Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'

They've been marching steadily towards forced updates, just they're being obnoxious enough first that people will thank them for cutting the UI noise.

All Linux/BSD systems I've used can update in minutes at the most (excluding the download time); I've long since wondered why Windows update is so much slower? Even binary diffs generally don't take that long to apply in my experience. So where is all the time spent?

Also why does it need to reboot? It is the "hard" file locking that's on Windows?

Looking at the way MS365 does it for different SKUs makes it obvious. Less money means more frequent updates.

My xps notebook with windows 10 OTOH, well, it's actually close to a nightmare. I bought it late 2019 and had multiple on occasions the machine decided to WAKE UP from sleep a hour after midnight and running the update Procedere without shutting down. If it was in the sleeve I was greeted by a very very hot notebook at the morning with almost no battery left.

It took a while to turn this of.

If you want to get it, I recommend the Microsoft Action Pack - you get a lot stuff for the money, including multiple Windows 10 licenses, 5 O365 licenses, Visual Studio subscriptions, Azure credits... It's amazing value really, but seems to be relatively unknown.

While I do prefer the update mechanism under my choice of Linux distributions, which allows me to initiate an update then cancel it if it looks like it will affect software currently in use, it is not suitable for most people.

What are the tactics Microsoft uses to deal with computers that are offline? Can those tactics be circumvented?

The other fun thing is that if you run into a complex problem, there’s no scenario where it will get fixed for you. For some products, there is literally a two week window before they freeze changes.

There is no escape — this is the new way. Apple is even worse and more unpredictable.

Worked in enterprise, windows computers there only update on the week end or when the administrator decides to force an update overnight (they send a notification firmwide that all computers will be rebooted).

Have you been living in a cave since 1999? Computing isn't about empowering people anymore, it's about extracting money and data (read: more money!) from them!

Could you elaborate on that? When buying a permanent license you should be able to deduct the full sum as a cost of doing business, it shouldn't matter if it's Saas or not.

"Users" as you likely remember them—"power users by necessity", people who willingly learned the arcana of computing just to use the thing—don't exist any more. They died out in the 90s, when computers stopped booting to BASIC and dialing into BBSes.

You know how it feels to use a centrally-managed corporate workstation?

That's how people now expect all computers to work. They're using it; but "someone else" is the sysadmin. They don't have admin privileges; "the IT department" does, or "their phone carrier" does, or "Google" does (in the case of something like a Chromebook.)

Corporations can still be the sysadmin for their own enterprise rollouts of Windows (and if you're a real "power user", I'd suggest going the route of pretending you're a corporate IT department managing a one-machine deployment—Windows is a lot more "submissive" in that state); but now Microsoft themselves are the sysadmin-of-last-resort.

But don't think for a moment that before this, most users were their own sysadmin-of-last-resort. Again, that died out in the 90s, when computers stopped being "business machines" that hobbyists could do some pro-am work with (in the same sense that one might build a machine-shop in their garage); and began instead being marketed to anyone and everyone.

Before Microsoft assumed the role, the sysadmin-of-last-resort for most post-Eternal-September users was either "my nephew who knows computers"; or it was "nobody"—until things got really bad, at which point they'd bring the computer into a repair shop and a random repair-tech would be the sysadmin. (It's like having no family doctor, only a free clinic you visit in emergencies!)

As one of those former "nephews who knows computers", let me tell you that I'd much rather Microsoft have the job than I.

> Don't tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case.

People like the idea of donating organs, but that doesn't mean they'll ever seek out a consent form to opt into the organ-donor program. But in countries where it's opt-out, they don't bother to seek out the de-consent form, either. It's just such a far-away concern to most people, that there's too much inertia for people to change the default no matter what it is. (And if someone comes up to them and asks, they'll default to whichever option is less trouble—i.e. continuing be either opted-in or opted-out, depending—even if it's not the option that they'd prefer. They just don't want this time stolen from their day, for something they care so little about; and since changing things can often have unexpected not-mentioned-up-front labor-costs, they put negative expected-value on switching, even if they put positive value on the switched end-state.)

Because most users don't know WTF they're doing, especially the ones that think they do because they ran their own domain 20 years ago.

Another first thing I do after Windows 10 install is killing the task scheduler. Among other things, it contains a broken task related to Xbox support, which activates on idle and takes up like 50% of the CPU. I think that people think that the machine is running a defrag or some other optimization.

If Linux got its UI business together, I would flee from the Windows immediately. I've been 10 years on Mac but we all know where that's going. Now with WebKit and Node.js so advanced, I'm not sure what's stopping us from creating a really nice Linux UI ecosystem. Perhaps the state of Linux laptop drivers, mainly the touchpad ones.

