The amount of user data collected in Windows 10 for example. Next to no user benefits, just value extracted for Microsoft.
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.
> "But as both teams warmed up, the computer crashed," he said. "When we booted it again at 7:20pm, it started automatically downloading updates. But we did not initiate anything."
> After all the updates were installed, Paderborn was ready to start the game at 7:55pm.
> But then Chemnitz formally protested, saying that because Paderborn had delayed the start time of the match by 25 minutes (instead of the 15-minute maximum as allowed under the German basketball rules), they should be penalized. As a result, Paderborn lost another point (Google Translate) in the standings, according to a Basketball Budesliga press release, which meant that it would certainly be relegated to the "ProB" league of German pro basketball.
The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button.
Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downloading that toolbar, installing that gizmo, disabling security settings".
People smugly complain about this, in many cases from their Linux box (= technical users on a system with a 1% desktop market share => smaller target and better human protection) or MacOS box (= slightly more technical users than the average Windows user, on a system with a 5%-10% desktop market share).
And if it were left open ended at the request of people like you...we'd still have compromised systems out there spread amongst normal people as well as within infrastructure and other more critical pieces of hardware.
People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
>People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.
Pro and Enterprise shouldn't be the same in this regard as Home but often are.
Four days ago I had to entertain a courier waiting to pick up a 6-figures piece of equipment for a waiting air-freight cargo plane, for immediate transport to a remote mining site, all because the fucking piece of shit fucking Win 10 Enterprise on a very expensive rugged laptop decided to hang itself in an update loop for an hour.
We dealt with different garbage during the Windows 7 and previous eras, yes, but I'm not sure we're better off on the whole. Windows 10 has given a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death".
> People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.
The very idea that users should be at the mercy of their computers instead of the other way around is contrary to the concept of personal computing.
People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.
> People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.
Why should they be forced to, at the expense of things that matter to them, though? That's the problem.
Automatic updates were a default. People turned them off because they were annoying. One solution to this problem was to make them not-annoying, but instead Microsoft opted to become aggressive and force people to update.
I will never hold anyone who thinks this is a good idea in high regard because they are actively making the world a worse place.
I fully understand the frustration after seeing people having their computers reboot in the middle of presentations and other important events. That's why they made multiple products. Consumer OS = you don't want to be the sysadmin of the computer. Enterprise/LTSB OS = do what you want.
Telemetrics are frequently inaccurate, sometimes to the point they paint a picture are interpreted in a a way that’s the opposite of reality. Windows telemetry in particular is not nice because it’s not really possible to turn off on the lower editions and it also does not seem to translate to benefits–especially as around the time of its inclusion word got out that Microsoft was cutting a large portion of their QA team.
Crash reports usually yes (but how to prevent receiving personal data from stack dumps?), features selection probably not. The reason is that you don't get data from the people who disable telemetry and they could use different features. You must find them, poll them and merge the results with what telemetry gives you. If you don't do that, telemetry is detrimental to those people.
Yeah, such statistics will always be skewed to some extent.
One could argue that telemetry _is_ the poll. If a user decides to disable feature-usage-tracking telemetry, and then realize they’d prefer to have a voice regarding feature selection, one possible solution would be for them to re-enable it.
If they absolutely won’t opt-in, they’re always free to email developers to tell them about their use case – a pretty powerful way to make yourself heard.
That kind of telemetry was in Windows 95 already with dr Watson. If people want the benefit of having the problems they run into fixed and they believe telemetry helps with that, they can just turn it on. No need to force things.
I haven't seen any benefit. Why should microsoft know everything and record everything I do with my computer. It could be opt in I suppose. But as it is, it is -extremely- hard for the regular user to opt out.
I can respect you as a person while still thinking your opinion is not to be taken seriously. Respecting an opinion which is this far off the mark isn't something I'm willing to do.
Today's software is vastly better in UX than software in the 90s and 00. Certainly I don't attribute all of that to telemetry, but your opposite view is incorrect.
To be fair it asks to update or not to update. You can also set how often it does check and when it installs (at night). It's just a google search away.
I go months without needing to reboot windows, and have for over a decade. Typically if I need to reboot it’s due to an update or software that requires a reboot to install.
The bigger issue, I think, I really having to restart just to update minor things i.e. what linux distro needs to restart just to update (the equivalent of) visual studio
Unfortunately, this is not possible on their consumer OS branch (unless you hack the system, but I have found that it often makes the OS unstable because its in an unsupported system state). For me, our IT manages the systems. They get to decide when the systems update. I have a test box that regularly sees months of uptime.
I dont use Windows much, but you can go to services and disable Windows the update service and.. in the Wifi settings check a box that says you have a limited connection.
To be fair, that's typically a policy enforced by administrators: "patch X should be force-installed if not present by Date Y" + "reboot should be forced if not happening after Z days from patching" => "reboot will happen at Date Y + Z, regardless of user's wishes".
Windows 10 telemetry, secretly turning on auto updates even after you turn it off and correct me if I am wrong, even if you disable the update service or add the urls to the hosts file it now "mysteriously" undoes that stuff over time.
