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Comment by mrec | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about Win10 reaching EOL is not being at the mercy of Windows Update any more. It was by far the biggest risk to having a functioning system.

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Windows is such a horrible OS to use when you work in a small company that isn't big enough to have IT to shield you from all the horrible stuff, like in a small studio. Normally I work in Linux, sometimes need to boot Windows just to do some export or something, then goal is to boot into Linux again ASAP. But time and time again fucking Windows forces me to prepping updates when shutting down for next boot, with literally no way around it, even weird terminal incantations can't stop this, nor changes in the registry, it just refuses to shut down without prepping to apply updates on the next boot.

Which means next time I have something to do on Windows that in reality takes ~30 seconds once I'm in, it'll instead take 15 minutes because Windows decides that my time is worth nothing to them.

Add in that I use Windows maybe once a month or something, and every single experience with using Windows for me is this fucked up process of time wasting.

This sounds like the perfect use case for a simple, straightforward VM. Dual booting is dangerous, time consuming, and makes it inconvenient to share clipboard, stuff... why don't you use a Windows VM instead? You can freeze a VM (saving state) rather than restarting it. Windows won't bat an eye since it's not being shut down or suspended. No longer unexpected 15 minutes pauses - restart it when you have time to spare, and keep working in your host Linux OS while the Windows VM does its shenanigans.

Sometimes it's for Ableton, sometimes for Unreal Engine stuff, or other stuff that technically you could run in a VM (or even Proton) but it works iffy enough that dual booting ends up simpler, except for these annoying updates.

Running an unsupported OS is even more risky, especially with the excessive number of security updates needed while AI finds RCE after RCE.

Eh, pretty much all my network exposure is via Firefox, which is actively supported.

Your network exposure is via the windows network stack first, then Firefox.

Most of the CVEs I've seen for that stack are in DNS, and Firefox's DNS-over-HTTPS implementation bypasses the OS DNS almost completely in sensible configurations.

The entire system is doing DNS queries though, like all that phoning home

MS should either fix the RCEs in Windows 10 (it is unsupported but the defects were already there when it was still supported, just undiscovered), or they should refund their customers (since they never managed to release a defect-free version).

These knee-jerk comments are not very interesting to read.

They're bluffing that Win10 is "unsupported"

Seriously my spare PC became so much less annoying overnight. It used to not only auto-reboot but also add some fresh non-dismissed nags with every update. Now it's just the nag to install Win11, which, I'd rather eat my entire PC.

Oh god that "OOBE" horror. I almost got locked out when it demanded a Microsoft Account login, which I never use for anything. I'd only just grudgingly acquired a portable telephone at that point; without it, I'd have had severe difficulty getting at my mementos.

You can (could?) install Win10 with no MS account by disconnecting it from the internet. But that was the only way. And you can't disconnect it halfway through the install, it has to be disconnected at boot.

I don't even mind making an MS account, I have one, just don't want Windows using that account and thus constantly freaking out about stuff like "you haven't enabled 3-factor auth." For all I know could also lock me out one day like they did with Minecraft.

You can disable the win11 update nagging inside local group policy editor.

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