I must be in the huge minority. I haven't had a single issue with Windows 10 (if we disregard privacy). Literally everything has just worked.
I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great.
I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut on the desktop or is pinned to the toolbar.
Having a functional toolbar on both monitors. That right there was all I wished windows 7 would do but otherwise I can barely tell that the OS is different.
I never used windows 8 so I don't have a comparison to that but I've seen Windows ME...
That is the tragedy of win10. It's actually a great OS but the lack of respect for user preferences around privacy and updates ruins it for power users. I have to think that the engineers who did the work to make win10 as efficient and stable as it is had cortana and dark UI patterns shoved down their throats. cortana is clippy, we all know that. Who thought it was a good idea to bring back clippy?! Could not have been the team that does powershell!
There are plenty of bad parts too. The start menu keeps freezing regularly for me on multiple machines. Searching in the start menu returns random results. Settings scattered across multiple control panels is just absurd. In-OS advertising is a complete no go to me. The nagging to use edge too. The frequent forced reboots and full screen notifications are a nuisance. And it makes it really difficult to change default apps, on purpose I suspect.
I just don't like it. It's not about visual design. I couldn't care less about flat design vs windows 7 menus, etc. But it is functionally really bad.
The dual control panels are ridiculous. I shouldn't have to go through two totally different interfaces just to change the mouse pointer speed. Type 'mouse' in the start menu, click the result, option isn't there, click 'Additional mouse options', totally different interface appears, go to the Pointer Options tab, drag the slider.
And I know this one has been done to death, but the privacy issue really is a major one - it seems to have expanded so much since the Win 7 days. There are several pages of scary privacy things to untick when installing Win 10, and then some optional ones are still enabled after you untick everything, so you've then got 16 (sixteen!) pages of privacy options in the control panel to check after install.
There's a lot in the Control Panel. The more you move to the new Settings app, the more complicated Settings gets. And if Microsoft didn't provide all those settings, or dropped the whole Control Panel, there would be a tornado of criticism.
Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system.
Do it all at once, they'll complain bitterly. Do it gradually, they'll complain bitterly. Don't do it at all, they'll complain bitterly. Which complaint would you like to make today> ;-)
On the good side, ordinary users have few problems with the Settings app, and it seems to do all they need -- or at least it comes close.
And the people who are resistant to change and are already familiar with the Control Panel can still use it.
Life is hard when you have 1.5 billion users, especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system.
That's true, but it's probably a lot harder when you've proven to be untrustworthy in what you include under "modernisation" or "updates".
Plenty of techie people warned that user-hostile behaviour like the GWX campaign or including non-security things in updates advertised as security patches would damage that trust and come back to bite them later. I think a lot of people didn't really believe that would be the case at the time, but as the article here notes, the adoption rates suggest otherwise.
> "... especially when a lot of them resist attempts to modernise or even update the system."
I am one of those holdouts, however I would have upgraded a long time ago if Windows 10 had allowed me control over upgrades/updates and had better privacy. After the tricks that Microsoft pulled, trying to force me to upgrade to Windows 10, I do not trust Windows 10 and you cannot feel that about an OS and install it.
Your loss. I trust Windows 10 a lot more than Android, and I use that as well ;-)
The future is more-or-less-continuous updates based on telemetry. That's how Google and Facebook work as well. Microsoft will never go back to a 3-year upgrade cycle, and no business should want to do that either.
I'd understand that more if it was all esoteric power-user type stuff that was missing in the new system. But stuff like mouse pointer speed?
Apparently Misrosoft has said that they do want to drop the old-style control panel eventually. I realise it's a huge job, but it feels very like a half-finished feature right now.
Mouse speed IS power user stuff. Poll the general populace, what percent actually know about mouse pointer speed or that you can adjust it.
back in 2002 I went around bumping everyone's screen resolution from vga in college because it hurt my sole. at least 20% of people got pissed at me for "fucking up their settings". Almost all eventually came back and said "I can't read my whole doc, show me that thing again."
Point being they didn't even know it was broke or that they could change it. Thus you have iOS where apple's defaults are the whole OS and literally millions upon millions of people are completely happy with it.
You'd also have to make the case that the things that did make the cut to get into the new-style interface are less Power User-y than pointer speed though. Admittedly they're usually simple stuff, but is e.g. switching the mouse wheel option between "several lines" and "whole screen" really less of a power option than pointer speed?
Everything he says is true because most people don't even fscking care the very least, even if the option were right in their face. Think BOFH dummy mode. People just want a zero-knob appliance for shit to get done. We are the damn exception to the rule.
My mum learned that if she did not like something she can just press the super button and start typing whatever the annoyance is related to. I am sometimes surprised by the specific settings she goes for. Based on this i think users at least check the options when they are easily available. (Linux obviously)
"works" Windows configurations are highly confusing if you dont know what you are doing. Windows 10 might got better but they are way to stripped down as well.
Not to mention that it's not preferable to be adjusting mouse speed in windows anyway, 6/11 on the slider is basically the only setting that should be used, as every other option is no longer true 1:1 input.
(disabling "enhanced pointer precision" is preferable, but optional)
If your cursor is too fast you need a mouse with a lower DPI, and vice versa.
In my Mouse panel, there's an additional tab created by the Trackpad drivers.
I can only guess how many proprietary extensions have been built to rely on the old Control Panel interfaces, and how few of them will ever be updated to Windows 10.
The most frustrating thing for me is the automatic updates that are difficult to turn off. If I leave a Windows 10 VM running on my laptop for too long, it will decide it's "idle" and start consuming my resources. Even if I let the updates finish, it then continues for another week, whenever I leave it "idle", to perform AoT .NET compilation, pegging my CPU. Incredibly annoying.
My laptop fan is a bit of a noisy bugger, if I leave windows 10 for 5 mins it thinks idle and the the fan just starts going.
First I found that ngentask was repeatedly running 32-bit ngen and it's practically impossible to debug what's gone wrong so I've replace the ngen with a dummy exe.
But it still does it, now instead of ngen it's simply "System" constantly burning 20% cpu for whatever utterly pointless maintenance task it's decided on that's obviously broken.
It's just really frustrating, I swear that the "idle" mode of win 10 costs me far more money than actively using the laptop. And it's so hard to debug because as soon as the computer activates it stops whatever bullshit it was doing.
On my desktop I tried ripping out all the privacy invasive stuff and have somehow managed to break the start menu search.
I do like it more than Win 7, the startup time's great, but it's still really frustrating at times.
FWIW, automatic updates took me about 5 minutes of googling to figure out how to turn off. Haven't been nagged once since then. I can go in manually and update as I please.
The start menu tries to connect to the internet when you search. It has an offline mode, but if you have an intermittent connection it will just hang forever. Opening an application should never require a connection.
Sometimes when I try to rename a folder in my home folder, Windows Explorer will lock up until I forcibly restart it.
Start menu search seems slower and the returned results are worse than in Windows 7, Unity, XFCE, or any alternative I've experienced. Searching "irefox" doesn't find Firefox. Maybe it's because I've disabled a number of privacy-sensitive features in Windows 10, but Windows 7 managed to make this work without spying on me.
The lengths they go through to push Edge irk me quite a bit: tagging it "Microsoft Recommended Browser", adding an extra scare prompt when you switch away from it in the control panel, resetting it to default status as part of automatic updates. I've seen screenshots of a popup appearing on the task bar begging the user to switch to edge, but haven't experienced this myself.
The Start Menu search in Windows 10 doesn't search Program Files by default. It only examines Internet Explorer History, the Start Menu, and Users/AppData.
It's super frustrating. When I search for "vlc", it gives me search results for VLC and instructions on how to install VLC, but it doesn't actually return the vlc.exe program that I already have installed damnit.
I have Firefox in my Start Menu, and searching "Fir", "Fire", "Firef", etc will turn it up. The search algorithm is just so bad that it ignores partial matches that don't start at the beginning of a word.
This was a popular thing ~10 years ago, not surprising that Windows didn't get it right. FWIW, MacOS also fails at this regularly with Spotlight, but Alfred is sometimes better. Wox seems to be the closest thing for Windows, and Launchy used to be the one the cool kids used.
This is one of the things when they announced was going to be a big part of Windows 10 I knew would turn a lot of people off. I used it sparingly on my WP8, and it was hit or miss most of the time with searches.
For instance, I always look for pizza places when I'm in a new city. I was in a new city and had some recommendations from clients. I asked Cortana like five times onmy WP8 and every time she would get it wrong or think I was saying something else. On my Android? One time, nailed it.
Also, the desktop integration is down right invasive compared to how the mobile version worked. I don't really use it at all anyways on my desktop, its not very accurate and my app launcher (executor: executor.dk) works way faster anyways for a majority of stuff I'm looking for.
Thousands of programmer years went in to Win10, and the most positive comment on it is "It's perfectly tolerable if you turn off all that stuff they added."
This should be in the dictionary to illustrate the phrase "Damning with faint praise."
I think it's the best OS I've used yet really. I remember getting BSOD many times on Windows XP and several times on Win 7 (although they were so rare they were the exception).
Almost always those previous iterations had some peripheral that needed help being configured but with Win 10 I haven't had to touch almost anything.
My computer has changed to be not comparable to those previous though because I now have a nice GPU, a nice CPU, and a SSD. So any speed improvements, graphic improvements, etc are skewed by the hardware changes I've made since.
I didn't turn off anything except the privacy that I could. It's just that I don't have a use case for most of the features (yet).
IMHO, operating systems are a solved problem. I think that's why Microsoft is pushing the line between OS and applications so far into application space. I understand they may want to ship with solitaire and weather and all the other garbage apps, but why not let me uninstall them?
I don't go to my computer and think "oh great, I get to use Windows" (or Linux or any other OS), I'm there to run some application.
If Windows didn't arbitrarily send data to their servers, I might use the built in calendar or contacts. It feels like they want me to give up my privacy and they are offering nothing in return.
Driver malfunctions are common, too. Apart from that, I think my last Windows-induced BSOD was in Windows 2000, indeed. (And I don't think the blue screens in Win9x really count, as they are often a very different phenomenon than a kernel panic.)
I'm a gamer and developer in high performance stuff. I've seen a concrete improvement in both average performance and responsiveness in going from win 7 to win 10 on the same machine.
I recently bought a 2GB Ideapad to use as a toss around machine. I wish it had come with 32-bit Win10 but MS's stupid rules require 64-bit on any processor capable of using it.
> I recently bought a 2GB Ideapad to use as a toss around machine. I wish it had come with 32-bit Win10 but MS's stupid rules require 64-bit on any processor capable of using it.
Is this correct? There's a bunch of low end machines that have 64 bit processors but not much ram, and thus were installed with 32 bit Windows 10.
being partially sarcastic: who could stand 8? as much as you hate the features you have to turn off... 8 was much much worse. 8.1 also really bad. 10 is like 7 that works way better. I also really like my work win10 where corp it has stripped all of the garbage for me, except that stupid "welcome" screen, which you used to be able to skip by task managering. Hello! I know windows is ready to go... I know you love your FTUE, did you think about your 92UE? :)
Eh. 8.1 works fine for me. I get the performance improvements over 7, but I also get to control when to apply updates. The start screen was an eyesore at first, but I actually kind of like it now. The Windows 10 "start menu" is much worse, because it's exactly the same as the start screen but way smaller
I have to use 10 at work because I'm working on a driver that I need Windows 8 or newer to write it and the only HDD with anything like that on it had 10, and I absolutely hate that once in a while I come in to work and the OS will have decided at some point during the night that updating itself was more important than whatever it was I had running.
