[HN Gopher] Windows 11 25H2 October Update Bug Renders Recovery ...
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Windows 11 25H2 October Update Bug Renders Recovery Environment
Unusable
Author : MaximilianEmel
Score : 125 points
Date : 2025-10-19 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techpowerup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techpowerup.com)
| lioeters wrote:
| > this update disrupts mouse and keyboard functionality within
| the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), making them
| unresponsive
|
| > Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media
| Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life.
| Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for
| Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to
| bypass.
|
| > Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved,
| except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE
| problem.
| izacus wrote:
| Wonder if they used Copilot for coding those features and then
| AI to review them. I bet the productivity of the engineers was
| off the charts for that one.
| janwl wrote:
| AI is bad and therefore everything that is bad was made using
| AI.
| Velocifyer wrote:
| At this point Arch Linux is more stable than Losedows 11.
| edoceo wrote:
| Windoesnt
| reisse wrote:
| Not "more", but they're on the same level. I was hit with
| recovery bug today on my Windows desktop, and with totally
| fubar-d Gnome 49.1 release on Arch laptop just yesterday :/
| varispeed wrote:
| Has Microsoft switched to vibe coding? Seems like the last series
| of blunders coincide with Coidiot rollout.
| EarthIsHome wrote:
| eating their own dogfood
| franczesko wrote:
| Switched? The Windows Insider has 3 different tiers for
| testers: Dev, Beta and Release preview and still update
| rollouts are an example of how not to do it
| pjmlp wrote:
| They got rid of most QA people, and nowadays apparently devs do
| QA as well, except that apparently not much of it, like in
| large majority of companies, where testing and docs come last.
|
| Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing
| on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be
| pushing a lot.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Closed tickets look better on KPI than re-opened ones
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's worth noting that QA change happened >10 years ago now.
| It's really the shift in focus that accelerated things
| recently.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, it has been slowly felt during Windows 10 and 11
| time, especially in anything related to UWP and WinRT.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Microsoft is just completely pathetic, it's become completely
| opposite of what companies want and it wouldn't surprise me if it
| becomes politics soon to switch to Linux on office spaces.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| office 365 is the only thing stopping people from switching to
| linux as the only current alternative is ironically chromeos
| (android office) and macos (fully supported by microsoft)
| echohack5 wrote:
| Office because lawyers send docs in .docx format like it was
| written in the blood of the Benjamin Franklin
|
| DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the
| vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck
| form
|
| I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh
| jayd16 wrote:
| Drivers and such are still usually windows first.
| esseph wrote:
| I'm 100% gaming on Fedora with proton and have been for
| quite awhile.
|
| Playing Arc Raiders now on Linux just fine, and several
| other new games. Not BF6 though, that requires you to
| basically install a windows rootkit.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| directx to vulkan works good enough these days, what breaks
| is DRM, anti-piracy and anticheats.
| potwinkle wrote:
| 99% of Steam games work great on Linux now thanks to
| Proton. You might be thinking of how it was back in 2015.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Most tasks are done OK with the web version of office365
| tools and I know a few companies who do not bother to pay the
| licence to install the full suite to all their workers so
| that should make them easy to switch.
|
| I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained
| on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly
| trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
|
| Compliance checkboxes. _That_ is the true strength of
| Microsoft - in 365 you are pretty much compliant with
| everything out of the box or you at least get the tools and
| reports to achieve compliance, and even the stuff where
| compliance is questionable (i.e. GDPR), no one will bother
| you as an individual company too much because any court
| would throw that charge out for being unreasonable.
|
| "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is just as valid
| today, it's just Microsoft. If you are a large company,
| there is virtually no alternative than the unholy
| triumvirate of Microsoft (Azure, AD, O365), SAP and Oracle
| (Java + DB) - deviating from that means lots of paperwork.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I see macOS growing in share for corporate laptops/desktops
| first, but it would be nice to see widespread Linux.
|
| But for now, with big enterprise office requirement, macOS is
| the next best refuge for most companies.
| BoppreH wrote:
| Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the
| total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is
| _unacceptable_ ), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux.
|
| Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The
| Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting
| my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about
| software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly
| painless.
|
| It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is,
| nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of
| greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the
| developers.
| Refreeze5224 wrote:
| KDE Connect is a wonderful piece of software, and works on more
| than just KDE! Most distros are supported, I believe.
| mook wrote:
| KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the
| feeling that it's really just people making stuff for
| themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to
| "win" in some fashion.
| BoppreH wrote:
| It's still limited by the features the OS supports. For
| example, on Windows you can't mount the phone's filesystem
| wirelessly.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Double Commander is the best (actually Total Commander but that
| is for windows).
