I’m not an ardent supporter of Windows, or, at this point any particular OS or infrastructure, but, and especially after the ludicrous nature of Windows 8, I have found Windows 10 to actually be a fairly stable and usable OS.

To hear the recent stories of updates causing issues is surprising, but with so many supported configurations for Windows, I find it a lot more excusable than MacOS or ChromeOS.

That doesn’t mean things like this shouldn’t be caught in QA, it just means it’s not always easy.

The previous file loss incident was more of a UX problem rather than a technological one. To paraphrase, the update would , at one point, ask the user whether they'd like to migrate their existing documents and settings. If the user chose no then their documents will be deleted. This is why it only affected some people, and a simple warning would have been sufficient to clear up any confusion, though some might argue the option should have never been offered in the first place.

This is the very same problem I had with the 1st gen clickwheel iPod. When I first connected one to a new computer, iTunes asked me if I wanted to 'initialize' the device. Oblivious of its meaning I went with 'yes' and wiped a borrowed iPod clean. Friendship ruined forever.

Are you describing the same migration as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18444898?

If so, that's not a UX problem. That's a flat-out bug. In short, there was an option to migrate files from folder A to B. Months later, in the update, folder A was accidentally deleted. The migration would decrease the damage, but not prevent it, and saying 'no' is not a mistake.

Wow. That reminds me of my experience with the Lisa back around 1983. It said that the boot disk needed to be initialized, and my attitude (it a school computer) was that if it was stupid enough to reformat the floppy it just booted off of, I was going to let it.

Sounds like Apple just doesn't learn some lessons.

Well that was almost a decade ago and I'm unaware of Apple making similar mistakes recently, however I have never managed to figure out iTunes sync in the meantime.

However this behavior is really out of the line for MS since they've got a good track record on backwards compatibility and data preservation. Previously during in-situ upgrades the installer would back up gigabytes of data in a special folder on the off chance that they might be needed again in the event of a rollback, and somehow they managed to drop the ball this time round.

Yeah, I'm also pretty "anti-windows", whatever that may mean, but I've been happy in using it.

I've had some problems, but then again, I expect my computer to do weird things sometimes, I guess that's expected if you're a software engineer :p

It's not like Windows 10's issues only started recently.

There have been plenty of reasons to bitch about it since it was released.

I wish Microsoft would update Windows to use a Chrome OS like update system with delta updates and read-only system partitions. When partition A is in use (mounted read-only), an update would create a copy of A on partition B. Then download a binary delta and apply it to B to update B to the newest OS version. On the next system start partition B would be booted, if there is an error restart to partition A (a known working state), otherwise B is marked as 'good'.

It's 2018 and updates are still slow to apply and/or break computers... what a strange world.

My Windows directory is currently sitting at 49GB. I don't think this is a realistic idea for Windows-based PCs unless cheap SSDs start getting bigger with a quickness.

Split that 49GB into separate piles of OS binaries, configuration data, and third-party crap that gets dumped into the Windows directory, and the problem won't look so bad. And SSD prices have been dropping fast for several months now, and the drops will continue well into next year.

But the ideal solution would be a copy-on-write filesystem supporting snapshots, rather than A/B partitions.

> But the ideal solution would be a copy-on-write filesystem supporting snapshots, rather than A/B partitions.

NTFS is already that via Volume Shadow Copy. They just don't use it in the way we're discussing, but the tech is there.

SSD are getting surprisingly cheap, you can now get 250 GB for 50 euros, 500 for less than 100 euros (and we're talking samsung 860 evo, not cheap knock off)

I just recently discovered the same. I hadn't shopped SSD prices in a quite a while, so I was pleasantly surprised when I did last week. I picked up the Samsung 860 evo for $87 (USD).

> My Windows directory is currently sitting at 49GB.

That doesn't sound like how much Windows is actually using for itself. How much of it is \Windows\Installer\?

