This article immediately reminded me of a video I saw a while ago.[1]
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
I know we're basically comparing anecdotes, but I've been surprised at how much more I've come to trust my windows workstation than my Mac in the past few years. I can't actually remember the last time my Windows workstation crashed outright (if ever?) but my Mac locks up at least 2-3 times per week. I also have to be extremely careful to avoid high memory pressure under Big Sur now, otherwise Finder spirals into a restart loop that can only be fixed with a hard reset. I also had to give up my Mac Thunderbolt setup because I've been fighting the same Thunderbolt crash that many people have been complaining about since Catalina was released in 2019 ( https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/10/16/gameover/ ).
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
Not even to mention the willfully broken font rendering on all peripherals that are not "retina enough" since a few versions ago. Using my work macbook with my trusty 16:10 monitors with 1920x1200 resolution in the home office is a literal eye sore since it's impossible to get a clear font image. The company had to send over a retina-enough screen...
The worst font rendering Linux ever had is still better what macOS does today to non-apple-blessed displays. It's a blurry mess.
No idea if this will help, but I had some instability on my macbook last year after getting my screen replaced. I ran memtest86 on the machine (using a UEFI USB image) and after a few hours it reported memory errors. I took it back to the genius bar and explained the situation. After reproducing the problem using their own internal tool they replaced the motherboard for free of charge and I haven't had any problems since then.
Your RAM might be working fine, but with crashes and lockups I think its always worth checking. Life is too short to put up with faulty hardware.
Yes. Every MacOS update is a shitshow of things that stop working. My company always have to send out a message to everyone asking them not to update when a new OS version is out, until it's been tested some more. Always break something.
At some point we all need to understand there's no single perfect platform. Windows works for me so does Linux but both have their issues. I still useful work on both of them. I have very little experience with macos but from what I read and hear from friends it's not all perfect either. We are a point where OSs do so many things which means there's a huge surface of bugs can appear on. What's probably more important is, how much those bugs affect your work and how quickly the "vendor" is fixing them once discovered.
I get the feeling those issues are over on the Mac now. Over the years I’ve had issues that are shockingly similar to my PC stuff on the Mac. I have concluded this is possibly the underlying architecture complexity. Most of the PC architecture that is shared is a massive stack of sticky tape and string piled up over the last 20 years and I think that leaks out into the OS. I’m surprised it works for any vendors at all. It’s not as if Linux doesn’t have a ton of problems in that space either.
The only thing I can say is that with the M1 Mac mini I have it’s the only computer I haven’t found any issues with at all yet and I’ve been using it since November 26th 100% of the time. Absolutely no issues at all.
Now windows is mostly reliable from the hardware side of things I’d you are lucky but the software is broken as fuck. Nothing works reliably or consistently. For over a month now Alt-tab on 20H2 has been randomly changing window ordering as an example breaking over 20 years of muscle memory. Their own mail client stops receiving mail twenty times a day. I’m not even going to start the book-sized rant on how unreliable their development stack is. And yesterday I spent an hour trying to delete a file which wouldn’t go away. It’s just motivational poison at the end of the day. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
I’ve battled application, driver, operating system and hardware issues on every platform I’ve used from mainframes to smartphones.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been better or worse times with platforms I’ve used over the decades.
But it does mean that no platform is exempt from flaws or even dark times.
Individual mileages vary wildly depending on a combination of general quality of the product at any stretch of time, personal use patterns at that time, and blind, random luck.
And I’m still using 3 or 4 major platforms daily, depending how you count. None are worth total praise. And none totally suck either. As with many relationships “it’s complicated” :-)
Last week I came to my Windows PC to see it was completely locked up. Until that I haven't noticed it, but at some point in my history with Windows boxes, crashes and issues became a rare notable event. I started relying on them. I was surprised.
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
Fair enough, but to be clear - I am not saying that apple software and products are free from problems. Far from it - butterfly keyboard, for example.
I am just saying Apple, for me, has the most reliable and consistent experience. And I have tried most options:
- windows, linux, and macos for my personal and work machines
- android, ios, and even windows phone (remember that?)
