Useless Windows 10 Features

I was venting to a friend. He told me he'd deactivated autoupdates some years ago. The foresight, i'm envious. But it's too late now and I think I can never have that.

I also remember some time there was an anti trust proceeding against Microsoft for shipping IE with windows as default. WTF happened to that and how is all this not a 1000x worse.

I definitely don't >want< to put up with this.

Can I ask why anyone is paying for this pile of crap?

There are literally no improvements from Windows 7 vs. Windows 10, that could convince me this level of built-in telemetry, and, God forbid, built-in advertising is worth an 'upgrade'.

For God's sake, they are in the freaking start menu, and slow down several of my friends older computers who were force-upgraded.

And before you tell me what I already know, that you can 'opt out' - we should not have to opt out of advertising on an operating system we pay for, especially one that did not have advertising before.

As far as I'm concerned, for all the talk about Apple's 'walled garden,' folks are so addicted to Windows x86 and x64 apps, and so locked into that walled garden, they are now willing to accept being tracked, and to literally have a slower OS due to the baked in advertising.

The failure, and massive financial deficit, that occurred from Windows RT should be more than enough evidence of this. Without its history of apps, Windows isn't Windows.

Knowing that, Microsoft can pack whatever bullshit it wants, including, but not limited to, tracking and advertising, and we still buy.

The only inherently worse-for-the-user OS out there is Android. I will no longer use Google services, even by request. I'm literally trying to ween myself off YouTube, reporting a post on HN yesterday that was merely a YouTube link to a guy talking about how his wife left him that had somehow snuck it's way onto the front page.

I pray one year, we will have that 'year of Linux,' and Microsoft can go back to creating a quality product, instead of focusing on new ways to get information out of users.

Edit: I also pray for, and would even contribute code to, a meaningful third party mobile OS solution. I'm worried Apple will realize they are the last company to respect user privacy to even a reasonable degree, and get greedy.

However, there are so, so many issues with a new mobile OS, between devices, carriers, a bootloader compatible with said devices, licensing, and such, that at the moment, I am not seeing any of the projects in the works as feasible. To be honest - the world of commercial operating systems has never looked so grim.

Because for certain areas of programming, Visual Studio is still king and if you want to develop for Playstation/Xbox then Windows is the only choice.

And of course playing video games in general requires Windows - it's less true than it was few years ago, but there's still plenty of games which give you very poor experience on anything but Windows.