The woes of Windows 10 • Hacker News Board

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#111

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

davidf18 wrote: post #100

akappa wrote: post #20

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 + learn…

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 Wind…

You describe the proximate cause of those breaches, but perhaps the ultimate cause was the difficulty of updating that OS in the first place?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#112

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #110

Unbeliever69 wrote: post #57

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!

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 techn…

[deleted]

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#113

Post by ChrisClark » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

0xFFC wrote: post #30

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 Micro…

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...

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#114

Post by Godel_unicode » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:57 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #40

akappa wrote: post #20

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 + learn…

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?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#115

Post by becarefulyo » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:57 PM UTC

0xFFC wrote: post #30

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 Micro…

Font rendering was improved in the Anniversary update. It should use ClearType in most cases on landscape monitors with 100% DPI.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#116

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

akappa wrote: post #20

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 + learn…

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#117

Post by Godel_unicode » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

modzu wrote: post #58

akappa wrote: post #20

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 + learn…

MS forces the change to force a sale

You're aware that the overwhelming majority of those forced updates were free, right?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#118

Post by 0xFFC » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

ChrisClark wrote: post #113

0xFFC wrote: post #30

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 Micro…

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#119

Post by 0xFFC » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

becarefulyo wrote: post #115

0xFFC wrote: post #30

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 Micro…

Font rendering was improved in the Anniversary update. It should use ClearType in most cases on landscape monitors with 100% DPI.

This is not true !

UWP (which most of the internal app are porting into it), does use DirectWrite and there is no way to change its font rendering engine to ClearType.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#120

Post by anowell » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #45

afghanPower wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You should try it. It's fun!

I worry more about the long term support workload than the initial install.

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.