Microsoft to force Windows 11 24H2 on Home and Pro users Microsoft has begun distributing Windows 11 24H2 to user devices as the company enters the next stage of the operating system's rollout. Enterprises need not worry at this stage – devices managed by IT departments won't be updated. But users with an eligible machine running the Home or Pro version of Windows 11 will eventually …
Weird. M$ with never ending issues versus Linux with... occasional minor issues? None of which I can think of off the top of my head. Odd peripheral driver issues that hardly exist any more?
But yeah, M$ good, Linux bad. /s
Locks up from browser using all memory, Can't install native apps because of libxx.so.nnn not compatible. Flatpack apps are 4x size of windows versions, 50% of videos won't play, email database corrupted - no known way to fix. Automatic updates regularly fail, have to be fixed from commandline.
Sadly around 2005, Linux was well ahead, but over the last 5 years it's now well behind Win7 on stability and usability for me.
Of course, MS is not forcing Win7 on us. No Sireee.
Good Universe man, leave the crack alone! I've been living with Linux off and on and now full-time on Ubuntu 24.04 for over a decade. The only reason I used to run Windows was for the gaming support.
Even that is now taken care of by Steam and Proton, so rather than put up with the risks of "Recall" and all the other "AI" shovelware Microsoft is pushing, I jumped ship permanently a couple months ago.
Zero problems. Three of many dozens of games tested won't run properly, none of which are a big deal compared to the fact that Recall captures digitally signed and identified snapshots of your screen that can be retrieved by a LEO request at any time without your knowledge. Why do you think the American spy agencies no longer cry about not being able to crack encryption? They are being provided the data they want regardless of your encryption now!
Running Linux means I can run the same software that production does instead of a not-quite-compatible Windows version. Makes life a lot easier.
Nope. It is forever Wintendo and not a serious OS to me. Linux won the war.
Linux "occassional minor issues"? The last version upgrade I did between the last Ubuntu LTS edition and the current LTS one was an unmitigated disaster. There was nothing special about the machine or the installation - basically vanilla with no tricksie setup. And it borked itself.
24H2 has been particularly naff though. The only machine it's cleanly upgraded on for me is the one that isn't supported hardware (no TPM, too old a CPU but it does have popcnt). Once I found out how to trigger the upgrade on such ancientness, no problems, it's running 24H2 like a champ.
You don't have to use Ubuntu... Other distros are available and IMHO, far better.
Even Debian is better than Canonical's finest. Canonical is IMHO drinking too much of MS's KoolAid in recent years. A great example of that is SNAP (YUK)
As someone who has been using Linux since the early days of Slackware, I rarely do LTS upgrades. I prefer clean installs after 4+ years of use. If (that is a big IF) your backup process works then it should be less risk than an LTS upgrade.
The same goes for Windows major versions btw.
Sorry but frequently on El Reg we joke about the standard Windows fix of "reinstall the OS".
Does this not become a similar thing if the only way to get a reliable OS upgrade is to reinstall?
I have done many Windows and Linux upgrades (mostly the RHEL derived or Ubuntu) with minimal issues. As a general success/failure criteria the more software or hardware installed the higher the risk. If Linux has a GUI installed the higher this risk.
What I have found on Linux is where dependent libraries or package like Mono are updated and the application does not like the update.
As an aside most of my OS installs are virtualised with only my laptop and the actual hypervisors being a bare metal install.
I've just clean installed 24H2 in an Oracle Virtual Box VM which also virtualises TPM. No problems (as yet) except Notepad not importing a file containing accented characters correctly (copy/paste from old to new worked, though).
Another clean machine install with Rufus, OK but slow, even with 8GB RAM.
Apparently it came in with AMD's Barcelona, and Intel's Nahalem / Haswell architectures. It's not part of SSE4a / SSE4.2, but came in at the same time those SIMD extensions did (which Win11 also requires).
A number of downvotes for you, I see!
It's fine to criticise Windows on here (and let's face it, there's normally plenty of justification) but you must never, ever point out any issues with any Linux distro. As all fanboys know, Linux is perfect in every respect and distros never contain Microsoft-esque problems. Even when they do...
The worst one can say about Linux is that it is now no more prone to difficulties than Windows. It's easy to come up with horror stories about either OS, but when you average things out, Linux is (approximately, if you insist) as usable and reliable as Windows.