Why is it so big though? On my system the Windows directory is only 5GB.

I just checked mine and it is at 33 GB. Are you running a fresh installation? Do you have very many MS development tools installed?

I know in the past, any Windows updates would be cached in your windows directory forever and there was no safe way to remove them. That would gradually grow the windows directory size forever. Also, it seems there are a lot of files that get thrown in there when you start installing multiple versions of SQL Server or Visual Studio.

Right-click on the drive -> Properties -> General.

Disk Clean-up.

Clean-up System Files.

Windows Update Clean-up (and Temporary Windows installation files).

Ok. Ok.

Enjoy.

I did a clean install of Windows 10 on my workstation less than a month ago and my Windows directory is sitting at 23GB, methinks something funky is going on here.

Do you have a bunch of applications installed? IIUC, Windows keeps different versions of each of its DLLs around for whatever apps requires them. I would expect that installing applications might embiggen your Windows directly a lot.

I wouldn't say I have "a lot" of applications installed, although I'm not too sure how to quantify that.

I assumed it WinSxS related as the other reply mentions, and upon investigation found that it is 9GB alone! I don't run Windows outside of work so I've just never really bothered looking into it, but if it continues to balloon I guess I'll have to.

It's probably due to WoW64 and WinSxS inflating due to dll caching and backup resources after Windows Update.

Actually, I was surprised to find that MacOS does a form of this, apparently - I recently attempted an update that failed and simply had to hold down ‘option’ on boot to select my regular drive instead of the update. The second time I tried the update it worked just fine.

I'm not 100% sure what you were experiencing, but this is not how macOS works under normal circumstances. Maybe while the update is in progress, but you can't just downgrade to High Sierra from Mojave so easily, once the installation is complete.

I suspect the GP saw this during a point release update on Mojave.

Baseless speculation: I suspect that they were referring to Apple making use of the ability to spin up a new temporary APFS volume to store the Update packages + Staging environment and blessing it for boot.

It makes a certain amount of sense to push out a static staging environment to then run the requisite OS updates and firmware updates from that controlled environment. That way you can reboot as many times as is required for the updates in the point release and still come back to the staging environment ready to go to the next stage - only needing to touch the User Data Volume when absolutely necessary.

While not nearly as 'clean' as an atomic update on a read only root filesystem, this method could be significantly more controllable and more 'clean' than doing it live on the User's Data Volume.

I suspect with iOS Software updates - it's a transactional atomic update as those machines all use read only root filesystems regardless.

It is in the works :)

The reason this update was paused was that it deleted user files (subdirectories of your user folder that it thought were empty and useless but actually weren't). The model you suggest might be a good idea but it wouldn't have helped with this update at all.

Fedora is also trying to do this for linux with their "Silverblue" tech preview

I wish Microsoft would modernize Windows to be a fully (or mostly) POSIX-compliant architecture like (almost?) every other OS in existence. It's a unicorn in that regard, and unicorns should stay extinct. ;-)

The people who truly care about it not being POSIX compliant are also the people who would still denigrate it even if it became fully compliant so ... From their point of view, why bother ? You are your own worst enemy on that one.

On the flip side, with WSL windows 10 can now pretty much run any POSIX compliant code anyway.

POSIX was made to unite the UNIXes. The reason why POSIX compatibility would be important is for efficient porting of software from one platform to another, especially when the platforms aren't UNIX-compliant.

Microsoft never needed to buy into that; Microsoft set its own standards with MS-DOS long before that, and Windows further cemented Microsoft's position. Where all the UNIXes and UNIX clones were in dire need of standardisation, MS-DOS and Windows were and still are the Microsoft standard.

Even in modern times, POSIX compliance doesn't necessarily mean much when a lot of recent software is being designed Linux-first, with support for other POSIX systems sometimes relegated to third-party or distribution-specific patches. Not to mention all the various implementations of POSIX compliance come with their own little quirks that make things different enough to still require manual checking for this or that.