So far, may experience has been the opposite of yours - my work laptop is a 2015 macbook pro 15 and still performs really well (no crashes), but I have BSODed a couple of times on my windows 10 laptop I bought last year. Doesn't say much, I know.
On work, I never had so much trouble, like with my HP ZBook and Win10. It had already once a complete reset, but still, I have a lot of trouble. Special since the new BIOS update about a month ago, it crashes once or twice a day again.
In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat ..
So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.
same, I often end up having to force reboot my mac as it seems to do strange things and freeze up. My windows machine is going strong, haven't really had a problem for a long long time
I have the exact opposite experience. We're running an older version of Office (2016?) at work with Windows 7. Thse are supported by MS via the extended support contracts. It will be upgraded shortly.
Basically I get blue screens, rendering issues, slowness, freezing, crashing, random glitches. I regularly lose emails. The changes to Outlook are abysmal too. When a meeting invite I've accepted is amended (e.g. a 'Starting in 5 minutes email or update'), the calendar invite is no longer accepted so the reminder doesn't pop up. Whomever decided that un-accepted invites shouldn't pop up, has caused so much upset, tears and hate.
I would describe my windows machine as entirely useless. It has got so bad that I use my iPhone to respond to emails and to use the calendar features.
I've been considering learning some .NET to write a pop up app that is always on top so that when there's a meeting it shows up. Has anyone done that? It seems pretty basic.
Try disabling the Chrome background update mechanism in MacOS, it seems to be a common issue there... Not sure if Edge does the same, but that may be an alternative option.
The person you're responding to has an agenda (perhaps is even a paid astroturfer), and his story is not based in reality. My Windows 10 systems are rock-solid. I switched from all Macs years ago and never looked back.
I've seen the same. In fact my Arch Linux laptop seems way more dependable than my 2016 MBP, so much so I switched my work MBP for an Arch setup too. I'm actually seriously thinking of replacing macOS with Windows on the MBP, which is not something I'd ever consider back in the Snow Leopard days.
I've been mostly Linux since 2011 and the few times I had to install Win10 for something I've been very displeased. We've fallen quite far in Windows, with ads everywhere, hundreds of services that do God-knows-what, fresh installs that break as soon as the updater runs for the first time. I'm really not impressed and I try to use it as little as possible. Just a bloated, unstable mess designed to sell Microsoft's value-added services.
It's a bit hard to take this serious because of the hyperbole, but I'll bite on the services bit: how is that different? Supose you didn't use linux for a decade, then went to a linux box with a desktop environment and looked at the process list: how different is that from 'hundreds of services that do Go-knows-what'? I mean I use it daily and don't know what half of them do.
This perfectly sums up my views, being a Linux only user since 2013. Windows used to be so... Less awful. It's like all the people who use it have been slowly trained to accept more and more anti-user features.
Yes, agreed. But at this point you want to buy the products that has decreased the least in terms of quality. In my experience, that usually means apple.
Wells Fargo and the US Army are well capable of paying Microsoft enough money to change their incentives.
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
I agree that any sort of data loss is completely unacceptable, especially given the amount of force with which MS has been pushing automatic updates and making it difficult to completely disable.
> Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life.
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, to be honest I much prefer - and trust - fully automated test pipelines to manuality. It affords more frequent and thorough verification of the final artifacts.
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
The other problem with the type of "in the field" testing that Microsoft does is that it can only capture issues that it can physically report back to the head office.
I had two separate computers with very distinct hardware that both failed to upgrade to any of the semi-annual Windows releases. They would just get stuck in a reboot loop at the SSD storage driver loading section of the installer, which means that no errors could be written. Hence, no specific errors could ever be sent back to Microsoft other than "failed".
I eventually found a workaround myself, but the root cause was never fixed, and will never be fixed, because Microsoft is blind to it.
Similarly, anything that causes a BSOD gets reported back via telemetry, but hangs and freezes aren't. Random performance issues, glitches, etc... are in the same bucket of permanently invisible issues.
If you're wondering why Windows is crashing less but glitching more... there's your answer.
I"m a huge proponent of automate the crap out of your tests, but you also have to break out of the automating mindset to get at the better problems. People are not machines, and automated tests are machines verifying machines.
It's why I like having a few non-automators and program noodlers around.