It's not about optimization, it's about the fact that games will come out that support only that because the game devs don't want to support multiple graphics APIs.
There are also a whole host of security improvements that you can't see. SwiftOnSecurity over on Twitter regularly calls out things that are literally impossible to secure on Win7 that are done for you OOB on Win10.
Any way to filter out all the extraneous tweets to see that information? I'd be interested in seeing a list, but not interested in signing up for Twitter and following someone with the volume of posts on that account.
Just because he isn't using the new features, doesn't mean they aren't useful. WSL is great - still needs work but on the insider previews it's on 16.04 LTS and they're slowly knocking out the nagging little issues with it. If you've got a 2-in-1 like a surface book, the switching from desktop to tablet mode is awesome.
If you aren't paranoid (and completely understand why some people are) about the security possibilities, cortana is actually pretty nice too. And as they slowly tie it into xbox and their other platforms it will just become that much more useful. Virtual desktop support is finally there.
I mean, outside of that, what were you expecting from Windows? It's the most widely used desktop on the planet... it's not like there were any major feature gaps that were just deal breakers.
> cortana is actually pretty nice too. And as they slowly tie it into xbox and their other platforms it will just become that much more useful.
Those are some of the things that I find most annoying. I don't want my OS tied into other platforms. I don't want a local search to also be an online search. I don't want a file search to also be a Windows Store search. I don't want a dozen opportunities to link my local user account to be connected to my Windows Live ID. I want the OS to provide a convenient environment to run my software in, and no more.
WSL is cool, and I'd like it on my Windows 7 machine. It's a lot nicer to use than Cygwin, and it's enough that I'm not planning on setting up my Win10 netbook to dual boot Linux. The generally lower memory requirement is nice too. Other than that, 10 feels a lot like 7 with more things that I want to disable but can't.
I'm sure, too. But why bother? The benefits of the OS aren't worth the work, between researching work-arounds, implementing them, and maintaining them in perpetuity. It sounds like something I might've taken some enjoyment from 10 or 15 years ago. I think my best move now is to stick to 7 and Linux.
The netbook can keep 10; I've hidden some of the more annoying "features", and it basically runs a browser, a couple games, and almost nothing else. Doesn't matter if it gets rebooted randomly, starts whirring at arbitrary times because Windows decided to peg the CPU while the machine's "idle", etc.
I think we're basically agreeing here, it's just a matter of perspective whether "it has a variety of features that are genuinely useful to a certain niche of users" is proof that Win10 is good or that it's bad. I mean, everything you said is true, but I don't have a Surface or an Xbox, so...
I'd imagine those features that the programmers implemented was not something they had a say in. I imagine Microsoft has a large bureaucracy that determines what features that make it into a Windows release.
If they change things in noticeable way, damn them for changing things. If they don't change things in a noticeable way, damn them for not making it more noticeable.
I'm most of the time using Linux but Windows 10 is quite fast and usable if you are willing to do the dance to check all privacy settings and clean the Start Menu of the spam.
I don't use an online id for logging in and use this tool to fix privacy settings: https://modzero.github.io/fix-windows-privacy/ (read the fine print, it's quite invasive!) there are powershell scripts for cleaning the start menu - I don't have a link handy, sorry.
However most regular users are stuck with the shiny and annonying defaults that make you feel you handed over your machine to Microsoft to show you annoying ads.
Shrug. I have to do the same thing in OSX. Every major update I google what's changed and then disable 90% of it. In what world do I want Siri on my laptop…
Same here, a couple years back I decided the effort needed to build linux up was less than the effort to tear OS X, Windows down. The end state is a little more customized to my prefs too.
You can remove just about all the tiles and extra bloat from the Start Menu, bringing on a more familiar return of what it used to be. Just right-click and 'remove' every tile until there's nothing left.
I can't get over this. It doesn't help that the search (start>type) constantly doesn't find apps I'm looking for. It's to the point where I'm pinning everything to my taskbar.
My workflow for a decade or more was to hit the Windows key then start typing to find indexed apps. It's almost useless to me now and I don't really get why.
I'm not what the point is, given there are probably hundreds of bugs that somebody would say "This is the #1 worst bug in Windows 10." But for me, this is the #1 worst bug in Windows 10.
Assuming they're honest, and in their defence, MS has been much more honest and transparent recently: could you imagine being the one poor soul who's been working on that bug for almost two years now? People keep reporting that bug, and you keep ruling out possible explanations.
I've indeed seen that kind of thing happen, so yes, there can be some poor soul doing this. But it's still more likely that MS doesn't think Windows not letting you run your programs is a high priority problem.
Do you mean the "Show app list in Start Menu" Option?
I can't remember if its on or off by default (If its off then I switched it on long ago and can't remember) but on my setup with the option on (settings -> Personalization -> Start -> Show app list in Start Menu. Just in case it is turn off by default) I get a scrolling list on the left hand side of the start menu under "Most Used" (I have show recently added apps turned off) that feels like it behaves just like all programs has on <= 7 (Only briefly used 8 and I replaced its start menu with Classic Shell when I did) in that if during install you have the option to "add program to start menu" it appears in the start menu.
<EDIT> Here's a screen shot of what it looks like when I press the start button - http://i.imgur.com/0VdDm7v.jpg </EDIT>
Just like <= 7 (and presuming 8) its just a folder full of short cuts ("%programdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu") to the apps launchers/uninstallers/config/help/etc that you have installed.
What I do find annoying compared to <=7 is the ability to right click and just remove things from the list (perhaps its an option in group policies and I've just not found it, tbh I've not looked) without going to the folder I included above and deleting the shortcut.
Well then the OS that you're complaining about isn't exactly "your OS" is it? It's now someone else's OS and you're just complaining about something you don't even use.
Scenario: I'm using X 2.0. The defaults are shit, and I complain. Nothing happens. At this point, I've got three options. Deal with the shitty defaults, customize the OS, or move elsewhere.
I really, really like Windows 10. I spend most of my work days in OS X on a Macbook Pro - but I also spend a lot of my free time gaming. Windows 10 is so much more user-friendly than any other OS I use. Settings are easy to find, generally easy to understand and change. Search is great. It boots super fast. It's about to get a 'game-mode' to restrict resources from background apps. Installing stuff from the Windows store has slow download speeds (compared to steam, apple) - but I have much fewer 'app is stuck in update' issues compared to OS X.
Hah. You're lucky your Cortana bar still works. They aren't as easy to find when your Cortana bar disappears when you click it. Tried all the random fixes on the internet to no avail. I never even tried to fix privacy concerns -- it just broke.
I have Cortana turned completely off and settings are really easy to get to. Win key -> sett<enter> isn't particularly difficult. Or just typing in part of the setting usually finds it right away.
Maybe you're just lucky, or you're the sort of user MS is targeting with their new UI design. Whenever I'm configuring a W10 machine I find myself going back and forth between two completely different configuration interfaces. I.e. the Control Panel and the Settings app.
To be far I'm the same as the grandparent post, but I tend to stick to the legacy settings menus which still have everything and only encounter the new ones occasionally (ie: updates).
I've learned enough of the new one to navigate it, but I can still basically type my way through settings in the old style menus still so it doesn't bother me.
Yeah something like that worked in win7, but now... Win key -> zero response to any text and if I click the text entry box it disappears. Maybe I should turn Cortana off completely, but right now I'm looking into switching to 100% Linux. It's just easier.
I've literally never had a system as buggy as Windows 10, every day I switch on my computer I wonder what's going to be broken today. Stuff which works on the same hardware on Windows 7 is just unreliable on Windows 10. Not to mention that 10 is a usability mess and a massive step back in pretty much every corner of the system.
Have you tried a fresh install of Windows 10, rather than an upgrade? (Once you've upgraded once, you should be able to install fresh as the Win 10 license is tied to the hardware.) Perhaps the problem is related to the upgrade process.
I use mine probably very much the same way as you do. It's configured to look 99% the same as my Win7 installation had been.
But frustration comes from the fact that Win 10 is just so random. I've had two installations (the second after the loss of my primary HDD). The first was great, it just worked. The second however keeps doing things I don't want.
- Initial installation immediately downloading video driver during initial updates, locking me for hours from installing the correct Nvidia driver. So I was sitting there in the default low resolution unable to really do anything.
- Disabled the annoying language bar? It'll be back tomorrow.
- Disabled fast boot (which causes my pc to shut down on startup every second startup)? It'll be back next week.
There's a number of other smaller things as well. Overall I don't hate it, I just wish it would stop trying to mess with itself/me.
I somewhat agree. I have to use Windows from time to time and it's usually Windows 10. I disliked Windows 8 so much, but Windows 10 is overall good IMO.
But, honestly, comparing to something like Windows NT 4.0, I can't really say, why Windows 10 is better. There might be tiny things here and there, but overall experience is similar. The only Windows releases I remember were those particularly bad (Vista, 8) and those, which accumulated large userbase (XP, 7). Other than that, I don't see much progress. If Windows NT 4.0 would be supported today on current hardware and software, I'm not sure if I would use anything else. It was good enough.
I use it in a VM now and then. The only thing from the later versions i'd want to see is adding thumbnails in the file browser, being able to right click in a start menu entry to show the file/folder properties without going through explorer , being able to search apps and recent documents with win+[text] and being able to drag the taskbar buttons to reorder them.
Beyond that Windows NT's interface is just perfect. And TBH none of the above are really essential, just small quality of life things. But even without those i'd be fine.
I think modern Windows add too many little distractions with icons, notifications/popups, gadgets, etc everywhere.
Also the classic theme. I want that back. I run Win7 with the classic theme and Windows 9x/NT4 color scheme (the one with the soft light in the 3d elements, not the "Windows Classic" in 2K/XP/Vista/7 which lacks it - i had to import the colors through a reg file from NT to get them) and i like how it looks. I used Win8 and Win8.1 for a while and ran a hack that disabled theme files (which forced Windows to fallback to the classic theme) but that broke Metro/UWP apps. It wasn't an issue with Win8.x but Win10 uses UWP apps everywhere and it becomes unusable. It might sound a frivolous reason, but i reverted back to Win7 because i don't like how newer Windows look like.
Since i don't expect Microsoft to do any of the above, my long term plan is to make my own environment that looks like Windows NT 4 in Linux :-P.
Conversely, I have Windows 10 running quite well on low-spec (for the time, not just for now) 6GB Acer laptop that I got when Windows 8 (not 8.1) was current, that went through in-place upgrades to 8.1 and then 10, and it's got a ludicrous amount of cruft that I keep meaning to clean up.
So, while I don't doubt your story, I can't help thinking that it may not represent the general experience.(Maybe I'm just lucky, though.)
You either have a hardware problem (mechanical disk?) or a problem with some preinstalled software running in the background.
8GB with even a several years old CPU should be perfectly usable. SSD is absolutely required though. No number of cores and gigs will compensate for the lack of ssd.
