[orf]

You see a lot of this kind of thing in HN threads as well, (including using older unmainted/vulnerable browsers), where there is presumably a subset of users who have very strong feelings about automatic updates and are also blind to the security implications of disabling them.

Keep your machines and software updated with the latest patches people. Keep your parents and non technical friends machines updated with the latest security updates. Don't ever tell them to disable it because your heavily customized windows 7 setup broke a little bit one time after a huge windows update.

[Anarch157a]

Security patches are a good thing, but reseting privacy settings, reinstalling Candy Crush Whatever/Cortana/Skype, re-enabling spy/adware, changing the UI EVERY.DAMN.TIME. is definitelly not good.

There are so much abuse people can take before they start considering the actual malware a lesser evil than Microsoft's malware-like OS.

My Windows box is running 10 LTSB with wuauserv disabled. I keep zero important stuff there, most of my gamesaves are synced with cloud servers from the game's developers (Overwatch and Elite: Dangerous) or from the store (Steam and GoG), so I can wipe it out any time with no real losses.

The important stuff (taxes, documents, pictures, etc.) are all on a notebook running Debian that is mostly kept cold.

Speaking on Debian, Microsoft could learn a LOT from them. Specially with regards to the strict policy of not adding new features to a stable version.

[Feniks]

One of the best things about LTSB is cumulative updates. I get 1.5Gb of security and bug fixes every month or so that quietly installs in the background. Like it was in Win7. And when its done it just sits there waiting for me to MANUALLY push the restart system button. Without ever nagging about it.

Honestly regular Windows is a fucking joke.

[Anarch157a]

> I get 1.5Gb of security and bug fixes every month

That's a joke all by itself. Not even a rolling release distro like Debian Unstable or Arch produce that volume of patches in a whole year...

Windows has two major problems in regards to updates:

1. It's utter inability to update files that are currently open by programs. All Unix and Unix-likes can handle deleting/moving/replacing open files gracefully by keeping a reference to the old file in memory. Windows can't, so the only way to update the most used DLLs is by rebooting.

2. It's a monolithic system, with so many cross dependencies, it's almost impossible to make small, punctual updates of independent packages. Hell, Unix was 23 years already when Windows NT 3.1 was finally released, MS used to develop and sell Xenix, yet they learned nothing from those.

It ridiculous how inept they are handling updates. If they ever ask me how to do it properly, I'd advise them to throw the whole idea of Windows in the trash and start again from a BSD (or maybe buy Solaris from Oracle). Slap an improved WINE for partial, best performance compatibility and a full VM for lower performance, full compatibility. It worked well for Apple while transitioning from "classic" MacOS to MacOS X, it could work for MS, as long as they don't screw it up completely.

[orf]

> It's a monolithic system

FYI, Windows is anything but a monolith - especially the kernel. It's heavily built around services and message passing.

Whereas actually Linux is a monolithic kernel (granted, the ecosystem on top is not so much).