| hebelehubele wrote:
| Are there any Linux laptops with very good (read: all day)
| battery life for software dev in an IDE?
| felixfurtak wrote:
| Most laptops can become 'Linux Laptops'. You just install
| Linux. Battery life is often similar.
| skylurk wrote:
| With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux,
| battery life is usually either much better or much worse.
| In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| Can you share just what tinkering do you do on them?
| miohtama wrote:
| Framework laptops are popular among Linux users
| amlib wrote:
| The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux
| desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency
| "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a
| bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low
| quality internet link but the final result affords the choice
| of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about
| performance and battery life when running things that saps
| energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux
| and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy
| when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with
| most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between
| (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of
| battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those
| giant 90Wh batteries in it.
|
| In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is
| heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while
| streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old
| inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4
| hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my
| computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering,
| tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct
| connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've
| swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a
| modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good
| network performance.
|
| Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency,
| low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and
| 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain
| since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at
| 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by
| swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software
| encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower
| your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is
| negligible when taking into account typical wan network
| latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps.
| H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer
| machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some
| reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my
| tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I
| disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code
| but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps.
| Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes
| everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma
| subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want
| to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder
| supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do
| that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!,
| though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which
| is less susceptible to that....)
|
| Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
| marcyb5st wrote:
| Pretty cool and thanks for sharing. I went down a similar
| path at some point to try to be a "road warrior", but in
| the end I bit the bullet, learned nvim and went the tmux +
| nvim + ... route.
|
| However, another alternative to streaming the actual pixels
| from your home PC that doesn't confine you to the terminal
| would be use the built-in servers in some IDEs/editors
| (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-
| server, https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-
| development-start... ) and you simply make your IDE/editor
| point to it.
| nickjj wrote:
| I haven't gotten into battery optimization yet but I will
| say, I picked up a laptop not too long ago and put Arch Linux
| on it with Niri (window manager).
|
| I am getting about ~4 hours of active usage where the display
| is on full time and I'm doing things (code editing web apps
| and scripts, running Docker containers, browsing, listening
| to music, etc.). I wouldn't mind more battery life out of it
| if possible, but it's not the end of the world.
|
| What I'm really happy about is the price / performance ratio
| of Nimo's laptops.
|
| I picked this one up: https://www.nimopc.com/products/nimo-15
| -6-n155-r7-6800h-fhd-...
|
| It was $575 on Amazon a few months ago. It's a 15" 1080p IPS
| display, Ryzen 7 6800H (8 core / 16 threads), 32 GB of
| memory, 1TB SSD with an integrated AMD 680M GPU. That GPU can
| use up to 8 GB of system memory as its VRAM (you can
| configure the amount in the BIOS). It also has a 2 year
| warranty.
|
| I initially got it as a travel laptop since I mainly use
| desktop machines. The keyboard is good and has a backlight,
| the trackpad is good to the point where I don't use trackpads
| much at all and I don't feel like it's in the way or a
| problem. Niri is super trackpad optimized too, I'm using 3-4
| finger gestures a lot.
|
| It's quite fast for what I'm doing with it and like it a lot.
| Once I'm back from traveling, I'll write an extensive blog
| post on my experience with it.
|
| I don't work for the company or have any affiliation with
| them, I bought it with my own money. The only interaction I
| had with them was calling their support before I bought it to
| see if it was still returnable if I formatted the drive and
| put Linux on it. They said absolutely, it's no problem. I had
| no intent on returning it unless the hardware died early. For
| reference when I called I got a human very quickly and they
| were friendly.
| rockyj wrote:
| Ah Dolphin. Forced to use MacOS at work, most things do the job
| but man I miss Dolphin. I really wish I could run it on MacOS.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| You can build dolphin on macos using their Craft build tool.
| It works ok-ish.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I say this with love for Linux. Controversially, I don't think
| there is a file manager available on any platform as good as
| Windows file explorer. MacOS finder is an actual joke. Gnome's
| files is a less feature-rich finder and Dolphin comes close but
| still lags behind Windows explorer IMO.
|
| I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for
| Linux
| BoppreH wrote:
| That's fine, it's a very subjective choice. Here a few
| reasons why I preferred Dolphin:
|
| - Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without
| navigating into them).
|
| - Checksum validation under "properties".
|
| - Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent
| across navigation).
|
| - When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between
| "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new
| folder".
|
| - Browsing SFTP drives natively.
|
| - Native Git integration.
|
| - Well integrated notifications for long operations.
