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Comment by userbinator

7 years ago

Sorry for harsh language, but this is not a bug. This is a complete brain damage of those who decide to implement such behaviour.

That's not "harsh", harsh is what happened to the unlucky users who lost data because no one on the development team bothered to call it out. It should be an implicitly understood rule that you NEVER remove a file you did not create, unless the user explicitly asked to, but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.

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userbinator

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cesarb  7 years ago

> but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.

This. Once you get in the mindset that you know better than the user, it's not a big jump to "I know these directories should be empty, any content is leftover garbage, let's remove them".

Bartweiss  7 years ago

> you NEVER remove a file you did not create

Absolutely this, with a followup of "and if you're 'helpfully' deleting an unused folder, check that it's unused first!"

Given that this was (stupid) desired behavior, making sure Documents didn't have stuff in it should have been a screamingly obvious step. It would still have been utterly unacceptable, it could still have created weird downstream bugs when users installed things that target the now-missing default Documents location, but at least it wouldn't have set a bunch of data on fire without any warning.

But then, I guess relying on common sense after the first terrible decision is made is never going to work. There's a reason "never break user space" is rule 1 for Linux updates...

ilikehurdles  7 years ago

Microsoft doesn’t consider the OS to be the “user’s system”. They clearly see it as something they rent to the user a little bit each day. If the user wants to keep the system for a little longer, he/she has to make a special request to Microsoft that they hold off for a bit before retaking control of the OS.

  • bitwize  7 years ago

    "Windows is a service and updates are part of that service. So if you could just go ahead and reboot now, that would be terrific."

    • drbawb  7 years ago

      I ditched Windows as soon as I saw that "Windows is a service . . ." notification show up in the bottom right after an update, boy did that make me livid. (You can ask my roommates, I actually shouted at my computer; it had just spent over an hour, on a best in class NVMe drive, doing that update.) I was pretty sure I paid $200 for an operating system, not an operating service. Admittedly that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, but this is just getting insane.

      What I paid for is a HAL, some drivers, a filesystem, a handful of media codec licenses, and some basic applications to manage all that. What I got was a bunch of "apps" like "Photos" that routinely try to use up all my available system RAM, a start menu that connects to the internet, displays ads, and routinely lags on a high-end workstation, a file index service that was broken for 3 major update cycles, and an ever increasing number of "privacy toggles" in the completely dysfunctional control panel^W^W settings app.

      Microsoft clearly doesn't care about "developers, developers, developers" anymore, because I have never lost this much productivity to an operating system in my life. (I say this as someone who has used Linux long enough to remember how bad WiFi was in the era of ndiswrapper; as well as someone who has used Windows Me and Vista for significant stretches of time.)

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mixmastamyk  7 years ago

Recently was reading the blog of the team upgrading conhost. On it they joke several times that the developers doing the work were not even born yet.

Well, this is the kind of thing that happens when your whole team is interns and the "senior" is 28.

Reading the associated bugs on github I also learned that there were lots of complaints about the new console, not on features, but breaking compatibility that is. Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.

TL;DR: At least one codger is needed on teams doing this kind of work to give perspective.

  • llampx  7 years ago

    > Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.

    To be fair, that's what led to Powershell and Command Prompt co-existing. I guess Microsoft wanted to reduce the number of console backends.

cheeseomlit  7 years ago

>NEVER remove a file you did not create

Seems like common sense, but Microsoft has been doing this for a while. In Windows 7 (not sure about later releases) the OS runs a 'Desktop Cleanup' periodically that deletes shortcuts to network locations it can no longer connect to. God forbid your network drives don't map one day and Windows decides to nuke all your desktop shortcuts... this actually happened to a user I was doing support for and they were understandably livid