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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

`Libraries` and `My Documents` an absolute mess, agreed. I've given up and just work from a personal folder that serves the exact same role but doesn't have any special Windows status, which is a pretty serious indictment of those "helpful" features.

A sincere question: why are you an Insider? After the Windows 8.1 issues I'd be really gunshy about getting early anything for Windows. Are there upsides to that, or is it pretty much just a public service in the same sense as running nightly Firefox builds?

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I like being on the bleeding edge. My only Windows PC is a gaming machine, so I don't mind it updating frequently and/or needing babysitting (for example, the very latest flight added a HyperV adapter and broke my internet, despite having HyperV disabled).

That, and honestly, they're pretty rock-solid. Other than this net adapter this thing past week, I've never had anything truly disruptive. OTOH, there've been a time or two that I was glad to be an insider because of a bugfix or feature that wasn't likely to be backported to stable.

And some misplaced desire to help? I can rationalize it with OSS, I can't really tell you why I feel some sort of responsibility to do it for Windows too.

That makes sense actually, thanks. I don't think Microsoft is inherently evil or anything, nothing wrong with trying to help make software better even when it's not OSS.

My confusion was mostly just that I couldn't picture who would have the tech background and Windows familiarity to fix (and productively evaluate) weird or buggy releases, but was also willing to have their system destabilized without much warning. For myself, I expect I'd find being an Insider exhausting; even if I know enough to fix the issues, I don't use Windows very often and I'd feel lost whenever things changed and needed to be fixed.

Getting early OS updates sounded much higher-risk than nightly Firefox builds or something. But "it's a gaming machine" actually makes total sense - I forgot how many people have a nice Windows machine they use often, with no real need for it to be stable.

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