Additionally, there are plenty of libraries that are compatible with both POSIX-compliant and non-POSIX platforms. Targeting these libraries produces perfectly usable software.

Therefore, POSIX compliance isn't the be-all and end-all of computing. Somehow or other we've managed to muddle through the years without it in Windows, and Nazis aren't riding dinosaurs on blood-soaked streets just yet.

You're making fun of unicorns, but treating 'POSIX' like a magic word.

As someone who generally prefers Windows, it would still be nice to have a greater degree of POSIX in it, just for the sake of more portability. There are some choices, like the path syntax, that are never going to make Win32 fully POSIX compliant. But why can't we e.g. have POSIX threads and synchronization primitives, or most of the filesystem API?

The old Unix personality had that - and now the new Linux Personality (they no longer call it that) implements this for you. This complaint no longer makes sense since WSL was released.

WSL serves different scenarios - it is for running Linux software on Windows. It's all or nothing - if you want Linux, you get Linux. If you want Windows, you get Windows. You can't mix and match.

So it doesn't help you if you want to, say, write a cross-platform library in C that needs threads, and that can be used from both Unix console apps and Win32 desktop apps. For that, you actually need a cross-platform threading API. In C++, that actually exists, in form of std::thread and friends. In C, you have to rely on third-party libraries, and those libraries have to wrap the various platform-specific APIs - so your program is only as portable as those third-party libraries. If you could just #include <pthread.h> everywhere, it would have been so much easier.

The IPC communication between WSL and native windows applications is getting better all the time. Along with the filesystem they both share you can use sockets, and named pipes.

Because of fork() you will never be able to arbitrarily use NT objects unconstrained in WSL apps, but there are lots of options. You can launch both windows and Linux programs arbitrarily from the shell now so the decision to choose one or the other is slowly coming down to preference.

When are they going to make WSL usable for developers, though? I have a nice Core i7 Surface Pro that's collecting dust because anything that touches the filesystem under WSL is too slow to use for most of the work I do.

This is literally never going to get better despite promises. It’s a filesystem limitation of NTFS. Small files cause MFT contention due to the architecture of NTFS.

This has always been a problem. Check out a really big git or SVN repo on the native box using native windows tools and compare to a native Linux install on ext4. Ext4 can take 10% of the time to complete.

ReFS suffers the same fate too.

I can’t say anything more than walk away.

Using a VM is orders of magnitude faster.

I find WSL to be pretty amazing. I can compile and test Linux binaries on my Windows laptop, and I can even directly use the same directory of source code as I use to build Windows binaries. I haven't noticed a difference in compilation or test times, but I wouldn't expect to unless it was at least an order of magnitude bigger. It's not like I sit there waiting for it to build (normally).

Of course it's absolutely fair if you find WSL poor for your use case. But performance is not really the main thing that makes it "usable for developers", IMO.

Its a problem for Microsoft (or any other company) to force updates on consumers who paid for the OS and don't want updates. It isn't about security concerns, because the security-related updates are only a small fraction of the overall changes that Microsoft forces onto our systems. This would be true even if their forced updates worked flawlessly and didn't brick machines or cause other unwanted problem. End-users should have the ability to turn off updates and voluntarily accept whatever risks come with their choice.

I also made quality changes: I switched to LTSC.

Post-Nadella Microsoft is trying to project an image of being customer focused. Well, what I'm seeing are a lot of customers who say that they don't want Windows 10's feature updates, or that they want them less frequently.

It just so happens that the version of Windows these customers are asking for already exists, as an actively-supported product. But you can't buy it. I can't describe this behavior as anything but anti-customer.

> Well, what I'm seeing are an awful lot of customers saying they don't want MS's Windows 10 feature updates, or they want them less frequently.

This is similarity bias affecting your judgment.

I believe the way windows 10 currently runs update is wrong for me, and for most tech users, by far. I'm glad it takes 10 second to fix it to allow delayed updates again, but still I would like it to come out of the box easier to manage.