Emotionally, however, Linux is continually getting easier to love, while Windows is getting easier to hate. Looking at Microsoft's actions, this almost seems intentional.
And that's why I, a Unix person, dislike Linux. The Bar is set to "better than Windows" -- and that's it. No desire to be a good OS, just "better than Windows". And Linux often stumbles over that bar. File system of the month, firewall solution of the year. Always more fun to reinvent something from scratch rather than improve (or fix) the existing things, and then leave support for both the new and several old solutions in place. Lots of re-inventing of very round wheels, with zero apparent benefit to the users.
We used to say, "Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.". Now we have Linux trying to reinvent Windows, poorly. Linux has been taken over by people who hate Windows, not those that understand and love the Unix philosophy. And yes, systemd...but that's just one example.
And yes, Windows is getting easier to hate, but I'm not finding Linux "easier to love" as anything other than a bad re-invention of windows.
I like Linux I really do and I will port my current W10 machine to it.
But Linux is only great when it works, if you have a problem it can be a royal bastard to sort out. Way beyond the ken of your average home user.
I wish I didn't have to constantly, and I mean *constantly*, correct Linux users on their frequent biases regarding their OS obsession.
"M$ good, Linux bad". Users build their Linux boxes, or at the *minimum* choose the hardware to install Linux, based on compatibility from the get-go. If you choose a laptop you first go to the Linux forums to check compatibility; if you decide you want to upgrade anything from your motherboard to your GPU to your printer, you make sure it works with Linux *first*.
MS needs to support practically all hardware, the question of compatibility is pretty much NEVER brought up. If it exists, it is expected to work with Windows. And if it doesn't, MS might end up in the crosshairs for the issue even if it isn't their fault.
Stop trying to compare "But I don't have problems with Linux!", after you hand-selected hardware that was known not to cause problems with it, to Windows where every user throws the kitchen sink at the thing and then simply expects perfection of operation. Linux is pretty much a "hobbyist level" OS on the desktop - it is a kernel that is designed for server use and people / groups take it upon themselves to patch together modules to make a desktop OS "distro". The other is a commodity OS where it is simply expected to be everything to everyone all the time, without question, regardless of how bad the developers of applications or drivers might muck things up.
You can't read my mind, but you can read the OP. For those of you who seem to be having trouble:
Users build their Linux boxes, or at the *minimum* choose the hardware to install Linux, based on compatibility from the get-go.
The OP then went through some serious pretzel logic to debase Linux based on the "fact" that Linux is only a Tinkertoy for those few maker types.
Which is, of course, complete bollocks.
The forums here, as well as in other well-traveled corners of the innerwebz, are redolent with examples (and testimonials) of souls who have taken a "Built for Windows" machine, shit-canned the Microsoft detritus, and placed one version or another of Linux on that commodity machine. It is true that some of these folks have had driver problems or other compatibility issues, but these appear to be a small percentage of the total commodity conversion community.
Got it now?
Oh, and of course there are the Macs that have been converted to Linux...
Really? Neighbours of mine have two Windows 10-certified machines that can't upgrade to W11. Those two machines are <2 years old. They started dual-booting (with Linux Mint), and find that they're booting Windows less and less frequently....
M$ do not support a huge lot of hardware with their latest versions, and their market share will diminish markedly when W10 support ceases. They really have got it wrong this time with their hardware demands.
When it comes to hardware compatibility, you give Windows more credit than it deserves, and linux not enough. Other than the occasional odd peripheral device that requires using software from the manufacturer, and shying away from buying Nvidia GPUs, I never check for linux compatibility. I just expect it will work, and it does. I have a few machines well over a decade old that still work fine with linux and a lightweight desktop environment, but either won't run a current version of Windows at all, or they might be coaxed into it by bypassing artificial requirements, but still be unusable due to the RAM and/or CPU being woefully insufficient.
(I don't buy Nvidia, but I'm typing this right now on a machine running linux using Wayland with an Nvidia card.)
Odd. I just had to reload Linux after a hard drive crash, replacing an elderly "spinning glass" HDD with a new 2 Tb SSD. To my considerable surprise, during loading, Mint 22.1, it immediately recognised my Canon Pixma TS6251 inkjet and gave it full functionality, including the scan function. No additional software needed. Up to now, I have always had to download Canon's own Linux software before I could use it. It also comes with HP laserjet M401d drivers pre-loaded. Nice, as I have one of these as well. The only time I had to go "outside of the box" was to get full function drivers for an Epson V600 scanner, which also works perfectly in its' new environment. Happy penguin now.
