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One of the most hated “features” of Windows is its update system – it’s slow, error-prone, and most annoyingly of all, tends to interrupt users at the worst possible times. This last issue is apparently so common it’s basically a recognisable meme, among both tech enthusiasts as well as regular users. The root cause of the problem is that because Microsoft wants to force users to install updates, you can only postpone them for a short while, after which Windows will install updates, even if you’re about to start a presentation.
Microsoft is now bringing this approach to the Microsoft Store. Up until now, the Microsoft Store allowed you to install updates whenever you pleased, but that’s no longer the case. Just like Windows Update, you now only have the option to postpone application updates for a short while, after which they will be installed. There’s no registry hack to turn this off or revert back to the old behaviour.
Be advised in case you’re using applications from the Microsoft Store for anything critical that starting soon, they will just update in the middle of whatever you’re doing. Splendid.
Thom Holwerda,
It’s so infuriating that owners are no longer in control of their computers. This happened to me just last week where a forced update insisted on installing right during a scheduled business meeting. And from experience I know these updates regularly take 30-45 minutes. It’s a terrible practice but my hands were tied and I had to do two hard power cycles to get windows to cancel the update. Another time this happened right before a flight and once again microsoft was at fault.
Fortunately windows recognizes the failed updates and aborts them…but there’s risk of corruption. Fuck you microsoft!!!
Is Linux mature enough now (installation, desktop, video, 3D, …) as a viable alternative, not just for geeks (having to go console mode to maintain things) ?
Kochise,
Indeed. I have a windows work laptop that I cant seem to deprecate though, haha.
My opinion about normal users switching to linux is that it works great depending on their software needs and expectations. Flatpak and appimage have really improved the 3rd party installation process considerably though. While software availability still favors windows, linux is definitely becoming more accessible to non-experts.
I haven’t been pushing linux on people who know they want windows, it’s not my place. But for people who are curious, sure why not it’s not exclusive to experts like it used to be.
I tried Mandrake and Slack in the early 00s, but wasn’t my cup of tea. Then Ubuntu made Linux almost as easy as Windows. Then Mir, Snap, … So they turned into Microsoft. Other Linux distros are still a hit and miss, depending on their architectures and often software packaging lagging behind release schedules. Hard to find the silver bullet here. My Tuxedo laptop comes with its own Linux distro (Tuxedo OS on Debian) and too have its quirks despite being quite well maintained (ie. package conflicts and KDE Plasma visual bugs). *sigh*
For people who need a “facebook machine” (working age equivalent : “Teams/Slack machine” ), Linux is IMO fine:Browsers run.
Stay away from nvidia.
Yeah, like it’s an easy feat to avoid the GPU maker than is used in around 80% of the machines sold. And can do Cuda and RT. Sure AMD is catching on, but still lagging behind a bit performance wise.
@Serafean
I do not think you need to stay away from NVIDIA anymore as long as you can use a distro that installs up-to-date drivers. The NVIDIA drivers have been pretty good for about a year now and are still getting better. Even the proprietary drivers will soon use in-kernel modules as well.
NVIDIA 575 is current. Anything above 555 should be fine (about a year old at this point).
Most distros are fairly up-to-date but sadly some distros feature ancient drivers. Even the recently released Debian 13 ships with NVIDIA release 550 which lacks explicit sync and so may have issues with Wayland. Sigh.
Thankfully even the slowest distros will have adequate drivers soon though I guess Debian could be stuck with older drivers until Debian 14 worst case.
I mean, support AMD and Intel. They have been much easier for the Linux community to work with.
However, many users have NVIDIA hardware, a strong preference for it, or have use cases that required it (eg. CUDA). So, I do not like giving the impression that NVIDIA does not work on Linux since I think that is not true anymore.
I wouldn’t even support Intel at this point, they keep firing their Linux devs and have shown zero interest in maintaining their Linux code going forward.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/linux-at-risk-recent-intel-layoffs-are-putting-key-projects-at-risk-experts-warn
Ironically, I’ve had more trouble getting AMD GPUs to work right under Linux than NVIDIA over the years.
I use Ubuntu 24.04 on all my home PCs (including my Microsoft Surface Book 2 and my 2013 MacBook Pro). I do web surfing , video editing, 3D modeling, programming and I game using Steam. I know nothing about Linux internals. I’m just a user of Apps. With that said, I’ve had absolutely no problems; everything works perfectly.
This is obviously a terrible place to ask as it is mostly a Linux user echo chamber. Better off just browsing recent bug reports and asking yourself “would this happen if I was on Windows/Mac?” And the answer is of course, still no. Linux is still pretty much a game of are you lucky enough to not have any issues. And that’s without Wayland being a fiasco.
dark2,
I know you are a resident linux hater but you aren’t being fair. Just because we’re linux users doesn’t mean we can’t be objective. In the first response I admitted windows supports more applications, which is windows main advantage. But you should admit that there are huge numbers of users who use computers for youtube/social media/banking and other web based usage. And you know what, they would have little trouble even without any linux experience. Manually installing applications is where linux looses points, it’s rough. But flakpak/snap/appimage are changing this. Not to mention stream works pretty darn well.
