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The woes of Windows 10

economist.com

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#221

Post by dcdevito »

vacri wrote: post #217
dcdevito wrote: post #211

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.

I don't understand this whole "forced updates" FUD. Just configure the times you want your machine to be updated and it gets out of the way.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#222

Post by swozey »

marcosdumay wrote: post #218
distantsounds wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you can't do, no matter what you try, is to make the Start Menu show all the programs you have installed. But attaching things there is nice. Even better than the KDE menu.

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#223

Post by davidf18 »

xwvvvvwx wrote: post #152
kristianc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

This is interesting. Could you give a bit more detail?

See: http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Wind...

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#224

Post by mundo »

tw04 wrote: post #205
mundo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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 possibil…

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...

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#225

Post by kyriakos »

dublinben wrote: post #186
kyriakos wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can use Android without sacrificing your privacy. You should be able to use your computer the same way. Sadly, Microsoft disagrees.

Can you though? I mean out of the box?

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#226

Post by bb611 »

rwc wrote: post #24

> 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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#227

Post by xemdetia »

alkonaut wrote: post #202
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run - using the word very loosely - Win 10 on a mid-spec 8GB Dell Laptop. It's literally unusably slow. Opening File Manager takes many minutes. This is practically a fresh install. I have Office 365 installed, but very little else. I don't even have a mail client set up. I dual-boot to Ubuntu on the same machine, and the latter is perfectly usable.

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.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#228

Post by davidf18 »

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…

Details on the Target and Home Depot attacks that would have been prevented by the upgrade from Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later:

http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Wind...

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#229

Post by ciaranm »

hfsktr wrote: post #164

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…

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.

I'm super happy with it.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#230

Post by Mithaldu »

mundo wrote: post #171
hfsktr wrote: post #164

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…

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'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.
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