LTSC really is the way to go for a stable windows experience, unfortunately there's no legal way for consumers to get licenses without a much larger investment than what a home or pro license costs.
You can meet in the middle and run transcript on pro which disables most of the worst new features.
LTSC isn't really meant as an enterprise desktop version. It's meant for industrial systems, the ones you don't expect to touch for years because they're controlling some vital factory process.
The expected version you'd be running on enterprise desktops is just the regular semi-annual release, delayed by a few months so the SMB sector can test the major bugs for you.
That's exactly what it is and it's becoming more common. Java went that way. Windows went that way. CentOS is going that way. Office 365 is even worse because the low paying users get more frequent updates than high paying users. I know because I tracked down a long file name issue for someone and was shocked they were paying for it and still getting to be a beta tester for the "real" customers (huge businesses).
The really sad part about this is that Microsoft was the systems programming startup. Their software engineers changed the world. Of course, that was 40+ years ago, but it's sad to see them turn away from their technical roots.
Windows 10 has been the most reliable, productive, stable system for me over the past few years. No doubt they use a lot of automated testing -- how could they not? But today's Windows 10 is -very- reliable.
It's filled with enough annoyances for me to be frustrating at times.
The night light is awful and blasts you with full blue light whenever monitors come out of standby mode and then it'll be "On" but not actually on until you toggle it.
Lately explorer hasn't been refreshing properly, so when I create a new folder I need to right-click, refresh before I see it and can rename it.
Things that auto-install drive me crazy. No, I don't want to "Meet Now".
Every SAC update tries to trick me into enabling OneDrive "backup" (sync is NOT a backup) and I missed it once so all my stuff got uploaded to OneDrive.
BitLocker with a PIN and Windows Update don't seem to know each other exist. Updates auto-restart the computer and then it sits at the BitLocker screen or, in my case, reboots continuously every few minutes spinning the fans up to max on every reboot.
I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones that annoy me daily.
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
AFAIU Windows updates roll out to regular users first, and to corporate customers much later (perhaps depending on how the admin configures it). In a way, regular users are test monkeys. But this makes it less likely to brick corporations. (Of course this can still happen to due unique corp settings).
Apple's has done the same thing regarding QA. Lots of companies have eliminated their QA departments, moved the QA engineers under development managers, and transitioned the QA labs to virtual machines allowing all tests to be identical and repeatable on each machine. You will never find edge cases or problems unique to certain hardware and software configurations.
As an example, Big Sur bricked lots of Late-2013 MBP laptops, but Apple had no way of knowing this would happen because they never tested them.
It's sad to say but I've had more hassle with Windows 10 than any previous (NT based anyway) release. 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all served me well. 10 has done everything from deleted my files (thanks, October 2018 Update) to DESTROYING my Linux boot loader that was placed on a separate hard drive.. it has no business touching that!
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
I've had pretty much the same experience as you. Honestly, linux runs faster uses less resources and is infinitely customizable. If anyone's work allows them to make the switch (eg. No hard dependencies on windows) then consider doing it, it is absolutely worth it.
Lately I've had great experiences with running any windows programs on linux in wine. It seems to have really matured a lot. There are some issues with my tiling wm but other than that zero problems.
I had the same thing happen to me with Windows destroying my Linux boot loader. After that, I gave up dual booting and have been on Linux 100% ever since. I don’t see myself ever going back.
I unfortunately need to due to professors not being OS friendly...
If there is a software they want us to use, you're gonna use it. Oh you use Linux or mac? Sorry, you gotta go to the computer lab at the school or find a windows machine.
Windows's quality has been downhill quite a lot. For the past more than a year, I struggle with intermittent touchpad scroll failure on multiple laptops (including surface pro, thinkpad, etc). Of course, the only support you can get from searching the web is to update the driver. In this case, I don't think driver is the problem, the windows multi-touch and precision touchpad component has internal bug, the cause scrolling, either touchpad or touchscreen, to loss response every a few minuets for 15s-ish period. Super annoying when you browse web without a mouse. I don't see any solution in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, I cannot just dump all my windows PC and switch to either mac or linux, because I stuck with a few CAD software that only runs on windows.
