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Comment by WayneDB | Hacker News Reader

Yes, just like that. Please show me a case where the setting is not followed because I have no clue what you're talking about nor can I find anybody complaining that it has not worked as advertised.

Furthermore, you're also free to disable the clearly labeled "Automatic Updates" service and then you can happily spend your time downloading and manually installing update packages. You can even get separate software to do this for you or even build your own.

You sure are right about one thing though. Windows is their OS...and it's a good thing too because I have just never had the time or the inclination to build my own ;)

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Microsoft has the option to override your settings, just as it happened when they pushed the WGA validation tool in the wild. When it happened several years back, you had to completely disable updates, because if you had it set on manual, it was still automatically installed. This coupled with the fact that the WGA validation wasn't working properly / had bugs, has led to serious problems for many users.

Also, with Ubuntu for example, you don't have to build it yourself, but it's yours in a way that Windows will never be.

There are all sorts of things in Ubuntu that I'd have to "completely disable" in order to make it do what I want. So what if I can pick apart the code and rebuild it? I don't ever want to do that.

Honestly - let's weigh the options here. With Windows I may have to beat the OS into submission once in a while, but I'd have even more work making Linux even fulfill the most basic requirement like...oh say, having "file creation time" stamps. (Now I know Ubuntu currently defaults to Ext4...but seriously - why did we need to wait so long for that?)

I'd rather pay Microsoft every month to use their tightly integrated, high quality computing ecosystem because it actually offers what I need with the least amount of hassle.

I hear this argument a lot. Do you fix your own car dude? Do you change the oil by yourself? I don't but I have a trustworthy mechanic that does it for me and I don't have to suffer the inflated prices of my car's manufacturer. This is even more important for transportation companies that have their own mechanics, just as many companies have their own IT department.

On the quality of Windows my experience has not been the same. For me working with it is like death by a few thousand cuts. Skipping over the fact that the developer tools that I need do not work well on Windows, every time I had problems I could find no way to debug what happens, so really the standard is to just reformat and install everything from scratch. How IT departments live with Windows I'll never know.

The difference here is that I don't need a mechanic at all to get what I need from Windows because Windows is not missing many very basic features. Five years ago, if we wanted file creation timestamps in Linux, we'd have to use an alpha or beta filesystem and hire a "mechanic" to fix or even install it. That's why everybody is using Windows and that's why you hear that argument a lot.

Furthermore, if you're not using Microsoft tools to develop for Windows then you're using the wrong tools. If I go try and use Visual Studio on Linux - it won't work. Go figure.

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