utterly unacceptable, it could still have created weird downstream bugs when users installed things that target the now-missing default Documents location, but at least it wouldn't have set a bunch of data on fire without any warning.

But then, I guess relying on common sense after the first terrible decision is made is never going to work. There's a reason "never break user space" is rule 1 for Linux updates...

Microsoft doesn’t consider the OS to be the “user’s system”. They clearly see it as something they rent to the user a little bit each day. If the user wants to keep the system for a little longer, he/she has to make a special request to Microsoft that they hold off for a bit before retaking control of the OS.

"Windows is a service and updates are part of that service. So if you could just go ahead and reboot now, that would be terrific."

I ditched Windows as soon as I saw that "Windows is a service . . ." notification show up in the bottom right after an update, boy did that make me livid. (You can ask my roommates, I actually shouted at my computer; it had just spent over an hour, on a best in class NVMe drive, doing that update.) I was pretty sure I paid $200 for an operating system, not an operating service. Admittedly that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, but this is just getting insane.

What I paid for is a HAL, some drivers, a filesystem, a handful of media codec licenses, and some basic applications to manage all that. What I got was a bunch of "apps" like "Photos" that routinely try to use up all my available system RAM, a start menu that connects to the internet, displays ads, and routinely lags on a high-end workstation, a file index service that was broken for 3 major update cycles, and an ever increasing number of "privacy toggles" in the completely dysfunctional control panel^W^W settings app.

Microsoft clearly doesn't care about "developers, developers, developers" anymore, because I have never lost this much productivity to an operating system in my life. (I say this as someone who has used Linux long enough to remember how bad WiFi was in the era of ndiswrapper; as well as someone who has used Windows Me and Vista for significant stretches of time.)

Oh yes. Excuse my harsh language, but fuck SaaS, and fuck Windows if it tries to be a SaaS. And I say that as someone growing up on Windows, still using it for work sometimes, and planning to buy a Surface device in the near future (I guess maybe I should reconsider).

Actually, I should probably use the term SaaSS, because that describes the kind of software I hate with passion more precisely. I recently stumbled upon this[0] essay by RMS, and like usual, it turns out he had this thing figured out years before I've even noticed we had a problem. If Windows wants to become a service substitute for an OS, I'll save myself future trouble and migrate away completely.

[0] - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

> Microsoft clearly doesn't care about "developers, developers, developers" anymore, because I have never lost this much productivity to an operating system in my life.

Azure's APIs are really nice! Microsoft cares about people developing against Azure. Those developers make them money.

And they've invested a lot of effort into allowing you to develop against those APIs on macOS or Linux.

What Microsoft doesn't care about, is people trying to use Windows to do development (outside of an enterprise use-case, where everyone is using the LTS version of Windows anyway.)

I feel like, increasingly, Microsoft sees Windows the way Apple sees iOS: something you develop for (to target the consumers that use it), not something you develop on.

Imagine a Microsoft that didn't have a Windows product, just their cloud products (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, etc.) Would that Microsoft build an OS? Or would they just tell you to use macOS/Linux to interact with their software ecosystem?

I feel like the answer to that question tells you a lot about Microsoft's priorities.

What I don't understand is, what led Microsoft down this path to begin with? Don't they have 90% penetration in desktop OSes and are fighting with established and trusted players like AWS, GCP in the data center and PlayStation and Nintendo in the living room? Why make it harder on yourself by shooting yourself in the foot?

The problem with Windows was never that it didn't have enough features, it was that it wasn't reliable enough. So instead of making it more reliable, they've doubled down on the features.

The trend for a while now has been diminishing user time spent on desktops and more time spent on mobile/web. Presumably Microsoft wanted to stake out a territory in those spaces.

Maybe it's finally the "year of the Linux desktop," lol... I mean both Apple and MS don't care much, and the market for desktop OS has become specialized again, so if it doesn't happen now it's never going to happen.

This whole meme truly underestimates the average person's Stockholm Syndrome for fascist rule. Microsoft's userbase is like some kind of microcosm of learned helplessness. I've never seen so many otherwise intelligent people feverishly defend Microsoft, its OS, and their actions. I have literally seen in the last week someone posting about Windows 10 completely hosing some of their important pictures, then in the same breath defend the people responsible.

Recently was reading the blog of the team upgrading conhost. On it they joke several times that the developers doing the work were not even born yet.

Well, this is the kind of thing that happens when your whole team is interns and the "senior" is 28.

Reading the associated bugs on github I also learned that there were lots of complaints about the new console, not on features, but breaking compatibility that is. Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.

TL;DR: At least one codger is needed on teams doing this kind of work to give perspective.

More precisely: at least one Raymond Chen is needed on every team in Microsoft.

Not really, anyone with a decent amount of experience.

Hm. If I don't include emoji and smileys in text, nobody understands jokes these days...

“More precisely:” is not how to start a joke, typically they are the opposite of precise.

> Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.

To be fair, that's what led to Powershell and Command Prompt co-existing. I guess Microsoft wanted to reduce the number of console backends.

The shell(s) and console are two different things, I’m talking about the second.

>NEVER remove a file you did not create

Seems like common sense, but Microsoft has been doing this for a while. In Windows 7 (not sure about later releases) the OS runs a 'Desktop Cleanup' periodically that deletes shortcuts to network locations it can no longer connect to. God forbid your network drives don't map one day and Windows decides to nuke all your desktop shortcuts... this actually happened to a user I was doing support for and they were understandably livid

Disable windows 10 automatic maintenance.

Windows is going into the Apple direction I guess.

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