I hate Windows as much as the next person, but the title is clickbait. It’s an update bug that affects a small number of users, but the title misleadingly suggests Microsoft deliberately removed this functionality.
If Microsoft keeps breaking shit, companies will eventually look for alternatives.
Just think about what’s happening behind the scenes on Azure. I work with it daily and even it feels like a bloated slow mess.
Bloated servers. Now I’ve heard it all. Thanks for bringing that out, all we hear is ‘windows this and windows that’ but it seems the cancer in Microsoft has metastasized to everything.
I’m honestly starting to not believe these articles. On an up to date version of w11 I never see any of the changes these articles claim are happening. I’m a linux user so I like laughing at windows as much as the next guy but i dont want to be an idiot falling for misinfo.
If you want comedy, look at the apple help fourms. You think linux users reimage alot the only troubleshooting step apple has is to reimage.
Never in my life have I needed to reimage any Linux machine, but I have had to reimage many, many, many windows machines and quite a few Apple devices too. I have a long career in IT (and even before that, I’ve been building computers since I was 12), so my sample size consists of thousands of computers going back decades.
I’ve only ever reimaged Linux systems when I felt like distro hopping for fun. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I think it’s probably more to do with the fact that Linux tends to be extremely reliable once you have it set up (unless you manage to break it, but even then there are usually multiple ways to fix it without reimaging).
Same here (except I’m 35 years into being a tech hobbyist, not a professional), and I’ve never reimaged a Linux install (except to try imaging it and learn how it works). Having been exclusively on Linux for 9 years now (playing with it for over 20 years) and Fedora the last 6, I can confidently say that it’s easier to just keep your important files in a separate drive (home directory in its own drive for example) and just reinstall whatever you want if you end up breaking your OS. Reimaging seems way more convoluted.
I went from an Ubuntu 16.04 install all the way to 20.04 and they involved multiple hardware upgrades and a completely new system at one point, just swapped out the root/home drive.
Since then I’ve been on EndeavourOS with pretty much the same story.
With Windows 7 and 10 I had to constantly reinstall.
same!… heck work updated my laptop from win10 to 11 and now the “Windows App” won’t run… IT dude gave up trying to fix it and order a swap
This is a laptop used, at most once a week, for regular office bs and it basically self destroyed just through windose updates
Out of interest, which aspect don’t you believe? The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.
This seems like a classic windows update issue. In fairness to Microsoft it is difficult to prevent bugs when there is a huge install base, with a huge range of hardware, with a huge range of users on different mixes of updates and updating at their own. I personally think that’s totally believable.
What’s not clear is perhaps the implied overarching story that W11 is worse for this than other versions of Windows. I can’t answer that about windows updates themselves, but I certainly believe W11 is the worst version of Windows I’ve ever used (and I’ve used every version back to 3.11 as a kid). I have to use W11 at work: the UI is absolutely terrible and unfriendly but far worse it constantly and inexplicably slows down, programs become unresponsive repeatedly and I come across errors constantly.
I work in a big organisation and I don’t even bother to report most errors now - we hop between PCs because of the nature of my Job, and I’ve come up across so many I just can’t be bothered opening more tickets. I’d describe it as a mostly large volume of minor issues and inconveniences that cumulatively, on top of the bad design, that make it a shit experience. But I’ve also had numerous major errors since we moved from W10 to W11 on different PCs - they all have the same hardware and software yet the problems are different on each. I’ve given up reporting the problems and just avoid the PCs, and I think a lot of my colleagues are the same.
My organisation (I work in a large Hospital), is already stretched due to high work volume and low staffing and we now have a constantly little drag from Windows 11 on everything we do. It’s like Microsoft sprinkle a little bit of shit onto every computer, every day, all day. The cumulative effect in just my organisation must be massive - I shudder to think how bad it is across the whole economy.
the only troubleshooting step apple has is to reimage.
That’s not entirely true. More often than not, the only troubleshooting step the “Apple Certified Professionals” there offer is to buy a new Mac.
From the article:
The latest kerfuffle will only be seen by Enterprise users running Windows 11 24H2 or 25H2 who have a July 2025 cumulative update installed as well.
Are you running Windows 11 Enterprise?
oh it was a bug, i thought they did it on purpose to force people to use their stupid ai crap.
This isn’t satirical?
We’re running the oldest supported Windows version in our enterprise just to make sure these non-stop stream of Microsoft fuck-ups doesn’t affect us too much.
oldest supported
So, Windows 11 then, right?
Enterprises outside of Europe can get another year of Windows 10 if they pay for it.
Yes, 23H2 at the moment.
Edit: Enterprise edition, to be clear. Home and Pro 23H2 were eol a couple of weeks ago.
Reads like a onion article
I have Linux everywhere except one computer that needs to run Windows. Can I configure it to delay updates by, say, two weeks?
They’re still allowing you to hold back updates? So nice of them.
Well, you can configure only manual updates with notifications but I’d prefer automatic updates except not on day zero. At least on Win 1X Pro, on Home I think not.
*checks that it’s not an onion article* Oh…
I think it is time to revive: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”
Glad I decided to never touch 11. Seems almost customary to skip every second Windows version by now. I’m curious to see if it will be just a skip and they get their shit back together by 12. For now, surprisingly, I do not miss Windows one bit.
I still keep 10 around as dual boot for PCVR. Sure, I got it working (mostly) on Bazzite but its by no means trivial and hassle free. Everything else was smooth sailing most of the time. Just the few times I crashed head first into the immutable nature, caused me a bit of a headache.At this point Win 11 has waaaaay surpassed Vista as the worst windows ever.
Surely ME was worse than Vista?
WinME was just Win98 with a paint job. And as Win98 was, it was pretty decent.
