I just had windows update almost brick an iPad. I have this old iPad I use to watch movies or shows while working out. I almost never update it it just sits on my network to connect to jellyfin. Well it wasn’t playing some shows and it looks like I needed to update its codec and stuff but it refused to do it from the iPad guess if you let it sit to long or something. So I boot up my old windows 10 PC that maybe gets turned on once a year for shit like this. Sit through like 4 hours of updates and 4-5 restarts I can finally install iTunes to update the iPad. As its updating the iPad windows just goes fuck you and does a update and restarts itself. I look at the iPad it spazzes a bit then comes up with this recovery error please contact support… Fuck get back into windows try updating the iPad again says it won’t update and that I must wipe and recover it. Fuck. Recovering the iPad worked but it wiped everything from it then had to spend the next hour trying to remember my apple password the last time I used it was like 5 years ago. In other words fuck windows. I hate apple too, the iPad was a gift. It works for what I use it for.
I just installed Bazzite because my rig has been used for Steam 90% of the time and Firefox the other 10%.
Now I laugh when it tells me where the steam deck buttons are supposed to be, reminding me to choose the non-deck version next time.
But the ‘HAY LISTEN’ of Windows 10 dying and being forced to use Windows 11 at work was enough.
It’s always nice when new people come into this community!
My partner is a little bit technopobic and adopted to Linux 4 years ago. Mint originally as a gentle step and now on Debian KDE. They needed initial set up doing for them eg localisation for Libreoffice. Updates etc are really no different to Windows so they dont need to worry about using the terminal. The challenge for most non-tecchy people will be having someone to hold thier hand with trying and moving to Linux.
So, this is only to some degree Microsoft’s fault, but yesterday, we were basically on a workshop at $DAYJOB to learn about a hardware setup, which had some crucial software on a Windows PC.
And because you can’t run updates in the background on Windows, the internal IT has a nagware program to remind you, that you should stop working and install an update.And like, truly nagware. It pops up in the middle of the screen, overlays all other windows, but also minimizes them, and the only way to close it, is to either go ahead with the installation or to click “Defer”, which makes it ask again in 5 minutes.
It then also unminimizes your windows, but does so in the wrong order, so a different window will end up on top.But what truly made this a unique experience was that there were like 8 updates it tried to install. Each of those updates had its own nagware pop-up with its own 5-minute-timer, so we get one of those ridiculous pop-ups every 30-45 seconds.
Eventually, we did realize that it was different updates it was trying to do (and not just a BIOS update which had failed twice already), so we could make it go ahead with the installation of some of those updates, which reduced the nagware pop-up frequency somewhat.
But yeah, for innocent me with my Linux laptop, this was still absolute bedlam. Just genuinely a moment of “How the hell do you get any work done?”.
I tried windows 11 recently because I couldn’t get a game to work with WINE. Man, what a fucking shit show.
If a studio can’t even be bothered to get their game running through proton, then I can’t be bothered to give them my money.
Nah. Windows is stalkerware digital slavery of the soul. It comes back with shackles. The future will make this far more clearly the case.
Won’t someone think of the investors?
I think this is the other way around, Windows Updates always fuck up the user.
Linux distros can still do…questionable things. In grad school I tried Arch for a bit, and I once was late to a video call because I had updated my kernel but did not reboot. Arch decided that because there was a new kernel installed, I didn’t need the modules for the old — but currently running! — kernel, so it removed them. So when I plugged in a webcam, the webcam module was nowhere to be found.
But yeah…somehow, still not as bad as Windows updates.
I wouldn’t call that a questionable thing. Reading through how it happened paints a crystal clear picture of cause and effect.
Coming from Debian, it was…not expected. I understand how and why it happened, but the user experience was surprising.
Debian keeps the previous kernel around, which makes perfect sense to me — in the event that a kernel update borks your system you can just load the previous one. This would probably only happen due to out of tree modules (looking at you, Nvidia…).
where linusx
Do Linux users still think Windows updates are unreliable? Can’t remember a breaking release, personally or for my users, for 6 or 7 years.
For me it was more about updates installing junk I didn’t ask for, undoing configurations I’ve made, and resetting my menu customizations.
Otherwise I agree - updates never actually broke my system. They just made me not want to use it anymore.
When I still used this trash many years ago, it gradually made my PC slower. At that, consistently with every update.
many years ago
Yeah, like I said.
To my knowledge, it still happens. The concept’s called “Windows Rot” and has been there since the 90s. Hey, but maybe adding bloatware like screenshotting your entire screen, every five seconds will magically fix it. Also, Windows has moved away from its own framework for the start menu and has instead used the JavaScript React thingy, result being that if you spam the start menu button, you can saturate your CPU. That’s not a joke.
Yes, because I also have a Windows installation and use it at work. So yeah, I do think it’s unreliable.