Linux "better" than Win 11? - which I still have to use on another machine. Yes. It is now much easier to set up, use and maintain, and much more stable. Can't wait for the day when I can wrap up the Windows project, chuck MS in the bin, and repurpose that machine with a Linux OS.
Just my personal opinion, of course, but I now see M$ OSs as obsolete dinosaurs. I will not lament their passing for one second.
On one claw: in the early days of Linux, one was best-advised to check fora and HCLs before buying your stuff if you wanted it to work with Linux, just as you described. But it's been decades since I've bothered to do that, because for the most part, things just work in modern Linuxes. My Turion-based Sony Vaio (tells you how long it's been) needed a boot-time parameter to make the sound work. I can live with that.
On the other claw: as Microsoft revises programming models and APIs for drivers with succesive versions of Windows, drivers for older devices are not ported forward, not by Microsoft, and not by the device manufacturers. "Too bad, so sad, Mr./Ms. Consumer, just go buy new hardware!" It's forced obsolescense. How many great old games, or business apps no longer run on newer versions of MS-Windows, despite so-called compatability modes? "Too bad, so sad, Mr./Ms. Consumer, just go buy new software!" Again, it's forced obsolescense.
Fuck. That. Shit.
My comments are based on using Microsoft "operating systems" from the DOS days to Windows 11 Pro, skipping only Vista. I used those machines primarily to access *nix systems, switching to Linux with RedHat 5.2 on physical media I ordered from them.
Any "bias" I have is from 30+ years of hair-pulling PAIN dealing with Microslop.
You obviously highlight your ignorance — and dare I say arrogance — by calling Linux a ‘“hobbyist level” OS on the desktop’. You're welcome to have an opinion, but opinions don't equal facts.
Oh, and for the record, I bought a PC without checking whether it would be compatible with a Linux desktop OS. Even with an Nvidia graphics card, it wasn't that difficult to get up and running on Ubuntu 20.04 (at the time) barring a quirk that caused it to stutter but that was down to the Nvidia graphics driver which was easily mitigated using a kernel boot config option I found on one of the numerous Linux forums. So you probably need to stop talking twaddle about Linux users always choosing compatible hardware from the get-go — in my experience, choosing compatible Linux hardware from the get-go is the exception rather than the norm for the technology circles I operate within, namely education.
Also, have you even used any of the various Linux desktop OSs recently? You'll be surprised how ‘non-hobbyist level’ they have become over the last five-plus years, unless you're still living in the dark ages and/or wearing your Microsoft-branded rose-tinted glasses.
Oh, and I was a big Microsoft fanboi until 2018. That's when I tried a Linux desktop OS for the umpteenth time and it finally clicked with me, maybe because of the direction Windows — namely Windows 10 — was being taken by Microsoft, such as the increasingly pushy upsell of Microsoft's online services being baked into the operating system, the disrespect for user choice such as system updates re-enabling features I'd deliberately turned off, and the underhanded data-slurping tactics. So, if I have ‘frequent biases’ regarding my ‘OS obsession’, then so be it. Choices change, opinions change. If you love Windows then good for you, but just don't be a dick about it when others don't think the same.
In the meantime, I hope you have a good day :-)
Beer icon, because we can agree to disagree.
" it wasn't that difficult to get up and running on Ubuntu 20.04 (at the time) barring a quirk that caused it to stutter but that was down to the Nvidia graphics driver which was easily mitigated using a kernel boot config option I found on one of the numerous Linux forums."
Penguinista - the quote above sounds very much like the sort of problem that someone at "hobbyist" level would enjoy fixing. Which rather defeats the argument.
A consumer level owner would be completly baffled.
"A consumer level owner would be completly baffled."
I hate to beat a dead horse but, as you see, they are in denial.
-------------------------------------
User: "I can't get this thing to work! Maybe I'll go on to a Linux forum for help!"
...
User post: "I'm having XYZ problem"
Reply 1: "RTFM"
Reply 2: "Don't bother us until you've searched the forum archives!"
Reply3: "Open up a terminal and do this...
sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade ;sudo apt autoremove ;sudo apt clean
sudo apt install --reinstall questionable-driver-xxz
sudo foobar /whatisthis /urscrewed
then do a
netstat -i
and then a
sudo ethtool -S eth1
and post all the output! It'll mean nothing to you but it'll tell us what is going on, and if we bother to follow up with you maybe we'll get somewhere.
