If windows (as it seems for all these years) has so many "loopholes" for malicious activity why would I trust a program from windows to guard its system?
Ironically, the loopholes that it has are really why businesses like Windows. Backward compatibility. MS did away with 32bit builds of Win 10 (this is for new computers, new ISOs mind you, not the computers already out in the market) just recently, they are the last to strip away 32bit builds, but Win 10 64bit still has 32bit libs in it. Windows is the only mainstream OS that still has by default 32bit libs on their 64 bit systems (even Linux requires people to get them from the repos if they need/want them, it's not available by default). Back in 2017 I think, there was a virus that used a Windows protocol that has been the same since Win 95.
So yes, it's not perfect and part of that is precisely the reason why a lot of business like Windows. Part of the reason why at least one user (a vocal one) likes Adobe products as well. Backward compatibility, even though it brings some cons with it as well.
Once again why update? Its pointless. I dont use IE or this EDGE I dont use any MS products to protect my PC....well at least since Im on a 2011 machine with windows 7 and no updates none of this would work anyway.
Updating in general
can be a good thing. There are reasons to update and there are reason not to update. The key thing is what is
in those updates. Forced updates are not good generally speaking. Not all of the issues that make it to the mainstream are caught in MSs Insider's program, even if they are flagged, they don't make it as far as they should be (the deletion of files in the $USER library (my vids, my docs, my music etc) for one was flagged, but still made it through in the wild. When I was still messing around with Corel, back in the X6 days, there were people that complained about the bugginess of that when it was first released. My workflow, I never had a problem. So updating was pointless for me, but maybe not for the next person.
Ironically, I have run bleeding edge distros on rigs (Arch and Fedora, even Fedora in production back in 2015), and I have had to deal with far more issues with my dad's Win 10 (and he doesn't tweak computer settings like most on here do and his workflow is nothing as niche as ours is here, about the only thing one can say is that his computer components are so new, the forums don't have info on them yet) then I have had on those rigs.
Bare in mind too, even if you may or may not use certain protocols or programs that are known to be bad, doesn't mean that the script kiddies can't still get you (
the above mentioned protocol and that more then likely still exists in your version of Win 7 as that was one update that they did push out to Win 7 users, but it also came with that nag Win 10 update as well). Depending on what permissions you run as well, depends on how easy it is for them. Most of this stuff is to mitigate the computer being low hanging fruit, none of it's perfect as there is still a user at the keyboard making the final call.
This just doesn't affect MS branded products (although they are one of the easier one's to go after), a few yrs ago there was an issue that plagued most browser's (and if something is an issue with Chromium, that affects 90% (if not more) of the browsers out there as the majority of browsers out there are Chromium based (Edge, Brave, Qute (I use this and LibreWolf), Opera, Vivaldi, Blisk, Colibri, Epic, Iron, can't forget Ungoogled Chromium (which is going to be regular Chromium soon enough) and quite a few others as well)) and that was reading PDFs in the browser. That affected every mainstream OS, because it was a browser related issues for cross platform browsers.
So depending on what you are talking about, updates may actually be necessary, it all depends on what is in the update. The problem is, a lot of dev forget that updates should be about iteration, not "innovation" and that's an issue that causes puckering twice a year when MS does their big updates.
it is a microsoft license enforcement mechanism
Quite a few protocols like that in MS (and in Mac as well, they actually took it further with hardware as well). One of the many things that I'm glad that I don't have to deal with when it comes to Win and OSX as I don't use them on bare metal (only Windows in a VM and most are EOL at that).
