
Ask HN: Why have OS updates become so aggressive? - hitgeek
After the controversy surround the aggressiveness of Windows 10 updates, I was a little relieved to be a mac user.<p>However, this morning I was confronted with a notification to Update macOS to Sierra, the two options are &quot;Install&quot; and &quot;Details&quot;. In addition an app icon has been added to the launch pad to install Sierra.<p>Is this the new norm? Why such a strong push requiring users to update?
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emp_zealoth
Last night Windows 10 popped up a notification while i was gaming "Windows 10
is going to restart in 3 minutes with options "Now" and "Cancel". I clicked
cancel and 15 minutes later it just restarted in my face, while i was ACTIVELY
using it, no notification, no popup, just blam, 1,5h of updates.

I might have been doing a project and lost half a day of my work just as well.

Now I have to go and take all permisions away from Reboot service in Windows
10

Also it keeps adding fucking Edge and Store to my quickbar every single update

Is Microsoft retarded? How can this be a good idea

~~~
gtirloni
I have never experienced this with Windows 10.

Every time I said 'no' to reboot, it never rebooted.

It only re-added Edge/Store to the taskbar after major updates (that is, the
first one and the anniversary update). It never did that on Patch Tuesday for
random updates.

I wonder what's different between your and my computer.

Are you using Home, Pro, Enterprise or Education edition? I'm on Pro here.

~~~
pfranz
I'm running 8.1 Pro here at work and the exact same thing happened to me. We
generally run the computers disconnected from the Internet.

I had connected to the Internet, came back to my desk to see a countdown
dialog, rushed to click "Cancel." About 10 minutes later the computer was
forcibly shut down to install updates. I figured, "might as well get all these
updates out of the way." So after that round of updates installed it said it
needed to restart in order to install updates. After that I checked for
updates and it needed to restart a third time. I hadn't used Windows since XP
and forgot how many times you need to reboot and how often updates get
released (I'm used to Linux and MacOS). The aggressiveness is also very
annoying--bordering on making things unreliable.

~~~
gtirloni
You may have a bunch of pending security updates that can't be delayed any
longer. Plus, if you're missing more than one of the 'big updates', it'll
reboot many times. The anniversary updates alone will reboot 2-3x.

I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be expected
the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some point.

I'm dual booting Fedora and Windows 10 and I get way fewer updates on Windows
than on Linux (every single day there's a new update). I've left a laptop with
Fedora alone for 2 months and when I booted it, there were 1.4GB of updates.

Personally I like the bug fixes, improvements and security fixes. I think it's
a fair trade-off (on whatever platform you're -- I get app updates on my
Android phone every other day).

~~~
pfranz
Fedora is the "cutting edge" and it's expected to have more churn than most
OSes. Linux updates (excluding the kernel) don't require a reboot and the
install itself doesn't require downtime. So daily updates to packages aren't a
problem. Even with kernel updates I only have to reboot once. With a fresh
install of Windows, it is 3 or 4 reboots with large downloads in between and
sitting looking at an update screen for hours--that's frustrating.

> I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be
> expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some
> point.

Sure, but have some respect for the user. I told it not to install the updates
right now. It shut down in a way where it did not ask to save my work. I also
have no choice but to sit and wait for my computer to install updates instead
of working. That could easily have been in a situation where it can cause
someone to lose critical work, get fired or lose their business.

~~~
gtirloni
Agreed, those are very good points. Something is definitely not right given
the all the reports about unexpected reboots. Maybe the situation is better in
Windows 10 vs. 8/8.1 but I wouldn't know.

Because I'm used to daily updates from Fedora, maybe I haven't noticed how
frequent/troublesome Windows updates have been lately. I remember reading an
article on MSDN explaining how they had reduced the number of required reboots
(completely forgot the details), but they need to do more work in this area.

~~~
pfranz
The aggressiveness seems like the part that's new. There are videos of people
live streaming and it dropping off to update to Windows 10 (not sure if any
are faked) as well as other complaints like mine. I feel like Windows has
always required reboots and many updates that required logout (which one would
hope would get minimized).

I've also heard about bundling updates for new installs (or people far
behind). Last I remember they were still about to roll it out.

------
jandrese
Because if you don't push users to update they won't. And then they'll be
owned by a 6 month old security vulnerability in a random drive by malware
advertisement or internet worm or whatever and their machine will join yet
another botnet.

It's designed to make not updating as difficult as updating so neglectful
users don't default to not updating.

~~~
saurik
To the extent to which operating systems manufacturers care about this, they
then need to address the actual problem: that operating system upgrades are
not just useful security fixes but also "the entire computer now has a
different user interface and no longer supports not only some of the software
I was using but some of the hardware I rely on" (I know someone who upgraded
to a new version of Mac OS X which rendered the $1000 multitrack mixer he uses
for his recording job non-functional, and has since sworn off of updating
anything ever, and I simply can't blame him).

~~~
pfranz
Audio stuff has been notoriously finicky and late to support updates to the OS
since the mid 90's. Most people I know go by,"Once it is set up, don't change
a single thing." For quite a few years audio guys stuck to Mac OS Classic
(9.x) because of the money invested in audio plugins. Audio hardware companies
seem just fine with dropping support for new OSs forcing you to buy the new
model.

~~~
cryptarch
OS makers seem just fine dropping support for older audio hardware forcing you
to buy the newer model.

When did it become the new normal for OS's to break compatibility with older
hardware? Or was all this hardware relying on undocumented and non-
standardized interfaces?

