Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 550 posts

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#201

Post by grassfedgeek »

With Windows Update what I really want is control over reboot. Don't automatically reboot, instead let me save documents, close applications and reboot manually. "Pausing" updates doesn't do that, and could be dangerous as urgent security updates are delayed.

With AI features, the most annoying thing has to be the Copilot key on my laptop keyboard. If you accidentally hit it it opens a Copilot window, interrupting your typing. The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off. There are other workarounds like installing an app from the Store, but all those workarounds come with unwanted excess baggage.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#202

Post by benrutter »

garganzol wrote: post #176
mdavid626 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say Windows Terminal is great. Have you ever used a proper one, like Ghostty or iTerm2?

Neither Ghostty nor iTerm2 work on Windows.

Yeah, I thought it was an odd couple of recommendations. Alacritty is an awesome terminal emulator that'll run on Windows (although I'd say Windows Terminal is still pretty close to decent)

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#203

Post by duzer65657 »

It is beyond naive, and I don't know how it can be anything but disingenuous to pretend that the top priorities of "Windows Insiders" are sensible defaults, a calm discoverability feed and how AI works in notepad. The reality is this guy obviously got promoted and assigned "win-back OS users" task, in the face of an organization that overwhelming wants to leverage Windows for short-term, user-hostile bumps in AI usage, advert impressions and questionable engagement scores. He's not going to be allowed to mess with things like the marketing strategy or sales targets, and you see that in these "highlights". Your target audience asked for things like "let me manage my machine locally" and you're delivering "a more muted and polished consumer experience". It's lipstick on a pig, only the pig is dead, and actually a pile of garbage.

Even if you do "get it", you ain't going to be allowed to deliver it.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#204

Post by ufmace »

Telaneo wrote: post #73
hackrmn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this. Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience. I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going,…

> I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the re…

> Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.

That's the one that really shocked me, and I haven't even experienced it for myself. I'm not normally that prone to excessive hyperbole, but that's about the most terrible thing I could ever conceive of an OS doing. All of the other stuff is a little annoying, but I could deal. But how in the hell could it ever be considered acceptable by anyone for your own OS to delete your files and move them to OneDrive or any other cloud service automatically? It's almost like ransomware, but the ransomware people will at least give you your files back for one flat payment. And the ransomware people at least know they're doing something nasty, and didn't try to integrate it as a default operating system feature. I guess they have better ethics than Microsoft!

It's just so obviously wrong, it's hard to even believe that it's a real thing. I don't think I could ever install an OS that even had a feature to do that at all, even if I could maybe temporarily turn it off with some scripts downloaded off the internet.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#205

Post by ninjagoo »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #155
PeterStuer wrote: post #40

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is. Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user bas…

> perpendicularly misaligned Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.

> Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.

I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit.

Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#206

Post by GeneralMaximus »

irishcoffee wrote: post #110
sagacity wrote: post #81

I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account. Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password becaus…

The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows. It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in you…

I don't even want a local account, I just want to be able to set a custom username for my account instead of some autogenerated jumble of letters.

My Microsoft Account email is "contact@". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".

I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.

I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.

I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#208

Post by realo »

TowerTall wrote: post #38

By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it. Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update. By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them. start > run…

I don't know if you realize it but your post single-handedly demonstrates a lot of the reasons why Windows is bad ...

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#209

Post by ramijames »

There's no amount of progress that will make me go back to Windows.

1. Microsoft accounts. No. 2. Ads in my OS. No. 3. Slow copying of files. No. 4. A maddening mix of UI/UX paradigms and implementations. No. 5. AI deeply embedded in my OS. No.

I don't know wtf their design team is doing.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#210

Post by p_ing »

snorremd wrote: post #93
PeterStuer wrote: post #40

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is. Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user bas…

Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop! When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work eith…

You can disable that behavior in the settings app.
Post reply on HN