this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
99 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37801 readers
119 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well, you could think of Microsoft as your distro. Generally, if they’re telling you to upgrade a driver, you should do it. At a minimum, everyone should be automatically installing security updates. This is one of the most important services an operating system vendor provides.
If you don’t trust them to do that or you don’t like their update frequency, maybe consider a different operating system. In the Linux world, we have some choices as far as release cadence and update policy. You can do rolling, 6 month, 2 year LTS, etc. Some are bleeding edge and others use “proven” software and remain very stable until the next major release.
The thing is, on Linux you can see exactly what an update brings, and you can also block individual packages from updating. I doubt you'll get the same courtesy with Windows updates, it's all or nothing.
I haven't used the more recent versions of Windows on a personal machine, but I know you at least used to be able to choose which updates you wanted to apply.
Control over individual updates was abandonded halfway through Windows 7, when they found out their algorithm for evaluating updates is exponential and has trouble finishing within 24 hours. So they moved to a linear sequence of all-or-nothing bundles and diffs.
They used to offer two tracks of those: everything and security-only. I don't think they do that anymore either.
You can uninstall individual updates after the fact. Not sure this actually works to any useful degree.
Auto update is fine for home user and ensuring latest stuff, but corporate use you want updates tested and then released in a controlled manner, otherwise you chase technical issues that are hard to trace and resolve with everchanging code updates being injected
Umm… you can do that with Windows in a corporate environment.
That was my point