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If you must run Windows 10

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Re: If you must run Windows 10

#31

Post by sdegutis »

owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

I think my main gripe with Windows is that it has one less app-accessible modifier key. As a power user, this is invaluable to me and Mac has it.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#33

Post by owenwil »

president wrote: post #18
owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

From a feature standpoint, Windows has definitely improved in the last few years, however, I don't see much improvement in terms of UX. To me, Windows development was always about "let's get this feature in so we can claim that we do X" but Microsoft has never proven themselves in terms of providing a cohesive experience in terms of inter-app behaviors or just UI/UX streamlining. This is extremely apparent when you l…

The UX is incrementally improving in every release. Through just the last few major releases, you've gotten Airdrop-style sharing (the new Share menu), full system-wide indexing and instant search, a unified control panel and a ton of other things. They're moving fast, but incrementally enough that it may not be noticable—but I vastly prefer the fast-follow improvements over the 1-3 yearly 'big bang' releases Apple has done with macOS.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#34

Post by charlesdaniels »

owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

As someone who has used Linux (with a few brief stints into macOS and BSD) for quite some time (since about 2012) coming from Windows before that, I don't understand the people who constantly defend Windows in these types of posts...

In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great.

The issue that I have had is that every version of Windows I have used (from XP up to 10) has had serious reliability and performance problems.

As a specific example, it seems that the one Windows machine that I keep around to play games on needs a complete re-install every 6-12 months, usually because Windows tries to update and bricks itself so badly that even "Windows Recovery" cannot salvage the install. This is a relatively nice machine (Haswell i5, 24GB DDR3), and I tend to stay on the happy path of just running the vanilla install plus Steam and a small number of games (never any programming, web browsing, etc.).

In cases where I've had to use Windows for work, I've found that most of the built in programs lag and take a long amount of time to respond to keyboard or mouse inputs (in the specific cases I'm thinking of, this was on top-of-the line Dell Precision notebooks at the time). Most of my code seemed to run subjectively much slower natively on Windows than it did in a Linux VM running on the same machine.

I'm not trying to be a power user of Windows, as I generally try to avoid using it as much as I can due to the bad experiences I've had in the past. I'm not doing any crazy registry editing or anything like that. Just pretty basic development work and gaming over the years. In that time, I've never had a Windows install where the features reliably worked, and the install remained stable for any period of time.

This is all anecdotal of course. It's possible I've just be incredibly unlucky, or that I've had a string of a half dozen machines that have hardware that's somehow broken in a way that only affects Windows.

So what I'm wondering is: all you people who keep chiming in on these types of posts claiming that Windows works well for your use case -- what are you doing? What's the secret to having it actually function reliably? I've not been able to replicate any such success.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#35

Post by mehrdadn »

willis936 wrote: post #14
owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

A serious and legitimate gripe with windows is how messy it is to automate things. It's hard to look at the command prompt the same way I look at bash. I resort to almost anything other than batch when I can.

Also try JScript. It's underrated.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#36

Post by bpyne »

owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

I use macOS at home but have Win10 in the office. I've been using Windows in some capacity since 3.1. Win10 is the first one I've found usable.

Going from Win XP at home to OS X, I found it astounding that my PowerBook could go months without a reboot. Likewise, my MBP astounds me daily that I can't remember when I last rebooted.

My employer's Win10 laptop is like that as well: I don't think about rebooting it anymore.

MS is on a good trajectory, finally, with its os.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#37

Post by owenwil »

hackcasual wrote: post #15
owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

Some people are tired of an OS that by default phones home about actions you do on it, include advertisement in your start area, and regularly push updates to add new features that also break existing software.

The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#38

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #9

LTSC is not intended as a desktop operating system. What people should be looking for is Enterprise: Which has all of the telemetry 0 options and such, but still works with modern Windows applications. It's highly likely especially after Windows 7 goes EOL, you'll start seeing a lot more consumer applications that depend on Windows 10 functionality that's not going to work in LTSC.

[deleted]

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#39

Post by bhauer »

Microsoft needs to realize they are doing their name harm by not giving power users and evangelist-style technologists an obvious and easily-selected low- or zero-surveillance Windows version.

If this article is mislead to select LTSC instead of Enterprise as that option (as is suggested in this thread), the confusion of Microsoft's messaging is largely to blame. Microsoft should have marketing material aimed at individual technologists who want a premium Windows experience with ~0 surveillance.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#40

Post by owenwil »

charlesdaniels wrote: post #34
owenwil wrote: post #2

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WS…

As someone who has used Linux (with a few brief stints into macOS and BSD) for quite some time (since about 2012) coming from Windows before that, I don't understand the people who constantly defend Windows in these types of posts... In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great. The issue that I have had is th…

I've been using Windows 10 as my daily driver for web (PHP/Node/JS) development for over two years without the need to recover/format/reinstall at all. This is the exception, rather than the rule, at this point: https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-...
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