I agree with most everything else you’ve said, but I feel like I’m using a different windows than everyone else when they talk about “forced reboots”. This never happens to me! I’ve seen prompts, but they were always able to be delayed. Is it something that only kicks in if you go an ages without manually rebooting?

At a certain point though, I’d say forcing users to install security updates is the user-centered option.

I've been using Windows 10 for the past year and a 4 months now, after some 10 years 100% on Linux. I had to disable a weird setting which would forcefully update and reboot the computer when it considered to be "Not Active". I believe it was called "Active Hours" and by default had no way to turn off: you had to choose some hours of the day when you're supposedly not using it. Lost some work like this and had to do some tinkering, not sure if register or otherwise. Or maybe I just disabled automatic updates I guess.

So, in conclusion, no, an OS taking control off my hands forcefully is not user-centered, no matter how much in programming circles updates are seen as "crucial". Nothing is more crucial than the computer being predictable to its owner.

People forget the security hell that preceded Microsoft's obsession with updates. You get half the internet's bandwidth used by a worm or you get forced updates. I haven't seen anyone propose a viable compromise.

the right solution is updates that don't require any restart or service interruption. but that is technically difficult atm

Obviously auto security updates, and make the other updates optional. Microsoft does not bundle the security and "feature"/telemetry updates for your benefit.

It’s not when it reboots in the middle of the night while you had open documents and apps, and the OS didn’t save any of that.

However, the forced reboots are trivial to disable in Group Policy.

I can't use Group Policy because when I upgraded from Windows 8, it upgraded to Home edition

it's Home edition because that's what came with the laptop's Windows 8, it was never an issue on Windows 8 because you could disable stuff on Windows 8 without using Group Policy

There are several ways to safely enable it on home.

That list mostly seems a bit odd.

This Windows computer doesn't force reboots (though it does nag me), it hasn't tried to trick me to upgrade to 11, it isn't sending telemetry to MS, it has never forced me to sign up for a non-local account.

I think it does force security updates on me, which I think is clearly pro-user, though arguably not respectful.

I also decided to use Edge to access my job's shitty Outlook stuff, and every ten minutes Edge tries to trick me into doing something, including but not restricted to making itself the default (you can pry my Firefox from my cold dead...). Until I decided to try Edge, it has not ever done anything to try to get me to use Edge.

That said, I'm not agreeing with GP that Windows "has more respect for the user than Linux does", that just seems confused to me. But I also think that I read a lot of criticism of Windows that seems laughable.

> it isn't sending telemetry to MS

How? Literally even LTSC builds have some amounts of telemetry. Are you running some nonstandard build of Windows?

Well, maybe I'm wrong about that. It's a standard build of Home, with an hour or two invested in config maybe a decade ago when I installed it (back when it was 7, or something, before 10 existed). I spent a little time on Wireshark seeing what it was doing, but not much time, and that was a long time ago. So maybe I'm wrong. :thinking:

Ah, yeah, that’s true, but the point is that you should be respected by default (even if they just asked yes or no). It’s on by default, turns back on almost every update, and some level is on at all times (mandatory).

Previously when I installed Windows, I had the option to create a local account. I had to click on a few misdirections but I was able to do it.

Recently though, I had to reinstall Windows to do something, and I could not find a way to create a local account at all. AFAIK they removed the option now, or made it much harder to find.

I did a Windows reinstall on a Surface in the Spring, it installed with no MS Account.

Mine doesn't do any of that. (Except maybe the telemetry, which I don't care about.) You've configured yours wrong if it is doing that.

And yet, my software from 20 years still works on Windows.

On Linux, I have to spend days to months figuring out how to port code to the latest snowflake distro flavor dependency. And that's something that takes an software skilled individual, imagine how disrespected your average user is in this process.