> [2] If anyone here works on Windows Update, please consider a career in literally anything else. Software development clearly isn't for you. There are many other positions out there and I suspect you'd be better at nearly any of them than you are at writing software.
I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?
What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.
I don't think that the god-awfulness of Windows Update is in any way related to the hardware you're running when anything else on the market designed for the same purpose outperforms it.
Updates take ages to download and even longer to install. There is no verbosity option, only a progress bar that likes to get stuck. Did an error occur? Here's an unhelpful 0x%RANDOM% code, where the only mention of it online comes from those who also suffer from it.
How come apt, dnf, pacman or other open source utilities, that are often maintained by an individual, just work, when something with a development team sucks at it so much? While there are an under-the-hood differences between Windows and Linux, replacing system components and libraries should be the same everywhere.
To be clear, this wasn't some custom hack job computer or anything. This was a relatively cheap HP laptop that was just using OEM Windows 10. The hardware is about as vanilla as you get for a laptop.
Linux has the same or even greater hardware diversity, and I have never had a Linux update so thoroughly break my computer as Windows Update did for my mom's computer recently. I run NixOS unstable, I run a system update daily, and while I have had packages break, it still boots after the update. I can say similar things about Arch as well, and I think Ubuntu LTS would be even more reliable.
Windows Update is worse though, because since Windows doesn't have snapshotting in the same way that Linux can have with btrfs or ZFS or bcachefs, an update can fully just break the computer. If you install ZFS on root in Ubuntu it will take a snapshot after each update or even every `sudo apt install`, so even if I did have something break because of an update I'm generally able to get the computer into a usable state by rebooting an choosing something earlier.
But even worse, Windows updates aren't really "opt-in" like they are with Mac and Linux. Windows Updates will happen accidentally or just in the background, as was the case with my mom a few weeks ago. As far as she is aware, she didn't choose the update, it just happened and then her computer was bricked.
Importantly, Windows Update really only has one job, which is to not brick the computer it's updating, or at the very least provide an easy way to roll back if they do. Updates are important, we want security vulnerabilities patched ASAP, but if users are afraid to update out of fear of their computer being bricked and actively do hacks to disable them, then they have utterly failed at their job.
I stand by what I said. Whomever works on it should be ashamed of themselves, and they should stop being software engineers because they are very bad at it. I have never used a piece of software that has more consistently caused headaches than Windows Update; I'm sure I've used software that was more crappily written, but a system update tool IS NOT ALLOWED TO BE SHITTY.
I started the switch from Windows to Linux in 1999, so have no up-to-date firsthand experience. But, do you think the issues with Windows Update go much beyond the problems with updating arbitrary hardware running software that's in an arbitrary state due to how users have used it?
What I'd say to those Windows Update developers is they should go to Apple, where they can rely on a much more standardized hardware environment and a much more locked-down software environment, which makes that job a lot easier.