Windows Woes

Brucehankins

Just venting.....

So I switched my personal hardware to Linux because I was tired of Windows pushing software, changing settings, and other random personal gripes. But I had never been burned by Windows updates the way some others have. I've had to rollback an update, but I could always get back to the desktop and never lost files. My company hardware still uses Windows, and as many know enterprise images are more customized and usually a few update cycles behind home users since enterprise users just don't tolerate bugs well. I had been pushing off updates for a few months, and finally went to install 20H2. Reboot and it won't boot into Windows, only into the recovery interface. My backups are gone, can't rollback the updates, the only option is to reimage. Ugh! I've used dozens of Linux distros, rolling, LTS, semi-rolling, and I've never had an issue where I had to reinstall that wasn't caused by me. I've heard the horror stories of Arch and Manjaro, so I mostly stuck to Debian/Ubuntu based options, but even with something like Garuda, Arco, and Solus there has never been an update that borked things so bad that I had to reinstall the OS. Of course, our images live on a server that only certain IT support staff has access to, so I can't reimage the machine myself. I have to ship it to our headquarters, wait however long, and then it's shipped back. I understand the need to protect corporate networks, but most of our workflow lives inside a VM on Citrix, and it can be accessed from any OS and even iOS. I'm able to and authorized to access our Citrix environment from my personal hardware, so why can't I just install Ubuntu or Solus on this machine and get on with my business. Enterprise bureaucracy is so frustrating.

kyrios

This got very little to do with windows. Update can fail on linux or any other OS as well. And It is normal that companies protect their assets and enforce policies.

BUT

What is not normal in my opinion is that their policies allow the users to delay the updates for a few MONTHS this doesn't look very professional and then it is much lesser surprising to get rotten updates... If they can't manage policies properly, we can suppose they aren't better for testing things.

How come your backups are gone ? Are you talking about your personal files (if so perhaps you should consider stopping storing them locally), is your hard disk encrypted? Or are you taking backups of your computer yourself (if that's the case, then your company IT department is really from the last century !!!).

Brucehankins

kyrios Only my work files, thankfully there wasn't much but a few recent downloads on there. Having to switch out Laptops every 2 years or so (they're leased) I've gotten in the routine of storing everything in the cloud (OneDrive) and also using my own dedicated external drive.

Our IT recently changed laptop suppliers, moving from Dell to Lenovo, and when they did they started specing out lower end machines with 128 and 256 drives, pushing everyone to dedicated server side storage. This meant a lot more files where being moved to our servers rather than local hardware, and they quickly realized we didn't have enough storage. They asked everyone to go through their network drive and remove any unneeded files, and at the same time switched off backup and recovery without telling end users. So if there is a failure, there's nothing for Windows to rollback to, it has to be reimaged.

We are definitely behind in testing and rollout, 20H2 was released in October, and when it was pushed out 3/25, I had the option to delay the update still. We still have lots of machines on 1909 and older and plenty of Windows 7 machines left around. Enterprise updates are a completely different animal.