I have similar problems, the amount of uncoordinated disk accesses that seem to happen constantly are murder for older spinning disks. After a while it levels out but that's usually after the first hour of usage- resource monitor clearly indicates what sent my disk queues up as Microsoft code that's recommended to be on such as defender. An SSD is absolutely required, or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 2.0 for the extra iops.
> or at least a modern hard drive with SATA 3.0 instead of SATA 2.0 for the extra iops.
The interface is unrelated to the IOPS you get out of a hard drive. 3Gbps SATA II has no trouble delivering far more than the ~200 IOPS a 7200RPM hard drive is capable of.
I'm running Windows 10 on a machine that's about five years old. No SSD. It's quite snappy. The only issue with speed is startup times are long if you force it to do a full restart.
Not a fan of the UI changes, or the advertising. If I didn't buy Office 365 every other day for the last year, what are the odds your popup will get me to buy today?
Right click on the tile and "Remove". There's also a setting which blocks reinstalling those preloaded crap "apps" with updates. O&O Shutup 10 can help with that.
Sure it can, but mechanical drives are just comparitively glacially slow agianst SSDs and 'general OS snappiness' is one of the major real-world examples of where you feel it.
Something might be up with your hardware. I run Win10 on a Surface Pro 4 that has a 900Mhz (yes, Mhz) processor and 4GB ram and it's really snappy. Even heavier type apps like Word and Excel have 1 second load times.
5400 RPM HDD ? Also what's the amount of pre-installed crapware running in the background ? Because these don't have anything to do with Windows.
I think Windows 10 can be a really nice OS, considering MS would stop with the telemetry/ads BS and make it more accessible to opt out. Until then O&O Shutup 10 tool is indispensible in that matter.
Windows 10 file explorer has a weird, terrible, default that causes it to be painfully slow.
Try right clicking a slow folder, selecting properties, select the customize tab, then change "optimise this folder for:" from whatever it is to "general". Apply that to all sub-folders.
Please let me know if it works, because I have a bit of a rant for MS if it does.
I've had fresh Windows 10 (no crapware) installs on two different development machines at two different companies. Both times it was slower than hell, and I immediately asked for a Linux install.
Perhaps this is me finally getting old and curmedgeony at the ripe old age of twenty-three, but I'll be damned if I'm switching my personal computer away from Windows 7 anytime soon.
If you were able to move to Linux - more power to you. Some of us are stuck with mighty machines and horrible system image with 10 kinds of disk/processor heavy background "management and security" apps running on boot.
My company's Windows 7 image craps up awesome hardware, and so did the XP image before it. Lenovo T450s with an SSD? Yeah, that'll take a solid 5 minutes to reboot.
It took some effort but I did make Win 10 reasonably snappy for me on a Lenovo Ideapad designed for Win 8 with a few tricks: Using a script to disable all the tracking(the only thing I haven't disabled, but probably should, is the SmartScreen protection, which kicks in obnoxiously frequently and wrecks the drive), going to 16GB of RAM so that it stops swapping, disabling all the graphics features except for font smoothing, and switching to NexusFile for day-to-day file operations. There are still instances where I click on something that uses Explorer and it sits there uselessly for a few seconds, and the initial boot or recovery from sleep mode can sometimes be a doozy, but this is now more exceptional than not.
I run Windows 10 on a 4GB netbook with a 4-core Atom-derived Celeron and a spinning hard drive. Performance-wise, it's been working well for several months at this point. Something's up with your laptop.
Then something is wrong with your hardware. My brother runs it on a 10 year old (!) laptop with 2GB RAM and an Intel Dual Core CPU (these were before Core 2 Duos)
Windows runs okay, but scrolling lags like hell on more complex sites and you cant play more than 720p videos.
It's either malware or bloatware. A healthy, stable system with Windows 10 and 8 GB of RAM shouldn't have performance issues granted it doesn't have malware and you aren't overloading the 8GB RAM.
You are not alone, I run 3 PCs with Windows 10 all 3 had zero problems - everything works fine. I understand people being privacy concern but as an android user I feel like that ship has sailed a long time ago.
I think you can't unless you buy a handset that you can use Cyanogenmod on it. Which I'd say it's as complicated for the average user than the hacks needed to turn off telemetry in Windows 10.
I'm with you here. Sure there are a few irritations but overall I'm really enjoying Windows 10. If you turn web search off in the search bar then it's incredible. I don't have a single shortcut on my desktop, I just search for every thing I won't and it appears instantly.
I almost feel as at home as I did in Windows 7, but not entirely. Windows 10 feels a little all over the place at times. As the below comments say, the control panel is a mess. But when you learn you can just search for mouse settings, or anything for that matter then you don't ever have to find yourself wading through all their ridiculous setting screens.
> I hate the menu [...] everything I tend to open has a shortcut on the desktop or is pinned to the toolbar.
You have to get Keypirinha! http://keypirinha.com/
Set ALT+Space to launch Keypirinha, then type the name of your application to launch it. Keypirinha adapts to how you use it. Often frequently launched programs will only take a couple keystrokes. For example TH launches Thunderbird.
Have had issues with the WiFi slowing down when the bluetooth is turned on in combination with location services; have ended up fixing it by toggling between turning off the bluetooth or the location services. The WiFi driver itself goes off randomly if I use my laptop for a long time.
The disk usage is incredibly high for atleast 10 minutes after startup; tried turning search on and off, cortana on and off, nothing works.
What's more annoying is the fact that there are no official troubleshooting guidelines for this issued by Microsoft. You end up visiting a bunch of sites and very randomly trying out myriad methods to get it working.
Interesting. Is anyone aware of a set of hacks to get rid of selective annoyances/known privacy violations and turn Win 10 into something that feels like Win 7?
- Cortana
- Searches that connect to Internet/bing
- call back to homeship
- other features that not everyone wants that I haven't listed...
Find an ISO of the Long-Term Servicing Branch distribution - LTSB. It has all of the crap stripped out, and is quite fantastic. All the goodness, nothing that people complain about constantly with Win 10. No Edge, no Store, no Cortana, no ads or telemetry.
I accidentally downloaded it from MSDN after my laptop's hard drive failed and I couldn't find any of my previously-burned DVDs or USB sticks.
LTSB seems better Windows for my needs. Curious though, can't we just wire trace the telemetry connects and drop their name resolution some how?
(Don't know the equivalent of /etc/hosts in Windows)
Windows does use a HOSTS file as well (located in %SYSTEM32%\drivers\etc\hosts), however, (since around Windows XP) Windows hardcodes certain IP addresses and hostnames related to updating and other Microsoft services into dnsapi.dll (located in %SYSTEM32%). This is checked before the hosts file is checked, so any entries in this DLL will override the corresponding hosts file entry if it exists.
The safest way to block suspect IP addresses and hostnames is to simply not trust the OS and use separate hardware to block the traffic.
I have had very few functionality issues. The main problem is the decision to self upgrade, constantly, without so much as an alert anytime you restart the machine. The dual control panels and ads are also really annoying and I can't imagine what a pain it would be for a laptop or tablet with more limited screen real estate.
So a good OS, great by M$ standards, with some annoying "features" baked in.
I meant I never had a problem with something not integrating when I expected it to. New mouse, new keyboard, new printer, headset, drives, etc. Everything has worked in that regard and painlessly (for me).
The menu I found functional (and someone else mentioned I can actually remove the crap on there I didn't want). I am mostly against the flat UI (I hate it everywhere though) and the settings that moved to random places. I never had a problem with search not working or anything of that nature.
I think there's an obvious and more general question here to be answered: if a piece of software is good enough, namely, it "disappears" when you are trying to do your job, then why bother to change it?
Yes, the new version might enable a more efficient workflow, or might be faster to boot-up.
But people hate changes and you need to invest considerable time in upgrading a piece of software (the upgrade itself + learning to navigate the new system + solving whatever goes wrong during the process). And that this is not just limited to "novices": I've heard wonderful things about Arch Linux, but my Ubuntu system works well enough and I've been using it for forever, so the incentives are pretty low and the time to be invested pretty high.
Profit. How else is Microsoft (or any other company) going to make money off software no one needs or wants? Other than rehashing the same old product and pushing it onto users for more money, more surveillance, or both, they have nothing of value to sell on the software side. Even if they did have something of value to sell, over 90% of the people have already bought their product. Gotta keep the cash rolling in so they tweak the UI, maybe in a way that people hate like removing the start menu. Or they add surveillance features you can't turn off and monetize that way while pretending to somehow be secure. Or forget all that, let's just push the new update forcefully onto people's computers and pretend that it's not malware.
When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.
There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.
Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately.
I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.
> There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.
It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.
I don't quite follow. You seem to be saying that Microsoft make changes just to justify the release of a new OS version. But they announced quite a while ago that they would never release a new major version. There will never be a Windows 11, you will never pay to upgrade Windows to the new version again. They adopted the macOS platform, where the OS sticks to a single version and gets an incremental annual update (macOS has been on version 10 for 16 years, with no plan to ever create "OS XI", and stopped charging for updates 4 years ago). So why would change for change's sake relate to profit at all?
Because MS makes money off of selling software vice Apple's model of making money off of selling hardware. If they continue to emulate Apple's policy of free upgrades, they'll see an eventual revenue drop since they'll be dependent upon users upgrading their hardware.
Right now Win 10 Home is $119.99. If Microsoft actually said what you claim, they're lying. Either way, they're doing it for the money. Whether that money comes from the actual software, hardware, ads, user data, or some other way, it's the reason why Microsoft will continue to push their software onto people, including people that don't want it. In fact, with the addition of ads and user tracking, I wouldn't be surprised if they drop the actual dollar cost of the software in favor of data cost a la Chrome OS and other Google products. And it still wouldn't change anything. Profit would still be the reason for them adding new features and forcing people to upgrade.
OSX/macOS promoted their point releases to be something between service packs and major version releases, keeping it at version "X" for marketing purposes. From what I can see, between Cheetah and Sierra the expected workflow of the system has changed strongly a few times.
Microsoft change its policy way to quickly and often (eg. about XBox One features, Windows Phone) for this announce to be taken at face value. Maybe its true but if the Windows 10 market penetration does not go as expected (as it seems to be) the strategy will change.
That's because in most cases the "change" is 90% costs externalized by the vendor, IT, or both.
Imagine if it was 1955 and we thought it was a good idea to randomly go into every company every year or two and say "Alright, this inventory system, this time tracking system, this customer service system... All of it, right out. Progress is here folks, and you don't want to be change averse. Time for some new fresh paper."
It's ludicrous. One thing you learn very quickly in business is that companies have little or not stomach for doing things that do not make them money. Every minute or dollar you spend on them appears to be money down the toilet. So if Microsoft wants people to use Windows 10 they need to offer more than hand-wavey bullshit about features and progress and security, because all of that stinks to high heaven of a company trying to convince its customers to give it more money because it wants more money - not because it's offering anything of real value to the customer.
> I think there's an obvious and more general question here to be answered: if a piece of software is good enough, namely, it "disappears" when you are trying to do your job, then why bother to change it?
I find I care about the applications I use: my IDE, git client, console, and the various web apps I use. I don't so much care about my browser UI, as long as it gets out of the way and shows me what URL I'm on and renders the page.
Likewise, I don't care about the UI of the OS itself, as long as it does its job properly: lets me start and switch between apps, connects to wifi, manages the display power, and sleeps and wakes up.
