
Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion' - fraqed
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-removes-manual-deferrals-from-windows-update-by-it-pros-to-prevent-confusion/
======
kens
I'm a tolerant person, but I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced
Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running
overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically
rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my
daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer
decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has
become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you.

My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they
keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care
how much they mess up the user experience in the process. Microsoft should
reassign that person.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
> The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead

All Linux/BSD systems I've used can update in minutes at the most (excluding
the download time); I've long since wondered why Windows update is so much
slower? Even binary diffs generally don't take that long to apply in my
experience. So where is all the time spent?

Also why does it _need_ to reboot? It is the "hard" file locking that's on
Windows?

~~~
m0xte
Reboot is definitely the file locking. One of the worst architectural choices
that they made.

As for the time, I have no idea. A lot of it’s sitting there doing SFA looking
at task manager.

~~~
jimnotgym
My impression, as an enterprise user is that Windows updates require reboots
less frequently than they used to.

I also note that Macs often require update reboots too, which suggests there
is more to this.

Some Linux updates also require a reboot on some distributions. Less
frequently than Windows, but still there.

~~~
beagle3
Some linux updates require a reboot for a kernel update to take effect; Many
modern ones, if properly configured, can update the kernels without rebooting
(e.g. Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle all have that as a paid option for businesses,
Ubuntu also free for personal or oss use).

But I've never had an issue where something wouldn't work between the end of
an update and a reboot, where that _does_ happen on Windows. Furthermore, it
has happened to me that after a kernel upgrade (on a system that did require a
reboot to make it take effect), I took a couple of weeks before reboot
(running long simulations), in which case I was able to apply _yet another_
kernel upgrade or two; but you only ever need one reboot to make the latest-
and-greatest take effect.

On Windows, you accumulate reboots if you wait (which requires constantly
rejecting the "shall I reboot now" prompts) so you may need many; and I've
sometimes needed several reboots even though I didn't delay anything.

~~~
rcxdude
Live kernel patching is limited though: it can update most functions and some
datastructures, but not all. This is great for bugfixes and security patches
but can't deal with larger updates. If you're trying to keep on the latest
version you need to reboot at some point.

------
raxxorrax
> Microsoft has been continually tweaking the way the Windows 10 updating
> process works based on "user feedback"

I... what... where... when?

Seriously, how about just giving control to users? And btw, I still see
machines were the telemetry service eats CPU. If you cannot get it to work,
remove it. It shouldn't be part of an OS anyway. Don't tell me users like it,
you could just offer an app in that case.

I don't get how neglected they have treated their flagship for desktop
computers. Software as a service is good for my tax declaration, but I really
hate this trend.

~~~
sp332
Windows machines get forcibly updated because users kept letting their boxes
be part of botnets which hurt other users.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but if you're going to do
forced updates then you might as well spend some time making the entire user
experience nicer. I don't know what the technical challenges are exactly, but
not forcing a reboot unless there's really a critical patch might be a good
start.

~~~
corty
And not mixing security fixes with feature upgrades, not forcing the latter to
be installed would be nice. That would also reduce the massive breakage many
windows updates cause due to poor quality and high change rate.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
I think that might actually be harder than it sounds though, since Windows is
such an integrated system.

~~~
corty
That is a kind way of putting it. I would say Windows lacks modularity and is
a messy monolith with a lot of spooky crosstalk.

~~~
Carpetsmoker
Yeah, maybe. I don't really know much of the Windows internals, so I try not
to assume too much (hence my question in the top comment[1], which was very
much a "curiosity"-question, and not a "omg, wtf"-question).

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23656237)

------
herpderperator
Before Windows 10 I would just disable the Windows Update service and enable
it on my own schedule when I wanted to do updates. I've had my machines stay
undisruptive for months on end, sometimes up to a year without rebooting, and
the reboots would be initiated by me (hardware changes, power outages, or
updates that I actually wanted to install.)

