> Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.

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...

So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.

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

For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.

Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.

From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.

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.

They've been way more stable than MacOS updates recently too. That has to say something about the processes Microsoft has in place to QA.

It’s not only QA. It’s approach to legacy features.

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

The trade off there is that Apple can then perform a major architectural shift in a single fell swoop because it’s not carrying around silly amounts of legacy cruft. Endless backwards compatibility isn’t always a benefit imo.

That works if your os is used by geeks. Doesn’t fly that well if you need solid, long term stable platform to build your solutions on top of.

Edit: typo

lol - Yup, Mac's are only used by geeks. /s

Have they? Or do the people they impact simply not blog about issues.

The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.

My new Mac mini was doing kernel panics at every shutdown for about a year.

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

How does that answer the question? If anything it reinforces the point.