I haven’t used Windows 11 interestingly, so I don’t know if they’ve changed their update habits, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Windows 10 is the last edition I’ve used. Since Windows 8, I had plenty of issues with Windows and Microsoft, and it got worse every release. I’ll bullet-form my personal complaints at the bottom of this page.

My final straw for Windows 10 in my personal life was a forced restart, and I had all my update settings where I wanted them, and still, I lost a really important session to that reboot. Since I was pretty comfy with Linux, I went that direction. Since then, Linux has gotten more user-friendly and plays videogames, way more than Mac. It’s still not something I recommend to most people, but probably someday, it’ll get to a Mac or Windows ease of use.

At work, most of us haven’t been migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and I still get updates installing in the background a lot, causing issues even on our Windows servers. I’m sure our ops team can tune these abhorrent update defaults, but it’s just a frustrating experience nonetheless.

I think a prompt or reminder could go really far to let the user configure that during setup.

Here are some of my complaints over time:

• Force installs and bloat. Inclusion of bloat by default. Reinstallation of bloat on updates.
• Resetting of my settings and registry edits regularly.
• Ads on the desktop
• Needless nagging to use their other bullshit like Onedrive. You think it’s good? Great! Let me uninstall it and use the cloud providers of my choice.
• Forcing an inferior start menu without a choice to use alternatives or the old ones.
• Windows tracks insane amounts of users’ data and actrivities, and I do not trust them to admit to all the tracking they do but the tracking they admit to doing is already mind-boggling.
• Windows 10’s forced upgrade and Windows 10 popup scandals were completely dishonest and disgusting, and I have not heard enough apologies for what they did. This personally affected me and broke a bunch of crap before Windows 10 was even well-baked.
• A history of forced updates. A history of forced reboots. A history of lost work. This is me and my family. It sounds like Windows has reverted some of their worst practices, but the precedent is set, and I’ll never trust Microsoft to stick to it.
• The Windows seeker’s scandal personally affected me. They put all sorts of beta garbage on my computer without telling me. This caused a loss of files. They’ve made a resurgence on their unethical behaviors in the browser space. I have faith they’ll continue to revisit their other old habits. Look up Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it’ll get you started. IE was their old baby. Edge is the new one.
• Buying and killing small companies and studios, such as Rare, a bit like EA had done
• Moving away from some of the nice things earlier Windows versions did, like a start menu with a neat list of organized and searchable programs.
• Having just 1 UI experience that isn’t super customizable and breaking 3rd party UIs.
• Fullscreen popups and nonsense over nothing
• Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has been a factor most of my life. They still push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior to the Nth’s degree. Again, that reading on Embrace-Extend-Extinguish will give you a taste of their BS.
• Having fewer features and techs than Linux that I like to use, such as specialty filesystems, IO schedulers, process schedulers, swapping systems (ZRAM/ZSWAP) etc. Being stuck on NTFS (are you kidding me?) REFS is too little too late and you can’t even boot off it
• Way worse IO/Disk performance and features
• inferior memory management

Overall, I don’t want to do business or help in the success in an organization I do not like by offering up my data, watching their ads, and using their products less than necessary. I like some of the things Bill Gates has done, but it doesn’t change any of my views on this.