Since Windows 10, Microsoft has caught onto this and added a new service that
checks if you disabled the Windows Update service and re-enables it
automatically, and sets permissions that initially deny you from tampering
with it that then makes this a little more challenging to get around, but
still possible to do manually. I later found Windows Update Blocker (WUB)
which does all of this for you in one click. I have been using it ever since,
and have never again been nagged by any update or experienced an unexpected
reboot: [https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-
blocker-v1-5/](https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-5/)

~~~
fsflover
This sounds like fighting with your own computer. No thanks, I go to
GNU/Linux.

~~~
wvenable
Running GNU/Linux involves a different kind of fighting with your computer for
a lot of machines. The intent is different but the result is the same.

~~~
ubercow13
Depending on the user, the psychological result can be quite different. I mean
it doesn't _really_ matter if Windows reboots and kills your computation
overnight, you can just do it again! On average over time, it probably doesn't
waste your time any more than making Linux work would. But it feels _rude_.

~~~
bragh
On average over time, I feel that Linux definitely loses out on desktop. But
it's not about rudeness, but about the choice of when you want to use the
administration time. If you have a strict deadline or presentation coming up,
then that 1 hour for updates or a forced restart can be much more costly than
when the update happens during the weekend or while watching a movie.

~~~
ldarby
Yes but I've been in a situation trying to debug CUPS because it was
corrupting fonts, and urgently needed a print out of something. So, pick your
poison...

~~~
Reelin
My solution to this is to use a LTS type release that's reinstalled and
configured once every few years for boring desktop work. Almost never add or
remove any software, just apply updates weekly or so.

For dev or other technical work I find a more up to date system that undergoes
frequent changes and might break on occasion to be tolerable.

------
rocky1138
If it didn't require a reboot, an automatic update wouldn't bother me at all.
I hate that my one remaining Windows machine is never in the same state I left
it because it rebooted during the night.

~~~
rubatuga
You can disable automatic reboots.

~~~
errantmind
If you mean by disabling the scheduled task, this doesn't stick. Even if you
delete all the scheduled tasks, or otherwise mess with them, they always come
back

~~~
a1369209993
You say "delete", but are you actually overwriting the task executable with
garbage, unlinking it, then creating a folder named "stupidshit.exe" (or
whatever the executable was called) so that re-creating it will fail, or just
removing it from a list?

------
wheybags
I finally got pissed off enough at the forced update policy that I made a tool
to disable updates for real:
[https://github.com/wheybags/win10bsfixer](https://github.com/wheybags/win10bsfixer)

It works by killing and disabling the windows update service every 10 seconds,
so it should be resilient to pretty much any aggressive changes ms makes. It
does allow manually updating when you want to too. I want to have it handle
some other nasty behaviours too eventually, but its enough for me to use for
now.

~~~
kasabali
Possible next step for Microsoft: making Windows update service unkillable
like defender service

~~~
userbinator
It's not "unkillable" as long as I can still modify arbitrary blocks of the
hard drive... even if it means doing so from another OS ;-)

But you're right, they seem to be escalating the fight.

------
charlesdaniels
As an outsider (someone who doesn't use any MS products) looking in... why
would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone
use this platform?

Windows 10 has, since it's inception, been a privacy nightmare, which simply
does not respect the user or administrator. There might be some hacks to let
you turn some of these behaviors off, but it seems like they aren't likely to
survive an OS update.

I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company
having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems
to get work done today.

~~~
jasode
_> why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would
anyone use this platform?_

Because companies often have a portfolio of software apps that _only run on
Windows os_. No Linux (or even macOS) options. Yes, if a company can do _all_
its business processes only with a web brower, then it can conceivably have
all employees use Linux desktop with Firefox.

But many companies have critical apps like business analytics, CAD modeling,
warehouse inventory management, legacy apps, etc that have no Linux options.
These companies had Windows XP, then upgraded to Windows 7, then upgraded to
Windows 10 -- so they could maintain Microsoft's continued support. Even for
home use, my friend who sews has an embroidery machine and that software only
runs on Windows. She can't run the embroidery software in a VM inside of Linux
because the USB security dongle doesn't work through the vm's USB emulator.
She's "stuck" on Windows too.

