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Comment by whiplash451 | Hacker News Reader

> you could turn off auto-update

I would not mess with that bit these days

NO! It must always be up to a user to decide to update software. Not all updates work. Not all updates are improvements.

I can’t tell if you’re trolling (or maybe a chat bot)

Not in the slightest. Not in operating systems, not in browsers, not in video games, not in software as a whole.

This is a post about Microsoft ruining their software. That software is distributed through automatic updates. Do you recall the campaign to get everyone on 10? That and the telemetry (spying) they added around the same time convinced me to disable updates. I eventually landed on a linux with only manual updates.

I guess I understand where you're coming from (having used Windows before and deciding to leave for this kind of stuff).

My initial comment was to be understood in general, though, not in the specific context of obnoxious update strategies.

There is a difference between:

1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha.

2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later.

Windows is #1. Linux is #2.

Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)

The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care. If the system doesn't eventually force them to update, they just won't. That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else.

If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool. Windows 10 / 11 always ask you when you want to apply the update.

> The only thing is that most users don't know at all, or don't care.

They will learn when they have been hacked often enough. We should stop treating everyone as children. Oh no, children are now treated like adults.

Unfortunately I think they won't learn. What most of them will do is to click the next banner that shows "We detected a Virus on your computer. Please click here to fix this.", but they will will absolutely refuse to click on that popup in Windows that tells them to update, because Microsoft is the ultimate evil that can't be trusted.

I don't even run antivirus on my personal windows machines.

Indeed 3rd-party antiviruses are useless. Your best protection comes from the OS provider through updates (hence my original message).

worse than useless, they quite literally will use the same techniques to grab ahold of the kernel as the viruses they're trying to protect from.

I always found it hilarious how the spectre mitigations were breaking AV software.

> That's alright in the first order if you just don't care that they will get hacked, but we know what happened in the XP times - the machines join a botnet and attack everyone else.

That's alright also in Windows 10 or 11 when ransomware commes, so it must be something else. /s

> If you're work PC forces you to reboot "right now", that's a corporate policy or some shitty "endpoint protection" tool.

Or they just know their users.

At our company,the policy is set up to request reboot during the next 30 days (so basically till the next patch Tuesday). Who complains the most about updates all the time or every day? Those, who didn't bother to reboot during the last 30 days.

So at some point, you have to force it.

I'm one of those who will ignore it until forced to reboot because it's less reboots in total.

At home I have plenty of times where rebooting isn't disruptive, at work that's never true.

To point out the obvious: run auto-update before doing the "crucial thing" and that won't occur. Or pay for the non-consumer oriented editions of Windows that allow full administrative control; they exist.

Anybody who could not figure that out is probably not capable of managing Linux properly either.

If a thing sucks, or even merely has some little blemish, the fault is in the thing, and it's entirely fair and rational to say so.

All the moaning and groaning over something trivial to avoid with even a modicum of common sense is neither fair nor rational. Even more so since it's an intentional design decision and it's already well known to be an intentional design decision.

What common sense is your own moaning and groaning exhibiting?

It is a useful ability to be able to deal with something that isn't as you would wish.

But that is orthoganol to another fact which is that in the entire history of the world, not one thing ever got better by accepting things as they are.

IDK, it's a can of worms. COMs, Services, HKEYs, Group Policies (local and forest), AD. I wouldn't fault someone for eschewing all that.

forcing shit updates by tying them to security updates, had to be the most effective method for ensuring noncompliance.

security updates should stand alone from vanity, and shit updates.

Also, in Linux you can update and keep doing stuff. Even a full distribution version update! I remember playing Stellaris at the same time that Kubuntu was being updated to the 22.04 LTS version.

It is not safe. Few years ago (around ~2016-17), there was that Nvidia driver update, that killed Xorg during the process. Yes, I was running the update in the gnome-terminal, and it didn't end up well, I spent next few hours piecing the system together from a live usb.

For next few years, I was running updates inside screen, just to be sure.

I certainly keep using my computer during updates but it's not advisable and you should be prepared to random and more or less subtle breakages. Maybe less on non rolling distros. On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it's usual that Network Manager stops being usable from the KDE GUI after big updates.

Linux also doesn't have the use case of grandma/grandpa. Gunshy small brick and mortar owners, kiosks, banks, employee who doesn't have privileges (both on the system and in writing) to update...the list goes on.

Forcefully rolling out the update is the only way it may ever get updated, in a lot of cases.

I'm not grandma. Let me choose.

Who cares if you ARE "grandma". That assumes that old women are technologically incompetent, and a pretty shit thing to assume.

My MiL (early 70's), happily runs Xubuntu on her machine. After getting the printer/scanner to work, it just fucking works. She agreed to schedule the updates in the early morning, so its just done.

She wanted a password manager, and showed her how to install software. That's done now, since we've had an app store longer than Apple.

The only thing she couldnt figure out was how to open an Access database made in 2003. That took me some time to figure out. Finally did and got them exported to LibreOffice spreadsheets.

My examples were perhaps too specific, but I was just trying to illustrate there's many use cases where updating will functionally not exist if not for a forced rollout.

> But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks.

I've legit had windows shutdown in the middle of an online p2p gaming session before.

absolutely ridiculous.

Seriously? In 2024? What Windows version?

It was a few years back, I don't recall the version of windows.

I was just noting that I've had it happen, it hasn't been recent though.

Your comment is orthogonal to mine. Updating is always the right thing to do. How it is scheduled by the OS provider is another story. But refusing to update because you don’t like the scheduler is unreasonable. If you can’t stand the scheduler, change OS.

> Updating is always the right thing to do.

Except when the update makes the product worse.

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