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If you've been trying to keep Microsoft's forced updates and upgrades off your machine, your job just got harder. With KB 4056254, we now have a new Win10 Update Facilitation Service joining its comrade-in-arms Update Assistant V2 to ensure no patch gets blocked.
You can look at the new KB 4056254 Win10 Update Facilitation Service and the re-emergence of Win10 Update Assistant V2 from two different perspectives. On the one hand, you have those poor hapless Win10 users who accidentally munged Windows Update. On the other hand, you have folks with bazookas and flamethrowers who want to keep some semblance of control over updating their machines.
Both groups now face two different Microsoft initiatives to reset Windows Update.
[...] Seems, from April to June 2018, some savvy Win 10 users have found new ways to disable or block Windows Update. So, M$ has to come out with KB4056254 to "neutralize" their efforts. It's like a cat-and-mouse game.
Which seems to me like the core of the matter. It's not nice to mess with Mother Microsoft's patching schemes, so you're going to get a few new services running in the background to whop your system upside the head if you dare to block patches.
Sources:
Win10 Update Facilitation Service joins Update Assistant V2 to make sure you get patched | Computerworld
Watch out: Win10 Update Facilitation as a Service and a new push for the Update Assistant | AskWoody
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @04:04AM (1 child)
I've grudgingly used Windows for years, dabbling with Linux and BeOS on secondary machines, but when Microsoft forced Vista on us and Ballmer insisted that this was the future, take it or leave it, I bought a Mac. I expected it to be a half-hearted affair, but I was surprised to discover that I liked it. A lot. The system worked much more logically than Windows. OS X 11.6 sung on the hardware of the time. And then Apple started to bog it down and started tying an increasing number of aspects of the system to "the cloud". Unless they make some serious corrective actions with the hardware -- I'm not holding my breath -- I'll probably be shifting more seriously to Linux as my primary OS.
There are still unsanded and sloppily-painted furnishings involved in the (honestly, far too numerous) Linux distros, but Microsoft has gone full-on malicious spyware with Win10 and doesn't bother doing any QA on updates anymore, just forces them out and waits to see what they break. Apple's hardware has gone to crap with everything soldered and glued into place, and their OS and applications are too tied to the mothership. BeOS is long gone and Haiku, lovely though it is, is a long way from being a usable primary OS. ReactOS looks promising -- I would happily embrace something XP-compatible that looked like Win2k -- but, like Haiku, is too far from being ready for prime time.
<sigh> Too bad about BeOS. It held great promise. Too bad Microsoft were major dicks, threatening OEMs who considered Be's suggestion to the OEMs to ship their computers configured to dual-boot so people could try an alternative to Windows.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday June 25 2018, @01:56PM
Yeah, I don't know anyone that was actually happy with Vista. Seems like Apple missed a big opportunity to become a lot more relevant in the PC realm - though I suppose they were 5 years into the iPod phenomena at that point, and just releasing the first iPhone. so may have simply had other priorities. Their decline since then was sad to watch - they actually made pretty decent computers there for a while. And with the incredibly user-hostility of Win10 they have another opportunity - but it seems they're venturing in similar directions themselves.
If you care about polish, I will reiterate that I've been pretty happy with Ubuntu's success there - things are mostly organized reasonably, work predictably, and look nice. On par with MacOS in many ways, and even easier in some. E.g. when setting up a new printer on Mac had to download and install the drivers and fiddle a bit - Ubuntu detected that the same printer had been plugged in, prompted for permission to download and install the appropriate drivers automatically, and then everything immediately worked beautifully.
I haven't actually looked at recent versions of Ubuntu, transforming their Unity interface into something useful for a power user was enough of a hassle that I've only used 14.x and 16.x long-term releases. But with their return to proper Gnome I'm hopeful things will start moving in a more appealing direction again.