(Windows 10 Pro automatic updates)

I think I disabled the automatic updates this way:

https://wccftech.com/how-to/how-to-disable-windows-10-automatic-updates/

Do you mean Windows still does automatic updates for you, even with those instructions?

However, in my case the Windows Update service seems to be in a "Manual (Trigger Start)" mode, not sure what exactly is the difference compared to "Disabled". At least in my case Windows 10 never seems to initiate any Windows updates unless I go to the update tool itself (in which case it starts to check, download and install updates right away).

Installing VirtualBox within Windows isn't any harder than installing a GOG game (from an offline installer) or any other Windows program for that matter. Just download the VirtualBox installer, double-click on it and pretty much just next next next IIRC.

After that, you must install Linux (or other OS) from within the VirtualBox program, but that is also quite easy and straightforward:

- Download a Linux installation media (.iso) to somewhere on your Windows machine.

- In VirtualBox, Machine => New starts the creation of the new virtual machine. You first create an "empty" virtual machine, and after it is created and you try to start that virtual machine, it asks for the (Linux) installation media and you just point to that and start a normal Linux installation to that virtual machine, not harder than e.g. installing Windows XP, 7 or 10 from an installation CD.

Then you can just as easily get rid of your virtual machines, and even uninstall VirtualBox itself if you feel you don't need it. Great way to try out different versions of Linux or other OS, if you want to try them out.

Quite easy on Linux, e.g. right-click on the internet connection icon on the desktop taskbar and uncheck "Enable Networking", or just disable the connection that is active in the list (wired or wireless).

It can at least turn itself on again, especially when installing anything related to MS. I might be wrong but when I installed Teams it got turned on again after having done it manually AND used tweaker-tools. And there's helper-services that can't be turned off manually.

Since I block MS update via the wall also I've not been getting forced updates personally.

What firewall software are you using?

Was this on Windows 10 Pro (not Home)? When you go to "Check for updates" (Windows Update), it has a remark "Your organization has turned off automatic updates", do you have that remark too?

I think I had my Windows 10 Pro laptop not updated for a couple of months, and IMHO it didn't do any automatic updates in the meantime, not even downloading the updates or bugging me "hey there are new updates, shouldn't you download and install them? Huh? HUH?!?!" (like I've seen it do on Windows 10 machines where automatic updates are enabled)

Not sure how to test this. Maybe I should decide now that I will not update this laptop for 6 months, and then check 6 months from now the update history that it hasn't secretly updated anything without informing me. Unfortunately I manually ran the update just a couple of days ago.

https://tinywall.pados.hu

Just remember it is blocking everything by default, so you need to manually add what you want to be able to connect outside.

Uncheck what you don't want under "Special exceptions" (those on the other hand are on by default).
https://imgur.com/a/9Ms4mKK

When it comes to Win it's just easier to just use tricks and forget it's even there. Windows is only good at one thing; gaming. For everything else it's Linux ftw :D

Yes, it was on 10 Pro.

EDIT: It did actually happened also when I installed Office on my gf laptop. And if I turned the update that was related to office itself off, Outlook just simply refused to start. If she didn't needed Office for her work I'd throw it as far as I could because it makes her laptop really slow and it takes forever to update anything, even syncing mail. Teams is also making the laptop fecking slow, but luckily one CAN use the web-version if the company have a paid subscription.

I use Comodo myself but still I like to check out alternatives.

DadJoke007, thanks for the link for the OS list, and your recommendation of Mint (which seems to be most people's favorite). As for the other link, I think that's the same page that someone else posted, but I'm not sure. If it is though, then that must mean it's good, if two different people are recommending it. I don't know about this Pop thing, but what does it have to do with Nvidia - it's just compatible with their video cards?

dtgreene, thanks. I figured if I didn't make a swap partition then it might not be able to use a swap file, but I wasn't sure about that. Why does it use the swap file for hibernation though? Are you sure that's how it works? It's just that I've never heard of that before.

kusumahendra, I don't use big websites like that or social media, and I use Duck Duck Go to search.

aRealCyborg, as for dual booting, refresh my memory - isn't that just when you have two different operating systems installed on different partitions and you choose which one to use each time you start the computer? Well anyway, that's what I was planning to do with Windows and Linux.

Lin545, it still sounds complicated to have to write any sort of configuration file for an OS that I've never used and know nothing about. I'm not sure what a functional language has to do with an OS, or why it would necessarily give it more abilities (technically, functional languages have fewer abilities than imperative languages, except weird stuff like Mercury, and I'm not even sure I'd consider that completely functional).

McMicroDonalds, I don't know what LTSC is, but your scripts might come in handy... if I had LTSC.

timppu, no that wasn't the page I used, but the instructions are the same, and I did a lot of other stuff in addition to that, and it still keeps re-enabling the updates almost every day! I may look into this virtual box though, and thanks for the info about how to disable the Internet connection.

sanscript, I think I may try that TinyWall. So that uses a white list, and anything that I don't put on it doesn't get allowed access, right?

Sorry, seems I forgot to answer this; I've been testing a little.

Like I suspected, the Medic service re-enables the Update service if I manually disables it (any update can also re-enable it too), and then the task scheduler runs update every day, at least on my Windows 10 Pro.

Haven't checked on how it is on the LTSB version yet, but this is rumored to be the actual version end-users should have gotten in the first place.

But, yes, now that I used WinAero both of those services was still on, but now I also have that remark as well. :D WinAero uses system policy for this.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/windows-update-medic-service

I've now deactivated the update and medic in the scheduler and see what it does tomorrow. It might be that WinAero disables forced auto updates, while leaving (for real this time) update by choice (perhaps Pro, as you wrote is that by default). I'll wait some time and see.

