>Windows Update’s Optional Updates section will let you see all optional updates including drivers and monthly non-security updates in one place.
If I remember correctly, all the way up to windows 8.1, you could choose which updates to install. It was only with windows 10 that they removed the ability to select updates. It's ironic how they're touting this as a new feature, when really it's fixing a regression.
Choice is a problem with updates, but they probably went too far. When a choice is possible then people will skip updates which endangers the whole ecosystem.
The prevalence of Windows means that they can't let individuals make too many choices because bad outcomes reflect on Microsoft and not those users or admins who contributed to the problem. There is pressure from governments and companies for protection from infrastructure threats which drives some of this thinking. This is not limited to Microsoft, even Firefox introduced updater changes which limits how users can opt-out of automatic updates.
There was likely an assumption that restart-less upgrades would become a reality more quickly than they have, so the responsible teams went with a simplified update mechanism to protect the ecosystem. That backfired in a range of other ways, but at least the ecosystem is relatively safe.
Not only that, it's more effort to maintain given the number of combinations when users may selectively apply patches rather than there being one straight track of patches.
> When a choice is possible then people will skip updates which endangers the whole ecosystem.
There is a reason for that. Reason not being just the choice itself, but mostly that automated updates tend to range from inconvenient, through bloating up the machine, to outright dangerous to your data and software.
The reason to install updates is security. The reason to not install them is all the other things that get included. Because of that, I wish it was a standard to run security updates separately from feature updates, and keep the second type fully optional. Yes, it's more work for the developers, but it's better for the users (and our industry is going too far with preferring its own convenience over end-user value).
>Because of that, I wish it was a standard to run security updates separately from feature updates, and keep the second type fully optional. Yes, it's more work for the developers, but it's better for the users (and our industry is going too far with preferring its own convenience over end-user value).
This exists for Windows 10. It's called Windows 10 Enterprise Long Term Support Channel. It gets feature updates every 2-3 years but each release comes with a minimum of 10 years of security support.
Leave it to Microsoft to make stability as an Enterprise fearure.
I dont think this is changing how core Windows 10 updates are handled. I think its adding in additional, optional updates that previously would have only been available via 3rd party apps (like currently available driver updaters from Intel, Dell, or NVIDIA). For example, its currently uncommmon to have Windows Update provide the latest GPU drivers.
I don’t mind updates. I do mind the unprompted reboots (on unmanaged machines). My understanding is we can’t fix this issue of requiring reboot to update without losing a lot of backward compatibility. However, disabling unprompted reboots on unmanaged devices (not managed by an corporation/organization) should be easy.
It's not a problem unless you are updating the kernel but if you run your services using clusters then rolling reboots to update the kernel can be managed with no downtime.
That said, Windows 10 driver handling already handles the basic drivers out of the box (at least for me)
Generally though, these manufacturers have their own driver / bios update software that 1.) creates additional background / tray apps 2.) autostarts 3.) offers implicitly to download extra "helpful", "optional" software
Examples of software where all three happens: Fujitsu ScanSnap, Gigabyte Aorus Motherboard, Lenovo Advantage
So now there's a passive, consistent performance loss on the system, a tray icon hogging up space, "helpful" notifications, and unsolicited popups not offering driver updates, but to download additional software (box is already checked)
One nice thing about Linux/BSD desktops is even when Nvidia did proprietary stuff, the most you'd see back in the day is an Nvidia logo when starting X (editing xorg.conf could disable it)
I bought Lenovo laptop few days ago and installed fresh Windows. Then I enabled WiFi and left it for a hour. It installed ALL drivers including Nvidia drivers and Nvidia control panel. I checked driver versions with Lenovo support page and every driver was fresh. Windows did awesome work with automatically installing drivers. Nvidia driver was not fresh, I think it was from July, 22, 2019, but I don't think that it's that old anyway. So for ordinary users Windows does very good job at installing drivers and I would recommend against doing anything by hand, unless absolutely necessary.
You don't need to log in to update drivers. You need to log in to have GeForce Experience automate the updates, though, which is nonsensical and stupid.
If you want notifications for new driver updates you don't need to login. You would go to Nvidia.com/drivers when you see the notification.
It's not quite as you described, but it is total horseradish.
You'd think a 300-400MB driver could update itself without a login.
