Since I've mostly been ranting about Linux configuration / migration type things here in recent months, you may be forgiven for thinking that I dislike Linux, and would love folks to be using Windows instead!
Alas, that couldn't be further from the truth! I just couldn't be bothered inflicting a medium-long form rant about the tyrannical regime of forced Windows Updates! (Those who follow me on Mastodon will however know that I do rant about this much more frequently: About once a month currently, as that's the frequency of the forced Windows 11 machine reboots from IT at work, while my personal machines are no longer subject to any of that anymore thankfully!).
Since I'm writing this today / now, you're correct if you guessed that I'm ranting about it right now, as my office computer went offline about 2.5 hours ago for one such forced update, and hasn't come back online again yet! (With luck, it hasn't bricked itself via Bitlocker, requiring the stupid recovery key to be entered on the physical machine to unlock it... hopefully I don't end up finding out tomorrow morning that that is what has transpired this time again! While I've had a relatively good run in recent months, my colleague and I have both previously had strings of these BIOS-bricking problems before...),
Anyway, given that such updates on our work machines typically takes them out of action for anywhere from 1 hour, up to in some cases 3-4 (while the Windows UI always cheerfully predicts "4-5 minutes" (i.e. this time was quite a bit beefier, at 8 minutes instead), I can only wonder how much "lost productivity" there has been *globally* from all these effing automatic Windows updates (as well as the impact of all that global electricity and bandwidth usage shuffling all those update patches around)?! 🙄
So yeah... to say I'm not a fan of this frequent-update-treadmill is an understatement!
* Perhaps one of the worst aspects of these forced updates is that merely using the machine isnt enough to ward against Windows Update on Win 11 these days being programmed to haopily do a "rug pull" on you, even when you're actively interacting with the machine when it commences! Then again, web outlook is equally brutal if your session expires while you're in the middle of typing out an email! (i.e. It just kicks you out, and doesn't even bother to save as a draft what you may have been working on! Yes... I've lost data this way!
* Another downside in my particular that I have to log back into a whole bunch of systems using 2FA, but have to wait about a minute between I can log into each one of those as I have to wait for those OTP codes to update before I can enter in the next one!
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