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Comment by vijucat | Hacker News Reader

It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.

I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

View on HN

It's such a stark contrast, my home servers just run unattended-upgrade (on Debian) with no problems, I just do the major version upgrade every year.

Meanwhile everything consumer and most enterprise is as you said, "don't upgrade if it is not broken, else you WILL feel pain".

Companies basically trained bad security habits into their user base

Do you do the major version upgrade the minute it's announced? Be honest.

On my home server, sometimes I do take some snapshots and upgrade a few VMs and LXC containers.

Sometimes I even run testing because stable will be out shortly and I don't feel like upgrading.

It's a very different experience to the single Windows laptop in my house, where the latest stable is always subtly broken in ways I notice. Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening, for example.

Once a new major version hits stable, it's been hammered on quite a bit. Debian has a reputation for being behind the curve, for this reason.

I admin a bunch of Ubuntu servers and I tend to do a major version upgrade on my laptop and then some low priority machines to see if anything has changed. Typically, the only issues I've had is when there's dropped support for older SSH/SSL protocols which is easily fixed.

However, Windows Update isn't doing a major version upgrade as far as I know - it's the equivalent of doing a kernel upgrade in Linux. Also, the typical Linux upgrade command will also pull in updates/fixes for pretty much every bit of software in the system, whereas Windows Update will ignore user installed software as far as I know.

debian stable? Yes. Debian stable is tested to the point that it's fossilized. Besides, we're not even talking about a major version update. We're talking a minor one, and the last time I'd had a simple update break linux was when arch was shipping the master branch of grub. (The dev and I had words over this practice, which resulted in me going to another distro)

He did say Debian, being stable is the one thing it's good at.

The point is that you don't have to: the unattended-upgrades part is separate from the major upgrades. You still get security updates for the previous stable release for a while after a new stable release, and the security updates can safely be installed the minute they're announced without bringing in unwanted features changes.

Since I switched to nixos some years ago, yes. My fear level dropped from 80% to 1%.

Yeah Debian is really stable because its so far behind the current releases, lots of testing has been done by the time it updates a package. Great for servers and stuff you just want to set and forget with auto updates.

Ironically, servers should be the most disposable and easily to replace from scratch after a bad upgrade but the world is a silly place.

If hardware is failing fair enough. If you can't restore bare-metal within two hours then you're doing something wrong.

It is equally great as a workstation when combined with a development environment manager with package installation like devenv or flox (or many other options). This combo gives you a stable (not-changing) platform with up-to-date tooling. Best of both worlds.

It's also why I'm a fan of atomic distros, easier to roll back from a major bug like my login screen no longer functioning.

> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

I think it will still be objectively bad. But maybe compared to Windows 12, it will seem good.

They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.

Windows 11 is pretty great though, it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them. I don't get the hate.

23H2 was pretty close to being solid and stable but 24H2 has been a disaster.

It's a buggy mess that harasses you. I understand the hate.

This morning I got three screens asking if I wanted to log in and configure backup. There is still not an option to say no, only ask me later.

Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening.

I'm logged in to my Microsoft account, so I've not seen any of that.

The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason.

I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11.

Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. From the start I could not even use my second monitor without turning off and back on the primary monitor first for the second to come on.

I get that moving the Start menu to the middle gives you a very "Iron Man in the command chair" type feeling on large monitors/multiple screens, where you spin off windows to the left and right...but is super annoying on a smaller monitor

The "Lets do it Later" trend of UI is one of the things i hate most about modern UI. Why cant i just say no, instead i have to say no to 10 different menus.

Not respecting a no is usually something very very bad people do.

Yes, I'm pretty sure not respecting "no" is a sign of abuse in a relationship. So is being told "no" but changing it to "yes" anyway.

Great for ... shareholders? Because you can't possibly be talking about users. Windows is an OS that forces cloud logins, tracks and records every interaction, steals email credentials, shoves ads and full screen nags everywhere, sabotages competing software, turns perfectly good hardware into e-waste, and won't take no for an answer from users. It serves the interest of billionaires, not common people.

For paying users, this is the definition of an unmitigated disaster. Windows 11 expands on all of the worst aspects of Windows 10. Inconsistent UI, duplicated settings, two context menus, laggy start menu with React in it, and on and on and on the list goes. It's obvious why people hate it.

