[Kushan]

Originally Posted by Carth

To be honest, I'm rarely surprised at anything concerning windows - especially the later versions. Every 'improvement' brings more 'exploits' with it, and Microsoft show great keenness in releasing patch after patch to address the stuff that they missed by pushing out poorly tested 'fixes'

While I won't defend Microsoft's handling of some Windows 10 updates, I'm happy to give them some leeway due to the sheer complexity of Windows these days. People like to rag on Windows versus other OS's like OSX and Linux, but neither of the latter still run applications made 20 or even 30 years ago. Hell, OSX drops support faster than most people change shoes. Window's biggest flaw is also its biggest advantage.

Originally Posted by Carth

I've worked at companies where the IT management insist on the 'auto update' being always on (can you turn it off in the latest OS? ), which has led to massive and costly downtime when the update borked the whole system

Let's be fair here, if you've got mission critical systems, you don't put them on auto update, you leverage WSUS or similar and you test those updates in a QA environment before deploying them, or roll them out to a few canary machines first. You just don't let changes happen to those systems without your involvement.

Originally Posted by Carth

Regarding the EOL slant, newer isn't always better for what/how you use it. When my Plasma TV dies, I'll be looking to purchase a used one to replace it, not a brand new 'bells n whistles' TV with poorer performance.
The Ford Capri EOL was late 70's but I'd love to own one instead of this modern masterpiece that has innumerable gadgets and features that are simply more things to go wrong and expensive to fix . . . and I can't easily fix myself

Turned into a bit of a 'get it off your chest' rant, sorry, but not everyone has the need or desire to keep up with the Jonses

I agree that newer isn't always better, but that's why Windows 10 has LTSB editions that don't get the major yearly/twice-yearly updates - that are supported for 10 years. Plenty of time to test and upgrade. If you actually vaguely want to keep up to date, you've also got separate Enterprise editions that have 30months support between major updates.

There's really no excuse for any business to get caught out with updates when you have plenty of options to suit your patch cycle, you just need competent IT personnel.

Now on the home/consumer side of things....that is a different story for sure! But again, way prior to Windows 10 people have a habit of ignoring updates, causing mass botnets of unpatched machines which just makes things worse for everyone. I don't blame Microsoft for trying to force people to update, but again they did it in too heavy-handed a way and caused too much pushback.