If your computer runs into Windows problems and automatic recovery attempts are unsuccessful, Windows 10 will now automatically remove the botched updates.
In a new support document, Microsoft has now detailed an interesting functionality where Windows 10 will automatically remove the installed updates to fix the startup issues and other bugs preventing PC from booting.
Neat.
Neat indeed.
Cynics would say that updating Windows is a horrible experience (which it indeed is IMHO) but fixing a windows box after a failed update was even more horrible.
Still. I’m typing this from an Arch desktop; I really should read the arch website news section before full upgrading stuff, but I rarely do. In fact, never. Because I rarely run into issues. And this is a bleeding-edge, rolling distro. Now I also use Windows 10 sometimes for gaming… somehow I’m bugged for updates in the middle of games, updating can take a long time, I often need to reboot…
But on a positive note, I like how updates are automatically removed by this new Windows, and quarantined for 30 days. Linux could use that too. Maybe windows uses a filesystem “snapshot”? Btrfs and ZFS are much better featured to make such snapshots. I believe OpenSUSE did have a yast feature to return to previous installation stages. I forgot, because I never use Suse. Maybe systemd has now some of that functionality as well.
Anyway the “keep running no matter what” mentality is laudable. Definitely an improvement from Redmond.
Same kind of thing here, I’ve been running Gentoo with the unstable keywords for a few years now, and even with the fact that much of the package versions that are marked ‘unstable’ are not actively tested against each other, I’ve only had significant issues twice, and both cases were issues with glibc (first one was a buggy glibc version, second was fallout from the switch to not having RPC in glibc itself).
Also same here, though the biggest issue I have with the update system is that requiring manual intervention to install updates is an all or nothing situation (so I get nagged daily because of Windows Defender definitions updates).
Yep, they make a restore point prior to running any updates, provided of course that you have system restore functionality enabled (and you should, it’s a wonderful safety net).
I’d say that’s debatable, and this is from someone who uses BTRFS _everywhere_. Window’s volume shadow copy service (the thing that handles snapshots and restore points) is just hidden behind a bunch of UI cruft because it’s assumed that ‘normal’ users wouldn’t have any use for it other than manual creation of restore points (which can already be done without poking at VSS directly).
They still do, it’s not just YaST (it works with Zypper too), and they’re not unique in that respect (Solaris has had this functionality for years, NixOS has had it since the beginning (though they use LVM snapshots last I saw), and a handful of other distros are working on it). The only downside to the SuSE version is that you have to install the system with snapshot support in the first place, which puts a lot of complicated constraints on how you can use the filesystem.
Interesting! Thanks. Hopefully it will someday be available for Arch and Gentoo users too. I’ve considered using NixOS but it is hard to beat a good wiki and an enormous amount of packages, something Arch and Gentoo have in common.
And it only took them 35 years to implement it. That’s really keeping on top of things. 😉