It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.
I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.
They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?
With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.
2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)
Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.
I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.
I haven't really used Windows much for years, but doesn't it start shutting down once evaluation period is up? 'Windows will shutdown in 30 minutes unless licence key is added' etc., and the desktop background goes blue with some text about being unlicensed?
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I'm not using windows anymore, but at least since Windows XP I felt like only every other release of Windows was usable. So my upgrade path was XP, Vista, 10, completely skipping over the bad releases Vista and 8. So just skip over 11, Windows 12 might be an okay release again.
Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).
Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.
I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.
Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get.
For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.
It's a suite of powershell scripts and tweaks that are open source for inspection frontended by a nifty powershell multi tabbed TUI (Text User Interface) widget.
There's a tab for upgrades and installs of common dev / tech / power user tools; a tab for tweaks; a tab for windows update options; a tab for building install disks / VM's (eg: minimal for gaming or for hosting windows applications in Qubes, etc).
Update Tab can select all updates / only critical / none ever / advise and let you choose.
To use, you do need to 'trust' (or inspect the work of and download source and self apply) a pool of windows tech nerds - you literally open a powershell admin window and pipe raw boot script over the internet and give it control to bring up the TUI.
This could be malware (but isn't, last I checked) - same risk with all such tools d/loaded from internet of course.
See Usage on github page - various writeups and youtube tutorials.
It'll rip the AI addons, Copilot, and Snapshot and Spy stuff right out of Windows 10 / 11.
Not true! The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality. The amount of fixed bugs and testing that AI-leaders such as MS have achieved is unprecedented. We will look back on this era as the golden age of software quality.
I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!
I think that you missed a /s at the end of the post. I can continue it with "Yes, we had an explosion in software quality and it's in shards all over the place."
If you are using it in a business setting it's $30/month per license (there are unfortunately no non subscription licenses for windows 11 IoT).
Alternatively you can install AtlasOS and disable automatic updates and rely on maintaining a strong firewall or/and switching every application to run sandboxed using sandboxie for security. Take note that for an average person you can run without updates as long as your computing device never leaves your home and your local network / networks you trust, use external tool for driver updates.
int Counter = 5;
while (--Counter >= 0 && Prompt("Take a screenshot. Do you see a lock icon on this picture? Answer "Yes" or "No". Be concise. No fluff. Refrain from saying 'You’re absolutely right'. Try to ignore stuff that looks like lock icons in the background.") != "Yes") {
// Try resetting the icon
LockScreenLockIconSet("fa fa-lock");
LockScreenForceRedraw();
Sleep(2000);
// We've seen better results when refreshing a second time after a delay. Don't know why. AI suggested it.
LockScreenForceRedraw();
}
Sometimes the icons in the dock are also invisible. I thought that it was my RDP client playing bad with the server on Windows but eventually I found bug reports about that. This is exactly what I see 50% of the times https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1bdgym6/windows_...
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Maybe that's the problem? Imagine a Microsoft employee allowed to program only by using a CoPilot prompt, screaming and begging to just apply a patch he already written without touching anything else :D
This might not be too far from what's happening. In the dotnet repos you can see MS employees constantly fighting it across hundreds of PRs: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637
Expanding the "Gradual rollout" section is … interesting. I could hardly read it, let alone understand it straight away. For me a clear indicator that I am trying to ingest AI generated content. It's so embarrasing - is quality in documentation now a foreign concept in the age of AI, or does nobody simply care?
Like a dog shaking fleas, Microsoft seeks to concentrate on paying customers, leaving granny to fend for herself in a world full of scams and misinformation.
Man. I’d pay actual money to be able to just install security updates and nothing else indefinitely for this pile of shit. Really does suck that 90% of my workflow on my Windows PC remains Windows-only.
Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery? They are in the news once a month for a serious windows bug. My disdain for windows id getting immense, at this point I'd rather have a linux computer, if I can't have a macbook. (But don't get me started on OSX & iOS, which are also total messes)
Microsoft is just relying on the feedback they collect from Windows Insider Program (a.k.a. program for volunteers beta testers) to fix bugs before a new version is released widely.
