https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsinsider/
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
Isn't it a wonderful catch 22?
Or is that just a rumor that many of us fall for because it seems like a great explanation of what we see?
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
looks like it
They never had QA. It was common knowledge to wait until SP2 for a "stable" version. These days, Windows is a rolling release, so all bets are off.