A new YC startup with no historical baggage of legacy apps can "choose their
destiny" by being a 100% Linux/Apple shop but mature Fortune 1000 companies
will be running a flavor of Windows for decades to come because it's too
expensive to switch off of it.

~~~
charlesdaniels
I suppose like it or not, this is the real answer to the question.

I do wonder why companies continue to write new software for the Windows
platform. I guess more and more is moving to the web, but it seems like I
still see relatively new programs that are Windows-only.

~~~
jasode
_> , but it seems like I still see relatively new programs that are Windows-
only._

Yes if we think of well-known software like Photoshop (Windows or Mac) and MS
Excel/Word (Windows or Mac), etc. ... or cross-platform apps
(Slack,Skype,Discord) using Electron ... then it seems like avoiding Windows
is possible.

However, a lot of the "invisible" or "dark matter" of the software universe is
LOB (Line Of Business) apps and they are overwhelmingly written for Windows
instead of macOS/Linux. As random trivia, I also noticed that the newest high-
end oscilloscopes from Keysight have embedded Windows 10 instead of Linux as
the underlying os.[1] I'm not sure what the technical reason was for building
the scope's ui on Windows because their older scopes already used Linux. Maybe
it was better graphics SDK with DirectX or some other Window's dependency.

[1] [https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-
series...](https://www.keysight.com/en/pcx-2935671/infiniium-uxr-series-real-
time-oscilloscopes?nid=-31885.0&cc=US&lc=eng)

~~~
charlesdaniels
Can confirm that Tektronix is using Windows also, though I think they had been
for quite some time. Seems like a really odd design decision for an appliance.
I would probably tend towards like FreeRTOS (or at least some variation of an
RTOS). On the other hand the EEs I’ve worked with also use their scopes as
workstations with external monitors and everything, so maybe that’s part of
it.

------
jimnotgym
There are a lot of comments on this thread which ignore one important point.
Windows updates are totally centrally controllable to an enterprise user. They
can be made silent, and force rebooting can be incredibly rare. On the other
hand I get lots of calls about mac problems which are caused by not updating!
That is not really the Unix stability that people argue for, is it? We answer
Mac calls with a 'have you tried updating, then turn it off and on again'

~~~
mrgordon
I'd love to hear about the long list of issues that require updating on Mac. I
have many old Macs and I've never seen an issue that require updating other
than new software (especially from the App Store) requiring a newer OS or the
inconvenience that Safari updates are tied to OS updates.

The idea that Mac is unstable and requires a lot of updates and reboots to
just function is news to me...

~~~
jimnotgym
'I can't send emails' 'I have not received any emails today' 'I can't save a
file I have been working on all day' These are so common from my Apple using
user segment that they are running jokes in our IT team. I have a feeling abou
tthe root cause (below)...but they are exacerbated by the user base beleiveing
some myth that Mac's somehow do not need updating and rebooting. And before
anyone asks, I have actually heard the words 'I don't need to reboot I'm on a
Mac.' come out of a users mouth. I have been watching our remote management
tools and Windows users seem to see shutting down at the end of the day as
normal behaviour, whereas my Mac users tend to restart when they have to.
(before anyone says anything, my experiments have shown that left on for days
on end both Windows and Mac show performance degradation, ususally from the
classic memory hogs of Excel, Adobe CC and Chrome.)

I think the answer to why so many systems are troubled by updates is that your
average Mac or PC does not exist in isolation, and are really semi-dumb
terminals for a bunch of cloud services from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. The
clients need to stay up-to-date with the service. The typical, 'Linux user
running a simulation over multiple days' that are posting about not having to
update below _are_ existing in isolation form those other services.

~~~
mrgordon
You’re saying they can’t send emails or save files because they are behind on
updates? I’ve never once encountered these issues and they frankly sound like
problems that people have when they aren’t used to using computers.

I don’t use Adobe and Microsoft on Mac much. Chrome is obviously a huge memory
hog due to tab sandboxing but realistically you just need to shut down the
browser and/or most of your tabs once in a while. Updating the OS (or even
restarting) sounds like overkill when the same result is likely obtained from
restarting the browser with no tabs open or switching to Safari which is more
RAM efficient

------
Multicomp
Too many users were using options to hit the 'defer updates for 365 days'
button.