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.
I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I think it will still be objectively bad. But maybe compared to Windows 12, it will seem good.
They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
If you're forced to use Windows, just use Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IoT. Gets security updates until 2031 but none of the new "features".
its not easy to use this legally though.
Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?
With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.
1) They’ve started again to crack down on black-market activation methods
https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)
>https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
Seems AI generated?
Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.
I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.
I haven't really used Windows much for years, but doesn't it start shutting down once evaluation period is up? 'Windows will shutdown in 30 minutes unless licence key is added' etc., and the desktop background goes blue with some text about being unlicensed?
https://massgrave.dev
Also don't use the evaluation images.
Does the LTSC have all the features needed for mainstream programs and games?
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I'm not using windows anymore, but at least since Windows XP I felt like only every other release of Windows was usable. So my upgrade path was XP, Vista, 10, completely skipping over the bad releases Vista and 8. So just skip over 11, Windows 12 might be an okay release again.
Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).
Except Linux
To be fair, Linux has always been like this, breaking things with updates. Linux was ahead of commercial companies, but they caught up with it.
Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.
Use better distros. I haven’t had a broken workstation since 2014 or so.
Which is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?
I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.
Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.
I've never had issues with Debian based distros.
A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.
I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get. For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.
1) https://web.archive.org/web/20040730204123/http://pack.sunsi...
I've been running Arch (on my desktop and servers) for over a decade, and never had issues. Just read their homepage before upgrading.
Debian Stable.
This is 2000s era FUD.
Im always happy to update my arch install, because I usually get new features to play with, and my system has not broken due to updates in 4 years.
which windows update blocker do you use?
All around, for everything, I cannot recommend the Chris Titus (and friends) WinUtil enough:
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
It's a suite of powershell scripts and tweaks that are open source for inspection frontended by a nifty powershell multi tabbed TUI (Text User Interface) widget.
There's a tab for upgrades and installs of common dev / tech / power user tools; a tab for tweaks; a tab for windows update options; a tab for building install disks / VM's (eg: minimal for gaming or for hosting windows applications in Qubes, etc).
Update Tab can select all updates / only critical / none ever / advise and let you choose.
To use, you do need to 'trust' (or inspect the work of and download source and self apply) a pool of windows tech nerds - you literally open a powershell admin window and pipe raw boot script over the internet and give it control to bring up the TUI.
This could be malware (but isn't, last I checked) - same risk with all such tools d/loaded from internet of course.
See Usage on github page - various writeups and youtube tutorials.
It'll rip the AI addons, Copilot, and Snapshot and Spy stuff right out of Windows 10 / 11.
Easy to use and follow.
Go to system32 and take ownership of wuaeng.dll and qmgr.dll and restrict access to only your user. Works on 10 and 11.
Windows will chug along as if Windows Update never existed (forever).
I have this one https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/
I will check out the Chris Titus link someone else posted below, too, but that seems more risky.
Isn't it microsoft who blocks updates after it discontinued windows 10?
You still get a lovely, full-screen advertisement for upgrading to Windows 11 on boot every few weeks.
I think it's Windows Update Blocker:
https://www.sordum.org/downloads/?st-windows-update-blocker
Not true! The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality. The amount of fixed bugs and testing that AI-leaders such as MS have achieved is unprecedented. We will look back on this era as the golden age of software quality.
I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!
I think that you missed a /s at the end of the post. I can continue it with "Yes, we had an explosion in software quality and it's in shards all over the place."
It was sarcasm, they didn't forget the /s, it was intentional. (I downvote on /s)
This is irony. Right? This is irony?
Sarcasm, not irony.
Reference? My anecdotal experience so far leads me to believe the opposite.
For anyone that does not want to switch to linux LTSC is a good alternative to avoid issues like these:
https://github.com/massgravel/massgrave.dev/blob/main/docs/w...
