They're release cycle is 6 months, I'm perfectly fine with them blogging about what's coming in half a year and available to try out early. Nothing to get worked up about.

Their release cycle is way more opaque than that. I had to wait literally over a year (after "release") for them to let me install the upgrade to Win10 that would give me WSL2 (I don't remember what version that was). They control the upgrade cycle, and I couldn't get it to upgrade.

Maybe a clean install would have helped, but screw that.

Anyway, it's not just "wait 6 months".

You can always run the update assistant to immediately update to the latest stable release. What you were waiting ~1 year for was your build to near end of support and be forced to a newer version.

I'm not sure what "update assistant" means, but I opened the Settings for Windows Update, and manually told it to check for updates, and it refused to give me anything. I wasn't waiting to be forced, I was proactively seeking an upgrade that all their blogposts said had rolled out a year ago.

I googled for that phrase, got to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/windows-10-update-... , which said that Update Assistant does automatic updates (which I already have), and that if I want to manually do updates I should look at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/update-windows-3... , which tells me to do what I was doing for a year. Maybe there's some nuance I'm missing, though, I'm not a very competent sysadmin, especially on Windows.

Anyway, as far as I can tell all this means that they're knowingly writing false statements, also known as "lying", in case I was too subtle.

Now, maybe their lies are reasonable. A rolling release makes sense, to detect bugs in smaller segments of the population, and manage them. And maybe they have some reason to believe that my moderately old hardware still has driver issues that need ironing out, or something, I don't know (the hardward in question is an expensive-ish highish-perf tower, but it's not that recent). Managing horrifyingly multiplexed complexity across a billion hardware vendors is literally the main value that MS provides, so I don't really want to second-guess them. After all, this is why I'm wanting to use WSL.

But the fact remains that their marketing about when things will be available is full of false statements about availability dates.

I had one problem after another with WSL. That made me question why I was even bothering when I could just use Hyper-v instead. I still don't get why you would use WSL. I guess MS is trying to make a more seamless experience for people who aren't Linux savvy but want some of the capabilities?

They made it available for the stable build too.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

Do you have the same counter to other dev/beta releases, such as firefox nightly, or is it only considered evil “unpaid work” when Microsoft do it?