As the world and people’s routines change, it is important that we focus on meeting the over a billion people around the world relying on Windows where they are now. That next step comes today with the release of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update. The May 2020 Update comes with feature improvements that will help save you time and maybe even be a source of fun. The new update is available today for those who want to seek it. You can get the update in a few different ways, visit this blog post to learn more about how to get the May 2020 Update today.
MSPowerUser has a detailed article of all the new features.
I’m pretty sure the masses locked down in their homes were all impatient for an update that can potentially break their working computers.
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of frequent updates which do not make any significant contribution to user experience?
Do you really expect an answer to that rant of yours ?
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311203-microsoft-puts-windows-10-may-2020-update-on-hold-for-most-devices
Yeah, pointless rant, ain’t it…
Am I the only one who is sick and tired of frequent updates which do not make any significant contribution to user experience?
I’m not tired of the frequent updates, but I am tired of being forced to install them. And yes, I’m aware you can delay them. Who gives a shit? Windows 10 update delays are nothing more than a false sense of choice. Ultimately the outcome is the same whether you delay or not. You might get the choose the day & time of your molestation, but you’re still getting molested.
(joke_mode_on)This rollout will prepare your Windows PC for the ID2020. Stay tuned. (/joke_mode_off)
I wished I could feel confident that this update won’t bring more problems like just about every other update MS rolls out. After every major update I find myself searching the user forums for how to fix the features (problems) the update brought me. I’d like to see MS split Windows into a basic business model based on Windows 7 and the classic desktop and whatever it is that floats their boat and causes me heartaches and lost productivity. I don’t need glitz and apps galore. I need intuitive functionality that remains the same on a rock solid platform.
Moonwink,
There’s no question that option would be very popular if it were offered for businesses, and even many ordinary consumers would want it as well. Alas, as corporations become more powerful they often evolve to care less about what consumers want. Microsoft really struggled to convince the market to upgrade from windows 7, so they adopted more coercive measures and at the extreme even relied on deception to trick users into installing windows 10. And now the forced updates in windows 10 gives microsoft the ability to completely sidestep the user consent. They can twist the knobs to collect more information about users and competitors, force them to install applications, etc. Rather than having to convince users to upgrade, they can just slip whatever changes they want through their backdoor. This gives microsoft a huge amount of unchecked power, which IMHO is dangerous.
As a user, I have the greatest empathy and feel the same way. I left the Windows team four years ago, and regularly use older versions specifically to avoid these type of updates.
But, note the problem they are trying to solve. For the last ten years or so, people trying to write programs for Windows have to write programs for a version of the system that is ten years old. Today, we see things like Visual Studio or Microsoft Edge still supporting Windows 7. In technology terms, ten years is an eternity. The hope of gradually upgrading users is that people writing Windows programs only need to support the last two (or whatever) years, which makes life easier for developers and allows them to write programs for today’s devices that solve today’s problems.
When comparing this timespan across systems, Windows stands out like a clear outlier. No software application supports ten years of MacOS, iOS, Android, or Linux. It’s rare enough to find support for half of that. In 2009, when Windows 7 was released, we also saw the releases of Snow Leopard, iPhone OS 3 and Android 1.5. Good luck finding application developers still supporting these.
I’m not claiming that this has succeeded, either (as Edge and Visual Studio demonstrate.) As I mentioned above, my use of older systems means that I’m personally the one wanting ten years of software support. There’s also a bit of fragmentation when servers are considered, since they’re not auto-upgraded, and variants like server core don’t include most of the newer development frameworks anyway, so when I write my own programs, they end up targeting Win7 (or older) too. But I’m fairly confident (although I don’t know) that the reason there is no broadly available long term support release is to avoid creating this fragmentation and forcing application developers back to the lowest common denominator.