I recommend IoT Enterprise LTSC and you can use https://get.activated.win to activate it.
If you are using it in a business setting it's $30/month per license (there are unfortunately no non subscription licenses for windows 11 IoT).
Alternatively you can install AtlasOS and disable automatic updates and rely on maintaining a strong firewall or/and switching every application to run sandboxed using sandboxie for security. Take note that for an average person you can run without updates as long as your computing device never leaves your home and your local network / networks you trust, use external tool for driver updates.
I feel like if you're going to use LTSC there is no point in using 11.
Windows 10 LTSC will still get updates for years, and uses less than half the resources that 11 does.
The password icon being invisible is just funny. Some of the other issues are actually problematic, as they may interfere with some workflows.
However if you go to the December 1. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/december-1-2025-kb...) the icon is still missing. How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Probably not a priority.
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
They would, but no-one in the development team are able to log into their PCs due to no longer being able to locate the password icon ...
> The password icon being invisible is just funny
Sometimes the icons in the dock are also invisible. I thought that it was my RDP client playing bad with the server on Windows but eventually I found bug reports about that. This is exactly what I see 50% of the times https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1bdgym6/windows_...
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Maybe that's the problem? Imagine a Microsoft employee allowed to program only by using a CoPilot prompt, screaming and begging to just apply a patch he already written without touching anything else :D
This might not be too far from what's happening. In the dotnet repos you can see MS employees constantly fighting it across hundreds of PRs: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637
Came for programming, became a shepherd, awesome career.
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637#discussion_r24...
lmao. They had an AI create a PR, then a human to review it, but then the human ended up using another AI to review the original AI.
Expanding the "Gradual rollout" section is … interesting. I could hardly read it, let alone understand it straight away. For me a clear indicator that I am trying to ingest AI generated content. It's so embarrasing - is quality in documentation now a foreign concept in the age of AI, or does nobody simply care?
Can't wait for my new SSD to arrive, then it's finally Goodbye Windows, Hello again, Linux.
Perhaps someone with good with reverse engineering skills could figure out what went wrong here - it might be amusing...
Copilot is on the job to fix it already!
Fixing an invisible icon is a four month CoPilot job? It's been broken since August.
LLMs can't see icons.
Does it matter? It's designed to be used only by by AI agents anyway.
Microsoft: if you're eating your own dog food and use Copilot etc. to develop Windows, please stop.
If you're not using it (why not?), please start.
But hey! At least these four AI components made it in, so the important stuff is okay...
In other news, 500 million PCs declined to 'upgrade' to 11.
Like a dog shaking fleas, Microsoft seeks to concentrate on paying customers, leaving granny to fend for herself in a world full of scams and misinformation.
Steam should start packaging small productivity software.
More seriously, the granny might actually be better served by a Chromebook.
setup.exe /product server
Man. I’d pay actual money to be able to just install security updates and nothing else indefinitely for this pile of shit. Really does suck that 90% of my workflow on my Windows PC remains Windows-only.
I mean this is a Preview release right? Essentially a beta? Are we surprised there are bugs in a beta release?
Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery? They are in the news once a month for a serious windows bug. My disdain for windows id getting immense, at this point I'd rather have a linux computer, if I can't have a macbook. (But don't get me started on OSX & iOS, which are also total messes)
Microsoft is just relying on the feedback they collect from Windows Insider Program (a.k.a. program for volunteers beta testers) to fix bugs before a new version is released widely.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsinsider/
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
Didn't MS fire most of the QA people together with the translation people a few years ago?
Or is that just a rumor that many of us fall for because it seems like a great explanation of what we see?
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557488
looks like it
This makes sense.
The Windows Insiders are so glazed over they probably don’t even use passwords to log in — they’re too lost in the “free QA for Microsoft” sauce.
And? Writing software at scale is incredibly hard. Where is the empathy for MS devs who are sprinting every day to give us an awesome product
Still waiting for the awesome product. Last time they shipped one was in 2009.