Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

Just out of curiosity, what dev work can't you do on Linux? I usually only hear that case for games or graphic/video editing.

I'm going to make a few statements here to address the parent and children; but let me put the normal disclaimers here: I ONLY can speak for myself, I do not speak for MS or any of my coworkers.

Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to.

More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation:

MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say.

Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.

I'm glad that you've had a good experience with Windows 10, but this is still a big deal. There are a lot of reasons this is different from Chrome and Firefox updating, or even from Microsoft automatically delivering updates to Windows 10.

Windows 10 is not just an update: it's a completely separate operating system, illustrated by the fact that you have to accept a separate TOS. And while the upgrade may be free, the OS is not. I have never heard of an involuntary OS upgrade, and it's ridiculous that Microsoft is trying to impose one now. No rational user of Windows 7 would suddenly expect to be force-upgraded to Windows 10.

Yes, Chrome and Firefox will force you to update when you restart your browser. Yet although they might nag you, they won't forcibly restart your browser for you. This is what Microsoft is doing to users' computers: the upgrade might take hours and download gigabytes of data, even if the user never asked for it. This is effectively holding computers hostage. If a computer is being used in a safety-critical situation, even if it shouldn't be, that's a recipe for disaster.

Finally, Windows 10 has downsides that Windows 7 doesn't. First, the upgrade itself might not succeed, as I learned the hard way when the upgrade process simply... stopped. Additionally, depending on your configuration, the upgrade could render your software or hardware unusable: not all hardware may be compatible, even if Microsoft thinks it is. And Windows 10 has more invasive tracking than Windows 7 did, with little or no option for ordinary users to disable it.

It is just shocking to see people complaining of data loss, and other extreme inconveniences caused by this update, but then on the other hand people going so far as to flag this thread (see comments below), despite this having been experienced by thousands of people. Being skeptical makes sense, but flagging the thread? I don't see that kind of polar opposite reaction often on HN.

It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.

I would normally agree, but Microsoft have a very well known pattern of astroturfing. Hell, they invented practically invented the Internet version in 2001.

I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10.

To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question!

Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity.

Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.