-------------------------------------
Did I get the newbie Linux user experience right?
@Snake:
God, you made me laugh -- that's probably pretty close to the newbie-on-a-forum experience.
But the thing is, these days, before even going to a forum, a Linux newbie is much-more likely to phone someone who knows about Linux, as there are so many more of them around these days than there used to be.
You talk about the "professionalism" of MS-Windows, but MS-Windows fixup arcana is just as cryptic to a non-technical user as is Linux fixup arcana.
That's a very sweeping statement, but I guess I hate beating a dead horse about the decreasing quality of Microsoft products and the fact Microsoft keeps listening to the ludicrous decisions of its shareholders and top exec than the feedback of their users.
Let's be honest, Microsoft don't care about their users and they don't care about you — you'll always be a rug-pull away from them taking control of your operating system from you.
To be fair, you did make me laugh regarding your newbie Linux user experience. I remember that happening in the late 90s and early 2000s, including on Windows forums when Windows 95's compatibility was troublesome. And here we are today where the ‘average’ Windows user *still* downloads files off the internet and opens them whilst being too impatient to read various prompts and warnings. But, hey, I don't want to beat that dead horse either like I do regarding Microsoft's incessant need to hide file extensions by default — that's still such a dumb feature, in my opinion.
Anyway, Snakey boy, you keep beating your horses whilst keeping your eyes are closed to what's being snatched away from under your nose by the tech bros.
Sorry, but what's a ‘consumer level owner’ when it's at home? If a ‘consumer level owner’ is a person who owns something, such as a product or asset, and uses it in some way, then I'm that too and I wasn't completely baffled.
Also, I didn't say I enjoyed fixing my issue — I just said it wasn't difficult to fix with a little bit of research, something which seems to be a dying art these days. Do you not use any forums for your Windows-related issues, or is using Microsoft's forum too ‘hobbyist’ for you? I'm genuinely intrigued to know what makes something ‘hobbyist’ or not.
Also, I'm pretty sure Ubuntu is developed by a British company called Canonical and a community of other developers, so I'm not convinced it's exclusively a hobbyists OS. It's a similar situation for Fedora Linux (consisting of a community of developers and Red Hat employees) and Pop!_OS (employees at System76), so I don't think it's as black and white as people make out.
I have total confidence that the next servicing release will fix all the outstanding issues and not introduce any new ones........
Several things:
Pretty much all commercial software now appears to have the most basic of testing so when one thing is fixed 3 other that worked are now broken.
Microsoft appears to be very bad at doing this - worse than most.
The aim is all about the regular user effectively consuming Windows as a service.
The more they do this the greater the base of installations that can be used to test stuff free of charge before the big corporate users do their roll outs. That said when it comes to Android & iOS now there is very little scope to defer or not update and this has been the case for some time.
Not to be "one of those guys.". But.. whenever I read an article about Microsoft and things like this.. I feel like the world has gone insane, at least that's how it feels from someone who hasn't used that platform for a long time. Intentionally pushing bad updates? I mean? What the coffee?
There's a difference between pushing code you are unaware is broken and pushing code you are fully aware to be broken to the end users.
No code is perfect, but knowing your code is broken and still choosing to send it to your end users with a forced update is odd, particularly when you're offering the corporate backed 'commercial/professional' solution (Windows).
Yeah, my opinions are odd. I'll get my coat.
PS: Are those CVE's new? I thought that was a few days ago and most distributions already issued fixes for them?
Snake, that's not entirely true. Let's keep to the facts.
The first time I saw the news was on the 15th:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1005129/
Which stated the updates hit on the 14th. Which is true, Nick Tait announced it on the 14th:
https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2025/01/14/3
There was also a nice breakdown of the vulnerabilities on the 21st by LWN:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1005302/
So, to say it was new information and the news was 'kept outside the media' until the 23rd is inaccurate. It's possibly more the case that the media outlets who didn't report on it until then had simply missed it.
To further clarify, within open source projects it is standard procedure for third party security researchers to report vulnerabilities they find to the project that is affected, the project will then typically fix the vulnerability and issue a fix with their next update. To keep users safe, if the vulnerability is not being actively exploited in the wild then it is typical to announce the CVE along side the updates that fix it. This is what happened in this case.