On the other hand, for the very very vast majority of windows users, this is superior to the end result they experienced before (updates never installed, and not by choice).

What's wrong here is a clear case of "one size fits all", they apply the same system they made for the majority to everyone, and it end up not work for some users for a variety of reason, but it's (imho) wrong of you to think this is not exactly what most users want: "do it like my phone/tablet, I don't care about updates"

Just to be clear, I'm not saying a majority of customers dislike MS's feature updates, just that there are a lot who do.

The amount of people asking for something like LTSC is large enough that Microsoft really, really ought to make that version more widely available. IMO, Microsoft's refusal to do so says a lot about their values as a company.

I would imagine that the vast majority either don't like it or are indifferent to it because it's just something Windows does.

> What I'm seeing are an awful lot of customers saying they don't want MS's Windows 10, but would prefer to go back to Windows 7.

FTFY. I'm not talking about the improvements underneath the hood, but just the way things looked and acted under Windows 7.

What do you prefer about Windows 7 compared to [(Windows 10) - (Feature Updates) - (UWP + Windows Store)]?

There's a "stable" software option available for organizations for Windows 10 Home.

I switched over to the "Semi-Annual Channel" in Windows Updates advanced options. The "Semi-Annual Channel" is for "widespread use in organizations" versus the "Semi-Annual Channel (Targeted)" which is "ready for most people."

Also, the updates can be deferred for up to 365 days, but I'm not sure if that would slow the updates down rather than just delay them.

Since you need either an enterprise agreement, or you need to pirate it, I'm not sure this is realistic for most people.

Pirating Windows is not realistic for most people? From my experience, paying for Windows is what is not realistic for most people.

The vast majority of Windows is the home version that comes preinstalled on your $400 laptop

I concede. Personally, most of the PCs I see are custom desktop computers, hence my comment.

As the other person above, this is similarity bias affecting your judgement. Which is fine, it happens, but it puts you in the wrong once you let it cloud your opinion on what happens (quote) "for most people". Most people have a legal windows 7/8/8.1/10 key that came with their computer and let them run win10.

A license for Windows 10 costs 100 bucks on Newegg. Who are these people building custom desktop computers who cannot afford $100? Custom PCs tend to be the domain of people building expensive gaming machines.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

In retrospect, the October update's flaws were incredibly tiny: What had us all scurrying to make backup copies of our Documents folder ended up affecting only people with really weird/niche configurations that didn't really make a lot of logical sense[1]. Data loss is always bad, but it strikes me every time I see this sort of thing that no other company[2] has even tried to maintain compatibility with so many arbitrary niche options this long. Neither Apple nor Google sell products which could have a weird configuration in a 2009 era OS which could be upgraded and officially supported in 2018.

That being said, Microsoft's month-to-month patch reliability has been absolutely terrible. While not causing data loss, the monthly updates have been regularly show-stopping of late, and anything that gets Microsoft to realize it made a mistake on axing it's testers (and removing the ability to cherry-pick security fixes) is something I can stand behind.

[1] Complete aside, I have actually heard of someone applying version control to the folder that contains the Windows registry, and being upset at Microsoft that it broke their PC.

[2] Linux is not a company, and truly open source platforms do some amazing things for long term support. I think they just dropped support for 386 processors a couple years ago.

>ended up affecting only people with really weird/niche configurations that didn't really make a lot of logical sense

Did it now? afaik if you only had one drive, and one partition, and had Windows installed there, and you didn't have enough free space, you lost everything. That's not exactly niche

That's incorrect. You had to be using folder redirection (very rarely seen outside of corporate environments, and no longer popular in those either), and then placed files in the original folder that was supposed to be redirected elsewhere, which you shouldn't be doing even if you are using folder redirection. (In short, to have this issue, you had to use a feature almost nobody uses, and also be using it improperly.)