That doesn't mean anything, I ran into a bug after 2004 that meant DPAPI protected secrets would be randomly corrupted. It was an incredibly frustrating bug that cost me a bunch of data.
After a few months without progress, I ended up debugging the problem myself and mailing them an analysis.
It's still not fixed, and not on that known issues page. I wrote a twitter thread about it here:
I really enjoy reading abour your findings, thanks for sharing!
I would love to see a how-to for the way you debug these things with IDA, as otherwise I consider myself good at debugging, but have never even tried to peak under the hood of Windows.
I suppose it's because they now "test" using virtualized hardware. So even if chkdsk runs during their tests, it's running on a virtualized disk, not a real SSD.
Honestly, I'd pay money so they bring back the testing team and not use all of us non-enterprise users as beta users.
I help run a service that uses hundreds of Windows boxes, and at any one time two or three of them always seem to have a borked windows update state. Recovery is utter fucking voodoo, and it's usually better to flatten a machine than attempt to repair things.
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
My favourite Windows bug is the Start Menu search function.
Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.
Try using the Start Menu.
Nothing will work.
The search upon typing will not show all items.
If you click on a search result, it won't launch.
Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.
Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.
Etc...
It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve had two instances where I let Windows update and a whole bunch of system stuff (including Windows Update itself, once) proceeded to break, even through a few reboots.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
It was reasonably common advice, (around 2000-2004) in the MS Small Business Server groups to tell people to wait for a few days before installing updates, to see if other people had problems.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
I'd be very curious to see a deep root-cause-analysis of this, especially because it seems to be SSD-specific and in the "detect if the drive is an SSD and do something slightly different" way, which IMHO is not good behaviour in general as it is leaking the abstraction.
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
> "detect if the drive is an SSD and do something slightly different" way, which IMHO is not good behaviour in general as it is leaking the abstraction.
I'd argue the opposite. Thin or leaking abstractions are how operating systems and video games harness the full potential of the hardware. Trade-offs are ugly nonetheless.
> I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
In that case, running Hyper-v might be a good thing. (Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning your logged in session is running in a vm with dedicated input/video)
Looking beyond the obvious problem here, just curious why the admin ran chkdsk /f for no reason, then did it on 6 more systems after observing it caused ntfs failure.
https://m.xkcd.com/242/ maybe. One hopes the reporter had backups (or was testing on disposable systems) before trying to reproduce a data-loss condition.
Readit News
The long and short - MS basically laid off the staff that tested Windows, and much of it is automated nowadays (I bet the MBA educated executive at MS who was responsible for that got PHAT bonus, at the expense of Windows customers and laid off testing staff, of course). Seems like it happened in 2015, which is why it seems that windows updates have been more unstable in the last couple of years.[2]
I really want to like windows, but Apple's M1 and Linux's community make it hard to ever love windows again.
Oh well, I guess I will be using Macbooks for the rest of my life. Which, actually, isn't so bad I guess.
FWIW - I would say this is unacceptable on microsoft's part. Windows is the default operating system of corporate america, department of defense, etc. Imagine if an update would brick Wells Fargo or the US Army.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9kn8_oztsA
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/former-microsoft-employee-ta...
Meanwhile, my Windows machine just keeps chugging along, drama free. All of my hardware and peripherals work just fine with it, but I often have to play the plug-unplug game with audio peripherals until video playback works on my Mac.
Five years ago I never would have guessed I'd be writing an HN comment praising my Windows machine and lamenting all of the issues with my Mac, but here we are. It's downright depressing to think of all the time I've lost in the past year waiting for my MacBook to reboot or replugging USB cables until everything works after I wake it from sleep.
The worst font rendering Linux ever had is still better what macOS does today to non-apple-blessed displays. It's a blurry mess.
Your RAM might be working fine, but with crashes and lockups I think its always worth checking. Life is too short to put up with faulty hardware.
The only thing I can say is that with the M1 Mac mini I have it’s the only computer I haven’t found any issues with at all yet and I’ve been using it since November 26th 100% of the time. Absolutely no issues at all.