~~~
pfranz
I'm just talking about what I've seen for people who run businesses with large
investments in audio equipment. It isn't just with updating software--that
credo goes for which ports are attached, how things are wired, and even the
levels on the console.

I have no idea if the examples I've seen ware relying on undocumented APIs and
as a user it's irrelevant (there aren't too many choices in high end audio
hardware and you can't always mix and match vendors). I've seen a new OS comes
out, it no longer works with the hardware you have (or it introduced bugs),
and nobody issues an update to fix it on either side. You're running a
business, so you may or may not care about the new features, but what was
working yesterday absolutely has to work today.

There's an article on the front page right now talking about how macOS broke
the "poll" call. Nobody can say with confidence if it'll even get fixed.
libcurl is working around it, but not everyone has the bandwidth to deal with
it.

------
twunde
Two highly correlated reasons. 1) It speeds up the pace of innovation and
change as these companies can now receive rapid feedback and see what works
and what doesn't. 2) It heavily reduces the maintenance requirements as Apple
is only supporting a relatively small number of platforms. By reducing the
number of platforms supported, the companies can then reallocate those
resources that would have been doing bug fixes on adding brand new features to
the latest version. These all allow the marketing arms of these companies to
crow about the new features they've added.

Think about it this way. Chrome's major innovation was being the first browser
to rapidly update itself. That allowed it to quickly leapfrog over IE and
Mozilla since they could push out many more changes over the same period of
time AND those changes would be more likely to be stable. It also eliminated
the need to support old versions like IE 6 with security fixes

~~~
pfranz
Unfortunately, that's not always good for the user. There are things I do like
once a year; update my drivers license online, for example. If the web site is
"good enough" and never updated, then great, I know how long it will take and
what steps to take--I may even have automated most of it. If they change the
website every 6 months with wiz-bang features I have to relearn it, I have no
idea how long it'll take, and it may not even work. A web service is kind of a
bad example since it require managing a backend.

To my parents, opening a spreadsheet or listening to music is the same. They
lack the lexicon to discover newer interface trends like the hamburger icon,
or ribbon interface.

Many people used IE6 because there was a huge investment in it. I agree it was
terrible to support and write against, but I don't see any problem with using
a payroll system that was written 10 years ago and dependant on IE6 if your
needs haven't changed. It seems silly to constantly update or completely
rewrite something that's working just fine if needs haven't changed. It just
sucks that they would use the same browser for payroll as they do for browsing
the Internet.

------
runjake
(This is meant to be a serious, non-snarky answer.)

Because the "move fast and break things" of app development has hit the
mainstream and crossed over into the OS.

It allows for faster iteration at the expense of some stability and
familiarity.

------
subway
Users are lazy and if you don't force them to update, they won't. Then they
get owned. Then they talk shit about you.

Why not make the world a better place, push the updates hard, and just jump to
the shit talking? ;)

~~~
user5994461
That is true for security updates which are critical and it makes sense to
'force' them.

But that is not a valid excuse to force major version upgrade like win8 =>
win10. It has little to do with security and it forces a different environment
onto the user.

~~~
serge2k
> It has little to do with security

It does when you start to talk about unsupported versions.

~~~
pfranz
It can also break compatibility. I built a PC for the first time in probably
10 years. I went with Windows 10, but most of the my stuff didn't have drivers
and support. I couldn't tell if things were broken or just didn't have driver
support. I cobbled together a version of Windows 7 to make sure everything
worked, then moved back to Windows 10.

South Park Studios still uses an image compositor called Shake. It's cross
platform (OSX, Windows, Linux) and Apple stopped development in 2008, but they
still use Shake to make new episodes. There's a good chance it won't run on
the latest version of the operating system, but they've made a huge investment
in software and hardware that works fine. Forcing and update would shut down
production.

~~~
serge2k
> There's a good chance it won't run on the latest version of the operating
> system

Why? These companies do put in work to try and maintain compatibility.

> they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine

Sure. and that bridge over there will work fine for forever too, so lets
ignore any maintenance or safety upgrades. IT Infrastructure is still
infrastructure. Admittedly when you are talking about a TV show it's not
exactly critical.

~~~
pfranz
The problem is that this is done on the OS vendor's terms, not the client's.
Maintenance and safety upgrades aren't done to bridges on a whim. They're
carefully planned to reduce the impact.

------
abramN
Has no one realized that Microsoft and others are moving to a SaaS model, even
with consumer OSes? Lots of other service providers update their platforms,
and the user doesn't really have much say in WHEN it happens. We just get a
message that the vendor is updating the software during a maintenance window,
and that's that. 10,20 years from now we'll be subscribing to all of our
software, and we will just be told when that software is going to update. We
may also see something similar to what the Playstation does - ok, don't update
now if you don't want to, but that means you can't use any network features!
But either way, prepare for a new way to look at the applications running on
your PC.

------
aphextron
Because hackers have become so aggressive. It's no longer just clandestine
groups of anonymous people working through the internet. There are industrial
scale state-sponsored hacking efforts across the world now, actively focused
on exploiting every single release of every single OS, and it's only getting
worse. Also, with the wide scale adoption of broadband internet it's become
possible to adopt an "evergreen" model for OS updates now, much like browsers
have been doing for years.

------
therealidiot
User choice has gone out of fashion

------
rman666
Uh, security?

------
executive
Windows 10 Home is brutal. There is no group policy editor.

Workaround is set each WiFi you use as a "Metered Connection" which will avoid
updates.