I believe auto updates aren't malicious. Microsoft had a huge problem with worms infecting millions of computers that used outdated Windows version. It made Windows less secure in public opinion, even though these issues had often been fixed a long time.
Forcing people to update was probably the only way to stop that.
I'm also not a fan, I got burned at least once by a Windows 10 computer restarting in the middle of the night when I had programs running on it, but I guess it's one of these things that's good for 99%, the 1% is just overrepresented here.
Unfortunately, Microsoft also has a trust problem with updates. Back in Windows XP era, there was no question about whether you wanted to upgrade to SP2 or not -- you'd maybe wait for a few days/weeks to make sure no major bugs were in, but there was no need to force anything.
Today, you might run an upgrade and reboot to find a more secure operating system -- or a full-screen Edge ad, with Edge being immediately auto-started afterwards and re-pinned on the taskbar. (Guess who had to drive across town in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown because one of their parents had to teach an online class and couldn't open Firefox anymore. Yep.)
It's a hole that Microsoft dug themselves in, and long before Windows 10, and instead of doing anything to dig themselves out of it, they just dragged everyone else down.
It solves the problem -- nobody's claiming it doesn't -- but it's not something that should be defended for technical or usability reasons, it's the worst solution that happens to still work, more or less.
But you experience the same when you login to GMail and it has a new interface or your Phone looks different in the morning because of iOS/Android updates.
Users are so used to be annoyed that updates disrupt UX, Microsoft isn't an especially bad actor here. In the end, users tend to disable updates as a response which is bad for security and makes vendors force them to update.
Maybe not "improving" UX with every release would be a solution but there are very few companies that stick with their UX for many years, redesigns are way too easy to sell as a new feature.
A long time ago, I had a GEOS installation that used to reliably crash every Sunday at 12 PM.
Should mandatory reboots every Sunday at 12 PM be introduced in a future Windows update? I mean, someone else has done it before. If you do it every second Sunday it's even better, Microsoft wouldn't be an especially bad actor here.
The fact that other companies are even worse doesn't make this any better. For any program that has a bug, I guarantee there are thousand other programs with even worse bugs. Pointing fingers and returning EWONTFIX may fly for some FOSS projects, where maintainers can at least claim that if you want a fix in open-source software that you didn't pay for you should fix it yourself, but it's a pretty ridiculous stance if you have paying customers.
I don't think it is sufficient to justify bad choices because everyone is making them. Especially in the case of an os, which is a lot more critical than the Gmail web interface or something similar.
I don't have a problem with forced security fixes.
I DO have a problem with forced updates which are completely unrelated to security, install thinly veiled ads disguised as apps, break existing functionality, change my browser/PDF reader preferences, occasionally brick the whole machine.
Also I have a huge problem with so much of this crap needing a reboot. Reengineer the damn thing so it doesn't in 99% of cases.
How many forced Windows 10 updates have bricked peoples computers? Just looking at the dates after googling has dates from '18, '19 and '20. So at least once a year. On an OS that has been out for 5 years now.
Do I control my computer or not? If I do then I should be able to control what happens when.
You control your computer, turn off updates, get malware, then come back and complain how M$ / Windows is crap. I really don't understand why so many people in this thread are actively complaining about not being able to turn off updates. It's like once a month and they give you advance notice and "pick a time"; you have a whole week to choose a good time to restart and apply some updates...
From my perspective windows updates are malware. I received one of Microsoft's malware updates on Windows 10. The computer forces updates on reboot except the update never completes. I've waited 2 hours for an update and let the computer stay on overnight. After 20 hours it still didn't complete. The solution? Reboot and turn windows updates off by disabling the windows update service. Except then they decided to override that option and suddenly my system started boot looping again. Why can't they just fix their crappy software? They've had two decades. It's always the exact same failure type on Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 10. Sometimes you you can clear the windows update cache by hand but guess what. That only works if you can actually disable the windows update service which they prevent you from doing now.
I do not know when there will be a good time for it, how long it is going to take, what it may break, or what settings it may reset. I update my Linux distro whenever I feel like it. I definitely like it this way. I have no "malware" on my system.
I'm actually OK with Microsoft being in control of security patching cadence. Too many people are simply unable, unqualified or unwilling to do the job themselves, and when there's millions of them, you get botnets. I don't like the loss of choice, but I readily admit it's a necessary evil.
But they should do much better QA and not brick anyone's PC ever, and absolutely NOT ship anything which isn't strictly security-related in this undeferrable-unskippable security patches channel.
and there's no way for me to use my machine as I purchased it (Samsung Galaxy Book 12 bundled w/ a Staedtler Noris Digital Stylus) and I've had to roll back an un-asked for upgrade since, the bottom line is Microsoft needs to completely decouple the OS layer where the security updates occur, from the UI layer.
If I pay for a system with an active stylus, I don't want it to be dumbed down to an 11th touch input which scrolls and won't select text or interact w/ the system as I've been accustomed to since Windows for Pen Computing.
If you want people to accept forced updates, just send the security fixes. Don't change the UI and don't mess with the users preferences, especially concerning privacy.
