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Comment by ItsBob | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious why anyone would download a beta of Windows... can someone enlighten me?

I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose.

But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users.

This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss.

Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!

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In addition to testing in advance that your own (hard|firm|soft)ware will work, some people will just want to get new features early and are willing to deal with the potential extra bugginess.

True. I'm a .NET dev and for the most part that's always worked on Windows really well so bugs (apart from the ones I introduce) are pretty rare.

Yeah some hobbyists just like to try new features. I remember when Windows Longhorn (pre Vista) was in beta and I would download the ISO and burn a DVD just to try out the latest transparency effects and the sidebar lol.

Yeah, this used to be me. I don't do it anymore but I used to spend a great deal of time playing with beta versions of Android, Windows, Firefox, and various iPod and Mac customization applications. I just enjoyed playing with the new features, figuring out how to break them, reporting those issues, and then helping get them fixed (even if I wasn't contributing code at the time). I don't have the time anymore, but it was one of my favorite activities when I was younger.

Same here. I remember playing with Beta versions of Windows Vista on my parents home PC. Ended up wrecking the system because I wasn't technical enough to fix it when it broke... but was still an important milestone in my journey today.

At the time, XP was 6-7 years old, and the screenshots of a shiny new Windows OS made me so itchy to try it out. Vista looked magical compared to XP just before release, it was the dawn of the frutiger aero aesthetic too. Very optimistic vibes back then.

> Ended up wrecking the system because I wasn't technical enough to fix it when it broke... but was still an important milestone in my journey today.

Ha, I remember dual booting Ubuntu and wrecking the bootloader, rendering my machine unbootable. Fun times, lol. Taught me a lot, though.

Definitely! We wouldn't learn and become successful technicians if it wasn't for all the failures.

Yeah, I was the same way with my iPod. I was contributing to iPod Wizard and one of the QA testers for iPod Linux, iPod Wiki, and Rockbox. I would install unstable firmwares on my iPod a few times a week and spend a few hours testing. I bricked my iPod more times than I could count. I had two iPod hard drives that I would swap between and I had a way of wiping the drive once it was out of the casing. To this day, I have no idea how my iPod 4G survived as long as it did.

That's exactly the reason, so you can test in advance.

(Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)

I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas.

I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.

I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.

That was it for me.

To me these movements always remind me of "free testing". If they want testers, pay for them.

You're not testing to tell MS that there's a bug. You're testing to make sure that your software doesn't break on the latest version of Windows.

You are actually testing for both, as an insider your feedback is asked every now and then, also you report issues you encounter willingly (Get Help metro app) or unwillingly (System Service/App stopped responding, collecting data and sending it to MS)

"Insiders" get (got?) to use Windows without license/activation as long as they stay on the latest version. That can be seen as "payment". The rest of the users get to offer QA services for free, after the repeated layoffs in the MS's QA departments.

Windows beta testing has worked this way for 30 years, if not longer. I was a 'public' Windows 98SE beta tester. I downloaded new 98SE ISOs over 56k once per week and wiped that machine clean once per week.

The only compensation I ever got was from beta testing DirectX 5?, I think, and I received a MS Force Feedback Pro joystick for filing the most bugs.

Sometimes there are new features that are interesting or useful. For example, before Windows 11 launched x64 emulation support for ARM CPUs was only available as an insider preview build for Windows 10.

The Insider program was initially created to combat leaks by just making every build public. At first they really listened to feedback when Gabriel Aul led the program - after he left, it became a joke (they tried hard to make "ninja cat" a thing) and the "unloved child". Microsoft doesn't know what to do with it, testers can't test anything and provide feedback since 1) MS ignores it 2) it has a literal roulette built in where features get (de-)activated upon reboot. They reopened the beta program for Windows 10 a year ago (to backport some Windows 11 features like Copilot?) and closed it after a few months.

Some people are really into new features, though that has dropped off in the last ten+ years.

I remember that betas of Windows XP were amazing, mind-blowing for those who hadn't seen Windows 2000.

I've been in the insider beta program since the beginning and I don't really have a good reason other than I live on the edge

To be honest the multiple times a week updates requiring restart (which is the entire point) are the biggest drawback. I rarely encounter bugs in my daily work.

The beta versions contain lots of bug fixes. Some of those bugs are bad enough to want the fix fast.

True, I never thought of that one.

I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.

I imagine content creators would be likely to download a Windows beta if it included any new or interesting features so they can try it out and share that information with their followers. This includes both written and video content.

Excluding the enterprise use cases - it's the same type of people who used Fedora Core back in the day.

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