Admins run into Group Policy problems after Win10 update A recent cumulative update to Windows 10 is causing headaches for IT administrators who are experiencing problems with their Group Policy Object (GPO) capabilities. Specifically, admins are complaining that after installing the KB5017308 update for OS Builds 19042.2006, 19043.2006, and 19044.2006 that was introduced in the …
It certainly beats the cluster F&*k of individual hotfixes we used to have. Managing that tangled mess was no fun. Although I would appreciate MS having more of a testing team to find and fix these still too common issues before rolling them out to millions of paying customers would be nice
The shift off individual updates was for two reasons, neither of them to do with making your life easier. It was primarily to cut down on QC time at Microsoft's end, and they only had to test the roll-ups, not individual patches and their dependencies. Second is wallpapered over the crippling problems with the client side of windows update on 2016 and earlier releases. So many small patches would take longer to apply then the roll-ups.
This simple acted as an enabler for the worst habits of the update team. The stopped even pretending to do real QC after the roll-ups were introduced, and even with the rollups the 2016 and earlier update code was cripplingly slow. Instead of addressing this by backporting the update code to the earlier OS versions, they hoped we'd all just jump on the then brand spanking new 2019 server.
So we as admins/users collectively went from finicky individual updates that were slow, to monolithic updates that are also buggy and slow, but if one 4.5 rating CVE fix in the rolloup is bad, you have to uninstall the 9.8 rated RCE fix that's also in there. It's not faster, it's not more reliable, but when there is a problem the result is a long exploitation window with tons of visibility.
The better solution is to fix the updater and installers so fixes can be grouped and tested, but individually blocked or rolled back, and so a 25mb patch file doesn't take 45m and a reboot to install. Reboots should be for installing hardware.
Apparently there is a thing called Known Issue Rollback, where (once MS deign to release one) allows the OS to run the old code instead of the patch.
TBF it would be easier rather than including double the code for everything if they hadn't sacked their QA and testing bods, and actually shipped stuff that worked
All the shortcuts on my home Windows PC all of sudden ended up with a .url extension and would no longer work. Removing the .url extension from the name did not help either. It would be really nice if Microsoft would spend some of their billions to actually, properly QC this trash OS before sending out patches to have their users Beta test for them.
.url shortcuts are a common kind of shortcut -- notably used for WWW shortcuts, but actually also used to locate other kinds of 'resources' on your computer (URL = universal resource locator).
When you start seeing the .url file extension, it doesn't mean that something has 'added' .url. It means that the URL handler association is broken.
In this case, probably broken by a 'security' change that further restricts the use of URLs. Security restrictions on URLs have (historically) been put in place because of that ambiguity that allows them to point to both local and remote resources.
For those that hate Windows, its updates and MS generally stop using it and move to MacOS, find a Linux Distro that works for you or even sell your soul to ChromeOS.
Then you can feel smug about your choice as you have done something positive and you can get on with your life and manually patch when ever you feel like it if you even think it is a requirement.
Be happy that at least on PCs you have several choices that can fit any pocket and any personal security requirements you may have unlike mobile phones.
My dual-boot PC (primarily Ubuntu but duals into Windows 10 for World of Warships) had updates to both systems last night.
Windows 2 restarts for 2 big 'updates'
Ubuntu updated the snap-store quietly and then a whole host of core updates also quietly with no restart demanded just recommended......
I know which I would recommend for a 'work environment'
I did that years ago and have never regretted it. I love my Linux updates which are fast, unobtrusive and often release space after the updates are complete. Reboot? Nope - rarely.
I installed a (legal) copy of Windows 10 Pro 64 bit on Virtualbox though, just because I need to run "real" Excel occasionally and yes, all it does is updates, updates and more updates.
Not an option for my work machine. Not running Windows is just possible here, but it requires a lot of time and effort to deal with all the corporate stuff. And I have to develop for Windows as well as Linux and a handful of UNIXes, and Windows is the least amenable to remote work or (on a laptop) running in a VM. It's simply much cheaper for me to keep the corporate-supplied Windows as the host OS on my work laptop, despite all the things wrong with Windows.
And, of course, with any of the Linux distributions we support for the products I work on, I'd have the accursed systemd anyway, so it's not as much of an improvement as one might think. On Windows I already have a UNIXy development environment courtesy of Cygwin (which I've been using for many years; I don't see any compelling reason to switch to WSL2).
It's a horror show. Pinned documents lose their pinning. Recently updated is a joke. Quicklinks seem to be deprecated because opening an open/save menu scrolls to the bottom of the tree, to where I don't want to be. New Whiteboard doesn't store recent Whiteboards locally, so they aren't in the previous file list.
I can find nothing. I know I wrote a document last friday, I thought I put it in Onedrive in the normal place, but it is gone. So I rewrite it, save it with the same name as I thought I used... would you like to replace? Would I ducking like you to remember what I did and where I did it?
And it's all soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo slow :(
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