"Windows 11 23H2 was rolled out in the same way – the company's support lifecycle means Home and Pro users* must be kept up to date, whether those users like it or not, in order to receive support."
What is this support of which they speak? When "end of support" is mentioned for W10 (or older) it seems to mean the time when the updates stop being rolled out. So they seem to be saying the users computers must keep being updated in order to keep being updated.
If an enforced update borks a user's computer why should MS not be prosecuted under the appropriate legislation?
* I assume they men the users' computers. Even in these days of intrusive AI I doubt they're updating the actual users. At least I hope they're not.
"If an enforced update borks a user's computer why should MS not be prosecuted under the appropriate legislation?"
I said similar elsewhere.
To knowingly breaking a system with software is an offence under computer misuse whichever way you look at it. "Accidental issues" can be argued over but when it is already clear that there is a problem and forced, automatic implementation is then enabled there can be little argument. Who's got the cash to employ a lawyer to test this?
It's almost Orwellian in approach. "You must be kept up to date in order to receive support". OK, how do I accept not having support? What's that? I can't? Well that seems... obtuse.
And as you say, have you ever managed to receive "support" from Microsoft in any meaningful way? Currently my wife's laptop won't open the start menu or any jpegs. I'll be damned if I can fix that, and the vague Microsoft support pages are next to useless, with the final step being "reset your PC". So reinstall it then. I already knew that.
They get away with it because the software license agreement (all the endless pages) contains a clause along the lines of:
"There is no guarantee that the software will function as intended and no responsibility is taken for any loss as a result of the software failing or not functioning as expected."
Basically they can do whatever they want with impunity.
If you get this forced on you, you must do at least this (in an administrative window) to disable the recall insanity (minus the leading >):
> Dism /online /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:"Recall"
In theory you can also do it with gpedit, but those evil mother[bleep]ers have been playing whack a mole and you may not find this present:
> Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows AI > Allow Recall to be enabled -> disable
I would also suggest the following, though up to you. Will make your PC flail much less, free up RAM, and save your SSD a lot of wear. But not as catastrophic as recall:
> winget uninstall microsoft.onedrive "widgets platform runtime" "windows web experience pack" microsoft.teams.free
> Dism /online /Disable-Feature /FeatureName:"SearchEngine-Client-Package"
Pretty unique selling point for an x86-64 PC, "like Mint minus systemd".
Unfortunately the MX Raspberry "respin" is still using the systemd packages & setup from PiOS. Hopefully they will make a more "native" installer at some point.
I am currently investigating Alpine, which uses busybox & musl libc, and no systemd, but it too is not fully native on the Raspberry at this point (and needs some minor tinkering to get X working). I suspect they are more likely to get a full Pi installer first.
I can't help feeling that Debian could have stemmed the systemd tide but chose not to (also they fluffed the decision to settle on XFCE as the default desktop).
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To FSCK OFF
Send them a legal Cease and Desist letter. Then if they force it on you then sue them for a few million. They were told not to interfere with your computer yet they ignored it.
Futile? Yes. but until people start to take a stand against forced updates they will carry on regardless.
I'm so glad that I gave them the finger more than 8 years ago.
Unfortunately they will just tell you to re-read the EULA that says you already agreed to this.
Although at some point the idea that they can bork or brick your device(s) remotely (whether deliberate or accidental) with impunity needs to be tested. There's probably a lot in the EULA that isn't technically lawful, but hasn't been tested by someone with deep enough pockets.
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Regular readers may know I've kept a W10 installation on an old dual-boot laptop out of morbid curiosity and to remind myself how bad it is. Bad as in now having been able to complete an update for at least a year. At the weekend I finally decided to install from a fresh ISO and at least cut out all the vendor's bloatware such as the McFee that even a wooden stake wouldn't kill.
Oh, what a faff. It wouldn't install from a DVD onto a drive with GPT, only MBR. Possibly if I'd worked out how, and let it blow away the Devuan installation it might have converted the drive to MBR, otherwise it has to boot from a UEFI medium. OK, the boot menu claims I can do a UEFI boot off the DVD or USB but just drops into the BIOS if I choose that.