Now windows is mostly reliable from the hardware side of things I’d you are lucky but the software is broken as fuck. Nothing works reliably or consistently. For over a month now Alt-tab on 20H2 has been randomly changing window ordering as an example breaking over 20 years of muscle memory. Their own mail client stops receiving mail twenty times a day. I’m not even going to start the book-sized rant on how unreliable their development stack is. And yesterday I spent an hour trying to delete a file which wouldn’t go away. It’s just motivational poison at the end of the day. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been better or worse times with platforms I’ve used over the decades.
But it does mean that no platform is exempt from flaws or even dark times.
Individual mileages vary wildly depending on a combination of general quality of the product at any stretch of time, personal use patterns at that time, and blind, random luck.
And I’m still using 3 or 4 major platforms daily, depending how you count. None are worth total praise. And none totally suck either. As with many relationships “it’s complicated” :-)
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
I am just saying Apple, for me, has the most reliable and consistent experience. And I have tried most options:
- windows, linux, and macos for my personal and work machines
- android, ios, and even windows phone (remember that?)
So far, may experience has been the opposite of yours - my work laptop is a 2015 macbook pro 15 and still performs really well (no crashes), but I have BSODed a couple of times on my windows 10 laptop I bought last year. Doesn't say much, I know.
In theorie Win10 looks nice. I tryed to upgrade one of my notebooks at home from Win7 to Win10. Privacy is one thing, but CandyCrush and things like that, was a totaly show stopper for me. I mean, I even have the Pro licences, but so much bloat .. So since the, I'm Linux only at home. I will never upgrade to Win 10.
In my company i am the only one, but it is not due to a faulty Dock since it works with Windows and Linux.
I had like 30 crashes until i could reliably avoid them.
Dead Comment
I often hear this, but I've never seen an ad (except MSFT's own ads getting to to try its new Edge browser.)
...by subtracting value
It's almost like a zero-sum game.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/macos-big-sur-update-br...
Dropping quality is happening everywhere.
This is why things like security audits exist - you can't judge a software product's internal quality from just what the salespeople tell you and what you see by running it, so you demand as a condition of purchase that someone look (with an appropriate NDA) at the internals and deliver a second opinion as to whether it's competent-looking code. This is also why things like PCI exist - you certainly can process credit cards without being careful about anything, but the credit card companies have decided (with an eye their own long-term profitability) that you only should process them with at least a little bit of care, even if that doesn't produce a visible functional difference. Yet.
Now, I'm not saying these are perfect processes by any stretch, but they absolutely act to prevent a company from laying off a division that provides an important but unseen function and coasting on reputation for several years.
No company the size of Microsoft is going to develop good software out of the kindness of its heart or a sense of professional pride or responsibility. Individuals do this all the time, of course - that's why Linux exists in the first place. But once you put a company around it, you should expect that it's going to have MBAs who don't want people to spend their time doing things that don't bring profit, and the customers should interact with the company accordingly: make sure the things you do want them doing bring them profit
The previous huge fuckup that caused data loss is still a fresh memory to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
I on the other hand would never voluntarily set my foot into the walled garden. That might be suitable for some users, but for readers of HN it shouldn't be necessary. I'm happy to run Gnu/Linux even on my phone, even if that might cause occasional inconvenience with the current duopoly in that segment. Freedom is freedom after all.
Well, people seem to make different choices...
The problem comes when the automation is only partial because added at a later stage, and the existing software does not lend itself to testing.
The risk there is that some short-sighted line manager will go “YOLO, I have a deadline” and skip the tests rather than flag the problem and dedicate budget and effort to redesign the existing for testability.
That’s where guidance and oversight are key, and more often than not, sorely lacking.
I had two separate computers with very distinct hardware that both failed to upgrade to any of the semi-annual Windows releases. They would just get stuck in a reboot loop at the SSD storage driver loading section of the installer, which means that no errors could be written. Hence, no specific errors could ever be sent back to Microsoft other than "failed".
I eventually found a workaround myself, but the root cause was never fixed, and will never be fixed, because Microsoft is blind to it.
Similarly, anything that causes a BSOD gets reported back via telemetry, but hangs and freezes aren't. Random performance issues, glitches, etc... are in the same bucket of permanently invisible issues.
If you're wondering why Windows is crashing less but glitching more... there's your answer.
It's why I like having a few non-automators and program noodlers around.
