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Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> Windows is way behind the curve with tiled window managers

Just use one of the third party utilities.

> it forces updates on you.

Prior to this, Microsoft received over a decade of scorn for not forcing updates for 0-days and other RCEs. RCEs in the wild on Windows make the news. RCEs in the wild for months on end are bad for the entire world.

Does no one remember the complete nightmare that was going to a relative's house and realizing they hadn't updating Windows in 1 year? From bot nets to hidden folders full of pirated files (or worse...), and an overall general expectation that all banking credentials ever entered on that machine are compromised.

Yes mandatory reboots are irritating, yes it would be nice if Microsoft hired back the armies of QA people they got rid of years ago so that the updates were more reliable, but those updates serve a real purpose.

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> Does no one remember the complete nightmare that was going to a relative's house and realizing they hadn't updating Windows in 1 year?

Yes, but at the same time I ran Windows XP and Windows 7 without any updates for about 15 years combined and I can count the number of times I had to format due to malware or a virus on less than 1 hand.

I once had 280 days of uptime on Windows 7 while constantly running VMs, an entire dev environment, games, etc.. It was a really good OS for what it was.

I guess the moral of the story here is if you want to play with sharp knives you should have the option to. Power users who have been using computers for most of their lives shouldn't be put on the same playing field as your 65 year old Aunt or Uncle who still thinks AOL is the internet.

You can. Block windows update addresses in hosts or install something like Wpd or shutup10.

The other problem is not providing a stable Windows distribution where updates don't touch functionality and only fix security bugs.

Exactly. It's one thing to aggressively push necessary security fixes (though they should always be optional if the user really wants, because nothing is perfectly reliable). But Microsoft hasn't done that with Windows 10. Instead, it's been systematically bundling functionality updates in with essential ones, and some of those functionality updates are unwanted or even actively not wanted by some users.

> Does no one remember the complete nightmare that was going to a relative's house and realizing they hadn't updating Windows in 1 year? From bot nets to hidden folders full of pirated files (or worse...), and an overall general expectation that all banking credentials ever entered on that machine are compromised.

When I go to my relatives for which i have installed a version of Linux, even though they don't update it very often it is never infected with anything. No malware, no virus, nothing. Always working exactly as I left it. That's one less headache when I deal with family members.

> When I go to my relatives for which i have installed a version of Linux, even though they don't update it very often it is never infected with anything. No malware, no virus, nothing. Always working exactly as I left it.

If enough people do this for their family members, when the Linux malware comes, it will sweep like a wildfire on dry wood. A complacent attitude, being trained not to worry about updates or malware is likely setting people for a very unpleasant surprise down the road.

Potentially. But the surface attack on UNIX-like systems is not the same as on Windows anyway.

I’m not so sure. Most malware I find on friend/family windows computers is installed by the user, and Linux gives you a lot more rope... At least windows has defender. The reason Linux systems that are given to family members don’t generally get malware is because those family members lack the technical ability to successfully install any new software on the machine.

unattended-upgrades in a cron-job isn't a terrible situation, particularly if you setup livepatch so you ~never have to reboot.

Please tell me livepatch actually works such that reboots can be avoided ... Ubuntu 18.04

You have to sign up for an account with canonical but it’s free for noncommercial use; it patches the running kernel.

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