It turns out that the USB has to be set upt to be partitioned with GPT. Then it has to boot off a FAT32 partition- that's part of the UEFI spec. Except it's going to have to have a file that's bigger than the FAT32 4G limit. Who one Earth came up with the idea of saddling UEFI with that limitation? Oh, yes, I remember whose sticky fingers are all over UEFI. So the medium has to have two partitions, a small FAT32 for initial boot and a big NTFS one for the actual installation. Of course it would be no problem if the ISO actually had that structure so it could simply be dd-ed onto the USB drive like any self-respecting ISO. No, it has to be made up just so with either some 3rd party medium creator tor some manual juggling.
In the end - yes it installs OK. Even excluding the media prep it's slower than a Linux install, of course, and has a restart or two. And it wanted to speak prompts. It has to do a lot of updates but then so would almost any Linux install except maybe for an ISO for a really fresh release. But slow. And the restart thing. And the opaqueness - several separate updates with different ideas of reporting progress, some straightforward, one sticking at 0% until it eventually competed, one that went up by quite a few percent quickly, then went back to 1% and climbed very, very slowly. Having done the initial bunch - with a restart, of course - it then found a couple more to do. Linux is just so much slicker.
And the result? Strange, of course. In some ways it's like the toddler that's decided it wants to "help" Mummy. The odd thing on the task bar that suddenly pops up news and weather I hadn't asked for and which it must have been keeping up to date, also unasked for. On the other hand where it could be helpful it isn't. For instance there's the alphabetically arranged start menu that must have been specified from high up by a paper-shuffler who's never laid a finger on a computer but has a PA to do short-hand and typing but would never dare suggest anything of her own initiative. And it's just so sluggish. And there's not only CoPilot, there's also Cortana. Maybe I'll come back to it some day and try to get rid of them. Anything useful, of course, like application software, instead of just being there, is a set of paid for extras.
Thank goodness it's not my daily driver. But it's good to be reminded of much better off I am with a decent OS, well equipped out of the box and not having to suffer this stuff to work.
But it's good to be reminded of much better off I am with a decent OS.
I too use a decent OS, in my case Linux but your sorry tale also applies to my attempts to install a new copy of my chosen distro. I thought that the days of fiddling around with an OS to try and get it work were in the past but with UEFI the demons have risen again and I'm stuck trying to figure out the magic incantation needed to get my new box to boot.
It feels like config.sys has risen from its grave.
.. WHY ?!?
Why must MS roll out Yet Another Update which improves exactly zero, brings no actual tangible benefit to users, introduces a whole host of new problems and appears to solve exactly none?
How about fixing the many, many, MANY security problems in the existing code so for once we have a Patch Tuesday which does NOT amount to various TBs worth of updates floating around the network (yes, yes, I know they borrowed from torrenting to lessen the overall load, but that's merely camouflage to hide just how big the issue remains) and results in a horrendous amount of man hours lost to reboots and new shiny problems.
Oh, and no, making the update happen when a user shuts down so it impacts their personal time instead of company time (in my opinion a a very US invention) does not help because any sensible employee will simply pull the plug on the desktop or close the laptop and go home anyway, at which point you will not only have the impact the next day but also possible corruption. Well, I mean more than Windows itself.
FIRST get to something that is even just moderately safe and stable (proven by the lessening of the Patch Tuesday floods), THEN come up with new ideas.
I apologise in advance for asking a perfectly logical question. Microsoft Marketing people, as down is up in your world I expect upvotes from you.
For some reason they seem to be stuck in the mindset that they simply HAVE to provide some new or updated feature/function with a "security" update.
They simply can't stop tinkering
The old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems to be long dead and buried at M$
I'll keep my Windows 7 until the day it stops working (I do have a window 10 VM for the important stuff)
Marketing mentality. "We must change things to 'freshen' our product!"
It's not just Microsoft. I saw some food item whose packaging proclaimed, "New package look, same great taste!" (Presumably they were referring to the taste of the product, and not the taste of the packaging...)
I had some fun with my windows recently. Microsoft Store decided to just stop and so did windows defender. Neither would open. Whatsapp also decided to go bye bye. Pretty sure it was an update that did this but It wasn't this one. There were many other strange goings on I just couldn't put my finger on like motherboard fan control and some other programs being a little funny but still working.
