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Comment by 00deadbeef | Hacker News Reader

Worse is that these forced updates sometimes break your Windows install. I use Windows exclusively for gaming. I have installed: Steam, Steam games, nvidia drivers, and Firefox. Hardly an unreasonable setup. Yet somehow, twice in two years, I’ve been forced to reinstall Windows because a forced update has blown it up and the built-in recovery tools couldn’t restore it.

I use macOS for work. Apple doesn’t force updates to happen. Despite people’s perceptions of Apple being controlling within their walled garden, I actually feel in control of my Mac. I don’t feel in control of my custom-built PC.

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Agreed. It’s got to the point now where Windows is in a bubble - I have a 64 GB nvme that windows is installed on, and absolutely nothing else.

The number of times I’ve had to reinstall Windows, it just makes sense to have it isolated so I don’t lose any data.

Except, I inevitably do because Windows finds a way to have files saved and programs installed where I don’t want them.

Interestingly, as of the most recent edition of macOS, this is how macOS structures itself natively.

It will install the OS itself in read only mode (and encrypted) onto a dedicated APFS Volume, with all the data on a separate APFS Volume, both sharing the same container representing the entire boot drive.

As a user you will not notice at all unless you go looking.

This is mainly for security reasons, as I understand it. But, surely this also makes an OS reinstall or recovery much simpler. I have not yet had the luck to need to do either since this installation model was adopted so I don't know what the impact (positive or negative) to the user is in such a scenario.

Anyway, I find it amusing that such a model has only recently been adopted by a mainstream OS after so many decades of the concept being espoused as important in the general Unix-like world. I wonder if Microsoft will follow suit.

That’s also how BSD does it. It’s easier to reinstall the OS then. Not that you’d need to, BSD being as robust as it is.

Look into Tron script (https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/comments/idcg0v/tron_v11...) to gain more control over updates and such. I use this on my machine and it works well.

Try getting rid of the 2GB desktop pictures that come with Catalina then and see how much control you have...

You have control. You can turn off SIP and mount the root partition as read write, then empty out that folder. And modify whatever other system files you like.

I'm sure there are workarounds to disable Windows update too. That's not really the point.

SIP is different. Apple explicitly built these tools with mechanisms to turn them off, for users who wish to do so.

If there’s a Microsoft-created mechanism for disabling automatic updates on non-pro (!) editions of Windows, I would love to know about it. All the methods I’m familiar with are weird hacks that have side effects or don’t always work.

You can disable Windows Update by changing the states of all its services in the registry to "disabled". To my knowledge, this doesn't have any side effects. Updating just no longer works unless you turn the services back on, plain and simple.

While macOS does not force updates, I have never seen update of any other OS to fuck up keyboard driver of a laptop. The laptop is unusable on macOS (internal keyboard not detected), reinstalling macOS does not help, downgrade is not possible, I had to install Kubuntu - and found out it's better than macOS.

Edit: why am I getting downvoted for this? Explain please. The issue won't disappear no matter how hard you downvote.

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