This is in regards to one Microsoft product: Windows. Reality is, they're not focused on Windows anymore, but I do agree it would be nice if they took away all that telemetry nonsense and allowed people to have better control over updates. To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
To be completely fair under Linux I get updates weekly more or less, but they're just not forced upon me to install them.
Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
I'm still hoping Microsoft see the light on all the telemetry and forced update nonsense before the Windows 7 cut-off in a couple of years. The trouble is, I can't see it happening as long as Nadella is at the top, and I can't see that changing as long as the big enterprise customers who aren't subject to that kind of nonsense are propping up the share price.
> in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0. The same cannot be said of Windows updates.
A few years ago I turned on my windows machine to see the dreaded upgrade. Being in a rush I went to another machine and the exact thing happened. I blew my top and replaced all windows with Ubuntu. I would have preferred Macs but I couldn't afford the Apple tax (high prices and not working on my existing HW).
> Also, in many years my amount of downtime due to Debian's unattended-upgrades is exactly 0.
That's nice for you, but if you use any non-open software or software not covered by the package repo then there's a fairly good chance you'll see downtime after an upgrade of your linux distro.
If you're talking about a major distro upgrade, say Jessie (8) to Stretch (9) in the Debian case, then yes, there's a fairly good chance at least some minor things will break, but that's a much bigger deal and presumably not something you'd ever expect to happen automatically.
To be clear, I was talking specifically about the unattended-upgrades package, which is primarily for automatic installation of things like security fixes. In my experience, this has been rock solid: it's never broken a distro package, nor any dependency that non-distro software we had installed was relying on.
Windows was completed with Windows 7. Everything after that is just churn. Consider for a minute that Windows doesn't need to be redone every 3 years anymore.
If you're on latest Ubuntu (or derivatives) since 16.04 at least you've been getting security track upgrades (through the default config of unattenfed-upgrades) forced on you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what you get default out of the box with Windows as well?
On Ubuntu you can install it on every computer in your house and still pay zero dollars and zero cents. LTS releases let you use the same core packages for the next 5 years.
Your OS can be configured to pull updates not only from official Canonical sources or those blessed by them but also any sources you please including your own. You can put up your own packages and use them just for you or promote them to all of planet earth. If you don't like a particular package or a particular version you can not update just that package although you might be unable to update others if they require the new package in question.
If you feel strongly about it you can fork and support old versions indefinately or take the package in your own direction.
Further you can even fork the entire ecosystem and not even call it Ubuntu anymore.
On Windows home you can't even decide not to update. You have to pay $99 per computer for that privilege and might have to pay again if you update say the motherboard. The windows store is only for apps that MS designates at its privilege and supposing you agree to give MS almost 1/3 of your revenue for a privilege it can revoke at its descretion at any time.
You can't fork Edge if you don't like how it works and if you could you wouldn't have the right to distribute such let alone create an alternative store/source usable by all for people to install/update such a creation.
You have pretty much misunderstood the entire point of open source software.
You can, it just isn't as simple as a menu option. Considering Linux's habit of requiring config file changes and obscure command line invocations to perform configuration it is hardly fair to judge in this case.
