Microsoft lost my 80yr old aunt and my two under teenager kids. My last hold-out at home is my son's laptop, which he needed Windows for a proctered exam (now completed). He's excited to soon be on the same OS as his other family members.

I did it. It’s great, I surprisingly like Linux more than both macOS and Windows. That wasn’t the case the last time I tried it.

Still, I don’t think this issue in particular is a big deal in the grand scheme of things. If you’re using Windows 11 and connected to the internet there’s really not much of a good reason to not want the latest updates in my mind, especially as the OS really has matured nicely overall in my opinion through those updates. The early days were rough.

It would just be nice if Microsoft did a better job separating feature updates from required security updates and being consistent about policy overall.

The way Apple does it seems ideal. They have a yearly release and you are never forced to update. The previous two versions continue to get critical security patches. Their hardware loses OS support at a predictable rate.

If you never update you’re really on your own.

Apple has on rare occasions pushed ultra critical mandatory updates IIRC, like the one to resolve that Catalina root bug. But that’s rare, and it’s not a major release.

Even more critically, Apple doesn’t continually change their mind and reorganize how it works like Microsoft seems to do. Microsoft decided to do biannual releases then figured out that they can’t go that fast but still call every release “H2” but then these are separate from security patches but now we are forced to update anyway.

Just decide on something that everyone is okay with and stick to it.

My hardware is supported and I'm sticking with 10 until the last ATM finally updates

You need to repair your Windows installation first, sometimes after enough updates it just corrupts itself.

Something that might work is downloading the current ISO, then mount it and run the setup

You can also block windows update in firewall, I like Fort.

so i instead get to run someone else's closed source .exe as admin on my system - out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Did it change? It's currently

>Microsoft to force updates to Windows 11 25H2 for PCs with older Windows 11 OS versions

They are pushing features that nobody is asking for and is not making life feel any better (bricking ssd, and ai reading you credit card details), and now here they are telling you, that they will force an update you may not be choosing to do, and do it with AI (which imo, isn't necessary for this process. Last I checked, MS will update when it notices idle time, no?)

The mistake you've made is thinking that they care about anyone other than themselves. Microslop is a rather fitting nickname.

I’ve been noticing (because of user bug reports) that the security policies are now AI driven. If you haven’t use a feature in x-days or y-reboots or other heuristic, it becomes an application crash the next time an application tries to use that OS feature (such as loading dlls or usb drivers)

Beneficial during the lawsuit probably

This has been said many times over years and even decades, but here goes again: Microsoft doesn't care about users, open source, nothing except their own pocketbooks.