Windows stopped asking

On 27 August 2026 a Windows update turned some people’s desktop backgrounds black. Updates break things, and that by itself is barely a story. The sentence Microsoft published about it is the story: “attempting to manually restore customized settings does not work.”

The same update reverted mouse and cursor customisations on non-English installations, carrying the same note. Microsoft documented both in the open and fixed them twelve days later, which is to its credit. For those twelve days the machine had overruled its owner, and the owner couldn’t overrule it back.

You can’t decline

Microsoft’s update FAQ doesn’t hedge: “You can’t stop updates entirely—because they help keep your device safe and secure, updates will eventually need to be installed and downloaded, regardless of your update settings.”

You can pause for 35 days. After that you have to install whatever is waiting before you’re permitted to pause again. You can set active hours, which Microsoft says will “help prevent inconvenient restarts”. Help prevent.

Windows 11 Pro has policies to defer feature updates by up to a year and quality updates by 35 days. Check which editions those policies apply to and the answer is Pro, Enterprise, Education and IoT Enterprise. Home gets pause, and nothing else.

For Home and Pro machines with no IT department behind them, feature updates just turn up. Microsoft’s release health page for version 25H2 puts it like this: “You can choose when to restart or postpone the update, and no action is required to receive it.”

The account

Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro for personal use both require an internet connection and a Microsoft account to get through setup. Microsoft deleted the bypassnro script in March 2025 and closed the remaining documented workarounds that October. What Windows collects goes through that sequence and the language Microsoft used for it.

Pro wasn’t always this way. It was brought into line in February 2022.

Defaults, and how hard they were to keep

There was a stretch where changing your default browser in Windows 11 meant reassigning file types one at a time. HTM, HTML, HTTP, HTTPS, each on its own, where Windows 10 had done the lot with a single click. Microsoft put a one-click Set default button back in an optional update in March 2022, and that’s how it works now, so anyone still telling you it takes eleven clicks is describing something fixed four years ago.

The longer-lived problem was links that ignored your choice. In late 2021 Windows stopped third-party programs from handling microsoft-edge: links, which is the protocol behind Start menu results, search and widgets. Clicking certain things in Windows opened Edge regardless of what you’d set. The tool people used to redirect those links stopped working, and it didn’t fail with an error. Windows simply ignored the setting.

In the European Economic Area none of that applies. Since March 2024 people there can uninstall Edge, see no recommendations to make Edge the default, get no pop-ups when they change their default browser, and keep their chosen browser through Windows updates.

That last item is the tell. Microsoft undertook to preserve a user’s default browser across updates for one region, which tells you what had been happening to it everywhere else.

Things that left

WordPad was deprecated in September 2023 and removed from every edition in version 24H2. It had shipped with Windows since 1995 and it opened a .doc file without asking anyone to sign in to anything. Also gone or going: Cortana, the Maps app, Paint 3D, Steps Recorder, Windows Mixed Reality, the built-in speech recognition, and the old System Image Backup, for which Microsoft’s recommendation is to “look for a third-party product”.

Windows 11 also arrived with the taskbar bolted down. Microsoft’s own specification page spells it out. The taskbar sits at the bottom of the screen and nowhere else. Apps can’t customise parts of it. Live Tiles are gone. The Start menu doesn’t resize.

The option to stop grouping taskbar buttons, which every version of Windows since 95 had offered, returned in the 23H2 update about two years after launch, following a very loud and very sustained campaign in Feedback Hub.

So things can come back. It takes two years and a lot of shouting.

Then support ended

Windows 10 stopped receiving security updates on 14 October 2025. Extended updates for consumers now run to 12 October 2027, by one of three routes: sync your settings to the cloud, spend 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or pay thirty dollars.

All three want a Microsoft account, that account has to be an administrator on the device, and the licence attaches to the account rather than to the computer. In Europe, after consumer groups pushed back, Microsoft dropped the settings-sync condition but kept the account requirement, and said that if the account goes unused for up to 60 days the updates stop until you enrol again.

Windows keeps asking for more machine covers the hardware half of that story.

Owning the computer, licensing the software

Tread carefully here, because this gets overstated constantly. You own your computer. Nobody is reaching into it to delete your files, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What you own of Windows is a licence. Microsoft’s use terms say the software is “licensed, not sold” and that the licence is “permanently assigned to the device” it was first installed on. That’s ordinary. Linux is licensed too.

The difference is what each licence permits. Windows gives you leave to use a binary you can’t inspect or alter, tied to one machine. The GNU General Public License gives you the right to run, study, change and pass on the software, source code included, and states that those rights are “irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met”. The Linux kernel ships under version 2 of it.

Irrevocable is the word carrying the weight. Nobody gets to decide in 2029 that your operating system is finished.

The case for taking the choice away

It’s a strong case and it deserves stating properly.

WannaCry hit on 12 May 2017 and shut down hospitals. Microsoft had released the fix on 14 March, eight weeks earlier. The exploit only worked against machines that hadn’t applied it. Every infection was a computer whose owner, or whose owner’s IT department, had declined or deferred or forgotten.

Nor is it a museum piece. Verizon’s 2025 breach report found exploitation of known vulnerabilities in 20 per cent of breaches, up about a third on the year before. Home machines are the ones least likely to have anyone patching them at all. Defaulting to automatic updates that are awkward to refuse genuinely shrinks the window in which a known hole stays open, and a lot of people are safer because of it.

Grant every word of that. It’s an argument about security updates. It isn’t an argument for requiring an account to finish setup, or for protocol handlers that route around the browser you chose, or for promotions on the lock screen, or for removing WordPad. Those came down the same pipe, under the same banner, and they aren’t the same kind of thing.

What changes

On Linux you get asked. Updates sit and wait. Install them tonight, or Sunday, or in March, and nothing restarts your machine while you’re in the middle of reading. You can remove any part of the system, including parts you’ll later wish you hadn’t. You can hold a version back and stay on it.

The honest cost is that the responsibility moves to you. Ignore security updates for a year and nothing steps in, and the WannaCry argument above is then a description of your computer. Mint and Ubuntu both prompt politely and make it two clicks. Neither will force you, which is the whole point and also the risk.

You also get to keep your desktop the way you set it up. That sounds like a small thing right up until an update turns it black and tells you that restoring it by hand won’t work.

Your first week on Linux covers how updates feel day to day.