(WinXP was my personal favourite)
I had WINME as my first hand me down. It wasn’t that bad. Vista straight up constantly crashes, BT did not work, audio issues. It was a mess
Were you not around for Windows ME? I’d take Vista any day over that hot streaming pile of regret.
At the moment the only fix is likely a reimage, unless you can get to the registry to make some edits or deploy a Powershell script to delay the launch of Explorer.exe until the system is ready for it.
How has Satya Nadella not been fired for this dumpster fire of a rollout?
probably saved some cash there from replacing human coders with an llm, by the looks of it.
Because all of them have AI shares.
Because line go up
Because everyone left at the company is as bad as he is or worse?
They do still have John Savill and Mark Russinovich but they are both focused on Azure. They really need someone like them on the Windows side.
You mean this Azure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Controversies
How is this not as bad or worse?
Okay, wow. I’ve garnered plenty of downvotes on the Fediverse by not auto-hating many of Microsoft’s new features and updates, I’m sure I’ve been labelled a “Microsoft shill” or somesuch in some folks’ user notes. But this is just ridiculous.
The single most important rule Microsoft should have is “thou shalt not brick thy customers’ computers with a routine update.” Sure, it’s not the most common set of triggering conditions in the world, but the problem is immediate and obvious upon booting up. How do they not have a test plan that would catch this?
Looking at all the new features and how none of them have appealed to me with it being different attempts at forcing copilot I think the only happy Windows users are ltsc ones. Closest experience to a dumb OS that doesn’t change and just installs and runs the programs you install and came with minimal bloatware compared to new regular Windows.
Because they fired the QA department years ago, in favour of non-rigorous testing by users crazy enough to run whatever Microsoft’s version of a nightly build is. Because there’s no testing plan, some sets of conditions never do get tested.
Because the rigour and quality of work that is needed to do good software to get to market is insanely higher than the one required for keeping the money machine alive once you are a monopoly. So as you hire more and more to get your hands in as many pies as possible, have fewer and fewer experienced staff to train the new hires, and do questionable hires in leadership positions, the culture invariably shifts to doing less and less effort, or putting effort in the wrong place, and there you have it.
Now in Microsoft’s case, the quality was never that high to begin with (but the scummy practices made up for that), and the pockets are deep aplenty, so I think we are in for quite the shitshow (it can, and it will, get even worse).
I’m convinced at this point they’re letting the vibe coders write the OS updates. It’s the only reasonable explanation for how they keep breaking core OS functionality that shouldn’t even be getting updates.
They are forcing AI on everyone in Microsoft.
There was an article about it, managers force to use AI to parse workers self reports produced by AI to make sure everyone and everything uses AI.
I was going to try and defend them by saying that given the number of recent layoffs, and the push from the higher-ups, they’re not necessarily vibe coders by choice.
But then I remembered, I don’t give a shit about a company where devs think that rendering characters to a terminal emulator is a PhD-level problem, and that it’s a good idea to use react native in your start menu, to only name two.
Perfect, you’ve got it, freeze the code base.
vintage 🤌
Jesus fucking Christ… Is Microsoft literally vibe-coding everything now? Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all before being released into the wild?
The only solution is to re-image?? This is just flat out fucking awful.
Sorry to all those people who went for the LTSC versions of Windows. How the living fuck does this kind of stuff happen.
A lot of what the other comments have said is right, but also add that to on top of all the layoffs theyve had and they keep telling their devs to double their efforts. Its been in so many meetings that at this point a single engineer should be able to do the work of the whole company…
the shareholders keep demanding doubling pace from their engineers but they just wont listen smh
They should just fire all the engineers already theyre clearly slacking off /s
In a way they are. Their QA was sent overseas and at some point was cut down to basically skeleton crew.
Every engineer at MSFT was recently ordered to use AI.
The bulk of where MSFT makes money is not from its OS but from selling your data and being a cloud provider. They don’t really care about the user experience anymore and that has very clearly shown to be their lowest priority for a few years on now.
It’s less the vibe coding and more: this is what happens when you have the developers do all the QA and fire the actual QA staff.
They’ve been screwing up the Windows updates since Windows 10, vibe coding wasn’t a thing at that point.
I remember hearing about this shift of theirs way back in the early Windows 10 days and thinking, “That sounds like suicidal stupidity but maybe there’s something I don’t know?”
Nope. It’s exactly as I thought.
Sounds like the development team outsourced the QA work to the customer.
It’s less the developer team that did it and more the shareholders and executive team that has turned the product to complete trash.
It’s so dumb, even with the AI stuff I wouldn’t care that much if it was just a new thing the OS could do if the rest of the thing was actually stable. But they seem to be allergic to doing some actual house cleaning and instead keep bolting things on.
The fact that the explorer can regularly completely freeze up nowadays or flat out crash is actually insane. That should be at the top of the priority list before anything else gets worked on. But instead they decided: let’s add a new keyboard shortcut to open a really laggy copilot chat interface.
*One of two different copilot interfaces. Either the personal copilot or m365 copilot chat…
The fact that the explorer can regularly completely freeze up nowadays or flat out crash is actually insane.
This was literally the trigger for my very first Linux experience, it’s fucking asinine that something so fundamental to the UX could perform so poorly for such an extended period of time.
I love having to reboot the explorer.exe process in task manager because my taskbar search stops working.
Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all
Lol no, MSFT infamously dropped their entire Hardware QA team after WIndows 7 and instead relied on the also infamous insider hub to get QA “feedback” from home users instead, leading to the also infamous Windows 8 disaster and slightly less infamous critical CVEs that went unaddressed because MSFT ddidn’t even bother to read the insider hub posts.
Oh and they didn’t learn anything and kept running with the insider hub well into Windows 10 & 11.