No other OS has shown this much level of outright contempt towards its users. Modern Windows is, without doubt, the worst desktop OS to ever exist in the history of computing.

Don't forget the greatly reduced hardware support in return for no actual new features. It's a rat trap with no cheese on it.

> it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them.

Are there any good ideas in Windows 10 ?

Volume mixer

Volume mixer has been around at least since Windows 7. Maybe earlier but I don't remember.

My parents older windows 10 laptop was getting slow and battery wasn't great.

They bought a new windows 11 laptop from Costco for $600. Yes cheap, but not total garbage.

Tried using it for a few weeks. Worse performance that their 6 year old similarly cheap laptop running windows 10.

Returned new computer. I installed Linux Mint Mate and bought an Chinese battery for $30. Laptop better than new.

I'm with you. I've used Windows 11 as my primary work OS since release and it is absolutely quicker than Windows 10 and nicer to use. I do, however, debloat it and remove all the cruft when I install it.

I don't want to use a Microsoft account. I don't want to use Secure Boot. I don't want the new right click menu (good idea, bad execution). I don't want the new start menu (I want the Windows 7 one if anything). I don't want my OS calling home. I don't want AI. I don't want ads.

I went to Linux instead. I got what I wanted there.

What ideas did 10 have that weren't just purely technical updates (i.e. DX12 and the like), and weren't just undoing what Windows 8 did?

I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.

If true, this would align with Microsoft’s historic dedication to backward compatibility in the face of horribly-written third party software.

You misread the GP. The versioning skipping from 8 to 9 was because of bad detection code for windows 95/98. The GP is talking about people staying on Windows 7 until Windows 10 came out, skipping Windows 8.

Windows 95 and 98 VersionStrings were 4.00.nn and 4.10.nn

I don't know the details of that. But even if that's the correct way to determine versions, I think there might be some fraction of software that does it the less correct, more obvious way.

I thought it might be to bring Windows in line with Mac OS 10. Seems petty, but I could see a billion dollar company not liking their flagship is on version 8-9 while the competition is on 10.

I thought that was why the second Xbox was “Xbox 360” so it did not seem a lesser number than PlayStation 3.

That too

Not entirely apocrypha. Among the ones we can most easily name and shame from available source files there were early versions of the Java JDK known to have tests exactly like that in low level library code. Presumably Microsoft's famous app compatibility lab found many more that were closed source that they were not allowed to name and shame.

There's also different apocrypha about the numerology aspect that 9 is a very unlucky number in some cultures and commonly skipped in version numbers (similar to but more so than 13 in the US being skipped on many elevators). (Also why it is said other companies like Apple often skip 9 to make it easier to use the same version cross-culturally without cultural taboo mistakes.)

I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.

It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.

Could be, but I had lots of complaints about Vista, and 7 worked much better for me.

I stuck on 7 for a long time, not because I was waiting for 11, but because I was waiting for some annoyances with 10 to get addressed.

I still would rather have an updated W7 than W10 or W11.

Updated means - security updates, clipboard manager, dism (W7's dism was limited).

Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.

> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it

Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.

That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.

And then the rhythm completely stopped.

The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.

Windows 5.0-5.2 is Win 2000, Win XP, Win XP64.

Windows 6.0-6.3 is Vista, 7, 8, 8.1.

One large contributor to modern Windows's lack of quality is that Microsoft laid off all of its dedicated QA staff in 2014, with the expectation that developers would own the OS's quality themselves, and whatever they miss would get caught by telemetry reports from Windows enthusiasts who sign up to test new versions for free. Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc (invaluable when you're dealing with a 30+ year old codebase where large portions were written prior to automated testing being standard). The free Windows enthusiast testing didn't make up for this because you can't expect them to act like how a QA tester would act.

Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.

I can totally see how letting go the dedicated QA roles increased the amount of bugs that ship to customers, but

> Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc

Seems incorrect from all interactions I've had with dedicated QA to day.

They usually have no idea about any of that, what they do know is how to use a software and what scenarios have previously broken, but not from a technical perspective that can reason about error scenarios. More like a power user that just learned to use a UI, without knowing what it actually does.

I feel like their recent push to AI driven development has likely had more impact in their issues in the last 2 yrs vs a decision that's at this point 11 years in the past - but they are probably both (along with other unnamed factors) contributing to this end result.

Overall saddening, as windows 10 really was a big leap forward in usability.

Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.

These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.

The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.

It works with 95/2000.

95 - good,

98 - bad,

2000 - good,

ME - bad,

XP - good,

Vista - bad,

7 - Good,

8 - bad,

10 - good,

11 - bad.

That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.

Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.

It sounds like a good theory but there isn’t much substance to it.

> That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.

I find this to be a mostly valid assumption, and 8.1 shouldn't be counted separately from 8 just as Vista SP2 should be counted any differently from Vista (Vista was mostly fine after companies fixed their drivers and Microsoft toned things down a bit. 7 just drove that home and put some necessary distance between itself and Vista).

> Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.

I fail to see why this matters.

I must be the only person who remembers everyone shitting on W10 saying it was awful and they were staying on W7 until W11 came around and suddenly we're pretending like everyone loved it

People were indeed shitting on Windows 10, but far less than Windows 8, and most people were willing to suck up the minor enshittification of 10 compared to 8 in exchange for a more modern OS.

People sticking to 7 until 11 came out is something I've heard nothing of. The people who stuck to 7 that I knew of knew that things were very unlikely to get better.

If you're forced to use Windows, just use Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IoT. Gets security updates until 2031 but none of the new "features".

its not easy to use this legally though.

Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?

With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.

1) They’ve started again to crack down on black-market activation methods

https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...

2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.

(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)

Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.

I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.

>https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...

Seems AI generated?

The author of the post is ‘ChatGPT’

Ahh. Well, I feel stupid.

I'd say it's increasingly hard to tell anymore, in my defense, but my god, it's right on the page.

> 2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume most people here are talking about their personal computers unless self employed.

The company IT department isn't going to be deploying oddball versions of Windows 10, unless you're shady small business.

I haven't really used Windows much for years, but doesn't it start shutting down once evaluation period is up? 'Windows will shutdown in 30 minutes unless licence key is added' etc., and the desktop background goes blue with some text about being unlicensed?

https://massgrave.dev

Also don't use the evaluation images.

I have not experienced that, which is why I questioned the difficulty. I've installed Windows 10 on a good amount of machines at this point, bypassing the NRO during the install process, and have not had any issues that prevented me from installing software/games or just using it like a normal PC, even after connecting it to the Internet.

However, my experience may be dated. It's been awhile since I've had to freshly install Windows. Perhaps things have changed.

Yes, I believe LTSC does have a harsher shutdown setting if you're out of the 90 day "evaluation" window. Standard Windows keeps working just disabling the wallpaper and showing a watermark which you might be able to ignore.

Consumer versions of Windows just put a watermark on your screen and disable changing your wallpaper and the like. You can use it indefinitely beyond that. And if you want the watermark gone, then Massgrave is your friend.

Does the LTSC have all the features needed for mainstream programs and games?

By Microsoft's own admission, it sounds like it:

> Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is built on the Windows 10 / 11 code base so it’s natively compatible with the software and solutions you use today.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-...

I've not tried to use it specifically, which is why I'm curious.

Yes. The one place you may run into issues is with Microsoft-specific services, for example I'm not sure if Gamepass works.

But if you're just using Steam (or any other third party storefront) you won't have any problems at all.

Yes, and it's easy to strip out the garbage you don't want like Games Center and App Store.

Yep, last couple of Windows versions I used as desktop OSs likely 7 and 8) were unlicensed and, other than making the desktop background black (sometimes) and an occasional watermark reminder that it's not legit, nothing stopped working.

And using Windows for free still didn't stop me from migrating to Linux exclusively (desktop and laptops and servers), and it's a decision I'm increasingly happy with.

You are missing that it is not legal to do so.

The tracking they do is also not legal. Do they care?

If they aren't willing to sell it to those of us who want it I don't see a problem with not paying.

If Microsoft doesn't want to sell it, I don't see why I should care that it's illegal. I don't feel bad for downloading abandonware for the same reason. They don't want my money? Fine then. I'll just get it somewhere else then.

My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.

Counter-point: I upgrade day 1 (or in a reasonable timeframe) because I know there's no way the company will ever "go back" on what they're doing. If the new UI nukes the pleasant atmosphere of the OS by making all the icons look glass-like, then I'd better get used to it now. I don't want to forego upgrading, then have to learn a bunch of new features ON TOP of the UI differences.

For example, iOS 26 introduced the liquid glass, which, coupled with how some UI elements work, was essentially the only change. If I wait until the inevitable iOS 36, I'll have to learn the UI paradigm on top of 10 versions worth of functional upgrades. The delta would be too large for me.

For fun, try a version of Windows Server 2025 with the desktop GUI. Its actually kind of awesome to see what they can do when they care to.

Interesting take. I've used MacOS for 30+ years, and for the last 20 years have had zero problems with updating immediately... For that matter, iOS has been flawless also.

flawless is a wild take.

lol indeed, since iOS 26 my GPS is broken on Apple Maps and Google map. It’ll just freeze the updates very few minutes making it almost useless for driving

Nice. Yours didn't work, yet mine did. Sorry mine works, bro.

You've either been very lucky or haven't been using much older software. macOS updates routinely cause issues early in the release cycle, particularly with backwards compatibility. Working in creative fields with lots of niche applications and plugins in use makes this a lot more apparent. Catalina in particular was a total nightmare.

The musicians suffer a lot with macOS upgrades, but I've found even if some hardware isn't supported officially, it most oftentimes works somewhat well.

I guess you have a point. I just use core system applications and a few browsers other than Safari. Sorry you guys have so much pain.

cool story, bro.

Thanks, friend. ;-)

Are you running Sequoia or Tahoe now?

Tahoe 26.1

Android has reached the state of complete maturity. For years already major version releases were mostly shifting icons around. There's zero reason to update.

Security.

Same goes for some of the desktop focused Linux distros, I had Fedora KDE break the login screen from a bad update that got pushed out. It's best to just wait to update anything important.

> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

I'm not using windows anymore, but at least since Windows XP I felt like only every other release of Windows was usable. So my upgrade path was XP, Vista, 10, completely skipping over the bad releases Vista and 8. So just skip over 11, Windows 12 might be an okay release again.

Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).

We used to say this about Star Trek movies as well before determining that they're mostly bad. I've moved on from Trek and I'm fine with moving on from Windows.

> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

Knowing Microsoft, feels like they’ll just make it a mandatory security update.

Its not, instead you should install security updates in a timely fashion. People blocking windows update and being left super vulnerable isn't the solution. This bug was from an august update that affected some people. I think people are overplaying this to justify a dangerous 'dont fix if not broken.' No, your system is broken if its vulnerable.

Unfortunately companies use the "security boogeyman" to push ever-increasing ads, telemetry, performance degradation, features you probably don't want that disrupt your workflow and muscle memory, breaking API changes to libraries, etc.

If you could sign a contract with e.g. Microsoft (or hell, NPM) to only receive updates that explicitly fix bugs and security holes, that'd be amazing - but I've rarely if ever seen it.

Exactly--if I could guarantee that I was getting just security updates and bug fixes, I'd be happy to turn on automatic Windows updates (and application updates too, for that matter).

During the early XP days Windows had granular updates where you could decline everything but security updates if you wanted. Even when they pushed out the Windows Genuine Advantage update (Which offered a user no genuine advantages at all, just possibly hassles) you could still decline it.

Unfortunately it’s not just a boogeyman. That’s why it’s worked so well historically.

You are less secure if you wave off years of security patches.

If the choice is between being broken behind the scenes and broken in your face, it's no wonder people pick the former.

If Microsoft and the like really cared about security, they'd push security completely separately from feature updates, allowing people to get the benefit of updates, without the negatives of those update breaking their environment.

Or better yet, not push updates that break that break their environment in the first place. Security is a nice excuse for Microsoft to get you to update, but it's been used so many times to push hostile experiences to users that I can't blame the users for not wanting to be burned. The fault lies entirely with Microsoft and other companies for pushing hostile changes and chipping away at their goodwill.

It hurts, Microsoft. Why are you doing this to us? (It's money. It's always money.)

because we all continue showing back up for it, yes.

I'm a major version behind on LineageOS. So far behind that it just gave up on offering me updates.

And honestly I'm going to keep it this way until something breaks. I'm absolutely fucking sick of my phone nagging me to update every couple of weeks. Besides, at this point I have to manually flash the new version and I just can't be bothered.

The only way to back up your phone is with some weirdass encryption. It generates a long password for you that you MUST write on physical paper in the real world with your actual hands. They disabled any and all method to digitally record this password.

It's all so disrespectful. This is my goddamn phone, I paid for it on cold hard cash, and it is mine to do with as I please. Fuck absolutely anyone who tries to force some particular interaction.

I have a few windows 10 VMs around and they all are firewalled from Microsoft. They don't like it, which pleases me.

which windows update blocker do you use?

I think it's Windows Update Blocker:

https://www.sordum.org/downloads/?st-windows-update-blocker

All around, for everything, I cannot recommend the Chris Titus (and friends) WinUtil enough:

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

It's a suite of powershell scripts and tweaks that are open source for inspection frontended by a nifty powershell multi tabbed TUI (Text User Interface) widget.

There's a tab for upgrades and installs of common dev / tech / power user tools; a tab for tweaks; a tab for windows update options; a tab for building install disks / VM's (eg: minimal for gaming or for hosting windows applications in Qubes, etc).

Update Tab can select all updates / only critical / none ever / advise and let you choose.

To use, you do need to 'trust' (or inspect the work of and download source and self apply) a pool of windows tech nerds - you literally open a powershell admin window and pipe raw boot script over the internet and give it control to bring up the TUI.

This could be malware (but isn't, last I checked) - same risk with all such tools d/loaded from internet of course.

See Usage on github page - various writeups and youtube tutorials.

It'll rip the AI addons, Copilot, and Snapshot and Spy stuff right out of Windows 10 / 11.

Easy to use and follow.

Anyone know if this stops the truly diabolical Windows 11 behavior where it removes the options to "Shut Down without updating" and "Reboot without updating?" At some point, the only option to shut down your computer is "Shut Down and update." I've gotten to the point where I just yank the power cord to turn off my computer, because Microsoft doesn't permit any other way.

Good question - I'm still running 10 daily, I'm busy today and only tangentially follow the community - but it is still an issue being tracked:

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/issues/2358

( it might be resolved via another number - worth checking by d/loading to 11 and checking the hotlink notes in the update tab ... )

I feel like cmd or Powershell will allow a magical incantation to shut the machine down immediately.

Edit: Yes, here we are, in Powershell,

Stop-Computer -Force

I have this one https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/

I will check out the Chris Titus link someone else posted below, too, but that seems more risky.

Go to system32 and take ownership of wuaeng.dll and qmgr.dll and restrict access to only your user. Works on 10 and 11.

Windows will chug along as if Windows Update never existed (forever).

Isn't it microsoft who blocks updates after it discontinued windows 10?

You still get a lovely, full-screen advertisement for upgrading to Windows 11 on boot every few weeks.

I fully expect at some point for it to ninja-download and ninja-install because I meet the system requirements.

This one not only blocks OTB update but lets you cherry-pick whatever is available afterward. From the creator of Sandboxie, another must have tool.

https://github.com/DavidXanatos/wumgr

Arch Linux user here...

Except Linux

Im always happy to update my arch install, because I usually get new features to play with, and my system has not broken due to updates in 4 years.

To be fair, Linux has always been like this, breaking things with updates. Linux was ahead of commercial companies, but they caught up with it.

Use better distros. I haven’t had a broken workstation since 2014 or so.

Which is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?

I've been running Arch (on my desktop and servers) for over a decade, and never had issues. Just read their homepage before upgrading.

The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.

Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.

Debian Stable.

A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585

I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.

Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.

I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get. For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.

1) https://web.archive.org/web/20040730204123/http://pack.sunsi...

I had a colleague once that was an absolute anthropomorphic distro. This man was Linux personified, and he literally walked around town with a Slackware live CD at all times. This man refused to use any other operating system, or any other programming language outside D or Erlang. He was pretty fun.

You can still use it. In fact it has never been easier because flatpak (available as a slackbuild) allows you to easily install apps you would have had to compile yourself many years ago.

I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.

IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.

I've never had issues with Debian based distros.

My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release. I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.

In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.

All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.

This is 2000s era FUD.

Yeah, exactly. We all know that Linux removed all bugs and made themselves bug-proof in the 2010s.

Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.

Linux is very much "pick your poison"

Run Debian Stable and it basically doesn't happen - only updates are actual security ones.

Run any rolling distro and you basically accept "with newest version comes the newest bugs"

And there is a whole bunch of distros between those extremes ,depending on how new you need your software to be (that being said, Debian Testing hits nice mix between "new enough" and "someone actually tested stuff before publishing").

Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.

Windows has tons of problem, but you don’t see them. That is, you see the problems, but attribute them to bad hardware. It works like this:

Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!”

Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”

(Re-post from 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32541772>)

But invariably, the hardware does work on Windows. I can't remember the last time I had that problem.

I can, just recently Windows update installed a firmware update to my network card (without asking) and made it unusable on both Windows and Linux. I had to run a manufacturer tool to get the network adapter to work again.

Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.

After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.

Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.

I can.

Last Friday I went to the office and my 5 yo fully intel win11 laptop only detected the full resolution of my external screen if it was connected during boot. Unplug it or even just let it sleep when going to the bathroom, and I’d return to a blurry mess of an image. Sometimes, if there’s a driver update, it can also fix the issue until the next time the screen turns off. This used to work somewhat reliably before.

It also refuses to connect to my Shure and Sony BT headphones. It sees them, says it’s connected, then immediately says it’s disconnected. The BT keyboard works fine. No issue whatsoever under Linux, so the hardware works fine.

YMMV today I literally lost all sound in the middle of an MS teams meeting on my win11 works laptop. When opening the mixer, I could see the little vumeter when sound should have been played. Unplugged the trs cable to my amp, sound would not play from the external speaker, connected my bluetooth headset, nothing (still that vumeter moving when playing random youtube videos to test), tried with cabled headphones, selecting thw default devices manually, different apps, nope, not any better.

In the end I rebooted and sound was working again. Something related to sound (driver, subsystem) had probably crashed randomly.

It was the third time I lost sound in the last 2 months. That is not counting the many windows updates that fail randomly with obscure codes, the randomly undetected monitors, windows Apps that randomly change my selected monitors after I lock and unlock my session and a number of other bugs I encountered in the last 6 months

This never happened in the last 6 years I had been making videocalls with MS Teams on Linux. Only issues I had back then was Teams not always showing new plugged/connected audio devices but this also happens frequently on windows so I fault MS Teams, not the OS in this case.

I won't say Linux never has bugs but statistically it seems to me that on well supported laptops (thinkpads), Linux is much more reliable than windows.

YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android. Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.

Better stick to LTS distros and even then....

> It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android,

If you even have control... I have a Google Pixel 8 which was nagging me to update to the latest and greatest Android when my phone was already working just fine. I kept putting it off and rescheduling it until two weeks ago. I was driving home from work, phone in the cup holder, listening to music when the music suddenly stopped. I picked up my phone to see if it was a call or the shitty Honda Bluetooth crapped out again but to my surprise, my phone was powered off. Huh? Never had a phone just turn off like that. I let it sit for a bit to see if it was rebooting but no, it was off. So I powered it back on and suddenly I'm looking at new animations and realize that somehow the OS update forcefully installed itself. WTF. I am not sure if I accidentally scheduled the install, highly doubt it, but there it is, I had the update forced on to me.

IThe best p[art is this latest and greatest Android that I did not need or want has a regression where swiping down the notification menu has a 5+ seconds delay to populate the menu with the notifications. So yeah, totally worth it... /s

Not true! The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality. The amount of fixed bugs and testing that AI-leaders such as MS have achieved is unprecedented. We will look back on this era as the golden age of software quality.

Reference? My anecdotal experience so far leads me to believe the opposite.

I think that you missed a /s at the end of the post. I can continue it with "Yes, we had an explosion in software quality and it's in shards all over the place."

It was sarcasm, they didn't forget the /s, it was intentional. (I downvote on /s)

This is irony. Right? This is irony?

Sarcasm, not irony.

AI boosters pose a bit of a Poe's Law problem; the poster here is probably joking, but also there almost certainly exist AI boosters gullible enough to actually believe something similar to that.

I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!

> The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality

Right, the software quality literally exploded. But, unfortunately, this was before AI. It came roughly at the same time Agile was becoming mainstream

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