I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.

Here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=872665

This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.

I don't think I've intentionally shut down my desktop or laptop (excluding reboots and when leaving for travel) for years. Especially not laptops.

Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.

Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.

There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.

... I hear keys on ebay are about $2

My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day.

At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information.

Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.

This sounds like back then there were only crashes with a blue screen (and dump), and currently there's only hard crashes without blue screen. Both of them are not true. I.e. there are apparently types crashes for which it hasn't been possible in the past decades to come up with a bluescreen, othiing new there. It is just as likely, maybe even moe so, the difference in your particular case is your hardware/driver. It's of course possible there were effectively changes at the OS level in how hard faults are dealt with, but I wouldn't just assume so.

My testing pointed towards a DRM problem, since it doesn’t happen with other video streaming or with rendering outside the particular Chrome + Hulu combination.

My point is two-fold:

1. Even if the driver crashes, the OS should blue screen (like it used to) rather than just hard freeze the machine.

2. Using an HP laptop with Windows and Chrome to view Hulu is so mainstream it should “just work” — so it’s a sign of industry breakdown it doesn’t.

Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].

All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.

[0] https://borncity.com/win/2020/12/18/windows-10-20h2-chkdsk-d...

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/658194/windows-10s-new-update-is-d...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-pulls-security-updat...

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

[4] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...

It didn't even need to connect to the internet.

I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.

Apple is removing frameworks like crazy, forcing apps to update or die. Windows takes backward compatibility extremely seriously.

Edit: typo

The 4th "security update" somehow made that disappear?!

Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in rolling-release models.

That doesn't explain forced feature updates.

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/win...

It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.