Yes, you can even set further restrictions like UDP/TCP, ports, and restrict to local only.

You can add to the whitelist by window, running process, or executable.

A swap file can be used, but it can be disabled; just delete the swap file and use
# umount -a
to force any existing swap spaces to be disabled (memory permitting, of course).

Also, Linux always uses a swap partition for hibernation. There's no way, to my knowledge, to hibernate to a swap file, so if you have no swap partition, there's no way to hibernate.

By the way, regarding updates:
* Manual updating is just a couple of commands away. In debian-based systems, for example, "apt update" followed by "apt upgrade" will update your system; a reboot is not usually required, unlike on Windows.
* Some distributions or branches get more significant updates than others. Debian stable and any distribution described as "LTS" will typically not get any new features (or other changes that would break your workflow), while rolling-release distros have their software updated more regularly, which can be annoying when a feature you're relying on moves or disappears.

I've mentioned it before, but I have philosophical problems with Debian based distros as a whole.(Staleness is stability in their books, backports ahoy, LTS into LTS into LTS, confusing users that Distro=Desktop.)

My distro of choice for entirely personal reasons is Fedora. I've been mainlining it since 2016, but records indicate I've been experimenting with it before then.

It doesn't have a dumb gimmick, it's fairly up to date, doesn't require you to finish assembly, and has sane defaults. There's also been very little in the way of dumb community drama.

Same. I kept running into issues with stale stuff, and wasted a lot of time with backports or just manually built libs & applications to work around the stale packages. Way to make the system a mess.

So the next time I complained about it, Debian fans told me to go with the testing version. "It's actually well tested and almost as stable as debian stale, but has fresh packages." So I did. It was a complete mess; incomplete documentation recommending me to use their new incomplete pre-alpha quality package manager frontend (aptitude, which is the worst thing I've ever seen) randomly together with apt-get. So what happens then? When you want to install or upgrade a package, aptitude comes with hundreds of different "solutions" to that which involve stuff like downgrade half of your packages, remove a dozen packages, upgrade a few, and potentially do nothing about the package you just asked it it instal or upgrade..! If you bothered to scroll through and manually inspect all these hundreds of different solutions, it's possible that you could find the one where it just simply installs or upgrades the thing you asked it to. What a fucking mess. Yeah there were bug reports end eventually they just stopped recommending aptitude. I don't know if it exists anymore.

Anyway, another "nice" quirk is debian trying to be helpful and enabling any damn daemon you install right away before you've even configured it (or before you've decided you want to run it in the first place), or messing with the bootloader just because there was a new grub package available. One day debian broke my bootloader during routing package upgrades. Sheesh. That night I wiped my disk and said goodbye to debian.. if I want to babysit a system, I'll use Gentoo or LFS or something.

I gave it one more try when I got a new laptop. This time with hand holding from a debian developer. We wasted a lot of time getting a new kernel (required for hardware support) and deps. Unfortunately even backports weren't recent enough and in the end it just didn't work. So I tried arch and fedora, both ran just fine out of the box.

Out of curiosity, how do arch and fedora handle newly installed daemons and new bootloader versions? (For example, in debian if you install ssh, it's immediately possible to ssh into the system; what's the situation with arch and fedora?)

Yeah, and I stopped using Fedora when it became clear that when a new version of it came out, it was near unusable due to all the bugs and shit, and when it finally seemed to become stable and usable... they released a new buggy version of Fedora that you were supposed to switch to, and they stopped supporting the earlier, finally stable Fedora (as apparently it becomes the next RHEL/CentOS release).

Basically, I felt like some kind of beta or alpha tester of new Fedora releases. Meh, I don't even run nor buy in-dev GOG games, why should I do that with my OS?

That was years ago, I don't know if modern Fedora is different but if I want to use a Red Hat family Linux, I use CentOS.

https://danielmiessler.com/study/fedora_redhat_centos/

It might matter though that I normally tend to run Linuxes on my older PCs (mainly my aging laptops which were previously running some older now unsupported Windows version, e.g. XP or 7), so having bleeding edge hardware support is not a priority for me.

This reminds me; of the time I tried to upgrade Mint from 18 to 19. For some bizarre reason, the developers of MInt are of the mindset of, "Please don't upgrade immediately". You know why?

Because their upgrade process is so internally byzantine as to be failure prone. Instead of for example, checking the entire upgrade transaction and testing it for sanity, or putting it into a special environment, it just treats it like a massive apt-get. With all the damnable issues. So to cut a long story short, the upgrade got stuck in an uncancellable upgrade loop, where it would try to upgrade a package, fail because a missing dep, and then try again.

Yeah, thankfully that wasn't my own install but I quickly replaced MInt.
A lot of the tech in Fedora is still bleeding edge, but the actual releases are thoroughly checked; to the point that they will delay releases if the tracker has blockers going. An occasional quibble may occur; so best to wait a couple of days to see if a statement raises. But I've 0 day upgraded a few times now.

On Fedora, there's a large reliance on Systemctl and Systemd. Your opinion may vary on that. New bootloader versions are upgraded nearly silently; and Fedora keeps the last 3 kernel updates; including checkpoints for major version changes. (IE, Fedora 32 to 33)

But what about daemons, like ssh? Do they start automatically when installed, or do you have to take an extra step?

(By the way, I think debian also keeps the last 3 kernel updates as well.)