Before Windows 10, I knew of only two categories of software would behave so offensively as to actively fight your attempts to control it: malware and DRM (which some would argue could be grouped into the former, but I digress...) Software that "phoned home" with details on what you did with it was also widely criticised and known as "spyware".

It's sad that such tactics have now become the norm, with the excuse of "security" justifying the means.

If I had the time and the drive I would transfer my work flow over to Linux. I use it everyday, just not on my work computer. It’s getting more and more painful having to deal with Windows.

My biggest issue is windows server. I’m worried if I disable updates it will break it.

Long term stable backwards compatible, cross compatible with other popular tools other people are using, familiar to a large pool of employees, supported by large numbers of third party software and hardware vendors. It’s cheap.

> I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.

Not buying any electricity from the grid today? Or any internet or cloud services, or any rented office space?

or just ignoring the group policy options and the months of time you could choose to update, ignoring the “update at times I’m not using it” options, ignoring the bandwidth metering options, not restricting its internet connectivity, and on the last possible day instructing all your employees to hit the “defer updates” button by hand and ... by gosh it’s gone!

I know that's not necessarily what you would like and that you're surely talking about the general issue of privacy, but you can actually block telemetry and other stuff you don't want at the DNS level. A pihole is quite effective at doing so.

Because companies often have a portfolio of software apps that only run on Windows os. No Linux (or even macOS) options. Yes, if a company can do _all_ its business processes only with a web brower, then it can conceivably have all employees use Linux desktop with Firefox.

But many companies have critical apps like business analytics, CAD modeling, warehouse inventory management, legacy apps, etc that have no Linux options. These companies had Windows XP, then upgraded to Windows 7, then upgraded to Windows 10 -- so they could maintain Microsoft's continued support. Even for home use, my friend who sews has an embroidery machine and that software only runs on Windows. She can't run the embroidery software in a VM inside of Linux because the USB security dongle doesn't work through the vm's USB emulator. She's "stuck" on Windows too.

A new YC startup with no historical baggage of legacy apps can "choose their destiny" by being a 100% Linux/Apple shop but mature Fortune 1000 companies will be running a flavor of Windows for decades to come because it's too expensive to switch off of it.

Windows Server also makes a nice dev machine.

Windows 10 is the evolution of Windows, so it's inherited 30+ years of cruft.

It's easy to compare it to Android or Chrome and say "Look how bad this is...".

That being said, if you're calling the Telemetry a privacy nightmare then you don't know what you're talking about. The privacy issues in Windows 10 aren't with the Telemetry and go back way before Windows 10.

I dual boot Linux and Windows. These days I need to boot Windows a lot less, but I still occasionally run into problems related to games. Usually anti-cheat systems picking a fight with Proton, but also some examples like Terraria 1.4 running in a 1080p canvas in a 1440p window as they updated a library which their Mac/Linux guy had patched to fix window size on those systems to a newer version, but not new enough that it incorporates the patches to actually fix the problem.

It's consumers who have no control over the process.

>Why would anyone use this platform?

There is no other system that takes backwards compatibility as seriously as Windows. Most companies like to keep their investment when they purchase high-value software. This is especially true for us when some of the software we use costs as much as a car.

then get enterprise license

Over last 2 or 1 year I had to wait like _once_ for update when I powered the pc at the beginning of the day

The idea that Mac is unstable and requires a lot of updates and reboots to just function is news to me...

Shutdown is currently two-phase, and has been since 7. Programs receive a shutdown notification, and then can handle it, and the machine doesn't shut down until all are handled... or until 2 minutes pass, because occasionally programs misbehave, and one program shouldn't be able to hold up the entire shutdown process.

Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different?

Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens twice a year.

I'm not saying that this is good, but what's wrong with that?

You cannot kill/significantly change the old one, meanwhile you want to add something more user-friendly with easy access to probably frequently used configs, what would you do?

Compare that to Debian. Updates are backports of bug fixes to the existing source code base. It is the absolute smallest change possible to fix the defect. There are literally 10 of thousands of updated to Debian packages over the life time of a single release, and yet you noticing any change over it's entire lifetime is very unlikely. [0] Calling Debian Stable "stable" is an understatement. It's a rock. Bedrock even.

On Debian big changes on happen when you move between versions. Versions are currently supported for 6 years. The timing of moving to a new version is at the compete digression of the user.

[0] That's a bit of a lie. Web browsers in particular are so big and complex the manual work of backporting fixes has overwhelmed the Debian Developers. For those packages only, they stick with the closest upstream provides, which is the ESR version for Firefox. But they only last a year or so, which forces Debian to move to a new version occasionally.

completely unrelated: ebay is great, isn't it?

I’m sure that there are plenty of those at Microsoft that disagree with telemetry and updates that you can’t opt out of. I would bet that many of them are in the developer division.