When I'm looking at the computer screen, I'm looking at what I'm doing, not the UI chrome. Even now, I'm only paying attention to this comment text box and your original message.. Everything else -- all the other tabs I have open, the visible bits of the OS, the other window open on my next monitor -- all blends into the background and gets ignored.
Interesting, readers of HN should know that upgrades to the newest version of Windows and updates is essential for reasons of software security. Newer versions of Windows incorporates security measures not in older versions -- sometimes even taking advantages of new security features in Intel hardware.
For example, Target and Home Depot were hacked because they failed to upgrade their point-of-sale hardware from Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later which was an upgrade recommended by Microsoft. Windows XP embedded had a security flaw later patched in later versions of Windows.
People vastly underestimate how massive, complex and heterogenous the likes of Target, Home Depot, Walmart's stacks are.
I've worked with people very used to working with enormously complex systems and even they say Walmart etc is on the higher end of that scale. We're talking weeks of people on site to get new software stood up.
This isn't to diminish your point about the need for upgrades, but it's nothing like a push button process.
Shouldn't these stores standardize on vendors? Why would they use different vendors which only adds to complexity unless they've bought out a different store chain and are integrating existing systems?
Also, they should pay the vendors contracts for maintenance instead of trying to do the upgrades themselves. The vendors are generally more likely to do the testing necessary and have the skills for upgrading systems across from various customers.
At any rate, as you put it, eventually they still should do the upgrade.
Even if they do standardize on vendors, they're then also dependent on, say, Oracle Retail supporting a given platform.
If you want your POS to talk to your marketing automation system, that's another integration and maybe another vendor who Oracle may or may not wish to support etc.
There's no way for a bank to standardize on vendors as it's back office systems might have been designed in the 1980s. If it wants to add an iPhone app or mobile payments, it has to rely on another vendor almost automatically.
Making these stacks work generates huge revenues for people like CA, Automic, IBM. Process automation is big business. Big meaty huge Fortune 500 companies held together with the software equivalent of sticky tape.
Of course, but I was talking about the incentives of an average user, which I'm not sure care about security as much as we do.
Just to make what I'm saying more concrete: most people in my home town in Sicily think it's perfectly OK to bring their phones and laptops to some random guy owning a tech-assistance shop and tell him their Facebook/Email passwords straight away so he can reinstall stuff and save their login for them. Do you think they care about upgrading because of "improved security"? I'm not sure they even understand what a security issue is...
The point-of-sale terminals have vendors that produce them in large quantity and they should have the expertise to upgrade the software of the machines that they built.
One can always hire experts with a proven track record to help with the install of the new OS.
Incidentally, many people may have trouble with upgrades to the new OS because
1. Running old hardware
2. Not running quality hardware -- e.g. for Windows laptops traditionally Thinkpads.
3. Do a fresh install. E.g. don't upgrade, but backup the data, clean the disk, do a fresh install.
I use Mac and did the fresh install of Sierra 10.12.1 and then upgrades for point version updates.
I also have been running Windows under Parallels and on Thinkpads prior to 2011 and not had problems with new versions of Windows.
All the time I've invested in acclimating to Windows 10 feels like a burden, while all the time I have spent tweaking OSx feels delightful. People don't hate change...we hate change that is painful. Windows 10 (to me) embodies painful change.
A lot of people resist change to things they are familiar with.
Between each significant revision of Apple's desktop OS, my mother would get frustrated at settings that were moved elsewhere/renamed/removed entirely, for example. OSX is no stranger to unnecessary changes (or at least that's what my mother thinks of them).
I get (maybe) your argument when it comes to Windows 7 -> Windows 10, but I think you're overestimating how hard it is to get up and running with Arch Linux. Following an Arch install tutorial shouldn't take anyone here on Hackernews more than 2 hours to get their DE, networking etc. up and going.
Arch isn't that hard to set up - I'll agree with you there. Where it falls down, though, is when you need to install something where there isn't a package for it.
Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want. But let's say you didn't want to do that, because you got tired of having a system full of cruft due to all these funky pieces of software scattered about the system that the package manager had no clue about - oh my!
So - you want to install the software as a package under Arch. Oh - and just to make things more fun, the software is something proprietary and closed-source. There is more than a few bits of useful Linux software out there like this - much of it niche areas where a) probably no one else in the Arch community uses, and b) it's proprietary - so you can't distribute it anyhow.
What does Arch require you to do in this situation? Well - last time I looked anyhow - and that was a couple of years ago, so maybe something has changed... It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.
That's basically the process I read about for any kind of software package for Arch; it was a very heavy manual process. While other package management schemes do require some manual effort, none of them that I recall seemed to require as much effort as Arch's did. This wouldn't normally be an issue with most open-source software, because once you made that package, it could be distributed and used by the community. But for a proprietary software package, only you could use it - so it was a ton of extra work for little gain in the end.
Don't get me wrong - I liked Arch, and their community support and forums, wiki, etc - is pretty top-notch (I like to use that part of the ecosystem myself for help and hint purposes when I need it). I honestly think it is a great distro, but it does have some drawbacks to it (and they probably don't have good solutions, either).
> It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.
This might be technically correct (not completely sure), but hugely misleading. Packages are defined by PKGBUILD scripts. When you run `makepkg` to create a package, it creates a directory called $pkgdir. In your PKGBUILD, you just delegate to whatever installer came with the source code & tell it to install into $pkgdir. e.g. `make install --prefix=$pkgdir`. makepkg takes all the files in $pkgdir and tars them and bam - there's your package.
If you look in most PKGBUILDs, they contain some metadata (where to get the sources, etc), and then it's more or less:
build() {
cd "$srcdir" && make
}
package() {
cd "$srcdir" && make install --prefix="$pkgdir"
}
cr0sh posited that the application being packaged was not in source form. So perhaps the hugely misleading thing is to argue against xem based upon how one packages up things that are in source form. (-:
Well as long as it ships with an installer, the above method still works - just omit the build step altogether (do a chroot if the installer doesn't offer a choice of where to install). If it doesn't have an installer, but comes self-contained, then just `cp $srcdir $pkgdir/opt` & call that good.
And if you're dealing with a non-source package that doesn't have an installer and isn't self-contained, then installing/packaging it is difficult on any OS - not just Arch!
In fairness, that's pretty much how you are going to have to package a binaries-only software with most package management systems. Install the binaries. Make a package description of those binaries.
I found this to be a real problem with using Arch in production. Updating is a bit of a catch-22: if you upgrade frequently, the workload of keeping up with the minutiae of not breaking your system is overwhelming. And the longer you leave it, the closer the chances of breakage when you do approach 100%. Result: you inevitably fall off the update treadmill at some point, usually during some sort of crunch time, and then never update again because who wants to tell their boss they spent a day debugging a self-inflicted problem? Safer to leave it alone and get on with your work.
This is why I switched back to Debian. Updating is stress-free and there's no downside to doing it as often as you like.
fwiw, I find the long term support pretty minimal. I'm only slightly more conservative in my use of`pacman -Syu` than I would be with `apt-get dist-upgrade`. If I notice a kernel or DE upgrade, I might hold off until the weekend on the off-chance that it needs a bit of extra maintenance. I appreciate handling these changes in smaller batches, as opposed to the 6-month system-wide major upgrade cadence. Of course, if I was just jumping between LTS releases, maybe only dealing with serious maintenance every other year would be an appealing trade-off.
(of course, I don't mean to undermine the argument for hesitating to jump to Arch on the grounds of maintenance. It certainly takes thinking about maintenance more often.)
I didn't touch OpenBSD from, let's call it, the latter half of George Bush's presidency through the first half of the Obama administration. My first install of OpenBSD in years was a moment of "oh this old thing still?" followed by "huh, that was just as easy as I remembered."
It's all about audience. OpenBSD's installer is a thing of beauty for technical people. I can see where it would be daunting and texty to someone who's never touched a command line, but that isn't the audience.
At this point, I feel forcing technical users through a plodding GUI install wizard is as cruel as making grandma install OpenBSD with a complicated RAID configuration and volume encryption.
Indeed, Win7 being good enough and not degrading in any way is a big challenge facing Win10 adoption, and that has been said times enough before. Once Win7 is out of support, may it be from popular applications or simply security updates, we may see things changing.
There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption.
Note:
Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.
Windows 2000 was the best version I've ever used. Back in the day, when XP was relatively new, if I bought a machine and it came with XP I would try and retro fit 2000 onto it. The 2000 installation would be noticeably faster for what appeared to be a similar set of features.
Currently checking the history of Windows 2000. Seems W2K was aimed at enterprises while ME at consumers. A bit less than 2 years after W2K's launch, WinXP came out and unified the consumer and enterprise line.
Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.
I upgraded to Windows 7 over XP for mainline x64 support and new window management feature (aero snap). Also, being able to sort system tray icons, as well as the taskbar were very welcome.
Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP.
But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP.
While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.
Windows 7 did get a majority of the Windows market.
Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.
I don't think moving people from one version of Windows to another counts as an increase in market share.
And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.
And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.
Pro tip: when a for-profit company does something that appears to be uncharacteristically altruistic...
...Aw, heck, you know what? Never mind. Enjoy the garden.
There were advantages for users and advantages for Microsoft. Both sides won.
As for your "garden", anybody can build their own Windows PC and sell it, without restriction. Anybody can write Windows software, and sell it. Anybody can use a Windows PC and software for any purpose they choose.
If you want to attack people for restrictions, you can find far more of them in other parts of the tech world.
I agree with you, but looking at the problem from Microsoft's perspective, they have to sell you something, whether you 'need' it or not. It's interesting that Microsoft is the only company still selling a consumer OS, everything else comes free with the device, including updates. This problem might be part of the reason for that.
The best way to maximize sales is to align your interests with that of your customers. I wish Microsoft would realize that, because Windows 10 is heading in the opposite direction.
World has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
Microsoft has successfully trained me that OS upgrades can be very traumatic. I consider myself an early adopter, and I always run cutting edge on my phone or win laptop, but I only ever upgrade my primary workstation when it dies and I have to.
Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.
The users may perceive operation satisfying, yet it may not be so, eg. because of security issues, which on the other hand pose dangers to other users as well, so the it doesn't matter to me attitude doesn't stand.
Given that the upgrade was free just as in the case of a linux upgrade the good enough point should consider these factors as well.
Because developers want to make more money. This is why the app store format is so incredibly popular amongst the developer crowd - it forces people to keep paying you to upgrade app to follow breaking Apple/Google changes just to keep the functionality of the app the same and it appearing for users of new phones. 15 year old software that works well and you buy once does not bring a steady income.
I think that you're wrong about why developers love app stores. It's about someone else solving all of the problems which aren't "make your app". It handles updates, feedback, discoverability, CC info, password resets, etc.
I've never had the experience you describe; which app(s) are you talking about which need to be bought repeatedly with no new functionality?
Not a fan of the app store model, but I've literally never heard of people paying for updates on app stores. In fact I've heard many developers complain about the lack of paid upgrades on the Mac App Store.
I am a manager at a small architecture firm and Windows 10 has brought nothing but woe to my office. We have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars troubleshooting and fixing problems (many of which remain unresolved) that occurred as a result of this draconian forced upgrade (and updates that followed). So what if we got the upgrade for free. I've paid for it many times over in labor!
