Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonwest | Hacker News Reader

Do you feel as though Windows as a SaaS would be better? At least as a consumer I have a choice to say “I’d rather not upgrade to Windows 11 and get the worse experience” and not just login and see that those changes that I wouldn’t have upgraded for have just been pushed down as it happens with a SaaS.

Windows, as an example, is an interesting one in that you’re paying once for a license and it’s good more or less indefinitely (or until things stop working and are no longer supported), but Microsoft does still have an obligation to be pushing out updates, whether security or QoL, so I’m not sure that it being worse over time has any reflection on the license model.

View on HN

You don't have a choice not to upgrade Windows, not practically, it will go out of support and you can't do anything about it other than hope Windows Next will be more to your liking.

Hello from the past. I'm typing this on a Windows 7, without the most of the updates. Most works fine, just can't install the newest Office or Games. But who wants that?

p.s.: Nope, no viruses or things like that. Windows 7 is so old that it's not supported by botnets anymore.

This is like bragging about not wearing a seatbelt because "I haven't flown through the windshield yet"

I've flown through the windshield a couple times in my life WRT malware.

I've lost so much more time to work computers where I'm forced to use retail Win 10/11 and have to deal with intrusive update policies than I have due to malware.

Having to nuke a few computers from orbit once a decade is a small price to pay for having systems that I can trust to work the same as they did yesterday, systems that never interrupt my flow.

EDIT: to expand on this a little bit, I think a lot of cybersecurity concerns are basically forced upon us by SaaS as a model. Attack surfaces become much smaller if you can just block things from communicating with the outside entirely. Not to mention the wonderful technology known as a "hardware power switch" good luck remotely turning on my SSD full of tax documents and embarrassing photos.

Or it’s like driving a reliable Toyota with a proven safety record vs not wanting to pay for some new vehicle with a seatbelt subscription and updates that brick your car randomly or blare ads at max volume while driving down the interstate.

I’ve lost more work to forced updates resetting my computer randomly and making operation less stable than I ever have to malware (the latter being never in my adult life).

True, because of how necessary OS updates / security fixes are, sooner or later you're forced to upgrade, even on a "buy once" model. But in that model, at least there was still a chance of an effective user boycott.

When Windows Vista and Windows 8 released, people got mad, and enough of them stuck to Windows XP and Windows 7 that Microsoft had to address it, for example by going back on the Windows 8 start menu. Now that they're switching to this permanent license, free upgrade, model, that is going away. Thankfully Windows 11 is very boring, but if they pulled off another 8 start menu, there'll be no real way for people to avoid it or have their voice heard now.

The key is to also keep your old hardware conveniently offline until they drop pushing forced updates to it... It works surprisingly well when no patches are applied, and documentation is usually quite thorough.

It may not be advisable, but tell that to the XP-for-life or 7-for-life people. It won't actually stop working, it just means you're much more vulnerable to malware.

It won't actually stop working, it just means you're much more vulnerable to malware.

The biggest threats haven't come from direct external assaults on the OS for years. I expect a typical consumer device is more at risk from an out of date browser than any other type of vulnerability now. The biggest risk for most of us as personal users is someone stealing our data via a hack, which often doesn't require root/administrator access to the host system anyway if you can compromise something already Internet-connected like a browser or messaging app.

Of course old versions of Windows not getting updates from Microsoft any more is a concern on some level but it's probably a long way down the list for anyone who actually has a good reason to still be using the old versions. I know quite a few people with quite a few different and entirely rational reasons for doing so, though many of those reasons involve some other form of predatory business model by some other big company that makes hardware and/or software. (Hardware that was declared EOL and doesn't have drivers for newer Windows versions, software with some sort of DRM that ties it to running on a specific system, that kind of thing.)

It has been several years since WannaCry, but absolutely nothing guarantees that another such vulnerability does not surface.

Ransomware, like the old data trashing viruses of the past, is trivially defeated by having backups.

Read up on the mechanism by which WannaCry spread and report back.

You mean EternalBlue? How exactly is a remote attacker going to use a vulnerability in a local networking protocol to attack a typical home user's PC? First you need a way into their network where you can even see the PC to attack. If you have that then you're already dangerous.

As I said before this kind of vulnerability is still a concern. Obviously it's a much greater concern if you're talking about something like a laptop that might be connected to an untrusted network, which would be crazy with an unsupported or unpatched OS. But for a home user who stays on their own network it's probably quite a long way down the list of things to be worried about.

We also dont know if some bad actor has already found that vulnerability and are building/already built and exploit.

Browsers and messaging apps also rely on OS security to a degree, it's part of why they don't support old operating system versions.

Your hardware point is interesting in the sense that it represents the non-saas model, but also appears to not be working.

So I get it, they bought the hardware with a one-time purchase. The maker moved on. One day the OS moves on.

But the hardware company is predatory for not writing a (free?) driver for their obsolete hardware on a new OS?

Surely if the model is "buy once" then there's no expectation to return to the well for "software updates"?

The solution is, as you noted, to freeze the OS. Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are happy doing that.

But the hardware company is predatory for not writing a (free?) driver for their obsolete hardware on a new OS?

The rest of the world deals with this problem by adopting standards. There are plenty of peripheral makers in the PC world who could perfectly well have followed or established standards too and then their equipment might be useful indefinitely through generic, long-lived drivers. In reality many of them chose to use proprietary protocols with no public documentation available instead. Building in artificial obsolescence is certainly a predatory business model.

Eventually after an OS passes it EOL... Even security threats decrease as the OS falls out of popular use. I ran a totally offline NT server for many years after EOL and it was glorious, CD-ROM and all.

Tell that to my graphics card. Had to update to 10 from 7 about 1-2 years ago because my graphics card started making very scary loud sounds when playing games.

Windows 10 LTSB will be supported for about 10 years from now. (with 0 feature changes)

A cracked version of W10LTSB with most of the cruft stripped out and updates/AV disabled is genuinely the best base computing experience. My WWAN card even works properly. Linux is happy inside a VM, and the host computer works properly without spending a billion hours recompiling drivers with every kind of weird lab hardware, GPUs, FPGAs, and it's own internals etc. If something is better supported on Linux I just pipe it into the VM.

Why not update it though? They promise 0 feature changes. Only security updates and bugfixes.

Although one possible problem could be if your hardware breaks down in five years and you want to take that as an opportunity to upgrade instead of doing a simple like-for-like replacement – drivers for then current hardware might not necessarily support old LTSB versions.

Well I think windows 11 has same kernal as 10? So probably drivers will be fine for a good few years also.

I think that's mainly backwards compatibility from the OS with regards to existing drivers, but Windows might still introduce some new APIs that hardware vendors might make use of, thereby rendering new drivers incompatible with older OSs.

Likewise, new CPU and/or chipset generations might require not just new drivers, but dedicated OS support, which in all likelihood won't be backported to the LTSB versions, either.

Wait doesn't this just make the point that SaaS is the proper model for Windows? Do you expect that Microsoft should "support" everything, for free, forever? If you want bugs to be fixed, or for things to improve generally, then you should pay something I think.

In enterprise, Windows and Office are subscriptions in most cases. I wouldn’t say they have gotten better.

I'm convinced that it would be better: the reason for worse every version is that they try to cram every major full of "revolutionary new features" nobody asked for. Because back in the day updates were a major revenue stream but only with headline features. I'd gladly pay for a 64 bit w2k

Reply on news.ycombinator.com