Just note the Windows team aren’t intentionally trying to break your system. They’re trying to ensure your system can run new software, and they’re really hoping that if it can, there will be more people writing software that you’ll want to run, and that you’ll be happy in the end. Or rephrased more defensively, they’re hoping that you won’t be left with a small selection of old software, and end up leaving Windows because there are more/newer/better programs elsewhere.
malxau,
Well, you aren’t wrong, 10 years (plus) really is a long time. Still, many consumers and developers kind of expect long term platform stability and I’d say historically it’s one of microsoft’s core strengths. Hypothetically they could do away with long term stability on PCs like they do with game consoles, requiring software to be ported in order to run it, but frankly a lot of businesses would shun a platform if they had to rewrite / repurchase their already working software every few years. That can dramatically increase expenses, but it’s not just licensing costs, new software adds new IT, QA, and staff training overhead. And unless the product is genuinely better, switching frameworks under existing products doesn’t automatically improve it, sometimes you end up replacing a mature product with something worse.
I’ll concede there maybe benefits to updating frameworks, I hope you can concede that it’s not always a given.
IMHO linux userspace has been stable over the long term, most software from eons ago will still work like new. However there’s a major caveat owing to the rather big difference in the way linux and windows software tend to be distributed. Windows software/installers tend to use monolithic zip files / msi packages / installers whereas linux software typically requires dependencies to be installed separately from the repos. This means that you’ll probably have a lot of trouble just getting a-hold of the original dependencies that were used when the original repos were around.
If you factor in online repos disappearing, it decreases support window. It’s a fare criticism, but it’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison since if you had zipped up the software along with the dependencies as is common with windows applications it would theoretically still run. Because of this I find it difficult to take a blanket position on this topic 🙂
I agree that fragmentation is an issue, but just to offer up an alternate spin: mainframe are some of our least fragmented technologies, yet are also the longest supported ones. Coincidence? Maybe not.
This may not be the right place to bring it up, but microsoft also has ulterior motive to kill legacy APIs in order to become more sandboxed like IOS. Microsoft has been testing the waters with restricted versions, but these have been commercial flops so far, I think a lack of trust is one reason some windows developers haven’t been very eager to make a transition. Most developers see the IOS model as a loosing proposition for developers.
> IMHO linux userspace has been stable over the long term, most software from eons ago will still work like new.
Right, but what about the other direction? What is the oldest distribution that the current version of Chrome will run on?
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7100626?hl=en
So, official Chrome binaries run on Windows from 2009 onwards, Mac OS from 2014 onwards, and Linux from 2014-2016 onwards depending on distribution.
Personally I use Slackware, and the most recent stable release is from June 2016, and that’s starting to be problematic in terms of supporting currently serviced versions of applications. You’re right that this is often about dependencies, but it quickly devolves to a Linux form of DLL hell where a new version of an application requires some thing to be upgraded, but the rest of the system is assuming the old thing, so there’s no easy way to keep the existing system with the new application.
malxau,
One subtle point is that it may technically run on other systems, it just means that it isn’t officially supported by google. This is from your link…
Google’s far from alone in doing this. Some of the corporate windows software that I support is only supported as far back as windows 7, but technically is still capable of running on older versions too. In our case we don’t go out of our way to support such old versions, but there isn’t much of an incentive to switch frameworks in a way that would break compatibility.
I agree with that. Those who claim there’s no DLL hell on linux probably haven’t tried installing anything outside of the repos.
You’re right that this is often about dependencies, but it quickly devolves to a Linux form of DLL hell where a new version of an application requires some thing to be upgraded, but the rest of the system is assuming the old thing, so there’s no easy way to keep the existing system with the new application.
There’s another form of dependency hell – dependency bloat hell. For example, I needed xinelib for something. I installed it from the Debian repo and it pulled in 2GB worth of dependency bloat that I did not need. At the time I was working with installs with very limited space and that 2GB of useless crap took up half of it. Instead of fighting packages, I just compiled it myself after ripping out everything useless for my needs. The resulting binary was about 30MB iirc.
It’s just shitty design. In a sane world you wouldn’t have dependencies where 95% of the total is completely unused and just wasting space.
Like every release since the first windows 10 release, it can best be described with “meh…”