Hacker News Reader

Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing like being woken up at 2 am because Windows decided now is a good time to update.

while i understand the intention behind automatic updates, i feel it's an anti-user design. It is based on the assumption (a bad one) that the user isn't intelligent enough to do the update at a time suitable for them. It assumes that the windows design and dev team knows better. It takes control away from the user.

Rather than forcing automatic updates, it is better to teach the user why updates are important. Education beats subversion.

View on HN

Software companies designed very intrusive update systems that pestered users. Then they made many updates that break software. This created a culture of hostility to updating. This caused some issues.

Then the software companies and developers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the best approach was to force updates on the users. Because when people are already upset with your awful updating mechanisms then forcing them to do so is surely going to improve things. And now we have people crippling update functionality as a result.

They tried that. We're all suffering because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches. Of course, now Microsoft has made it even worse by having routinely broken patches since they no longer do proper in-house testing. End result? Damned if you do patch, damned if you don't.

Windows 10 has been a nightmare in terms of patch quality.

> because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches

A large number of users were not patching because they believe they didn't need to, and they weren't educated well enough.

Raising the competency of the users is part of the responsibility.

A large number of users, such as myself, also probably think that Microsoft could fix some of the reasons that make a full reboot necessary so often.

> because a large chunk of the user base refused to be responsible on patches

No, they were very responsible. They knew the updates are likely going to be UX downgrades, slow the machine down, make it bluescreen more, or possibly even brick it. That was the experience around Vista/7. That's still the experience today, maybe sans the bluescreen.

The cardinal sin of Microsoft and every other company pushing automatic updates is update commingling. Mixing up security patches (which users need and might even want) with generic bug fixes (which users need and like) with feature updates (which users don't need, and rightfully don't like). As long as all of those are mixed, updating is a risky job, and many users will responsibly decide not to do it.

I don't mind automatic updates, but I at least want to know when they're going to happen. There are two important pieces of information that are apparently impossible to obtain: "if I put my computer to sleep, will it wake up and update?" and "if I leave my computer on for the next <X> hours, will it reboot and update?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com