They don't: they skipped release preview step this time.

They just want everyone to start at square one.

Windows updates in previous versions have caused more downtime for my businesses than any other sort of technical failure. Sometimes that has included data loss.

Package managers for various programming languages are another recurring source of danger. They often have debatable architecture with limited security and sandboxing functionality, sometimes allowing any rogue package's installation script to damage the system or cause data loss.

Apple's style with iOS updates seems to favour bricking old (or not so old) devices or crippling reductions in performance over data loss, but they still have a pretty bad track record, and they still rely on a ratchet-style update system where you can't easily go back if something does break.

I still find it baffling that in 2018 we retain so much emphasis on things like complicated filesystems, applications built on top of shared libraries and dynamic linking, and complicated plug-in based architectures. There are remarkably few good arguments for these fragile, risky, over-complicated strategies on modern systems. It's just momentum, but the collective cost to society from all the things that break as a result (and worse, break but can't then easily be fixed again) must be staggering.

[0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/#_wha...

However, I'm getting a bit tired of the overall poor quality of the biyearly updates. There's always one machine (either my main workstation or one belonging to my close relatives) where it'll miserably fail. The error messages and logs are completely unhelpful and so is whatever you'll find on the Microsoft Community website. In the end, I'm sure I'm going to have to reinstall at least one Windows cleanly, every six months.

I would guess that for a company as wealthy as Microsoft, the reputational damage to its flagship product would far outweigh any money saved.

But perhaps I'm just wrong about how the market works. If nothing else, reliability concerns are just one reason I'm avoiding Windows 10. (The other primary reason being Microsoft's potential snooping.)

Years ago I would end up drifting back into Windows.

However I haven't logged into Windows for a while now, and I'm considering deleting the partition.

When are Adobe and Autodesk going to support Linux properly? They are the only non-gaming reason for Windows now.

When there will be a business case. That means, when there will be people willing to purchase Linux versions of Adobe/Autodesk/whatever apps, but not their Windows or Mac versions.

Normally, when people need Adobe/whatever, they will purchase also whatever OS is needed to run them - if you are getting expensive pro apps, 130 EUR/OS license (pro/oem/before VAT) is a rounding error. To Adobe this signals, that the porting effort would be a wasted effort, which they can save and earn the same revenue anyway.

So it is more realistic that some competitor appears, fills that demand and grows somewhat, before established vendors notice.

I think this is becoming a real possibility.

The other day I realized that all of the commercial FPGA design tools I use, from Xilinx, Altera/Intel, and Lattice, are available for Linux as well as Windows.

And despite being fairly expensive if you need the versions that support larger FPGAs, they all provide a free version.

Naturally they target the enterprise distributions like RHEL, and there are quirks in general and some friction to using them on other distributions, but they actually work and they're supported.

Now, perhaps there's something about the people working on FPGAs that makes demand for Linux versions of those tools much higher, I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of installations for those tools was still mostly on Windows.

Autodesk has many programs now that run on Linux. Maya has run on linux for over 15 years.

Meanwhile their original product, 3ds max, is pretty locked into Windows.

It was originally a DOS application, which was rewritten for Windows, and is used in game development.

It doesn't make sense to say Autodesk doesn't 'properly support Linux' when they have software for Linux, and one program that isn't for Linux doesn't really have much demand on Linux in the first place.

It is really hard to change anything about the system without verbose and cryptic calls to under documented executables.

Windows is a poorly made piece of software rotten from the core. If you look deeper, you discover the horror of how things work and fragments from Steve Ballmer days.

You can try to make an argument that it’s not rotten to the core, but no way in hell anyone would say “Windows is beautiful”.

A business having constant issues with Windows updates breaking machine needs to hire better people on the hardware planning and acquisitions sides, QA sides, and Windows/Active Directory/Group Policy sides.

What if I only have 5 employees and just want to use the computers with MS Office and another industry specific program on it?

Do I need to hire a dedicated technician to make sure my PC is running or do I want the OS manufacturer that I pay to deliver a product that isn't suddenly deleting my data?

There are some smaller IT shops doing IT support for SMB but they can't come in every day and the customers are often not skilled enough to notice that something is wrong. Like losing valuable data through Windows and incremental backups.

use the Semi-Annual Channel and defer updates for 365 days? presumably by then the issues would have been worked out.

As well as this idea that consumer users are essentially beta testers.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-...

[2] https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2018/10/02/wi...

2018. Windows update deletes non system files.

2018.

But Microsoft is doing its damnedest to make it look like just another update to ordinary users. It's the same trick they used to automatically "upgrade" Windows 7/8/8.1 computers to Windows 10, only subtler this time because users already have Windows 10 which helps conceal what's going on.

So, I don't think Microsoft should be allowed to rely on the kind of argument you make in your first paragraph. If it's going to push everything out as being just the latest version of Windows 10 that everyone must have, then all updates are now "regular Windows updates", and the entire-OS update needs to be as reliable as the essential security update that just replaces a flawed networking library with a bug-fixed version.

If Microsoft can't do that -- and obviously it's an extremely difficult requirement to meet, with ample evidence suggesting that it won't happen -- then maybe the whole mandatory updates strategy isn't such a great idea?

If you use Windows 10 Professional or above, though, you can defer Redstone updates for a maximum of 1 year while still getting the usual bugfixes. I guess that's how long Microsoft wants to keep supporting the not-updated version.

That's OK as far as it goes, and maybe for casual power users (if there is such a thing) it's better than nothing.

However, for small business users who would traditionally also be using the Pro edition of Windows, a one-year delay is marginally more valuable than a chocolate teapot. We're talking about the operating system, the foundation on which the rest of our software base is built, and that software base may cost thousands per machine. The guaranteed support period is missing a zero if it wants to be taken seriously.

With that being said it's a bit annoying to say the least that they don't discern between minor and major updates (considering the time it takes to perform it and then the time it takes users to find their marks around if they change UI stuff).

Although Windows 10 Pro had the option that would have deleted the files set to "not configured" which as far as I know is safe. I set it to "disabled" just to be extra safe.

This reminds me of an ongoing gag in the movie Airplane![0]

"Looks like I picked the wrong week to [stop smoking, stop drinking, stop sniffing glue, update Windows 10]".

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v46plhmxXU4

If you want stability and safe update, you either use safe release version (Debian stable, Win10 LTSB, ...); you wait the service pack, or you give it a month or two to have issues found.

JFYI, accordingly to this, LTSB is now LTSC and you shouldn't choose it unless you have an embedded device:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ukplatforms/2018/06/11/s...

Of the twelve key points/reasons given in the above, more than six make me actually want to have a LTSC, however.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/940017/user-profile...

You access it through the group policy editor (covered in the above article).

I guess this was a problem once with Vista 10 years ago. The same exact steps work with Windows 10.