It used to work that you could unpack the NVidia installer and then point the Windows driver search to the directory with the unpacked files to let it pick the correct driver without actually installing all the crap. Does this still work?
That's surprising. The installer was never executed using this method, it was unpacked using a tool like 7-Zip. Windows would only use the inf-files to pick the appropriate driver dlls.
I built a new computer and for the first time in over a decade I wanted to try Windows, but apparently I was missing drivers for something. It never told me what I needed drivers for, and even with all the drivers for all the parts I could find on a separate USB drive, it couldn't find the drivers that I supposedly needed, so I gave up and chose to install Ubuntu instead.
Ubuntu apparently knew all the drivers I needed, fetched them from beyond the great ether, and all was in harmony.
Why is this so easy for Canonical, but not Microsoft?
I have a non-computer-savvy friend who regularly has to reinstall nvidia graphic drivers because windows 10 update REGULARLY overwrites them with drivers that CRASHES blizzard games (world of warcraft, overwatch). Has to be done every 4 days or something like that.
It's really weird to not know who is at fault here, if it's nvidia, microsoft or blizzard. There are no good way (other than disabling updates) to prevent windows update from overwriting drivers.
I wish microsoft would do something about this. Can't even remember if I submitted some feedback. Not to mention this computer is crazy slow since the upgrade from win8 to win10. I know the usual "get a SSD", but that computer was NOT THAT SLOW before the upgrade. Anyway this computer is a all-in-one, which has weird hardware. But still, it's a i7, with 6GB of ram. It's hard to believe it takes so long to open the start menu or just a folder.
Oh yeah, other thing: another friend bought an used laptop which had some insider preview enabled. 3 weeks ago her microphone just stopped working. Apparently you cannot remove an insider win10 build WITHOUT REINSTALLING. I was not able to fix it. I'm not even a maintenance guy.
> Apparently you cannot remove an insider win10 build WITHOUT REINSTALLING.
Well, yeah. If a beta takes a wrong direction in the design of a new on-disk data structure, do you really expect them to write a reverse-migration that turns it back into the old format? That's a lot of work for a tiny point-release on branch of development they're not even sure they're going to make public. No commercial OS supports this.
They could've warned instead of defaulting to failure.
I wish they'd ease up with signing core system files with short-lived certs either; I once had to reinstall my PC after not booting into Windows for ~3 months - when I tried to start Windows after that break, I discovered some core DLLs had expired certificates, preventing the system from booting.
It's the year 2019. We communicate with the speed of light across the ocean and manipulate DNA, but installing drivers is still not a solved problem on Windows...
... and a modern display server is still not used by default on Linux.
To be fair, one less desire-able 'solution' to drivers issues would be to not allow the hardware to work at all. MacOS users don't have access to Nvidia graphics cards, for example. I'll take Windows' driver work over that any day.
MacOS includes drivers for (most) 700-series graphics cards. It's just, Apple hasn't shipped Macs with nVidia cards since 2013ish, so they don't ship Mac OS with drivers for cards they never used, either.
nVidia used to ship third party Mac drivers for their newer cards, but they decided to stop maintaining them a couple years ago, possibly because Apple said they wouldn't sign them them†, depending on how you interpret vague PR statements. Still, the third party drivers work on slightly older OS's—I'm currently typing this from a macOS High Sierra machine that has a GTX 1080 Ti.
† I want to note that driver signing isn't some draconian Apple thing, 64 bit versions of Windows also require signatures. You can install unsigned drivers on macOS by partially disabling SIP, but presumably nVidia didn't want to ship drivers that would require that.
Even for supported cards, Apple's drivers are broken. OpenGL support is a decade old and deprecated. No Vulkan support whatsoever. No Direct3D either. No CUDA even if you own an NVIDIA card.
It’s not the driver signing that’s the problem. It’s that Apple is a gatekeeper for driver signatures and won’t release drivers unless it suits them.
I know the GTX 1080 works on High Sierra, but that OS is at (or near) the end of its supported life.
Microsoft manages the driver signing process but doesn’t play these games. If nVidia wants to write and maintain drivers for macOS, why get in their way?
I guess it just depends on what's actually happening. What nVidia has said is:
> Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14.
A lot of people have decided to interpret this as "Apple is refusing to sign nVidia drivers", but I'm not ready to jump to that conclusion without more explicit details.