Every time I hear about updates being "forced," yes, Microsoft did some shady things to trick non-tech people into the upgrade which I agree is shady. However any competent IT manager would know how to stop that from happening. Even a cursory google search shows you how to remove the windows update that starts the upgrade. Also all computers on a network domain will not auto update. Each time I read of an IT manager who says he/she was "tricked" into upgrading all I read is "Incompetent IT Manager Makes Massive Mistake"
EDIT: I should probably reference the single small command that stops the bugging notifications and upgrade. Open admin level command line:
Black UI magic, to shove users into a certain direction, that needs to be yanked from the registry and forbidden via group policies- and that can be defended?
You know a OS is in a bad spot, if it gathers followers, who attack criticizing experience reports and anecdotes. Who needs truth if one has beauty?
Windows job was to provide a easy, trap-free OS, one where you wouldn't spend weeks with a bomb-defusal kit, looking at the upgrades blowing up systems.
Well at least the victims of the landmine dont have to worry about shipjumping converts of the holy church of the foreboding fruit snapping at them for heresy.
Not trusting vendors is part of the job. IT departments will typically turn off automatic updates from vendors, and instead role them out in an automated way that they control.
If they are too slow in doing that, then they are doing it wrong sure. But Microsoft updates do brick computers, undo obscure enterprisy settings, or role out unevenly across your estate so people are on different versions. You want to see if that happens to someone else before you roll out.
This is even more true with windows based servers, where you'd probably want to switch in an alternative or do everything at 3am on Saturday morning.
They had a dialog saying "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you closed it or said no it would leave you alone for a bit.
Then it would pop up and say "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you said no it would leave you alone but if you closed it it would assume you were okay with it.
I know a lot of people who woke up one morning and their computer was running Windows 10 without their approval, despite having said 'no' to previous questions.
Right, I am not saying that these dialogs did not exist, were not terrible, and some people did not take the time to read them and inadvertently scheduled an update...
However, I am interested in how this happened to an entire business and they did not simply roll back the upgrade? Instead, they chose spend thousands of dollars trying to work around software issues for apparently no gained benefits.
No offense mate, but if you're a manager at an architecture firm and you struggle with Windows upgrades and configuring the updates then perhaps you should find another profession, or hire better help. This stuff isn't rocket science.
When I hear complaints like this, basically any complaint about a major technology in use around the world, I am always baffled that the people who have trouble end up blaming the technology, rather than their policies and implementation.
This technology works (almost) flawlessly for hundreds of thousands of people and organizations, the idea that the issues you're experiencing are legitimately the fault of the technology feels... unlikely.
I get that the best technology adapts perfectly to your individual needs, but the idea that you don't have to change a single thing about your business to use a technology just feels, on its face, absurd.
I got a Windows 10 laptop (Razer) for Christmas for gaming / media / browsing purposes (been a Mac user for 10+ yrs).
It's buggy as hell. The shortcut icons on the desktop and taskbar kept going away (replacing all the icons with a "not found" placeholder), forcing me to reinstall the OS. Now none of the search functions work (e.g. windows key -> search for app.. no results). Whatever, I just use 2 apps anyways (Chrome and Steam).
Windows settings panels have at least 2 diff ways to configure anything, the "old" and the "new". Graphics settings have 4 places to change stuff (Intel, Nvidia, built in old and new). It's just a jumbled mess.
Bluetooth never recognizes device names (it's a guessing game as to which "Unknown Device" is the one I want). The trackpad is mediocre, and the config panel from Synaptics probably hasn't changed since Windows 95.
With the tech press in love with Windows 10, I was definitely expecting more. Feels like people just want to love every other version of Windows (7 "good", 8 "bad", 10 "good again).
>Windows settings panels have at least 2 diff ways to configure anything, the "old" and the "new". Graphics settings have 4 places to change stuff (Intel, Nvidia, built in old and new). It's just a jumbled mess.
They're well aware of that, and if you follow the insider previews, every new build is moving more of the features into the "new" way of doing things. Is it annoying there are two places? Absolutely... but the alternative is not changing anything and waiting 5 years while everything gets rolle dup.
>Bluetooth never recognizes device names (it's a guessing game as to which "Unknown Device" is the one I want). The trackpad is mediocre, and the config panel from Synaptics probably hasn't changed since Windows 95.
Not sure what to tell you there other than a buggy driver on your laptop. All of my bluetooth devices tell me exactly what they are before and after adding them.
The trackpad thing isn't Windows, it's the trackpad razer chose to use, or the driver. One of the reasons that MS finally said f-it and introduced precision touchpad. If you still have the old-school synaptics panel, then Razer chose not to participate.
> but the alternative is not changing anything and waiting 5 years while everything gets rolle dup.
Windows 7 was released 7.5 years ago, and Windows 8 was released 4.5 years ago. Whether or not they make interim releases, Microsoft clearly cannot pull off a user interface overhaul in any reasonable span of time.
You underestimate the complexity and depth of Windows. There's a TON of forms and code out there and you literally cannot just port that 15-30 year old C code to C# without taking a step back to think about the design and functionality of the new screen. There's a LOT of work that goes into each transition from ancient Win32 to a modern interface.
The complexity is mind blowing. And yet, does it need to be? Recently I started looking at how Windows Update works. It self-updates first with a reasonably complex web services API, then it has this ridiculious way of checking what is installed by looking at undocumented registry keys and even loads its own registry component hive.
It then works out via web services what needs to be updated, and uses deltas to download file chunks.
It downloads and installs the new updates into the winsxs folder, then updates hardlinks from this folder into the c:\windows\system32 directory, but does not remove the old package.
Then it installs the updates, which can be done with a cab file, mum file, msi file or some other mechanism.
To do all if this it uses WSUS, Component Based Servicing (CBS), Component Servicing Interface (CSI), Windows Side by Side (winsxs), NTFS link features, Windows Installer and probably much more besides.
And yet it is unbelievably fragile. I can't tell you how many times I've found broken packages. Microsoft have turned on CBS logging on all systems and recently I've found that hard drives have run out of space because it has taken up gigabytes of space (this is because Microsoft archives log files in CAB files, but these have 2GB limits and if the log file goes over 2 GB it can't handle this), gigabytes of dusk space is taken up with useless old updates that until very recently you couldn't remove.... the datastore.edb file is massive and can corrupt, security patches had issues because there have been so many of them and Microsoft had to make a new CAB file format, and Windows 7 and later has the most insane package dependency generating algorithm that I kid you not but it spends hours just generating it. Some of this stuff still hasn't been fixed.
Then I look at a Debian based system. I've literally never had an issue I couldn't work out how to solve in 10 minutes. It just works, and in an incredibly fast time - and I virtually never have to reboot!
I'm currently involved in a monolithic refactoring and redesign task at work converting a C# application to C# (this is partially a joke) and it's hair raising. I can't even imagine all the moving parts involved in creating a new OS that's backwards compatible with the old but still be new...
> They're well aware of that, and if you follow the insider previews, every new build is moving more of the features into the "new" way of doing things. Is it annoying there are two places? Absolutely... but the alternative is not changing anything and waiting 5 years while everything gets rolled up.
The Control Panel started transitioning to a 'browser-style' interface with Windows Vista. 10 years later, I'm still waiting for everything to be 'rolled up'.
In both cases, the old paradigm was 'fine', and a bifurcated UI made for a worse experience than either alternative.
In the current state, tons of settings are only available in one of three UIs, where all three are named identically and serve the same purpose. EG: To change the name of your computer, you might go, Settings > System > About > 'System Info' --> System [Vista] > 'change settings' --> System Properties [Win95].
I'd rather have the Windows 95 control panel workflow to this mess.
If it takes 5 years, they'll take 5 years. There's no reason to make the system worse in the meantime.
Sorry to hear that, Razer is utter garbage. Not to mention they have the WORST customer support on the planet. I'd sell it mate, ASAP. Seriously, not joking. Sell it and get an XPS
No wonder that Win10 fails like Win8 - Microsoft doesn't care about users, they only care about their shareholders. Win8 and Win10 looks like designed by color blind designers with a bad taste the brutalism of UI design plus the phone-home spyware features that cannot be deactivated. Windows 7 is too good and the perfect OS, if you don't install some recent spyware updates it will last at least until 2020 - and who knows if Android/Fuchsia or whatever OS is a proper alternative than.
Look, I don't like the flat-UI trend any more than you, but there's two simple facts here:
1) It's not just MS pushing the flat-UI trend. Apple and Google are too, along with every other Web/UI designer out there. Everyone's doing it. MS's version does seem to be the ugliest though, mainly because of the horrible color picks.
2) The users you seem concerned about like this stuff. They're all buying and using Windows, along with Macs, iOS, Android, etc. devices. There's simply no serious effort being put into any UI alternatives. There's some stuff going on in Linux-land that has a minuscule marketshare, but that's about it; even there, the most popular desktop is Gnome3, which is on the same bandwagon in many ways.
> MS's version does seem to be the ugliest though, mainly because of the horrible color picks.
For whatever it's worth, Windows 10 is one of my favorite looking user interfaces, especially with its dark theme. I am not sure why so many mainstream operating systems do not offer viable dark themes.
Your second point doesn't really hold up - I'm a Windows 10 user, and I don't spend any time even considering Linux UI alternatives because you could show me one that I liked twice as much as Windows and I still wouldn't want to use Linux for my day to day stuff.
I actually don't mind the Windows 10 UI as it happens, but if there were the variety of options for Windows that there are for Linux, I'd certainly see if I could find one I liked more.
She wasn't implying you should switch to Linux to get the UI alternatives available there. She was saying that there is nobody working on UI alternatives/innovations except for a few people in the Linux space. That everyone had settled on the same basic UI.
She was saying that the alternative UIs aren't popular, and my point is that their low market share is down not only to the UIs themselves but also because of the software they are compatible with.
If people actually cared about it that much, at the very least there'd be some 3rd-party program available for Windows that would improve the UI, and it'd be selling like hotcakes. I've never heard of any.
I think the windows 10 platform doesn't lend itself very well to 3rd party UIs. It's quite closely coupled to the actual OS.
In a sense though, this is what I consider to be the strength of the windows UI. With the tight coupling, you can make guarantees on the UI covering all possible configuration options. At the same time, it allows a fixed standard of how to implement configuration. (Some of this comes from windows being monolithic)
The end result is a 'unified' UI where there are user-friendly ways to configure a system. Most notably, it is a lot easier to 'explore' the configuration options of windows as opposed to any linux distro.
This is the first I've heard of it. Just like I said before, if the Windows UI were really that hated and unpopular, this thing would be common knowledge and selling like hotcakes. It isn't. Maybe the word just hasn't gotten out enough, but I doubt it.
I do have to say, $9.99 is a pretty good price for this. But this again reinforces my point: if people really hated the Win10 UI that much, a $10 purchase should be nothing to fix it.
Also, I only looked over the link cursorily, but does this fix the whole Metro interface? That's my big complaint with Win10; when you're on the regular desktop, it isn't much different from Win7. It's when you want to load a new program, or use the Settings, or stuff like that you suddenly find yourself in the purple hell that is the Metro UI. If this Windowblinds program is only letting you skin the desktop stuff and not changing the whole start menu, then it's not really fixing the problem, just making the crappy, clunky Win7 desktop more pleasant to use.
WindowBlinds is a very old program - consider it started on OS/2. It used to be very popular back in 90s and 2000s, but its popularity have dropped the last few years. Still, if you find any alternative Windows theme on places like DeviantArt chances are it is made for WindowBlinds. It isn't wildly popular, but it isn't unknown either.
It sounds like it really doesn't affect the whole Metro UI part of Win10, which is the part I have the biggest complaints about UI-wise.
I don't like the Windows desktop that much (I like the start menu and such, I don't like the look and feel and other things, which is why I'm a KDE fan). But I can deal with it fine; it's the Metro stuff that's really horrible to me.
I rather like the clean aesthetic of Windows 10, and am now using it as my main OS. Sure, it's by no means perfect, and there is still work to be done. But by and large I am happier with Windows 10 than with MacOS, Ubuntu, GNOME, and so on.
Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.
>Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway.
I think we shouldn't take the defeatist position with respect to surveillance. I know that techies like us can block this kind of traffic at the network edge or chase down the multiple settings it takes to turn this off, but not all users will be this sophisticated.
We should be pushing back against surveillance in how we use our own computers.
> User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.
User analytics and tracking everywhere (including IRL with for instance face recog in shops),
Facebook curious to know if they can manipulate the mood of their users,
Google/Microsoft/Amazon investing in "big AI",
Money doesn't grow on trees,
Do the maths.
I have a dual boot PC which is Arch Linux and Windows 7.
The Windows 7 machine is only for gaming / steam, I never browse the internet on there and have pretty strict firewall ruleset. To be honest, I would consider upgrading it to 10, but I missed the free window, so I really don't fancy paying for it.
My hope is that by the time that Windows 7 goes EOL, I can delete it and game just on Linux. Either that or I will get a console (as most of my gaming takes place in my living room anyhow, using a steam box).
Similar here. Mac & Linux for work. Mac for home. I only keep Windows for gaming. In fact, I only recently upgraded to Windows 7 on my gaming computer. XP was working fine, but for DirectX 10 compatibility (baked into win7 and above, only) I had to upgrade. Were it not for this one "feature", I'd still be happily using XP.
But I've decided that this is the end of the line for me and Microsoft. They lost me forever due to the spyware / monitoring debacle of Win10. If ever there is a technological forced upgrade to 10, then I'm simply out of luck -- no more upgrades past 7. I'm done.
In an interesting twist on the ordinary plot I now code in Windows (picking up C# and want to use standard setup for now) and boot into my Linux machine every time I'm tired and want to play CSGO (often works wonders when I am sleepy) because it seems like I get somewhat better performance from my non-gaming laptop on Linux now
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You didn't miss any free window, you can still just download the image from Microsoft and upgrade. Upgrade to Windows 10. Windows 7 is archaic, especially for gaming as its primary use.
You need Windows 10 to use DirectX 12, that's probably the biggest advance. The Windows Display Driver Model is also updated, I don't know if this actually matters for most games though.
> But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10. <...> Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.
Linux gets refugees both from Windows and MacOS because MS just keeps messing Windows up (seems to be happening every other version), and Apple simply lets MacOS rot by not giving it any attention.
You just made three subjective claims. I don't see Linux's market share growing by large numbers. Apple updates macOS every year. Which features do you want? I haven't used Windows in a while but Microsoft seems to be making faster progress in updating Windows, browser, etc.
I hear complaints from MacOS users about the bit rot all the time. Where is OpenGL 4.5 for instance? And not just graphics. Many simply feel it's completely stagnated, because Apple are too busy with their mobile delirium, and don't care about desktop anymore.
Absolute numbers are large. I'm more interested in the trend here. Still, there should be more push for Linux on the desktop. This sick situation exited for way too long.
That won't happen until desktop Linux is usable by non-tech people, and they have easy access to it (pre-installed, simple install, etc.). There's been a lot of progress, however there are still plenty of issues. Not to mention application support.
Seeing someone trying to work with it sometimes reminds me of someone trying to hold a hot potato in their hands. For example, today someone tried to display two PDFs and a word doc on a large screen. Well. I guess you know how long that took to work out.
Which windowing system does it more easily and more obviously than Windows 10 though?
Here's a 2 minute demo of "Snap Assist" which is turned on by default in Windows 10. Near the end you can see the user snapping three documents into place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8yTBLEj3c
Apple releases a major update to MacOS every year with new features. They're releasing a new filesystem this year, and do security updates regularly. The Mac hardware could be called neglected, but the OS is anything but.
Exactly. It's a shame Apple didn't adopt Vulkan and went with their own proprietary Metal API. Yet another reason for game developers to keep ignoring the platform.
> There have been some issues, specifically around certain drivers, issues with Mesa and Intel hardware. I’m hoping all of those are behind us and will remain so. Unlike a lot of other communities, Linux users are quite aware of a lot of the issues with their platform and will usually be OK to wait for an update to fix their issues.
This is opposed to OSX where the updates break things horribly. The support for the OpenGL standard in their drivers has been lacklustre for years and it's only getting worse. They now want developers to move to their proprietary API Metal, but I'm jaded enough not to fall for that. And don't even get me started on having to shell out £3000 for a mid spec dev machine.
It would be nice if Apple even supported their own OpenCL drivers so that I could get semi-decent performance out of Blender without getting an Nvidea eGPU.
It was a bad decision to continue with Metal instead of updating OpenGL, but the operating system is not neglected. One example of a feature you personally want (that I do too) does not constitute neglect. It gets regular updates.
Not sure how else you can spin it, but not updating graphics drivers for years IS neglect. It shows a complete lack of care, since they easily could fix this. Or may be you are implying it's an intentional act of letting it rot to force developers to use Metal and such? That would be actually even worse, and I'd say should encourage both developers and users to ditch Apple even sooner.
Case in point, I've heard several times how people were saying, they are ditching MacOS, because Wine developers aren't going to support DX11 games there, courtesy of Apple not updating OpenGL.
Your subjective "desirable" qualifier leaves it open for you to no-true-Scotsman away any response as "not desirable", but I can show you several.
Sierra brought tabbed applications and a bunch of other end-user features [1]. As for the more technically minded, there's a new filesystem coming this year [2].
I won't defend Apple's treatment of Mac hardware recently, but the software itself does get regular updates for security, performance, and features, regardless of how one subjectively feels about them. Personally I think it's a rather visually ugly operating system and has weird quirks like awful keyboard shortcuts, and I'm mad that they removed a feature (the battery time remaining) but generally functions well for my specific use case.
I've been using both Windows (work) and Linux (home) on the desktop for many years. I far prefer Linux (I tried many distros, settled on Arch and Mint now). Package management and window management is way better in Linux. To name just a few.
To me, Windows10 is not better than Windows7. The package management is still a mess. Forced updates, no rollbacks, reboots, you name it. Permissions are also strange: why are admin rights needed to install some fonts? We still have this "Registry" with its voodoo. We still miss tools like dmesg. When thing go wrong, Windows gives some sort of simple log file, of course not in txt-form but in some proprietary format that needs it's own reader (to read some flat text, for crying out loud). The file manager ("Explorer") is still confusing. Microsoft seems hellbent in obfuscating where files are stored. Going to the terminal, the difference is even clearer. Linux offers first rate terminals; Windows look like an afterthought. Is it even possible to use a terminal full screen in Windows, nowadays? Tab completion, a decent history, pipes?
The funny thing is that Ranger, my favorite file manager, is able to give previews of files in MS formats (such as .docx) where Windows Explorer is unable to do so.... ????
Two big steps back are privacy and font rendering. It's bad enough that apps spy on me, I don't want my OS to"phone home". The font rendering is optimized for the few Windows on mobile devices users, at the expense of the bulk of the users (like me) who use it on the desktop and are now confronted with blurry fonts.
My OS must help me with my personal computer tasks. Personal means a) I want to customize the hell out of it, and b) my data is _mine_. Also, I'd like a nice readable font on my screen. Sadly, Windows10 does not meet those requirements.
I don't tried Win10 on a personal computer... but they made font rendering even worse than it was on Win7? (Win7 MS "assumed" everyone would have LCD screens, and changed not only the rendering code, but the default font themselves to one that doesn't work with CRT or LCDs that don't follow common patterns in pixel shapes... and my favourite screens are CRTs, because I am yet to find a LCD that I can afford that is superior to the CRTs I own).
>The package management is still a mess.
If you mean for system updates I'd agree, but software package management is a shit show on Linux and it shows why less people bother writing software with & why Electron is popular there.
Windows wasn't really designed with package management in mind. In the Unix/Linux world, there is the notion of the "unix way", and package management is central in facilitating this methodology. As a result, unix/linux world offers a software package management experience that's years ahead of what you can get with Windows (natively, Choco is pretty nice, the app selection has finally gotten non-trivial). Brew in OSX offers something pretty close.
You first have to open a browser, then find the sotware's website. Then find the download page, then download it. Then open explorer to where the .exe was downloaded. Then double click it. Then click next a bunch of times. And if the software's dependencies are not bundled in the installer, then you have to redo this whole process again.
On Linux you just open your terminal and execute a single command.
>On Linux you just open your terminal and execute a single command.
Lmao, yes speculating that it includes that certain software package or that it's the latest version.
That burden is on the developer (if there's no maintainer) which has to waste time packaging same thing for X distros. Windows developer uploads the .exe to the web and he's done.
I dont know why name Windows 10 a fail, when the bigger competitors of Windows are... Windows! Mac and Linux mostly are used for niche users (as us). I'm really really happy we CAN upgrade for a new Windows version easily, just compare with Android. More: the reason to most people dont upgrade isn't why "Windows 7 is better than Windows 10", but the actual reason is they are comfortable with Win7 and dont want/can take time to "learn" a new OS. Even Win7 being an awesome OS, took years to take most of XP users (even today there are a lot of loyal XP users out there...)
Android and iOS have probably surpassed windows in number of consumer installations.
The PC will be invaded by Android at some point, and it will be like a blitzkreig when it happens. Google would make all their money back shortly off of appstore sales.
As much as I enjoy using Android on mobile, Google's horrible track record with security updates means I'll be appalled if after all the noise people have made about Win 10's privacy, they accept Android with Google everywhere + security updates EOL after 3 years...
That's already happened, PC sales have already declined in favor of mobile years ago. And contrary to what people may think, appstore sales are also not really on the rise, and most users don't install any new apps in their phone monthly.
Just fix fucking font rendering, I did use Windows machine as my workstation for 4 year (although being in love with linux), But I had to switch to Ubuntu, because of ridiculous font rendering. I don't have money to pay for new monitor every 2 year, and I am quite happy with my dual monitor 27 inch 1080p until windows 10 changed font rendering to DirectWrite. It is fucking disaster in low dpi monitor.
As always Microsoft ignored their current users in pursue of new users. I haven't seen this attitude from any other company. I haven't seen apple make font rendering on old MacBook worse to force people to switch to new MacBooks. Or I haven't seen something similar from Google.
This is fucking total disaster.
As someone who reads text for whole day (programmer) I care about my eyes and it fucking hurts my eye to see font rendering in new UI (UWP) and Edge.
p.s. Old/win32 application do use old rendering engine and are acceptable.
We're re-vamping some of our Windows products this year to support high-DPI usage under Windows 10, so if you could be so kind, I would be curious as to what exactly you're seeing that is causing your issue: is it that older Windows applications look blurry because they aren't high-DPI-aware and Windows 10 auto-scales them, or is it that you don't like the high-DPI look because it's too sharp/jagged, looks weird on older monitors, etc. ?
I don't want to piss off our customers by making their usage experience poorer under Windows 10, so I would really appreciate any input you can provide.
Quite the opposite, Microsoft changed their font rendering engine to introduce GreyScale (IIRC), But the problem with this new engine is it is horrible on low-dpi monitor.
Traditionally Windows does have problem with high dpi monitors, but I think there is workaround it (scaling and etc), but with windows 10, fonts on low dpi (by low dpi I mean most of the monitors sold until 1,2 years ago, 20+ inch with 1080p) windows looks like shit (literally). If you are using old framework (WPF and etc) it is okay, because underlying framework is same. Same good old rendering (not in par with Mac or FreeType, but quite acceptable). But if you are using UWP, then quite honestly you are in trouble, in low-dpi monitors. Because Microsoft UWP only does have DirectWrite engine.
The problem with old engine (which is used in Win32, WPF, etc) was it was slow on mobile, and as always Microsoft wanted to compete with Apple and Google on Mobile platform and because they have 99% market share of mobile os. So what is better option than ruining people experience in desktop to force them to switch to WinRT/UWP bullshit ? (I am being sarcastic)
Correct. I use Linux at home. Ubuntu and Mint have nice rendering OOTB, Arch got that great with the Infinality package.
OSX also has decent rendering (albeit too fat for my taste), Windows' subpixelrendering + matching fonts used to give sharp letters, yes too skinny, but legible.
With their new engine, texts are less legible. The letters are still skinny, but now they're also blurry.
All this to cater to the very small fraction that uses Windows on a mobile device; throwing existing desktop users under the bus.
Yeah, I honestly thought I had a hardware issue on a computer I built for my son with a 24" 1080p monitor and it turned out to be Windows 10 font rendering changes.
I use Ubuntu at work and my other Windows 10 machine has 1920x1200 monitors at a distance that makes the rendering regression not easily noticeable.
It's great for small 1080p screens on laptops and 4k monitors though. :-/
Oh. Is that why the text on the Win10 lock screen on my 1080p monitor looks like it's rendering on a 640x480 display? I'd wondered why it seemed so damn ugly.
This is so strange. I assume I'm blind to those types of things? I can't find any difference between apps here that you can see so clearly. Do you know of a site that goes into detail on what the differences are? I could just be font-rendering blind in the same way some people don't mind bad aspect ratios on their widescreen TV...
There was huge discussion about it in Reddit, I don't know any technical site or blog post about this issue. But the conclusion was Microsoft is not going to fix this issue, unless users make noise.
Thanks, I'll do some searching myself and see what I can find. I'm slightly afraid it's one of those things that will suddenly bother me forever once I notice it though. :)
It got better for Edge after anniversary update. But I would not call that "fixed", because it is not on par with ClearType.
Microsoft can go fuck himself, I am not going change my monitor/hardware everytime he wants. I would be much much happy with my Fedora/Ubuntu, or if I want good support there is always apple much superior to Microsoft.
Exactly, They know their hardware, and trying to optimize their software for their hardware.
Microsoft do know what hardware people use (in third world country I would say 99% of people do use low dpi monitor), but they changed and ruined people experience anyway. That is the main point, they don't care about existing user.
I bet if apple monitors was low-dpi monitor, apple would do everything they can to improve font rendering in their low-dpi monitors.
While 8 tried to make tablet the priority use case, and thus breaking the muscle memory of many long term users, 10 abandons the notion of the owner of the hardware being in charge (sadly one that is increasingly taking root in FOSS circles as well).
Thus you have things like updates being ramrodded through even if the user says no, and keep saying no.
Damn it, i keep having to roll back the driver of my igpu because for some reason MS keep trying to update it along with the dgpu. This even though the support has been discontinued by AMD...
The thing is, people don't upgrade Windows, in the large. They use the version of Windows their computer came with until they replace it. Microsoft has done more work getting people to upgrade to 10 than any previous version of Windows. I don't see what more they can do.
It's bizarre that people continue to think of Windows PCs as being predominantly owned by individuals or even individuals with a specific interest in technology.
Maybe I'm misreading your comment but I think you're implying that people who care (like gamers) are less likely to be using Windows 10, but it's the opposite - 50% is far higher than the total market share Windows 10 has.
If I misunderstood your meaning, then this comment can just be a clarification instead of a correction :)
Stopped reading at:
"There is no question that Windows 10 is an impressive piece of software, and quite the most secure operating system ever devised."
> There is no question that Windows 10 is an impressive piece of software, and quite the most secure operating system ever devised.
This is simply not true. Windows is in no way the most secure operating system ever devised. Microsoft has support pages devoted to removing malware from Windows 10, while there has never been a major malware outbreak on iOS. For the average user iOS is by far the most secure OS.
Now obviously a lot of iOS's security can be attributed to Apple's walled garden approach to apps. If you limit the question to desktop operating systems I supose it's slightly less cut and dry, but I'd still rank macOS significantly higher than windows in terms of overall security.
> Chromebooks are now outselling MacBooks in the crucial education market, where long-term preferences tend to be established.
Apple has historically held a dominant position in the education market, so how does one square the "long-term preferences tend to be established" portion of that sentence with the 8% marketshare MacOS commands?
In my experience (4 years in ed orgs with 15-5,000 employees), chromebooks dramatically changed the ed market. Instead of $1000+/unit, you can buy chromebooks and their support infrastructure (9-5 support, networking, charging) for about $350/unit. For a fair number of schools, that allowed them to transition from a few roaming computer labs (carts of laptops) to a cart of chromebooks for every room. They also came along as there was a significant political and financial push for more access to technology in classrooms. This is abundantly apparent in the bay area, but it happened along both coasts and in most cities.
I think that "long-term preferences tend to be established" mantra is defensible in light of this, absent large market changes people tend to stick to what they're doing. The chromebook was a major market change for the ed space.
Even if people would prefer macs and perceive them to be superior (regardless of whether this is true), most aren't willing to shell out the cash for one.
Plus the crowd who cannot have data go to external servers. I would love to use something like Chromebooks but the lack of a local storage server and user management kill it. I got to follow the rules after all.
If I could get a group of Chromebooks that sync with an on-site server then do my backups to someone like Tarsnap, I would be happy and following the local rules.
My experience too. My chromebook has easily been the best value for money computer I've ever purchased, but it's just not the right device for development outside of the web browser. Maybe sometime soon browser based cad tools will become more widely adopted but there are some serious limitations imposed by web browsers that make that difficult to see happening anytime soon.
Personally I'd be quite happy if the market for PC's bifurcated into thin clients on one side and powerful workstations on the other. The user experience for professionals has been compromised by the need to support 'normal' users on both Windows and OS/X.
Windows 10 is a great operating system, but if you have an existing business-critical workflow, why would you update your major version? Stick with what works unless you have a reason to update. It's why some multinational companies are still running COBOL programs after nearly sixty years.
"So Windows 10 pops-up little advertising windows—sorry, tips—on the Edge icon in the taskbar, or in the Action Center UI, or in the Settings interface where you can change your defaults, because it really, really, really doesn’t want you to exercise free will and make a better decision for yourself."
"For the next version of Windows 10, Microsoft is even experimenting with ads—sorry, tips—that will appear in File Explorer. You don’t get any more “in the OS user interface” than that, folks, unless Microsoft starts displaying ads in event logs next. Don’t laugh.
So repeat after me: There are ads all over Windows. And it’s just getting worse."
Windows 10 gets a lot of flak, but it's honestly the best OS I have ever used. It's fast, stable, reliable and secure. Oh, and I should mention I'm a developer, and WSL is getting better with every release. Is it perfect? Heck no, but it's sure a lot better than Linux on the desktop and Macs are just not worth my money anymore.
I don't really count a forced reboot "now or in 15 minutes, no delays" as reliable. There are people who've had this happen in the middle of presentations at meetings.
Similarly, I've had these forced updates happen, and on relogin "click here to see what was updated" -> nothing listed.
Except that the configuration options force you to choose at least a 12 hour contiguous period in which updates are allowed. If I could tell it to reboot at 4am when I'm definitely asleep that would be fine, but apparently that's not an option.
Regarding hard drive encryption backed by TPM, a) this has been a thing since Win7, and b) google tells me it only works OOTB on Win10 if you sign into Windows with your Microsoft account; how many people do that?
If that's the secret sauce that makes Win10 so much better, color me unimpressed. And neither of those features offer additional protection against zero-days (neither does VSM), which are what the TFA discusses.
It only works OOTB with a Microsoft Account because the OS needs a place to backup the key. The alternative is that if the user forgets their password, they lose their data forever. You can still turn it on manually very easily with a local account.
I am running Bitlocker without a Microsoft Account. You can just print out the recovery key instead (or you can just configure bitlocker through command line).
> With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult.
Physical attacks aren't part of my threat model on a desktop PC. Indeed these protections feel more like DRM - trying to protect the computer from the (legitimate) user.
Preventing unsigned code from running, and choosing which sources of software you do want to trust, is not just for DRM. It severely reduces the attack surface of a device and makes it much harder for user error to cause a compromise. Accidentally getting compromised is possible for advanced users, let alone the most tech-illiterate person in the company.
iOS being totally locked down in this way is no small part of why exploits for that platform sell for so much more money than exploits for other platforms. Of course, it is also used for DRM on that platform.
And to add to my previous comment, I can't see why you would want to keep your laptop or desktop unencrypted. If someone steals your computer, they have access to all of your data.
And without Secure Boot and/or TPM-backed key management, hard disk encryption becomes vulnerable to someone planting a modified boot loader or firmware on your system.
Well, the most secure OS is something that's going to be endlessly arguable, but its probably the most secure Windows considering how people use computers today and how many attack surfaces a modern OS has.
A lot of security features found in the previously stand-alone EMET are slowly being ported over natively to Win10, for example. It comes with a built-in AV which is pretty good. Smartscreen is unusually good at warning about suspicious executables and I've seen it stop ransomware attacks. VBS makes it harder for hackers to modify system or protected files. Secureboot and bitlocker support are useful in some scenarios. Device guard is supposed to helpful but I'm not sure how it works. Windows hello can replace the traditional password with camera or fingerprint auth cooked-in, which is probably a step in the right direction, although I'd rather see passphrases become more common. Cameras and fingerprints seem gimmmicky and not all my computers have those things.
Windows Hello is the new platform for authentication. I imagine that all authentication APIs are grouped into Windows Hello, including traditional passphrases.
I question it. In my opinion, OpenBSD is the most secure OS that is likely to be used on a home computer. As for the most secure OS devised for any commercially available computing-capable device, I'd probably pick VxWorks.
But for an RMS-level of paranoia, I might have to go with RTEMS on a FPGA acting as a J-Core (SuperH-2) CPU.
Compared to BSD? (One of the BSDs, that focuses on security, I forget which one.) Yeah, I don't buy it. But I bet the writer at The Economist never heard of BSD...
No, I wasn't being sarcastic. I've never used BSD, of any flavor, but I recall that was was focused obsessively on security.
Absent evidence to the contrary, I presume that OpenBSD is more secure than any Windows, even Windows 10, but has considerably fewer features. Do you know of actual evidence?
I also don't think you can have this discussion without talking about the influence the NSA and OGA's are having on big tech companies products. If game developers really pulled their shit together and started doing AAA/AA titles on linux you would quickly see the piss taken out of the likes of M$.
I'm normally very fond of The Economist, but this is one of their "blog posts", which seem to not receive quite the same careful, nuanced care that their other articles for their weekly edition do.
Part of the challenge of Windows 10 was the transformation of Windows from a large-release product into a trickle-release service with much faster cycle times with an incremental and continuously-learned approach to ongoing product changes.
At it's core, that's a valid and (I think) mostly welcome change, but Microsoft's solution to the impedance mismatch between the two categories of offering was to force it down and ask for forgiveness later. :/
IMO the success of Windows 7 was an exception, not the norm. Comparing the adoption rate of Windows 10 to that of Windows 7 might be a little harsh. 24% isn't actually that bad, considering Windows 7 is still good enough.
Microsoft is their own worst enemy. My wife can't transition fully from XP to the Windows 7 PC I built for her, because it doesn't have Outlook Express or any reasonable substitute. We can't upgrade the living room PC because Windows 10 doesn't include Media Center.
I'm also not fond of the way Windows 10 updates are so aggressive, you'll essentially be replacing your OS every so often without any say-so. If I had any faith that this would be painless I might be tempted to try it, but see above. Windows 7 is darn near perfect, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Yes, there were substitutes available, but didn't meet one requirement or another. And Windows 7 appears to fall into a gap where Microsoft was changing email strategies and left it completely uncovered.
There was a version of it for Windows 8 as well. I was completing the chain for anyone curious about application lineage that wasn't opposed to Windows 8+.
It's a paid option, but I've found Postbox to be the least annoying those rare instances when I need to check my email on my gaming PC. https://www.postbox-inc.com
Are you sure it doesn't let you just turn the service off in services.msc? I can't find any references online to the Home edition having that behavior.
Because it already came with Windows and was exactly what we needed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If the PC dies someday and needs to be replaced, I might look into avoiding Windows altogether.
Media center was pretty good when it was released but it's kind of "meh" these days. I understand "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." but sometimes it's actually nice to have something new.
Do users actually desire changes to the actual user experience of modern operating systems. I would be totally fine with the OS experience itself I had on Windows 2000 or OS X from 2010. Software that runs on top of the OS and support of it is a different issue. Of course also security and driver support. To me OS user experience is a solved problem and most changed to what I'm used to just make things different without providing value, but require me to retrain muscle memory. I do upgrade regularly because security. If that wasn't an issue I would never upgrade.
Well, the reason why corporate users are holding on to W7 is easy: training costs. With XP and even W7, you could at least switch the majority of the GUI to look and feel like good old W95/98/ME... no way to do so with W10.
Also many companies don't want the legal risk associated with telemetry (you never know what data leaves your premises and heads towards MS), and small-ish businesses are afraid of the non-disableable automatic updates - I certainly wouldn't want to get into the office and $essential_program has stopped working over night due to an update gone bad.
I'm someone who stuck with Windows 7. The history of Windows has been so shaky, and the general software quality of Microsoft is so low, that the only rational strategy with Windows is "if it ain't broken, don't fix it."
I have both Windows and Mac hardware, and I prefer to update my Mac OS as soon as updates are available. On reflection, I suppose it's because the software quality is always high, and I know the core linux-based OS won't have any major changes. Upgrading, except for the occasional "I guess networking doesn't work now," is a pleasant and expected process. There are also rarely, at least for me, compatibility issues with existing software and newer Mac OS versions.
It seems like major versions of Windows are completely different operating systems, with "improvements" built on top of original hacks and poor code, and news reports of zero day crippling flaws in every new version. And of course, Windows 10 looks visually terrible. Flat design in general looks bad, but Windows 10 seems to have done something especially colorblind with it.
As someone stuck with Windows Vista (no sarcasm intended, although I shall be upgrading later this year when patches stop coming) I beg to differ. There is a continued degree of improvement since the Windows 9x days and in the meantime Windows have displaced Mac OS and Linux in certain market segments because of its code quality not despite of it. It is impressive that they have maintained great legacy support alongside it.
The current tirade against Windows 10 is not really that different to the period after Windows XP came out just because it is radically different to its predecessor, yet the latter eventually became the most long lived MS product ever. A similar torrent of FUD did kill Vista's reputation, but as we all know Windows 7 is just minor upgrade but this rebranding is enough to pacify the most vocal critics. Make me wonder if Jobs was right that users really have no idea whats the best for them.
What bother me is that they use net application data only... However I tend to question that source as we have now reached a strange situation where MacOS market share is around 6% according to netapplication (netmarketshare) and around 11% with globalstatscounter.
They can't be both right and that is a huge divergence.
"There is no question that Windows 10 is an impressive piece of software, and quite the most secure operating system ever devised."
What? Sorry had to have a bit of a chuckle. That being said it is the most secure version of Windows, well with the expection of collecting tons of your personal habits.
I am surprised by how hard it is to find reliable information about Window issues. Most pages I find look like thinly veiled pitches to get me to buy some stupid utility or online service. Its easy to find authoritative information on Mac OS or Linux issues, but I can't trust most of what I read about solving any Windows issue.
I would like to swap out my system dive and replace it with an SSD. Every discussion on the web I come across wants me to download some third party backup/restore or cloning software. Isn't there anything in Windows or that comes from Microsoft for me to do it?
I had a rather odd problem with Win10 and that is it hurt my eyes. I don't know whether they changed something with ClearType or for some other reason but after two days I reverted back to Win7.
Other than that, I really didn't like the UI. To change colors in menus you have to use a hack because the preselected list of colors is just dreadful, the start menu once again is all over the place and various other mishaps that give the impression that it's not a finished product. They try to build a unified OS for all devices when all I want is a simple desktop OS.
You don't really realize just how much win10 is doing in the background until you try it (preinstalled) on a cheap low-end notebook. It was literally unusable out of the box (which I suspect is why I was able to get mine as an "open box" discount). Minutes of freezes and waiting for anything to open or run. I installed win8.1 on it and everything runs smooth by comparison.
I'm not a a massive fan of Windows 10, so I'm certainly not trying to sell it, but here are some takeaways:
1. After holding out until December 2016, and only really using Windows 10 on dev machines/VMs , I finally threw caution to the wind an attempted to upgrade my very heavily loaded (software wise) main Windows 7 machine to Windows 10. Upgrade went fine, absolutely zero issues, and everything still worked 100% afterwards. No-one was more surprised than I was about this. I actually think it's because the hardware is a brand name (HP) desktop, and not a self build.
2. I've turned everything off I don't wont, all the privacy snoops; Cortana is gone completely; and the OneDrive icon does nothing.
3. Since early Windows 7, I switched to a menu bar type launcher that sits on-top at the top edge of the screen, it's populated with links to everything I use. I never click on the start menu, so it's bad behavior and stupid tiles don't really bother me. Screenshot: https://www.weegeeks.com/upload/ApplicationBar-2014-09-29.pn...
4. The forced updates really irritate me. It's my PC why am I being dictated to on this?
5. VB6 apps still work without issue! (LOL!)
6. By comparison, whose bright idea was it not to include .NET runtime 2.0-3.5 by default? This leaves a schism for older apps - Run fine on Windows 7 and 8.1, but needs the runtime to (try) and auto install on Windows 10, or recompile the app targeting .NET 4.0+ and run fine on Windows 10, but completely fail on Windows 7/8.1 with a dialog saying the runtime is missing. Arrrgh.
Overall, I'm living with it, mainly because I've banished all the bad bits, so now it's doing what a good OS should - support me, but also not get in my way. I'm not sure I could use Windows 10 in it's default state though, which is why I'm slowly moving towards a completely customised shell (once I find/write one I like).
Edit: Forgot to mention - if you can lay your hands on it, have a look at 'Windows 10 2016 LTSB' edition - it's designed for corporates who don't want all the consumer crap, so a lot of the stupid stuff is not installed by default. It also ONLY accepts security updates, and refuses any updated that are 'feature updates'. Downside, it needs a KMS keyserver for activation.
this is good news for having only to test for <10 but bad for my Node.JS projects with native bindings which have been only fixable in recent versions due to node gyp.
>The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10.
One thing I've learned over the years: you don't need a high IQ to run a successful business. Without a lot of smarts you're never going to compete with google, but you don't need to compete with google to make a living running your own business.
>Chromebooks are now outselling MacBooks in the crucial education market, where long-term preferences tend to be established.
It's unfortunate that proprietary software ever came to dominate schooling. Hopefully ChromeOS will open things up just enough so that cross platform tools become the norm. Schools using both Windows and Chrome will be more aware of proprietary/incompatible software and file formats and choose to use open formats.
>It is impossible to retrofit older Windows versions with the sort of defense-in-depth that has been built into Windows 10. Nor would Microsoft do so even if it could. If anything, it is about to do the opposite. Windows 7 users will soon lose access to a stand-alone toolkit for mitigating zero-day exploits.
Another reason why Windows is a joke OS for serious tech enthusiasts.
>A word of warning, though: such upgrades do not necessarily go without a hitch. A Windows 10 tablet your correspondent relied upon for much of his mobile computing was broken irreparably when a recent update corrupted the display driver, rendering the touchscreen useless.
......... makes you wonder why they lock these things down, are tech enthusiasts even designing them?
>But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10.
Yes I prefer Linux to Windows in most cases too. I never have good long term experiences with Windows.
>It used to be that only free software came with advertising; users paid a fee, if they chose to do so, to get the software free of advertising. Microsoft charges top dollar for Windows 10 ($120 or $200, depending on the edition) and now wants to bombard users with sales pitches to boot—without so much as by your leave, let alone the option to turn the nuisance off. Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.
Yeah these days pretty much the only people who are using Windows are people who don't know any better. Most people aren't even exposed to Linux except those of us in the tech sector, and it seems to be just as popular as windows and OS X at the shops I've worked at.
What makes a serious tech enthusiast? I consider myself one and I enjoy using Windows 10 as my desktop PC. I have had almost no issues or qualms with how Windows 10 has performed for me since launch.
More than 700m of the world's 1.5bn or so computers continue
to run on Windows 7, a piece of software three generations old
Win 7, Win 8, Win 10; 2 generations old. Preeeetty easy to check, WSJ. If your lede carries such a glaring mistake, why do I trust anything in this article.
Maybe they're including Win 8.1? In that case it is 3 generations. Although Win 8.1 was an update to 8 so you could argue whether or not it should be included but lots of version lists list it separately.
I will say thinking about it that my computer used for 99.99% gaming/internet/text documents. I keep anticipating that something is going to go horribly wrong but so far it's been great.
I hate the menu and store that it shows so almost everything I tend to open has a shortcut on the desktop or is pinned to the toolbar.
Having a functional toolbar on both monitors. That right there was all I wished windows 7 would do but otherwise I can barely tell that the OS is different.
I never used windows 8 so I don't have a comparison to that but I've seen Windows ME...