nospam wrote:

So I was able to do the impossible, for a while, which is stave off the
Windows 10 Pro updates.

that's a very, very stupid thing to do. you're not getting bug fixes,
security patches and new features.

The answer to that objection is that if I had wanted Microsoft updates, I
would have loaded them on my own.

Just like I do with my iPads to prevent the diarrhea that is iOS constant
updates of buggy releases (that even, as you know, Craig Federighi at Apple
admitted earlier this month) I don't want to load any operating system
update unless I know I want or need something on that operating system
update.

And that almost never happens.

Of my iPads, for example, they are still on 9.x and 10.x as I recall, and
they work just fine - where I would have left them at 7.0.0 had I known the
hell I would go through with them breaking Linux connectivity with 7.0.1
since iOS isn't even tested in the real world (where Apple support merely
says the real world "isn't supported" so they don't care what they break
outside the walled garden).

I do the same with Android, with all Google framework and Google Play
updates turned off - and that works just fine for me since I'll update what
I want when I want.

I suspect Microsoft never coded the if-then-else to handle jumping from
Windows 10 Pro Version 1511 OS Build 10586.1106 to the 16299 Upgrade from
November 2017 (1709 release).

since just about nobody is in that situation, there's very little
reason to bother.

It's a classic coding rule to abort gracefully when the unexpected occurs,
which Microsoft did - for years - but not recently.

there are far more important problems to address, ones that affect many
more people.

You have the tunnel mindset of the classic Silicon Valley coder, where I
know hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. You have no concept of how to
code properly to handle exceptions if you actually believe that.

you're using win10 *not* in the way it was designed to be used and will
end up with problems.

I flip the switches that Microsoft provides - so it's a bug if they can't
handle their own switches being flipped.

Nonetheless, after having been burned, I'm going to flip fewer switches
this time. Microsoft and Apple and Google and Ubuntu all have a way of
enforcing their rules, all of which I customize probably far more than does
the average person so I likely run into a lot more bugs than the average
person does.