What issues are you talking about?
Microsoft loves you and wants you to be happy. Microsoft knows what you need better than you do, under all conceivable circumstances. Accept Microsoft into your heart accept their default settings as the one true way, discard all applications which cannot conform, and don’t worry about your newfound massive upstream bandwidth use – you’re simply helping them by being a distribution node for Windows Update. It’s all for the best, you’ll see.
That’s a really good summary.
Right now, it makes a LOT of sense to get rid of Windows: If not just for the sake of efficiency and privacy, then for the sake of sanity!
> The root cause of the problem is that because Microsoft wants to force users to install updates, you can only postpone them for a short while, after which Windows will install updates, even if you’re about to start a presentation.
The root cause of the problem is the ludicrously low quality of the update process. I’m honestly baffled that a so-called modern os has one that is so debilitating that one can not be confident enough that it won’t interfere with abovementioned presentation.
Mote,
While I agree, I would say the bigger problem is lack of “downdates” (downgrades). If an update is broken, my only option would be waiting for the developer to fix it at their leisurely time.
I will side with microsoft on this one.
SASSER and I love you have proven beyound any reasonable doubt, that users can not be trusted to click on the update-button.
The only alternative are forced updates.
And people complaining because they are to incompetent to click the button to postpone their updates and set an installation-time for said updates just proves ms right.
smashIt,
That’s not a good justification. Updates have been automatic for decades. Nobody’s asking for the updates to stop being automatic, rather for the updates to stop being forced, which is very different.
Even if microsoft believes forced updates are in the owner’s interest, Microsoft don’t own the computer and ethically the property owner’s wishes beat out microsoft’s. If you want to say owners have to opt out of updates at their own risk, I’d be ok with that. But if you’re seriously suggesting microsoft not allow opt outs when owners need to use the computer, then frankly class action lawsuits would be warranted to collect damages from microsoft for every instance of interfering with people’s use of their personal property. Fair is fair. There needs to be real consequences to microsoft for causing denial of service on property they don’t own.
Sometimes I do see the delay box that lets you opt out, but not always. Sometimes it doesn’t let you delay, especially if you use your computer more intermittently. “Forced” is literal.
Alfman,
I agree they need to be held to account as the behavior is unacceptable. However unfortunately they will likely get away with it.
They will cite some obscure EULA item, or claim “this is all for security, think of the children! we made a study that shows 10% of kids never update their apps”. And a sympathetic judge will agree with them.
Well most people here do represent admins, it guys in large corps, developers, representing what? 5%of users? Propably the other 95% of users need to be more pushed for security / updates. It’s annoyingly blind everybody always complaints about what Microsoft does bad and wrong. Surely distributing updates at that scale is different to where is Linux now? 5%? No Linux has to even have an infrastructure like that. But Microsoft has to. Back in the days when people were in control what was number one topic? Security of windows? Defining updates hours I never had one update interrupting anything.
sao,
The market share for linux is irrelevant.
No, they don’t.
I’m not against automatic updates, but owners need to have control over them, otherwise it becomes a literal denial of service. Just because microsoft is behind a denial of service doesn’t mean owners should be any more accepting of it. That is absolutely ridiculous.
Good, I am happy for you. It doesn’t change my complaint though. It doesn’t happen to me often, but it’s unacceptable when it does.
Updates can be automatic, and non-intrusive. Download in the background, extract into a separate tree (silently with minimum process priority) , install there, and upon next application/system restart, switch the tree.
If uptime is a problem, this also makes the update process instantaneous from the user’s perspective, so forced updates aren’t a time consumer.
This is a consequence of “updates prevented me from using my computer for 2 hours” .
Also “updates made my software worse” , but that’s another discussion.
Serafean,
+1
Indeed. I’ve already brought this up in the past, but there are instances of windows update malware. Prolific for one are guilty of using windows update to replace perfectly working drivers with broken ones for planned obsolescence purposes On the one hand, using windows update this way is a clever business strategy to force customers to buy new hardware. But on the other hand it’s ethically so messed up that this is a thing.
I hate Windows Update from the following reason – from time to time I need to use my mobile phone as an access point, to have Internet outside the office. We have 7GB plan/monthly on the phones (more than enough for me). The Windows Update was over 1GB to download, and failed more than once (even on LAN). It starts every time from zero with download. My monthly plan was over at the 3rd of the month.
So, every time I am in the office, first thing in the morning is to manually check for updates, but…
I often forget that I am also using VMs with Windows 10 (compatibility problems apps Windows 11), and here we go again.
Since Windows 10 there is an option, in the “modern” Settings panel, to mark a connection as metered, so that it would not be used for background activities such as system updates.
Hi bobby,
In my Windows 10 I can set up a network connection as a “metered connection” (ie. paid per GB) .
Then in Windows Update advanced settings you can toggle to not download updates using metered connections .
I hope there is the same combination of options in Windows 11, and at least you can set it up in your Win10 VMs
It seems to work reasonably well with stopping automating downloads of updates in background
It not that hard to disable with Group Policies or DNS. You just make it so the windowsupdate URL is unreachable. At least we still have control over our networks.
tuaris,
I appreciate your point about hacks to keep windows update from working if you really want to do that, but I think it’s worth pointing out that disabling windows update is usually not the goal. I actually want updates, but as the property owner I need more control over them. Just think if other companies tried to pull a microsoft. A house cleaning service might say “Oh your having party today, that’s too damn bad because we’re running the vacuum in the middle of your party and you don’t get a say in the matter.”. Yes obviously I can cancel the service, but it does not follow that just because an owner wants more control that they don’t want the service at all. It’s not less abusive coming from microsoft.
That’s the wrong approach. The correct approach is for windows to detect a metered connection, and respect that.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols/ms-nct/7c4adf77-f13b-43aa-8491-637ef4543d96
A few years ago I had it working based on this:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/ms-meteredconnection
The phone AP should set this. I know it’s a high ask…
I say start annoying phone vendors to properly support this.
Ill chime in with the unpopular opinion. We all benefit from up to machines and apps.
If we allow updates to be postponed forever, and somewhere along the line there is a vulnerability. That vulnerability forms a botnet.
If it affects 1% of the (2bn or so) user base, thats a 20 Million strong botnet easily capable of DDoS national infrastructure.
Azure was taken out 10,000 sources in 2021 for an idea of the scale needed.
Who will get the blame then? The person who keeps hitting “skip” or Microsoft?
Adurbe,
Owners get the blame when they keep running an old operating system, and yet we don’t prohibit them from doing so. That is their right. The most reasonable thing to do is for the OS to issue warnings and keep owners informed, but owner property rights trump microsoft. When it comes to bot nets, I’ve seen ISPs shut down user service for that. There was no blaming microsoft, the ISP didn’t even care what operating system was running, it’s irrelevant to the ISP. Owners have to fix the problem regardless and I think it’s completely reasonable to hold those owners responsible for their property. But by the same token when microsoft themselves create a denial of service against property owners, then it’s fair to hold microsoft accountable for damages. sukru makes the point microsoft will not be held responsible for damages because they’ve got teams of lawyers to make sure they won’t be, but you know what would happen if they actually were? Windows update would finally get fixed! Rather than using force, microsoft would suddenly care that the process works smoothly for owners.
While a nice in theory. Thats a bit of a response after the horse has bolted. We’ve had decades of user managed updates and XP proved that users simply don’t update when left to their own devices. Even with Very aggressive “reminders”.
Adurbe,
It is because there was no visible downsides for those who do not update. They don’t seem to get any immediate benefits, so they would choose the “path of least resistance”
You can fix it with external incentives. Like ISPs and large cloud providers refusing to service non-updated systems citing security concerns.
The same can be said for the apps: “sorry you need a newer version of our client to access services”
And of course make sure it is actually for security (don’t need to try too hard as there is always a new bulletin, but still it should not be just “b.s.” reasoning).
sukru,
Like the couple times windows update replaced my firefox settings with MS edge.
They didn’t actually say this of course, but there’s almost always a “we did it for user security” argument they can throw down. It’s the go-to justification just about any time corporations want to take control away from owners.
Alfman,
Yes, I can easily see them abusing this.
Adurbe,
Regardless, that is the property owner’s right.
Honestly it boggles my mind that a company takes control of private property without permission and it’s the owners who get criticized for wanting control. Property ownership rights have fallen far.
Its the same argument made by anti-vaxers.
You do have the right to refuse a vacation.
But vaccinations are most effective when deployed across a population. It creates herd immunity, and if there Is an outbreak its easier to contain and respond to.
@Adurbe: I 100% agree in this regard, I even tried to implement some end user free will on one of my networks not long after Win 10 was launched. It ended within 6 months simply because people would not update and could not get basic instructions correct like rebooting versus a shutdown.
@Sukru: Isn’t the invisible downside a botnet? The people who don’t or can’t be bothered updating won’t notice either way!
@Alfman: If somebody fails to maintain the vehicle they own and it causes an accident they are liable, if we suffer botnets propagated by unpatched systems should the system owner be liable?
cpcf,
Yes, owners are liable for their own property. It seems bizarre to me that anybody finds this to be such a foreign concept.
cpcf,
Yes, it is.
Most people will not even realize they are infected. They will brush it up as “the PC is again acting up, typical Windows”, while they have an actual negative effect on the network they reside in and the whole Internet as well.
That asymmetrical nature of updates makes it difficult to convince people.