You can meet in the middle and run transcript on pro which disables most of the worst new features.
The expected version you'd be running on enterprise desktops is just the regular semi-annual release, delayed by a few months so the SMB sector can test the major bugs for you.
Probably came from the same MBA: let consumers be lab rats to for big enterprise customers
I always stay one entire version behind. I'm going to barely going to update to macOS Catalina now that big sur is out.
The night light is awful and blasts you with full blue light whenever monitors come out of standby mode and then it'll be "On" but not actually on until you toggle it.
Lately explorer hasn't been refreshing properly, so when I create a new folder I need to right-click, refresh before I see it and can rename it.
Things that auto-install drive me crazy. No, I don't want to "Meet Now".
Every SAC update tries to trick me into enabling OneDrive "backup" (sync is NOT a backup) and I missed it once so all my stuff got uploaded to OneDrive.
BitLocker with a PIN and Windows Update don't seem to know each other exist. Updates auto-restart the computer and then it sits at the BitLocker screen or, in my case, reboots continuously every few minutes spinning the fans up to max on every reboot.
I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones that annoy me daily.
Having used Windows for decades, I more pleased with Windows update now than I remember ever having been. Although some of that may be because I don’t have a team responsible for patching Windows servers anymore. But my workstation performs great and the update process for Windows 10 has seemed very reliable (relative to versions past).
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As an example, Big Sur bricked lots of Late-2013 MBP laptops, but Apple had no way of knowing this would happen because they never tested them.
Anyway, if you make money using your computer, don’t update. If you make money making updates, I don’t know.
I always looked at Linux as not being worth the hassle.. now it's not worth the hassle to use anything else.
If there is a software they want us to use, you're gonna use it. Oh you use Linux or mac? Sorry, you gotta go to the computer lab at the school or find a windows machine.
Would it be fair to say that Windows extinguished your Linux install? :D
After a few months without progress, I ended up debugging the problem myself and mailing them an analysis.
It's still not fixed, and not on that known issues page. I wrote a twitter thread about it here:
https://twitter.com/taviso/status/1310619801606184960
There is an office kb article about it, because it turned out it also broke Outlook.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/outlook-and-other...
I would love to see a how-to for the way you debug these things with IDA, as otherwise I consider myself good at debugging, but have never even tried to peak under the hood of Windows.
I don't understand how such core things break in Windows.
Honestly, I'd pay money so they bring back the testing team and not use all of us non-enterprise users as beta users.
1. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
A while back I installed a couple racks of shiny, new, absolutely identical servers (except for MAC addresses) with factory-imaged operating systems, and had two of them fail initial windows updates. Out of the box. How do you even do that?
Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.
Try using the Start Menu.
Nothing will work.
The search upon typing will not show all items.
If you click on a search result, it won't launch.
Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.
Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.
Etc...
It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.
I would guess it's something like non-deterministic order of patch installation. Which seems easy to end up doing even if you think it's deterministic. For example, some patches don't finish install until boot time, so unexpected reboots could bork things. Or things like "can't install this patch while X software is running", etc.
flaky hardware?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
Did you cross over from a parallel universe, because Windows Update always was, to use the term of endearment, a shitshow:
https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+update+deleted+docum...
Now you're forced into it, like it or not.
Anecdote, of course, and theoretically I could have hardware issues, but things to seem to be worse than a few years ago.
(I'd try to find a few posts but Google searches of Usenet newsgroups is suboptimal).
EDIT here's one thread talking about installing some, but not all, patches and updates: https://groups.google.com/g/microsoft.public.backoffice.smal...
I wonder if a VM simulating a virtual SSD hosted on a machine with a regular HDD would be able to reproduce this bug, but then again, recent Windows versions seem to be doing some detection of whether they are running in a VM (and likely altering behaviour due to this too)... what a mess.
I'd argue the opposite. Thin or leaking abstractions are how operating systems and video games harness the full potential of the hardware. Trade-offs are ugly nonetheless.
In that case, running Hyper-v might be a good thing. (Hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning your logged in session is running in a vm with dedicated input/video)
He only found that there was a problem when the ones started earlier finished and rebooted.
By then it was too late for 7 machines but he was able to stop it on the rest.