Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10 Fall Update Uninstalls Desktop Software Without Informing Users (ghacks.net)
ourlovecanlastforeve sends this report from Martin Brinkmann of gHacks: Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system may uninstall programs — desktop programs that is — from the computer after installation of the big Fall update that the company released earlier this month. I noticed the issue on one PC that I upgraded to Windows 10 Version 1511 but not on other machines. The affected PC had Speccy, a hardware information program, installed and Windows 10 notified me after the upgrade that the software had been removed from the system because of incompatibilities. There was no indication beforehand that something like this would happen, and what made this rather puzzling was the fact that a newly downloaded copy of Speccy would install and run fine on the upgraded system.
An IT Director I know had this happen with ESET antivirus as well, on multiple computers. He says fixes have been rolled out for both TH2 and the antivirus software to prevent this from happening. Other reports mention CPU-Z, AMD's Catalyst Control Center, and CPUID as software that's being automatically uninstalled.
So, I guess Windows 7 will be the last Windows OS that I use. Hopefully by the time new games stop supporting it, Linux will have the support of new games.
Oh wait, there are no release notes except marketing talk. Believe or not, they don't publish release notes anymore. When a company CEO talks about what a "serious" company they are, show them this story.
To be fair, and I'll play the devil advocate for once, not all Windows users are slashdotters. Yes, you, /. reader, belong to the cream of the cream of the IT knowledgeable people on Earth. For the remaining 99%, Windows is just a tool to run some games, play movies, open IE and watch porn, and to occasionally feed some accounting basic Excel spreadsheets. So MS takes over, sometimes, and decides for you what's good, what's bad. And acts accordingly. And maybe this is better for most users. Of course, however how deep you'd have to dig it, there must be an option - intended for the advanced user - to switch off any of those intrusive features.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Windows 10 is an unfolding disaster in slow motion. I make a living writing code that is used mostly on Windows and I had a bad feeling since the first Technical Preview. Decided to hold off the upgrade until the end of the free upgrade period hoping that the problems will be hammered out and the control will be (at least for most part) returned to the user. But instead it started bad and goes downhill from there.
Before you get your knickers in a bunch: this is most likely just a bug, not intentional. Microsoft pulled 1511 temporarily because it thinks it's doing a fresh install of Windows 10 or upgrade from a previous Windows - version instead of just being an update to an already-installed Windows 10 and ends up resetting some settings because of that, and Windows 10, when doing an upgrade from 7/8/8.1, does remove applications it thinks may be incompatible and/or interfere with the upgrade.
There are a lot of users who might be best of with the company knowing best... but ceding control of one's PC is not a good thing.
Folks, we are starting to lose the war on the desktop. Consoles are already lost, phones and tablets are becoming less modifiable, and with the push for "security" on IoT devices, this usually means security against the owner, not an intruder.
If we lose the desktop, we are fucked, pure and simple. Look how recently PC makers and MS have been pushing boundaries:
1: The Superfish type of items. In this day and age of anything and everything being used as a potential means of intel gathering, any type of "functionality" along these lines should be treated as malicious criminal activity, or at best, gross negligence. This should never have passed any QA department.
2: W10 removing software. I understand the purpose of the Windows MSRT... but there is a boundary between obvious malware and Speccy.
3: Telemetry data. Before this year, telemetry was not even used much in this context. In the past, people would be writing their senators about such privacy invasions (think the "scandal" ages ago, where Prodigy set aside temp files without clearing them, and people found their deleted stuff in them.) Unless something is done now, this trespass will continue to the point where a Windows machine is basically an endpoint belonging to advertisers, intel gatherers, and potentially malware authors.
Want to know how to get the desktop back? It is going to be pretty tough at this rate, but we can still run older operating systems, or operating systems which don't really care about telemetry data. Virtualization also helps.
As far as I can tell, Windows 10 is the Microsoft play to become Google or Facebook on your desktop. In effect, you choose to run their code and in exchange they spy on you and sell all the info they get to the highest bidder. Microsoft clearly saw that investors are seeing bigger gains from non-manufacturing companies that just spy on uses and sell the info, and they've decided that as the OS itself they can do it better than anybody else.
Once you choose to run an OS that owns you, vacuums-up your every keystroke, mouse action, and utterance within microphone range and that routinely phones-home and auto-installs/auto-removes software, the auto-disabling of various applications is just another bullet-point on the features list. You are now the submissive; Microsoft is your dominant. If you wanted to complain, you should have done so before clicking on the "Accept" button of the EULA. Microsoft does not place a "safe word" in that EULA does it? Enjoy the ride to the software version of the Folsom St parade!
The only reason I (still) use W10 is games (more than 300, in Steam only). I have every second of using it. ... ever.
As soon as there are enough high budgets games running on Linux, I'll finally get rid of it for a systemd-free linux (Manjaro-openrc comes to mind).
I've good hopes that SteamOS will lead us outside of the Windows era.
Microsoft was right : Windows 10 is the last Windows version
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
And they should.
You bought an MSI or ASUS or whatever brand graphics card with an AMD-branded Radeon chip... which of these words hint at "Catalyst"?
I know it sounds less "k3wl", but what's wrong with naming it "AMD graphics driver".
Marketeers should keep their dirty mittens off anything that affects actual users.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Kinda what I, and others, did. I'm still in Windows 7 because "it was there", but I already struggle to keep it "user experience enhancement" free from Windows Update. When someone asks me for help on a W10 system, I give it a quick glance, and if it can't be fixed in two mouseclicks (most of the time it can... some people just don't get computers) I just say "I don't know anything about W10."
I slowly started to install some Ubuntu (for ease of use) on my parents' computers, and that fits most of the requirements they have: internet, flash games, video, music.
Only "niches" left for Windows are some games and stubborn business. But as time pass, the game requirement become less and less relevant, and the business thing usually work in either a VM or a pro computer dedicated to this.
Microsoft told the world they would be doing this. They clearly stated that win10 would remove software they considered harmful or illegal. The outrage came from PC gamers for months. It was very vociferous, mainly due to the fear of losing their pirated games; or Microsoft deciding they were pirated versions regardless of whether they were or not.
The fact you feel the need to defend a global corporation having the power to remove what it wants at will from devices all over the planet, says more about your feeble compliant mindset. The reality is someone hiding behind a monitor thousands of miles away can say "don't like that, delete it en-masse," or automated it. Which is even scarier.
With a bit of luck, you'll lose some of your applications, settings and associated data from this bullshit. How we'll all laugh. Microsoft know best, though!
For me it didn't uninstall anything, it however screwed many settings in registry, e.g. keyboard layout and user specific settings. It seems like it "upgrades" by installing the ISO on background when restarting the computer once it's downloaded it.
I don't think Windows 10 in general is stable yet, for instance Start menu stops working sometimes, "Modern" apps stopped working (Calculator, Photo viewer etc.), Edge browser window does not appear anymore and Windows Update Settings does not open.
I get some of the features back if I create new Windows account, but not everything. It looks like I have to do clean install sometime in near future, what a wonderful upgrade.