Microsoft can't let them do that ("...Star Fox!"), they NEED the newest
features, security updates, and telemetry.

Cynical: The stupid users don't know what's good for em, that's for MS to
decide now, not the users.

However, there is an opt out via GPO for now. Of course if that gets used
enough it will be ignored.

"If you wish to continue leveraging deferrals, you can use local Group Policy
(Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components >
Windows Update > Windows Update for Business > Select when Preview builds and
Feature Updates are received or Select when Quality Updates are received)."

~~~
rkagerer
They ought to consider why users don't want (and are actively circumventing)
the updates.

~~~
OldHand2018
> ought to consider why

It's a stunning indictment of the entire concept of telemetry. They know what
people are doing but have no idea why.

You can root out and eliminate bugs this way, but improving the experience is
a crap shoot.

~~~
blibble
next they'll hook the camera and microphone into the telemetry service

(sounds far fetched, right? if you told me 10 years ago that the 2020 version
of Windows Pro had adware, spyware and reboots whenever it wants I would have
laughed at you)

------
LorenPechtel
Want us to be more tolerant of updates? Set things up with much better support
for shutting programs down cleanly and ideally restarting them as they were.
Add a Windows message that says "shut down for restart" and don't do a forced
restart until every program has honored it. (Obviously, older programs won't
support it.)

~~~
freeone3000
That's actually very close to what happens in Windows 10 2004. UWP apps, store
apps, and any app updated reasonably recently (so, ime, Chrome) will
absolutely reboot and resume state after a machine restart. Try it out, it's
cool.

Shutdown is currently two-phase, and has been since 7. Programs receive a
shutdown notification, and then can handle it, and the machine doesn't shut
down until all are handled... or until 2 minutes pass, because occasionally
programs misbehave, and one program shouldn't be able to hold up the entire
shutdown process.

~~~
Dylan16807
The request isn't for it to be two phase, it's for auto-shutdown to cancel if
any program can't fully restore itself.

If there's going to be a forced shutdown, to make sure everyone updates, it
should come after half a week to a week of having a big warning on the screen.
Windows should never be forcing programs closed when the user is on a coffee
break or gone for the day or asleep.

Also chrome will reopen pages, but if you were doing something on that page
it's going to be gone. So unless they improve that, it's not a great candidate
for auto-reboot.

~~~
freeone3000
For Chrome, that's going to be a fix on Chrome's side - you can't simply
suspend/unsuspend like with hibernate because libraries are going to be
changing, so it's up to each program to figure out how to restore. UWP handles
it for you but, well.

As for waiting for ALL programs to be ready: No. Not going to happen. There
are programs written in 1996 still running on Windows PCs today that don't
comprehend the event model, nevermind listening to the shutdown event to save
state. And they will forever run. And the system is going to have to reboot at
some point.

The alerts were tried. People didn't like being told their computer was going
to restart, so the alerts went away.

~~~
Dylan16807
If you only check programs that are in the task bar, you'll find plenty of
computers where every running program is restart-aware and able to mostly save
its state.

> The alerts were tried. People didn't like being told their computer was
> going to restart, so the alerts went away.

So what? Restarting without an alert is worse.

~~~
freeone3000
And those programs handle a two minute window fine. This is two literal, wall-
clock minutes. The problem is never the head. The problem is the long tail
(not even that long!) - notepad, LabVIEW, Blackberry Storage Manager don't
handle the event; Hexchat, Photoshop, and Mathematica opt not to restart.

~~~
Dylan16807
If you're in the tail, then give the user warning. It's a really easy thing to
do. They just don't want to.

------
whyoh
I'm trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen
every 6 months, but I don't see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they
have to be so massive (several GB downloads)?

And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels and an
overall inconsistent UI and plenty of bugs. The whole OS is like a permanent
work in progress.