I'm using 11 enterprise btw. I would like to think I know what I'm doing. I've got a Linux server which hasn't given me grief for 10 years now even with many updates and adjustments. I decided to start delving and fixing. SFC/DICM/Powershell uninstall and re-installs to name a few of the things you can do. Installing from Msixbundle. You name it. Absolutely nothing worked no matter what I did. I was ready to install over the top but alas I couldn't get it to give the option to keep programs (I was about to force change the image version to get round it) but then I did something so fucking simple it made me question my own existence and why the fuck I bother with these things. I booted into safe mode, ran sfc /scannow, it reported no errors whatsoever and I rebooted. By Grabthar's Hammer, everything was fixed and I mean everything. Since then I have done numerous scans and tests but I still have absolutely no idea what caused it exactly and absolutely no idea what fixed it. I guess this is the Windows 11 life now.
This update is going nowhere near my computer till I know it is absolutely safe. How do Microsoft get away with this? If it wasn't for certain software I would have ditched it years ago.
"How do Microsoft get away with this? If it wasn't for certain software I would have ditched it years ago."
I think you just answered your own question.
If you are desperate to get away from this, you need to learn about running a Windows VM under and alternative OS. Then you can gradually migrate function away from Windows. (Obviously web browsing, email and office-style apps are the low-hanging fruit here.) Naturally most people either can't be bothered or are too fearful to try, but it surprises me that enterprises and medium-sized businesses don't seem to be tempted either.
A driver hanging, not allowing a task to complete because it's waiting for the driver. When you reboot using safe mode, you no longer use that driver but usually another from MS to be used in safe mode only, and the task completes because there's nothing stopping it.
Upon next boot, the breaking task completed during the safe mode, so all is well.
it surprises me that enterprises and medium-sized businesses don't seem to be tempted either
Only the ones that are intelligent enough to look at both CAPEX and OPEX when they take decisions. MS typically points at the savings in CAPEX to distract the attention from the huge continuous overheads it causes in operational expenses in practically anything from elevated resource costs to wasting massive amount of man hours through rubbish code (to the point of using customers as guinea pigs) and spectacularly bad usability. Frankly, they make Adobe look useful.
It's not by accident that IBM switched to Macs, and quite a few private banks, and frankly, it's a shame there is for business people too much diversity to pick a Linux desktop (thus no business applications which becomes a chicken and egg problem, and usability is sadly still less). Both environments have enjoyed stable interfaces for more than a decade, so all that relearning and thus lost productivity could have been prevented. It's one of the reasons you'll have to pry LibreOffice from my cold dead hands (expect for Keynote, that is IMHO the easiest path to a good and focused presentation. But I digress).
It is thus also not by accident that Microsoft does its level best to entangle you so disconnecting is hard without high conversion costs. All this BS about CoPilot & friends empowering their users to do their own IT (and yes, we'd call that shadow IT, bad in itself) is simply there to again create as many vested interests in locking in the status quo as they can get away with, and entanglement is a game they have been playing for literally decades.
If Microsoft wrote code that was half as good as their marketing and entanglement strategies are, irnonically they would actually not need those strategies..
THIS is my major objection to Windows.
Wake up one morning, go to the computer and try to use some app. Discover that it no longer does what it's supposed to do. Cue: "JFC, I don't have time for this..." But...everything you planned to do this morning is on hold until you can figure out WTF Microsoft did that borked your machine (even though you have manual updates turned on, MS will still force updates on you if they feel like it). The UI changes, options aren't where they used to be, menus change, system config menus have moved or been renamed...again.
Linux isn't perfect, $DEITY knows, but at least I feel I have some control over it, it doesn't change overnight, and I have a good chance of finding the solution to my problem on Google, and it likely won't require me to reinstall the OS from scratch.
I use Windows only when I have no other option.
< "...I have done numerous scans and tests but I still have absolutely no idea what caused it exactly and absolutely no idea what fixed it. I guess this is the Windows 11 life now."
Windows 11? This is not new, and I wouldn't say it's unique to Windows either. I've had experiences like this with nearly every piece of hardware and software I've ever used. Non-reproducible and non-diagnosable errors are no fun, but they have been a ubiquitous part of tech-support for a long time.
Finding problems with no resolution whatsoever is somewhat unique to Windows. I've lost count of the problems I've found documented in long forum threads on MS sites, only to end abruptly with a "This issue is resolved" - with no resolution on offer.
Linux has the opposite problem. Every byte of the innards is so well documented that most problems have too many solutions. You doggedly plow through them knowing that eventually one of them will work.
Personally, I prefer the latter approach. There are obvious issues in Win10 that have persisted through all updates and never been fixed. This is the curse of an opaque system, serviced (and at this point barely understood) only by an uncaring corporation.
I agree 100% on the poor documentation practices of Microsoft, usually it's way out of date, assuming it was ever accurate, and the forums are full of the sort of thing you describe: somebody who supposedly works for Microsoft will confidently give an answer to a question that turns out to be totally wrong, and then they disappear into the ether, never to be seen again, while everyone comments things like "What the hell are you talking about? Those options don't even exist!"
My original comment was more about things seemingly fixing themselves and the user never knowing what was wrong in the first place, let alone what fixed it.
I'm still personally using Windows 7 Professional, the environment that no longer supports Google Drive and OneDrive is completely secure and works completely easily with no user problems or infection risks. I have to work with the newer versions occasionally to help users but the newer versions are always uncomfortable. I created a lot of applications years ago, starting in the Windows XP environment, that eliminated all Microsoft access requirements (DLL's etc) and the applications still run fine in the current Windows versions because they were written to work in the Windows world, not use Widows.
My 4k monitor black-screened after installing W11 24H2. Only a slight problem perhaps, but it was the only monitor attached to the PC.
Fortunately I had a 2k TV I could plug in, which worked fine. This allowed me to work out the most likely cause was a driver issue. An hour spent on the Intel site found and downloaded the new driver, which was released Dec 24, and all is ok now.
tried them all over the years :)
1. mint for normal users
2. fedora kde for power users
hate to say this ... but chromium runs better on linux then the default firefox no matter what distro
remmina works well for rdping into windows desktops if needed
majority of vpn and overlay vpn clients work ok under linux now with easy setup, even have a gui :)
latter two is a biggie for remote company users
While both of those are good options, I myself used to be a Fedora user too. But, I find you get more freedom and control with Gentoo which is my current preference. So, I would recommend that for most users as it works like a dream, I never get any issues with it, and I get to configure it exactly as I need it. And on top of that, if you break it, you don't re-install, you simply fix it. (And have the tools to do so.)
This is not about W11 is better or worse than W10. It's about TYRANNY. Its about these corporations saying YOU WILL DO THIS, we OWN YOU. You have NO CHOICE. OBEY. YOU WILL INSTALL OUR UPDATE weather you want it or not! Your choice means NOTHING to us.
This represents a complete shift from how the world was when I was a child. Corporations think they are our new unelected rulers. I have a BIG problem with this.
I will NOT comply.
After a career in IT (PCs), culminating in IT (PC) security, I got out and now earn a living with what I earn from writing. A working computer is a must - especially when the 'muse' is at hand. At such times, I don't want or need my train of thought to be broken by a computer telling me I have to update. Going off to make a cup of tea or coffee isn't an option.
So I jumped ship. I no longer use Windows. I no longer fret over what my computer will foist upon me next. No longer do file associations mysteriously change to those preferred by the operating system's creator. No more worries.
It has now been two years and I am secure and watch the mess taking place with detached interest.
Trust me, running away from Windows is something that pays off in heaps.
What kind of garbage support are they talking about? I'll tell you. It's bottom-rung support-in-name-only from some barely trained Indian bloke who sends an email where most of the words are simpering niceties and the rest of the words are a reference to a support article at MS where they cannot acknowledge that they're wrong, and the words "reinstall windows".
Well they're not fooling me.
So, let's face it: the "update" to 24H2 is similar to shoving in a DVD (or mounting an ISO) and running "setup.exe"
M$ hides / wallpapers over the fact that the "update" is actually an Install of a new version of Windows.
During this install, "approved**" applications and drivers are noted, and carried over. "Unapproved" items are not.
Many "custom" settings, even as simple as "Power Options" (like, "Do Not Hibernate while on AC Power") are "lost" / "ignored" / "forgotten" / "disappeared" / "nuked".
How many hours does one have to spend "recovering" from this update?
My newest laptop (purchased in July 2024, did not meet the "Copilot 2.0 minimum specs" which, according to published articles of the time, was a requirement for 24H2) was "offered" (the "you can't refuse" type) the update in early December -- this article is actually late to press -- and, over a month later, I'm still finding settings which had been set back to "default". Gee, thanks, MicroShaft!
* Apologies to Led Zeppelin
** No doubt, there's a $$ fee / M$ Tax to get on the whitelist.
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