For example, nVidia has continued to release drivers compatible with High Sierra security updates (necessary because nVidia driver coded their drivers such that they'll refuse to launch on non-whitelisted build numbers). Apple has not suddenly refused to sign those drivers.
My personal theory: in Mojave, all desktop compositing goes through Metal, so nVidia would have needed to a major rewrite of their drivers. Given how few Mac users install third party graphics cards, this isn't worthwhile for nVidia. nVidia wants Apple to implement some type of legacy shim in macOS that drivers can plug into, and Apple characteristically said no.
That, to me, makes more sense than Apple suddenly deciding not to sign any drivers which are compatible with 10.14+.
People also seem to be interpreting the line "eager to help Apple deliver great drivers" as Nvidia having new drivers ready to go, which I strongly suspect isn't the case.
Yeah, I was kind of expecting an announcement that they've figured out a way to make it possible to install drivers in place regardless of source without rebooting.
It took about half way through to realize they just meant a UI change... kind of surprised they bothered with an announcement.
The vast majority of windows drivers can be installed and upgraded in place, since at least NT/windows 2000. That is unless they regressed something in win10. Back 20 years ago, I was doing windows driver development and even then outside of some storage filters, and maybe IIRC the graphics drivers all you needed to install/update a driver in place was the package/.inf files.
I'm pretty sure that continues to work as of at least win7 where one can go into the device manager and click hardware without drivers and install/activate most things without rebooting. Or upgrade/switch drivers for a piece of hardware. Its only if windows fails to stop the device does it request a system reboot. Probably the biggest problem, are the stupid little monitoring utilities that some vendors provide that open the device and never respond to device state change requests.
Oh, totally agree that it's much better than it used to be. And far fewer reboots. Solid kudos to them on that.
Still happens though. Thought they maybe had a clever way to make it invisible to more legacy software that forces reboots, or to make it so windows update never required one, or something similar new. That would be pretty amazing to me and worth an announcement. UI change, less so.
I bought Lenovo laptop few days ago and installed fresh Windows. Then I enabled WiFi and left it for a hour. It installed all drivers automatically. I'm sure that there are cases where Windows won't install proper drivers, but from my experience Windows does awesome job at installing proper drivers.
PS I also booted Ubuntu LTS Live CD and while it worked, hardware support was not very nice. Display FPS was set to 60 instead of 144 and after 5 minutes it turned display off and I couldn't turn it on. I guess, with enough tinkering those problems could be solved.
Every part of my computer, which I built myself, gets its drivers from Windows Update. Drivers have been pushed from Windows Update since... forever? Granted, I always install a more recent version myself.
Huh, I've used Windows 10 for years now, and didn't realise it still had this feature - I don't recall ever seeing any "optional updates"?
But then, for most things I always install recent'ish drivers from the manufacturer myself, which I guess would disable this feature for at least those things.
Only that they are not optional, they force you to install those drivers (unless you're installed your own before). But they do indeed show up on Windows Update.
They are optional. The option is just not visible in that UI. If you have Windows 10 Pro or higher, open the Group Policy Management snap-in, navigate to "Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update", edit "Do not include drivers with Windows Update" and set it to 'Enabled'.
If you have Windows 10 Home you can get the same effect by manually creating the registry key the Policy controls. Go to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate", create a new DWORD 'ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate', and set it to '1'.
Yah, I don't understand why MS doesn't just make sure more of the drivers are in windows update or updated on a more regular basis as part of the driver signing program.
I'll take this as a tacit admit of partisanship on the mods part. Was I incorrect? Does title correction not happen frequently without flagging? Answer honestly and don't cower behind a digital wall.
I have been using Windows 10 (and its ancestors) on a kick-ass desktop PC for the past decade or so. It's been a shit-show. I've probably spent about 2 full days totally out of action, during this period, if I'm only counting downtime caused by MSFT idiocy.
I'd like to remind all commenters of this part the HN Guidelines:
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
Fair, that was snarky. But your response of offering a photo of your windows 7 disk was worse. Your initial comment didn't make sense until you edited it, and there was no need to be so defensive about that. You could have just said you meant 7-10.
And it's not the same product any more than XP and Vista are the same product. A free upgrade is still an upgrade.
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
If I remember correctly, all the way up to windows 8.1, you could choose which updates to install. It was only with windows 10 that they removed the ability to select updates. It's ironic how they're touting this as a new feature, when really it's fixing a regression.