~~~
jsnell
They definitely need to be that frequent, because the less often your upgrade
the more risky and painful it is. It feels like most the OS X releases are
despised as buggy and breaking everything, since they try to do too much in a
year. And then you have the occasional release that stabilizes things and
mollifies the users. ChromeOS releases every couple of months. The changes are
so incremental that it's hard to notice they even happen. And if there are
breakages, they're hard to notice since it's just a couple of things rather
than everything. Also, they can be fixed or rolled back quickly, since there
isn't a year of other feature work built on top of whatever caused the
breakage.

Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app
with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different?

Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound
unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens
twice a year.

~~~
zozbot234
Releasing too often is just churn for the sake of churn. Debian issues one
stable release every two years, and it takes many months to get a release into
shape after the freeze on major (system-wide) updates.

~~~
snazz
Debian is not Windows. Debian is a well-tested collection of frozen-in-time
packages that receive backported security fixes (an approach that does not
scale to applications the size of Chromium and Firefox). Debian doesn't have
to do any marketing; stability on servers is of the utmost importance.

Windows, on the other hand, "needs" to have new features annually or
biannually for marketing purposes. Same with macOS and iOS. Windows is an
integrated system, not a collection of packages.

While I agree that constant releases are annoying, I do understand why modern
software is released frequently. Companies that make money off of ad
engagement (like social networks) do A/B testing to make money. This usually
requires frequent updates.

------
pndy
All these never ending stories with Windows Update in W10 is like walking
around the problem that is caused by lack of proper QA team that was pushed
onto users and removal of previously perfectly working feature of selective
updates installing - which was obviously great because in case of problems
user could just skip the bugged patch and wait till a fixed version is
released. The old way of delivering patches in Vista/7 style should return -
even by a price of patches "weight".

I get it: they want people to stay up-to-date to avoid problems of zombie-
machines but Windows isn't OSX that works on narrow set of hardware and
software configurations - these differ much (duh) and that affects how updates
work. Expecting that users will ditch their workflow to report all issues on
forums (or these will come from the " _enthusiasts_ " testing grounds), will
want to play countless reinstallations, backups and restoring is just wrong.
This leads powerusers who want to have more control over their machines to
disable (temporarily or permanently) WU along with associated processes which
by the way, seem behave in a very malicious way.

~~~
rstuart4133
Windows updates have another feature: you wake up in the morning, and UI has
changed, the feature set has been updated, things can no longer work. This
happens on Android as well. Infuriatingly Google Maps decided to update itself
during the day, between two car trips. I'm driving on a freeway, realise I
don't know where I'm going, and fire up maps to tell it the address and am
confronted with a new UI that is going to take some real concentration to
decipher, the sort of concentration that can not be given while driving down a
freeway. I yelled a few things at the maps developers that day.

Compare that to Debian. Updates are backports of bug fixes to the existing
source code base. It is the absolute smallest change possible to fix the
defect. There are literally 10 of thousands of updated to Debian packages over
the life time of a single release, and yet you noticing any change over it's
entire lifetime is very unlikely. [0] Calling Debian Stable "stable" is an
understatement. It's a rock. Bedrock even.

On Debian big changes on happen when you move between versions. Versions are
currently supported for 6 years. The timing of moving to a new version is at
the compete digression of the user.

[0] That's a bit of a lie. Web browsers in particular are so big and complex
the manual work of backporting fixes has overwhelmed the Debian Developers.
For those packages only, they stick with the closest upstream provides, which
is the ESR version for Firefox. But they only last a year or so, which forces
Debian to move to a new version occasionally.

------
pwdisswordfish2
I am honstely surprised that businesses and other organisations have come to
accept this constant 24/7 "updates" scenario from Microsoft without some
intelligent business people calling them out on it.

Imagine if every month, every week, or even every day someone from an office
supply company came around to your office and collected all your pens, pencils
and other office supplies and replaced them with "updated" versions. Meanwhile
you could detect no meaningful difference from the "old" ones. After a while,
you would just tell them to go away: "The supplies I have are working just
fine. Thanks."

------
ausjke
A happy Ubuntu users here for the last 15 years, I guess I don't really
understand what Microsoft is messing around anymore and I'm just glad that I
do not need Microsoft at all for so long.

------
driverdan
If you _must_ run Windows 10 I strongly recommend the Enterprise LTSB (Long-
Term Servicing Branch) version. You have much more control and can strip out
most of the garbage.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to get a single
copy of Enterprise LTSB. Hint: windows 10 enterprise ltsb gen2

~~~
blibble
you probably want ltsc, which is a newer branch

completely unrelated: ebay is great, isn't it?

