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Comment by banachtarski | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

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Windows 10's forced updates and telemetry say otherwise.

Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but some of the forced updates come as a result of problems found in telemetry data...

But I generally agree, I want my OS to ask me every time it wants to send a crashdump (or anything else).

Updates are ok when they're bug fixes and security patches. They're not when they're forced feature and UI changes and often break installations.

Forced updates are bad.

1. Updates can introduce breaking changes.

2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.

3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.

I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.

There are literally billions of Windows users. Less than 5% understand why keeping your computer up to date is important.

Forced updates may suck for you, but understand that it is you they suck for, not the vast, vast majority.

> I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates

I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.

I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.

Those devices only take you so far. They are consuming devices only, similar to a television. People still have and use normal PCs and will do so in the future. (Notebooks included of course)

That's kinda my point though. The strawman user these kinds of arguments prop up as the reason everything needs to suck is pretty much 100% consumer. There might be a few things, like typing documents and printing that aren't entirely covered by smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks, but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things.

>but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things

Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)

I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.

Maybe you have a point, but I don't feel like connecting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to a smartphone makes it a desktop. Regardless, I don't think those OSs are good desktop OSs either. I still maintain that this is a poor excuse for having shitty tools.

Using keyboard/mouse/monitor with smartphones is very uncommon.

2. Can be delayed.

3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.

I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.

Feature updates can be delayed for up to a year.

On Pro and up. Not on Home.

2. Can only be updated so many times until Daddy Microsoft knows best and will forcibly shut down your computer.

3. "Users have freedom to do what they choose unless it makes more work for me"?

> Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.

Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.

Forced updates can be bad, for example I narrowly missed having a bricked workstation when the April update was released and it borked machines using Intel 600p SSDs. I hadn't used that machine for a few weeks and it had been powered off; by the time I finally started using it again Microsoft had blocked the update for machines with that hardware.

Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.

I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.

Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.

I saw one happening on a PC in a conference room two weeks ago at the very moment a talk should begin. Nobody could do anything with the pc until the update was over. Great user experience.

Fault from the admin I would say. Updates can be delayed or scheduled. I know that this won't help in the moment.

Enterprise versions are updated based on the admin policy.

I recently had to do the forced April Windows 10 update, and not only did it take 10 hours, the UX was horrific... e.g. Random CMD prompt windows popping up etc.

If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.

10 hours? You on a dinosaur computer or something???

No, forced updates are also bad. I own my computer, I built it, and I paid for Windows. Microsoft shouldn't get to decide how I run it (I can't turn off Windows Defender permanently) or when it updates (you can only delay them so long before it forces you to update). If their updates were stable it would maybe help the argument, but they routinely break my system such that I lose time that was intended to be spent on playing a game. They also conveniently reset some of my settings which always tends to favor the way Microsoft would like for me to use my computer. Or they reinstall fucking Candy Crush.

For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.

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It's that kind of crap, not even the telemetry that got me to switch off of windows entirely at home.

Microsoft is a big company, that's a different team with a different set of leadership. The guy in charge of Windows stepped away. Windows 10 is the last version of Windows basically. Not sure if that means someday they may release a distro (crazy I know) but it's interesting nonetheless.

You are behind on the crazy: they already announced their first Linux distro, it's called Azure Sphere OS and intended for secure/maintained IoT.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/microsofts-bid-to-se...

I know about that one, but I mean one that'd be consumer driven in some way. I know the ship has sailed but I'd love to see Microsoft create an Android / iOS competitor, and maybe something open source would give them an edge in that regard. It would be best if it were somehow privacy / security focused. Microsoft has the resources to make amazing products the issue is and I've mentioned it before, the company is ever so big, with ever SO MANY PRODUCTS and projects. We know they've got quite a bit going on on the user facing front, but I can't imagine how many internal tools they've got that they rely on as well.

Automatic updates are great, I use it on most of my dev servers

I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.

I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?

As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.

Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.

Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.

That's not to say they couldn't revert to their embrace, extend, and extinguish tactics of the 90s, even under future leadership.

I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.

I'm not enthused about the idea of Github being bought. But on what grounds do you suspect that the Microsoft of the 90s is just lurking, like a conscious spirit, to reveal itself after a decade?

CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?

> what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?

I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.

I've mentioned this a number of times, some of Microsoft's open source tooling is under the very permissive MIT license. In the case of GitHub it just means competitors will rise up and replace GitHub. Remember when SourceForge was the GitHub of the day, and then it became bad, and finally it's acceptable with the new owner. People will outright ditch GitHub if evil is truly done to it, but Microsoft doesn't want that, they'll do everything they can to not screw up GitHub.

Whoa, hang on a second. SourceForge? Acceptable with new owners? Have you tried to download anything from the site recently? They may not be bundling crapware with downloads anymore but it's still an ad-laden slow-loading pile of trash unusable website. (I don't think I'm being hyperbolic there, to be honest!)

I usually get to a download page and it auto prompts for downloads. I mean why are you not using an ad-blocker?

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