|
| - Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like
| WinDirStat, but with circles.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| What specifically in Windows file manager are you talking
| about? I quite like Gnome's Files but mostly I like MacOS 's
| column mode and which it were elsewhere. I think it depends
| on what tasks you reach to the file manager for though.
| xxs wrote:
| > file manager available on any platform as good as Windows
| file explorer.
|
| How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of
| windows file explorer that I need (or use).
|
| Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and
| b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that
| even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file
| (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file
| permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact
| some of them are coupled with registry paths)
|
| I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time
| estimation.
|
| Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file
| manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task
| manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative
| point.
| kwanbix wrote:
| It depends on your definition of perfect.
|
| For me the perfect file manager is Total Commander or
| Midnight Commander or Double Commadner.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| Not Windows Explorer; but I can't live without Total
| Commander.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > as good as Windows file explorer
|
| In what way is the MS Windows file explorer good? It neither
| has tabs, side-by-side view, pattern selection, performant
| search, an UI, that doesn't regularly blocks and becomes
| unresponsive, etc... .
|
| What feature does it have, that some other file manager,
| doesn't have? I can't think of any?
| florbo wrote:
| fwiw Windows 11 Explorer does have tabs.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Oh is that new? I haven't noticed that yet. Is it obvious
| how to use it? How do you use it? (C-T, C-W, C-Shift-T,
| ...?)
| mihaaly wrote:
| > don't think there is a file manager available on any
| platform as good as Windows file explorer
|
| Good joke, made my day! : )
|
| (very sorry, it is late, would love to collect and expand in
| a dedicated thread later. a prime reason for hating to turn
| on my work computer - no Windows at home! -, me, the tech
| enthusiast since learned how to hold a screwdriver, is
| Windows Explorer. so many senseless inconsistencies with
| unfinished junk petrified into unmutable practicies that
| changing line of work where never ever need to use Windows
| again is getting increasingly attractive very fast. even goat
| herding sounds a sensible alternative sometimes)
| bkraz wrote:
| In Win11 as admin, take ownership of the following files, and
| remove all permissions for the system user. This prevents any
| updates and can be easily undone at any time. I turned off
| updates, and life is much better. I no longer feel guilty about
| having my system "at risk". It's no longer worth the pain of
| updates.
|
| C:\Windows\System32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll
| C:\Windows\System32\usosvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\wuaueng.dll
| prmoustache wrote:
| I'd rather use a non broken operating system than disable
| updates.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea at this point updating stuff is just almost more pain than
| pleasure, since new features are very limited nowadays and most
| of the time things end up being more broken.
|
| For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the
| touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now
| everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and
| UI changes in the latest iOS.
|
| Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out
| unless absolutely necessary.
| esseph wrote:
| > Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them
| out unless absolutely necessary.
|
| As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role,
| that scares the every living fuck out of me.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| Same boat here, but I'm not surprised in the slightest.
|
| I'd also argue that the inevitable fallout from large
| numbers of people making a similar decision is on
| Microsoft, not the individuals.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| That's the result of (maliciously) bundling security
| updates with feature upgrades. Security and feature updates
| should be entirely orthogonal, so that you can install
| security updates without affecting the functionality.
| xxs wrote:
| ...Or the fact that virtually all updates reset a lot of
| modifications done (incl. disable real-time antivirus
| nonsense)
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Maybe, but that is again not necessary. dpkg essentially
| shows you a three way merge, when you changed a setting
| which default has changed and asks you what you want to
| do.
| Yeul wrote:
| Yep the recent Windows update broke a videogame that I was
| playing.
|
| Windows used to be about backwards compatibility. Microsoft
| was proud of it. Twenty year old software ran on it.
|
| Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck
| about.
|
| Copilot is now a hardware key on the keyboard. The
| audacity, messing around with people's muscle memory just
| to push more slop.
|
| Microsoft truly has gotten too large to exist and needs to
| be broken up finally and permanently. In fact that holds
| true for _any_ company found to abuse their existing
| financial power to push through slop or other unprofitable
| shit to outcompete others by sheer user count.
| tgv wrote:
| I pinned the system version on 23H2. It does get other updates
| still.
| Arrath wrote:
| I can't wait to try this. Long have I feuded with the Task
| Scheduler and its slippery ability to reenable the update
| services when I look away. Thanks!
| bakugo wrote:
| > I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk".