------
panpanna
What pisses me off is that a windows machinea spend so much time downloading
and installing the OS and just a few Microsoft apps.

Linux machines update everything including hundreds of apps you may have
installed (and some are updated very often) and you barely notice it happening
because it's so damn efficient.

------
seneca
I genuinely don't understand why people buy the "New Microsoft" marketing
line. They are adopting Linux because they have no other option. Where they're
strong, the desktop, they're still the same old Microsoft.

~~~
wayneftw
It turns out that there are multiple groups of people at Microsoft and these
factions aren’t all in agreement all the time.

I’m sure that there are plenty of those at Microsoft that disagree with
telemetry and updates that you can’t opt out of. I would bet that many of them
are in the developer division.

~~~
mikro2nd
It doesn't matter that there are multiple groups with differing opinions at MS
or at any other organisation. The organisation acts as a organism (or, if you
prefer, as a set of emergent behaviours). It is, for all practical purposes, a
single entity. So ascribing a behaviour or a wish or a bias to "Microsoft" is
an entirely valid generalisation. Generalisations are only bad when applied to
isolated/differentiated components/constituents of a compound body.

~~~
wayneftw
Oh okay, well that explains everything.

So which other group on the same order of magnitude of Microsoft's 150,000
employees do you know of that exhibits the same kind of decisiveness that
would normally be attributed to a single entity?

~~~
wizzwizz4
Facebook is the first that comes to mind, followed by Twitter (the "other
social media company" in my mind, even though Reddit's bigger).

~~~
wayneftw
Didn’t a bunch of Facebook employees stage a walk out last month?

What are some examples of these companies acting incomplete unison at all
times?

------
amyjess
This is just going to cause technically-inclined people to configure their
networks to MITM all calls to the Windows update servers and block updates
network-wide.

------
jeisc
WINOS >> a work in progress since the 1980's WINDEVS >> don't touch what is
working unless your boss told you to do so. WINUSERS >> don't update unless
your boss tells you to do so if you have no boss don't update. REALITY >> you
need two computers which can do the same work if one goes down.

------
m0xte
I’m done and out. One too many turd to deal with.

------
naikrovek
To all of you shouting complaints into the ether in the hope of gaining karma:
this change only affects Windows 10 Enterprise.

------
alibert
Please note that the feature to defer still exists and can be found in Group
Policy.

------
henearkr
And of course it's still possible to opt-out with some "pro" version?

I mean, there are always situations where you want to avoid to be interrupted
by updates by all mean...

Oh wait, I get it... pro versions are called Arch, Gentoo, etc... ;)

~~~
ashleyn
As usual, they will be moved up to Enterprise, with no ability for the
consumer to purchase Enterprise.

~~~
Spivak
Purchasing Enterprise is definitely super annoying but it's not out of reach
for an individual.

You can only purchase Enterprise through Volume Licensing and you have to
find/choose a reseller (VAR in msspeak). But you buy one license of Windows 10
Enterprise and 4 cheap user CALs and you're done. You don't actually have to
have a business or anything. Any reseller will just put your own name as the
business name.

(If your machine didn't come with pro then make that 1 Pro license, 1
Enterprise license, and 3 user CALs.)

~~~
henearkr
So probably the best next step for MS is to prepare something like a "dev"
license, i.e. an Enterprise license for the individual that knows what he is
doing.

------
2OEH8eoCRo0
Makes sense. I clicked it accidentally out of habit because it looked like an
optional download button for an update.

------
voldacar
Would it be difficult to just patch the binary that controls updating to just
go back to the previous behavior?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Code signing may make this difficult.

------
corty
Microsoft is reducing confusion. They don't want you confused into thinking
it's your software or your computer...

------
twirlock
It does prevent confusion! It prevents confusion about who Microsoft thinks
owns my computer once I install their OS.

------
unixhero
How "helpful".

