Windows has a long history of tech-illiterate users downloading optimizer tools from shady websites that mess with registry keys and break stuff in surprising ways. And it's always Microsoft who gets the blame, not the shady utility. From that POV, I can understand Microsoft being reserved about gating this kind of stuff behind registry keys. These days, you can only do this stuff with group policies if I'm not mistaken, a feature that regular home users don't have access to.

Isn't group policy applied by changing registry keys? I've never actually looked it up, but I've always been under the impression that group policy changes just update registry keys that are checked by other software/parts of the os, and that the only advantage to using it (in a non-domain environment) is that it's the official way of doing it.

It does yes, but it also prevents the user changing it (or it changes it right back if they can). But it is possible that the feature requires a domain join to actually work, or perhaps the Enterprise edition of Win10. I didn't look into it.

It's annoying having to set up a whole windows domain just to disable this though :(

I haven't been using Windows for a while, but I think there's a way to disable via Group Policy or registry now?

There is. Hard, but possible, just the way it should be.

Enterprise and Education only.

I got Windows Long-Term Service Branch (LTSB, now LTSC for Long-Term Service Channel) for precisely this reason.

After having an update happen at a bad time, one closing a file I hadn't yet saved, and another killing a process of computations I had been leaving to run overnight, I decided that I wanted to use my computer the way I saw fit, not the way someone else saw fit. If someone cannot wrap their head around the idea that I might leave a process running while I sleep, or that I might forget to save something in a program that doesn't have an autosave feature, well, they're not considering all of the use cases.

For giggles, after LTSB I did "all the things" to get rid of forced updates on one particularly infrequently-used tablet and, as an experiment, left it unpatched for slightly over a year before seeing what would happen once I finally let it do its thing. For one, the updates took about three and a half hours, which I thought was interesting; just re-installing would likely be faster.

More interesting, though, was that the world did not end because I had not patched this tablet.

I get aiming at the eighty percent of your users who just would not think to update, but being that hostile to the other twenty percent who are aware of updates and still would like that control is annoying. It is sad to see that this kind of thinking has made its way to Linuxland, which I had imagined to be the last bastion of "we're doing this for your own good."

True, LTSB/C is really really nice. It doesn't come with any of the crap/bloatware that MS package in the normal editions either. It's just clean and does its job. I love it.

It's just really hard to get officially for consumers. They should sell it to everyone that wants it.

And yeah, Ubuntu Desktop is kinda the "Windows Home Edition" of Linux though. Something like Arch, Debian or Alpine won't do this to you.

There always has been (though perhaps not for Windows Home Edition). My Windows systems have never, and still don't auto-update.