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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

> forced updates

I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.

"at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable.

you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.

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It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster.

I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.

Serious question, do you actually use Windows 10? I use it daily and I've never had it force an update on me in the middle of the day. I turn it off every night and it applies the updates then, as it should.

It happened to me a couple of times this year. It was really annoying to go make coffee, and come back to an updating screen. Even better, one of these failed and spent another 30 minutes rolling back the update.

I think you may be in a minority of people that intentionally turn their machine off at the end of the day.

I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.

That makes sense, if you've got a laptop and you never reboot it then you're creating an impossible situation for the updater. I still don't understand the constant whinging in that case, though. Of course it's going to update while you're using it if, from its perspective, you are always using it.

I have. There was a Chrome version (69 IIRC) that kept it from using a proxy server that was at a CNAME and had Kerberos authentication.

Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665

This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.

People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline.

Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.

Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.

There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.

To concur:

My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day.

At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information.

Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.

Microsoft fired their Quality Assurance staff, hence the regressions in reliability: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...

I somehow missed that — thanks for sharing!

That sounds like a hardware or driver thing, specifically related to GPU, rather than a Windows issue. You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome.

Sure, could be.

My testing pointed towards a DRM problem, since it doesn’t happen with other video streaming or with rendering outside the particular Chrome + Hulu combination.

My point is two-fold:

1. Even if the driver crashes, the OS should blue screen (like it used to) rather than just hard freeze the machine.

2. Using an HP laptop with Windows and Chrome to view Hulu is so mainstream it should “just work” — so it’s a sign of industry breakdown it doesn’t.

At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen

This sounds like back then there were only crashes with a blue screen (and dump), and currently there's only hard crashes without blue screen. Both of them are not true. I.e. there are apparently types crashes for which it hasn't been possible in the past decades to come up with a bluescreen, othiing new there. It is just as likely, maybe even moe so, the difference in your particular case is your hardware/driver. It's of course possible there were effectively changes at the OS level in how hard faults are dealt with, but I wouldn't just assume so.

ltsc is the solution, and even though all the MS sychophants will tell you it's for ATMs/medical equipment only: I've been running it on my 2019 gaming box for a year, and had no issues at all

... I hear keys on ebay are about $2

What's Itsc?

Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.

It didn't even need to connect to the internet.

Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.

From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.

I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.

For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.

They've been way more stable than MacOS updates recently too. That has to say something about the processes Microsoft has in place to QA.

Have they? Or do the people they impact simply not blog about issues.

My new Mac mini was doing kernel panics at every shutdown for about a year.

The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!

How does that answer the question? If anything it reinforces the point.

The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.

It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features.

Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.

The trade off there is that Apple can then perform a major architectural shift in a single fell swoop because it’s not carrying around silly amounts of legacy cruft. Endless backwards compatibility isn’t always a benefit imo.

That works if your os is used by geeks. Doesn’t fly that well if you need solid, long term stable platform to build your solutions on top of.

Edit: typo

lol - Yup, Mac's are only used by geeks. /s

> Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].

All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.

[0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d...

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat...

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

People who are newbies at computers wouldn't be able to find the switch to turn off updates anyway, so why not include the opt-out setting for users who care?

Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.

I dislike the forced windows update because they shove crap down your throat with the updates, try to force edge on you, and repeatedly try to get you to accept their privacy stuff.

>I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.

That doesn't explain forced feature updates.

Sure it does. It means you don’t need to backport fixes to an infinite number of builds.

But they do a great deal of backporting anyway. Enterprise and Education users can run a slow path that gets bug fixes and security updates only, for feature updates as far as 30 months back. This is not offered for any other editions of Windows, meaning feature updates are forced on them earlier than they need to be.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...

General consumers are now the beta testers for Microsoft Windows. With Windows built-in spyware features, they don't even need any user interaction to collect data from your computer.

Yet chrome forced updates are the greatest revolution it's modern software solutions.

They're revolutionary not because they're mandatory, but rather because they're transparent and not disruptive.

I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.

The thing that finally got me to abandon Windows was when a forced update wiped away the system settings that I had spent days figuring out to get a trackpad to work the way I wanted to.

I wonder how many people who complain about forced updates also complain(ed) about having to support users running decade-old versions of the OS/browsers?

It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.

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