Updating your OS: Windows 10 VS Ubuntu Or, what consumers really want.

Last week, when Microsoft announced that they were upgrading Windows 10 Update with AI to make it suck less, I wasn't sure what to think about it. I mean, it is an instance of Microsoft at least trying to fix something that Windows 10 users have been complaining about for two and a half years, but the actual announcement was somehow... underwhelming. I felt nothing; no joy, no satisfaction, no anger, no disappointment, just... nothing. And I didn't know why.

I experienced the same lack of feeling when Microsoft announced that they planned to win back consumers, having done so much over the last decade to lose those consumers in the first place. This should also have been good news, right? I mean, it seemed to indicate some awareness on Microsoft's part that it was their fault that consumers didn't care about Microsoft anymore. And yet... I felt nothing.

Maybe it was the name? As a PC gamer who'd spent the last year watching AAA gaming companies' attempts to turn everything they made into a "live service," Modern Life Services just sounded like so many horribly empty PR buzzwords. But I couldn't feel outraged about it. Once again, I was utterly unmoved, and couldn't put my finger on exactly why I was so unmoved.

And then I came across an interesting article by Jason Evangelho at Forbes which brought it all into focus for me. He was writing about OS updates, as it turns out, but not Windows 10 updates, though; no, sir, Señor Evangelho doesn't suffer through those anymore. He's decamped to the Ubuntu Linux camp, you see:

Updates on both Windows and Ubuntu come in many forms. You have security updates, feature updates and software updates among others. If you’re someone who’s ever entertained the idea of ditching Windows for Linux, chances are Windows’ aggressive update behavior is a primary reason.

Microsoft’s system update policy has reached a point where its implementing artificial intelligence to guess when a user is away from their PC so that Windows can reboot and apply the latest updates. When I wrote about that so many people said “hey, what about just letting the human in front of the PC make that choice?”

And just like that, it all made sense. Yeah, I said to my self, fuck yeah. That was my reaction, too.

Because that had been my reaction; I remember thinking almost exactly that, in passing, and I'm not even on Windows 10. If Microsoft are so big on winning back consumers, I asked myself, why don't they make Windows 10, their flagship product, the one Microsoft product that almost everyone uses, more user-friendly? Not by experimenting with over-complicated AI, which they'd be doing anyway because AI and "intelligent edge" are the focus of their post-Windows corporate strategy, but through the simple, pro-consumer expedient of giving control of their PCs back to Windows' users?

And the more I read of Evangelho's description of the Ubuntu updating experience, the clearer it became: