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The woes of Windows 10

economist.com

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#21

Post by dom0 »

shmerl wrote: post #9

> 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 giv…

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#22

Post by drzaiusapelord »

nxrabl wrote: post #11

> There is no question that Windows 10 is ... quite the most secure operating system ever devised. Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#23

Post by burkaman »

aluhut wrote: post #19
overcast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the advances of using 10 instead of 7 for gaming?

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#24

Post by rwc »

> 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?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#25

Post by frik »

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#26

Post by overcast »

aluhut wrote: post #19
overcast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the advances of using 10 instead of 7 for gaming?

Modern drivers, DX12, native xbox one controller support, xbox one integration, background recording, game streaming, not going EOL, FREE.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#27

Post by shmerl »

melling wrote: post #17
shmerl wrote: post #9

> 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 giv…

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.

> don't see Linux's market share growing by large numbers.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=...

> Apple updates macOS every year.

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#28

Post by wildmusings »

nxrabl wrote: post #11

> There is no question that Windows 10 is ... quite the most secure operating system ever devised. Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?

* Secure Boot

* BitLocker: Hard-drive encryption backed by TPM & Secure Boot

With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult.

* Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) - separate OS running on the hypervisor that can perform sensitive operations. Which enables:

1. Device Guard - Runs code integrity protection, i.e. only allowing signed code to run, from within the VSM.

2. Credential Guard - Runs user-mode security subsystem (LSA) inside VSM.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#29

Post by jackhack »

nul_byte wrote: post #4

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…

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#30

Post by 0xFFC »

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.

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