Note that the reason that Microsoft failed to address it is because while a Feedback submission had been made, it didn't have any upvotes, because it was so niche that almost none of the Insiders experienced it. Despite the fact that Insiders are the sort of power users most likely to have fiddled with weird features like folder redirection.

Details are here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/10/09/updat...

I'm not sure that was the only way for it to happen. I don't have sources, only the anecdote of a friend that got his install ruined and had to reformat. I don't know what he did, but I'm 100% sure he wasn't doing any folder redirection

How would Windows deleting his personal files ruin his installation and why would a re-format help in that case?

But maybe you're referring to another bug.

I think it didn't just deleted his personal files; it corrupted the installation itself. It might be another bug. I'm not sure though.

Searching around for some sort of source, I found this article[1], which says "...some of my readers told me their hard drives were corrupted and thus were unable to roll back the update." Of course this may be hearsay and false information in times of panic, so I take the statement with a grain of salt.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/10/06/micro...

A corrupted installation requires a new install, but not a reformat.

> and then placed files in the original folder that was supposed to be redirected elsewhere, which you shouldn't be doing even if you are using folder redirection. (In short, to have this issue, you had to use a feature almost nobody uses, and also be using it improperly.)

I seem to recall reading that the "improper use" in this case could also consist of using a program that hard-coded paths and was not aware of folder redirection.

If I remember correctly, folder redirects were being set up by OneDrive attempting to mirror well-known directories like My Documents and My Pictures. Many people lost very important files.

The issues were not at all tiny: OneDrive is installed by default, I think (it is on the Surface Book), and it uses known folder redirection; yet it’s easy to end up with things in %USERPROFILE%\Documents as well as %USERPROFILE%\OneDrive\Documents, whether deliberately or accidentally. For me, I used to deliberately put some things in OneDrive and some things not in OneDrive, depending on things like their size and how often they’d change and how much I cared about them. After OneDrive app broke on my account, I gave up on using it.

All up, I think data loss was probably uncommon, but not rare. And data loss of such things is always severe.

The installed base is so huge that it will be a significant number of people affected no matter how weird the edge case. Also, if they’re going to implement a feature they should expect it to be used and know when they broke it (especially for a company with the absurd resources of Microsoft).

I believe you are undervaluing the consequences and likelihood of that bug.

These are one set of steps to be effected by the bug.

1. Have a primary hardrive that is nearly full.

2. Get a second hard drive to store more pictures to your machine.

3. Change My pictures folder location to save on the new hard drive. (The least likely step but not super unlikely if your searching ways to stop your primary hard drive filling up)

4. Click no when asked if you want to copy everything across to the new location (ignoring it saying it's recommended (but only so you can see your older photos easier))

5. Have the update roll out and delete all of the old photos you had.

Losing those old photos (perhaps of passed loved ones) you may not have anywhere else can be heartbreaking. The fact that a very small percentage of users is effected does not change the fact that as we're talking about a massive user base, the absolute number of users is always going to be high.

This seems like an excellent time to point out that storing a single copy of irreplaceable data like photos is a really bad idea.

I am certainly not undervaluing the consequences. Data loss is always huge, but I would say, comparatively, the likelihood of losing your data to this Windows bug pales in comparison to say, getting locked out of your Google Photos account and having no way to appeal. (I have a friend who is unable to get into a Google account with correspondence from a deceased family member.) I don't feel like Microsoft is even close to the industry worst in putting your data at risk because of this bug.

And with regards to the massive user base, bear in mind, this was caught in the very early stages of a slow, phased rollout process, explicitly for this sort of reason. So it was a small percentage of a very small rollout to begin with.

I don't know about this particular issue and how bad the fault was. But I do feel this aspect of Microsoft (regardless of how horrible they have been or is) gets downplayed to oblivion. OsX would have data loss every minor release if the current issues of the OS is anything to go by considering how few configuration it has to support.