Honestly, I've never heard anyone complain apart from tech people. Long reboots are annoying but overall, Windows 10 is pretty well accepted by every non-technical person I know.
Oh, the non-tech people hate it too, but what can they do? They have literally zero choice in the matter.
That's the thing with tech, and that's why I consider all arguments that "people voted with their wallets" to be bullshit in this space. Most users don't understand how computers work. They don't have mental models to recognize how things should work. They have no choice but to accept whatever they're being given.
Devices around them getting less ergonomic, slower, and more flashy UIs? "There are smart people building this magic, they must know what they're doing!". Their computers slowing down to the point of uselessness in the span of a year? "It must be these viruses!". Techies complain because techies understand it's all greed and laziness, and that same technology is capable of being much better than it is.
I mean, ask your parents whether they like their operating system. I'll bet their answer will be a resounding "no", and you may get an earful about their general frustrations with technology.
One notable moment where the dissatisfaction of masses was voiced in unison was the forced Windows 8 to Windows 10 upgrade. You didn't have to have any sophisticated mental model there to recognize you're being made to do something bad for you against your will.
A friend of mine uses his PC only in the weekends (he uses the company's PC during the week) and hates Windows because every time it takes hours to download and install updates over his slow ADSL (I think there is no fast Internet there.) He has to remember to turn the PC on in the morning to use it in the afternoon. If he forgets, next weekend. Of course he could turn it on Friday night but the user experience is still really bad.
What are you talking about? Non-tech people complain all the time about it. Updates deciding to run right before you have to give a critical presentation is a meme at this point.
All this "well, users are stupid so it is ok to treat them like garbage" nonsense is part of the reason I've come to fucking hate IT. I wish all of you who think that way would go away.
Because non-technical people probably don't even know they have a choice in the matter. Macs are too expensive and they've probably never heard of Linux.
>I got burned at least once by a Windows 10 computer restarting in the middle of the night when I had programs running on it
That means you have been spared. For me "getting burned" means endless boot loops and reinstalling windows. Windows updates have bricked my system on every version of windows so far. Windows Vista, 7, 10. Their updates all suck.
Yes, I'm one of those "stupid" people who installed updates as soon as possible. No more bullshit. I'm using Linux now.
I do not like the idea of not being able to control my personal computer and wasting my time because of updates that may or may not break crap, that may or may not reset some settings. Ugh.
yes. most of the things I see about windows vs linux involve "well you can just turn all the spyware stuff off, all you have to do is dive into these 10 menus and flip these switches" "Its easy to disable the ads in the start menu" etc etc. Even if you can turn the stuff off, the fact that you have to feels a lot like the OS working against the user.
Because that's how installing software works on Windows. You install a new program which can open JPGs, it's not allowed to grab control of all JPGs unilaterally. Instead it registers itself as a handler of JPGs. Next time you try to open one, Windows prompts you "you have a new program which can do X, what do you want to use?" and you get to keep your old one, or choose the new one, once or every time.
Get a new browser installed, prompt for your choice of browser. This is an improvement to "get Edge installed, have Edge take over everything silently" and an improvement on "I installed a thing and it doesn't do anything, where is it", and an improvement on "IE 11 for eternity".
after the edge update, when i started my computer, edge opened itself and forced me through a "first run" mini tutorial thing that i couldnt skip or ignore. it wasn't even a "you have a new program" prompt, it was a "YOU ARE USING EDGE NOW".
one of the updates most certainly was not just a mime handler update. They pushed a new edge (when they swapped to chromium) and rather than leave people with old edge as their browser, they just flat out set new edge as your browser without checking what you had otherwise, and set it to auto run on your next boot.
I agree with you but you could say the same thing about a lot of linux installations.
"Its easy to install arch, all you have to do is run these 10 arcane commands"
With some linux distros is definitely feels like it is hostile to entry-level users. Which is probably by design, but I'm just saying that Windows isn't the only OS where you have to do a bunch of weird hostile setup stuff when you first install it
So you're telling me that macOS is more performant than Windows 10? Have you used both? Do you not feel the delay in every mouse click you do in macOS that is so maddening after coming from Windows?
Both the UI lag and general performance in macOS is just a sad story.
My windows machine runs 24/7 for months without needing a restart. I am forced to restart macOS weekly, usually because of system issues.
To be fair, it can happen when the kernel is very busy, for example while paging.
Even with a SSD and 16 GB RAM, it happens regularly for me due to bloated webpages, or apps like VS Code.
I used macos, I was forced to restart and update.
I used windows, I was forced to restart and update.
I use kubuntu now, and I haven't turned my computer off(unless you count sleep state) in a few weeks, sometimes i've gone months.
Both operating systems feel slow to me now that I've used linux. I was apprehensive to use it at first, and feel kinda guilty evangelizing it, but if you have these problems, I think this is your solution.
I have zero problems with my Mac and I use it all day long for work. I can put off updates for as long as i like. It doesn't get in the way or spy on me like Windows 10, or attempt to throw up shitty ads. It's also snappy. If yours isn't then there's something wrong with your Mac; some software that you installed or your hardware is buggy.
Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss