I am glad that I don't need to use Windows anymore. When I did, the LTSC version (the one made for ATM and Kiosks) was the only one that was productivity-friendly.

Microsoft doesn't want to accept that no one cares about Windows, and the OS is the thing that gets you to the thing you want to do.

I saw 2 instances of people getting "updating windows" in their personal laptops when they tried to present something and lost everyone's time. I imagine this happens a lot of times every day. And now they are just breaking everyone's system by forcing updates as well.

If nobody cared about windows there wouldn't be any posts like this one everyday on HN. The problem is people do care and need to use windows which makes all these stupidity by Microsoft the recent years frustrating.

I am personally just a lurker. Windows used to be my only OS for a -very- long time (DOS 2.x, yes 2, was my first MS OS). Now I click on these just to see how far it has fallen. It is like that friend you drifted away from and now you look at their FB posts now and again to watch as they get crazier and crazier.

We need something that just works. I guess Microsoft made me care because their products are unpredictable.

LTSC is what mainstream Windows should be. It doesn't load up a bunch of apps you don't ask for or throw ads in your face all the time. Solid, dependable, reliable, and stable.

Last Thursday windows 11 forced this update on my Acer machine. It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device, so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.

So I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update[0], especially when it's not mentioned whether the latest update solve my issue or not. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358

> so I had to reformat my machine to get Windows running again.

I can hear everyone in choir saying "but why would you do that?"

If Microsoft would ever do that to me in an update, I would install an immutable Linux distro on my machine and run windows as a VM (only if I had a strong requirement for it). That way you can do snapshots you can restore from easily.

I switched to Macs almost completely for personal and devlopment use about 13 or 14 years ago. However, last year I started a 3d printing side hustle, and got an HP laptop for running the print studio since the amount of hardware I could get for less than $1000 was hard to ignore. However, things like this, and other weird issues (my fonts have gone all wonky a couple of times after random updates) make me want to switch it over to a Linux distro (even though the software support for what I need is much better in the Windows world, and in some cases, better than even on the Mac)

I have embroidery software and cs3 suite that won't run on linux so I'm planning an offline windows 8.1 just for them on an old computer.

> the software support for what I need is much better in the Windows world

Please elaborate; can you name a few tools and what you use them for? Just curious.

A number of the Autodesk tools and Solidworks, for modeling. Slicers can use APIs native to Windows to perform model repairs. Bambu Lab's farm manager only runs on Windows.

The Creality one runs decent on Mac and Windows, sadly on Linux its a nightmare, and technically why I ditched Ubuntu / popOS for Arch Linux, but I can't help but still feel it runs a little weirder + its out of date compared to Mac and Windows versions. My buddy used to use Orca slicer on my printer, that one iirc should run on Mac too, but I havent tried it.

So sayeth the sea lion

Not the person you replied to, but I’ll go. Try experimenting with ham radio on anything but Windows. As far as I can tell, they revoke your Apple developer’s license and confiscate your Linux install disks when you start selling radio hardware.

That’s not completely true. There’s good Linux and Mac software for lots of things. But approximately 100% of radio manufacturers ship Windows software. Far fewer support anything else.

I bought a new radio at Christmas. Before buying it, I ruled out alternatives that didn’t have 1st party or good 3rd party support. It’s like trying to buy a scanner in 2003.

Fixed my son's computer by shredding all evidence of Microsoft off his computer and installing Linux Devuan OS. Fortunatly his files were all stored on his separate ssd dut to a previous issue.

I suppose that's one way to make Windows secure, keep it from running entirely.

> “ Microsoft has received a limited number…”

I always find this wording funny; the “limited” conveys no information but downplays the issue in a non-specific way. I wish we could have standardized writing guidelines for press reports, to call out such weasel words

Just today I dumped Windows 11 and moved to Linux, lots to learn but wow, so nice not to be inside their walls.

> Just today I dumped Windows 11 and moved to Linux, lots to learn but wow, so nice not to be inside their walls.

Well, best of luck. I don’t regret switching from Windows to Linux decades ago, I learned a lot, but I can’t say the problems ever stopped. If anything, I ran into more issues than I did on Windows, many of them caused by things I did at the command line, and others due to quirks or bugs in open‑source software. Still, it was a long learning journey that ended up helping my career. I’m not sure you’ll have the same steep learning curve we did back then, but I hope the switch pays off for you.

I had to renuke one of my gaming PCs this month so yeah

Except I think the problem happened just before Jan 13

But symptoms were almost exactly what TFA says

How is this not considered destruction of property? How about big tech plays by the same rules as everyone else?

I've got to stop doing Windows Updates

It is called Windows 10.

just delete the service entirely, same with defender

it's great

my only remaining windows PC is for games, and it's on its own vlan with its own external IP

if it gets hacked: I simply don't care

You don't really need Windows for gaming anymore unless you're playing the games that absolutely insist on kernel-level anti-cheat. Proton is extremely good on Linux these days.

> unless you're playing the games that absolutely insist on kernel-level anti-cheat

Sadly, I do :( Valorant is the main one that keeps my Windows partition around, for better or worse. Also sadly still there's some performance overhead for Linux gaming today, I hope that goes away in the future (for Intel/Nvidia cards especially)

I have a 2nd nvme in that machine for bazzite

not quite there for me yet I'm afraid!

sometimes games just won't work on Linux, doom the dark ages refuses to work on Linux for me.

VR?

You should care because once your PC is part of a bot network, it’s part of the problem

it's running Microslop Windows, so it's born compromised

it's an OS with constant built-in ads and spyware

it would have been considered malware in the 2000s

Herr derr derr!

KMFMS

Not being an incompetent or inexperienced Windows user, I'm vanishingly unlikely to be infected by a bot network trojan... and if that does happen, rest assured, I'll notice it.

Windows Update, on the other hand, is part of my threat model.

You can't do that. Eventually, something will stop working because it requires a certain Windows update.

Then reinstall with a later ISO and cripple it again. On the whole that's probably more reliable.

And noone asks why Windows looks, feels and operates the way it is. Isn't it strange that a megacorp creates these watermelon headed monstrosities and it gets worse after each iteration?

Hasn't the answer always been legacy support.

Do they really have legacy support anymore? They just randomly break things with updates

I think the general incompetence in the decision making behind windows is also a driver

Simple fix, move to Linux. (unless you're forced to use it like I am at work, for security theater reasons)

What is "Tay Bridge syndrome"? There are no Google hits. If you're going to use an obscure term (or make one up) then please define it.

Is it a reference to the Tay Bridge disaster? Looking at the Wikipedia article [1], it didn't seem to have anything to do with losing organisational knowledge due to retirement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster

they hire low quality engineers from 3rd world countries for years to save money, at some point even hr department was from these countries and prefer only people from same country / nation, what quality you can expect from such products

You mean the one I just downloaded and updated my laptop with? It installed OK.

I usually use MacOS and Linux, it's just that some software is Windows only, and I run MacOS on Apple Silicon - the windows program I needed only uses x86-64 architecture, so I can't use parallels (AFAIK).

I'm kind of hoping I get an update that bricks my laptop so I can install Debian over this MS Windows hellscape and run windows on a VM when needed. I may do it anyways after I get fed up with nagging MS messages and workarounds.