|
| The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is _vastly_
| overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear
| mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a
| tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest
| tracking and ads.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Our update trust has been abused
| boznz wrote:
| Microsoft updates feel like they are boiling the frog, changing
| the whole OS to something you never signed up for. Why can't they
| stick to just security and stick their bloatware AI crap in
| Windows 12
| keyringlight wrote:
| There's been a little bit of a trend with windows that things
| they start experimenting with towards the end of the life of
| version N become a focus for version N+1. In the case of
| windows 11, they had been trying to get onto the dual-display
| portables wave with a "Windows 10X", but cancelled it and
| brought much of the UI over to 11 to a mild reception. I'd be
| really surprised if they don't try and leverage AI as much as
| they can with the next full version (and whatever fun name they
| give it).
|
| More to the point, I'd agree I'd love it if they had a widely
| available basic version and a separate version where they can
| chase the latest shiny object, but I can't see them being
| motivated to do that in the foreseeable future.
| pks016 wrote:
| Windows 11 rant:
|
| My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months
| after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible
| solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
|
| The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth
| won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is
| it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
|
| My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some
| sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and
| slowing moving towards linux entirely.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Whyis quality dropping like this between Windows and macOS? Is
| this asking this even just rose-tinted glasses on the past?
| dijit wrote:
| Some things are better than they've ever been, so there's some
| amount of rose-tinted glasses.
|
| The thing is, I've been _aware_ of the power of MacOS and
| especially Windows to alter my computing environment against my
| wishes under the threat of not being patched for a while, and
| it 's something nobody else seems to care about even when I
| pointed it out.
|
| As much as things are better on all operating systems (drivers
| aren't _really_ a problem anymore, for example, and chargers
| are practically universal, and battery-life is glorious!)-
| there are things that are really shitty, and we ignore the
| solved problems. I 'm now also feeling a huge amount of
| catharsis.
|
| Linux, however, has genuinely never been better.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| There's no business reason to keep the quality high. As long as
| the happy path works it's grand.
| k8sToGo wrote:
| This is affecting me. I created a new Veeam Backup recovery USB
| and mouse and keyboard isn't working. Ridiculous how this got
| past testing.
| cheschire wrote:
| I was running Mint on a 256GB SATA SSD for about 6 months before
| finally just making the switch and moving it to my 2TB M.2 NVMe
| drive.
|
| But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare
| games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the
| kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my
| 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
|
| I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot.
| Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a
| small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit
| older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but
| Windows couldn't handle the drive.
|
| Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of
| the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah,
| concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
|
| I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things,
| or if it's just a coincidence.
| riedel wrote:
| This update seems to be a real mess. It tries to install for
| since days and always stops at 38% and then rolls back. Instead
| of a reasonable error message it keeps retrying, rendering my
| laptop unusable for 30 min.
| maldev wrote:
| I'm a really big windows expert. I've reverse engineered alot of
| it. Big fanboy, one of the most knowledgeable people about it.
| Ever since interviewing and declining a Microsoft position, it's
| clear the people their are absolute idiots. My first interview
| round as a C++/C kernel dev, was for a C# job? I passed and got
| the offer, then they send me for a systems admin role after I
| decline? From recruiters, to actual engineers there, the level of
| incompetence was insane. I will NEVER work or support this
| company in any way until they get rid of all the H1BSlop they
| have pushing these horrible updates. I think Apple and Meta are
| the only major tech companies not held up by velocity and
| actually have functional organizations. It's not a surprise
| seeing all of these bugs. And there's multiple bug reports i've
| submitted that go unsolved in their win32 or kernel API's.
| ESPECIALLY for new features. It's sad how they've fallen so much.
| If I can find these bugs in 5 minutes using IDA, how come they
| aren't catching it in code reviews?
| mihaaly wrote:
| Keyboard troubles?!
|
| I wonder if this is related to what I experienced. After the
| update (update and shoutdown reliably updates and restarts again,
| does not shut down) a parctice of mine switching Control and Fn
| keys on my Mac so Control key function gets into the same
| physical position as Ctrl on the PC keyboard, so using Windwos
| through Microsoft Remote Desktop and at the keyboard of the
| Windows computer is a smoother switch, is not working anymore.
| Windows, through the Remote Desktop does not register the Fn key
| as Ctrl anymore. The whole thing does not make sense to me. The
| Remote Desktop software on Mac did not change, MacOS should send
| Remote Desktop the signal of Control key pressed when pressing
| Fn, the Windows update shall have no effect, yet the sole change
| here was the Windows update when this annoying thing emerged. I
| simply had no time to dive into diagnostics and find the
| underlying reason, it is less resource intensive and less
| painfull - but one more annoyance on top of the many concerning
| Windows use - learning to use different Ctrl button location on
| Mac and PC keyboard again (done before, before learning the
| Control <> Fn switch trick).
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