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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
which windows update blocker do you use?
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).
All around, for everything, I cannot recommen 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.
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.
I think it's Windows Update Blocker:
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.
This is 2000s era FUD.
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.
I've never had issues with Debian based distros.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Reference? My anecdotal experience so far leads me to believe the opposite.
This is irony. Right? This is irony?
Sarcasm, not irony.
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?
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.
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(); }> 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
Can't wait for my new SSD to arrive, then it's finally Goodbye Windows, Hello again, Linux.
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.
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
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.
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)
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?
[delayed]
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.