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If you must run Windows 10

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Re: If you must run Windows 10

#101

Post by UnFleshedOne »

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.

No fan of ads and stuff, but OSX is the "all you software is breaking by us" OS currently. Every major release breaks something.

A lot of it for good reasons, but the churn is very much there, unlike for windows.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#102

Post by UnFleshedOne »

fhood wrote: post #68
wvenable wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you're doing, it's not typical. My main desktop has been upgraded from Windows 7, WIndows 8, 8.1, and now Windows 10. I've never have to re-install in all that time. It's stable and fast. No update issues. This is really the norm. And I'm not particularly easy on Windows -- I have tons of development tools, games, customizations. I've changed hardware.

It varies. I have two windows 10 machines that I use regularly. My personal desktop, which has been perhaps the most reliable and consistent computer I have ever owned, and my work PC, which recently attempted to update outlook, and in the process fucked my hard drive beyond recovery.

Your harddrive probably just died a while ago and nobody noticed before outlook started rocking the boat and found that the water is not there anymore.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#103

Post by rasz »

owenwil wrote: post #37
hackcasual wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is every OS running kernel traces and uploading them to the mothership behind your back? Have a look at C:\Windows\System32\SleepStudy C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\WMI

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#104

Post by esotericn »

owenwil wrote: post #37
hackcasual wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Control?

My OS does not phone home.

It contacts package mirrors when I ask it to and only when I ask it to.

It contacts NTP servers because I specifically enabled that.

That's it. By contrast Windows is a black box of nonsense.

The copy I have running in a VM has the marketing name "Cortana" process running even though I specifically chose "no" at install.

I enabled a data limit the other day and played some games. The game used 30MB and the combined OS used >60MB doing who knows what despite the fact it tells me updates are not downloaded on metered connections.

Sorry, no, there is no excuse for this. If it's not opt in, it's malware. If it's opt in defaulted to yes and with no clear benefit to the user, it's malware.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#105

Post by AsyncAwait »

wvenable wrote: post #45
charlesdaniels wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whatever you're doing, it's not typical. My main desktop has been upgraded from Windows 7, WIndows 8, 8.1, and now Windows 10. I've never have to re-install in all that time. It's stable and fast. No update issues. This is really the norm. And I'm not particularly easy on Windows -- I have tons of development tools, games, customizations. I've changed hardware.

> Whatever you're doing, it's not typical.

When someone's describing a completely untypical break scenario on a Linux desktop thread, it not being typical is dismissed by Windows users as not a valid response.

Funny how that works.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#107

Post by jscholes »

latexr wrote: post #100
jscholes wrote: post #93

> If you must run Windows 10 I must, because it's the only viable choice for a blind, screen reader user (me) who wants to get real work done.

I’m curious about this in case you wish to expand on it, such as what you mean by “real work”. Perhaps there are no macOS equivalents to the apps you need for your occupation, but generically claiming one can’t get “real work” done on macOS is inaccurate for several jobs. Unless you’re referring to the screen reader, but my impression is Apple is generally regarded as the best in what comes to accessibility features,…

> Unless you’re referring to the screen reader

I am. I would never claim MacOS couldn't be used by professionals in a more general sense.

> but my impression is Apple is generally regarded as the best in what comes to accessibility features, and they keep improving. They’re so proud of it they frequently brag about it in promotional videos

For screen reader users, they're the best in terms of what they ship with the OS. You get a fully accessible experience out of the box, which includes a tutorial for first-timers. You can even run with text to speech in the Recovery mode e.g. to format your disks.

Contrast that with Microsoft, with Windows 10 being the very first version to offer an accessible setup/installation process, no obvious way to use a screen reader in Safe Mode, and next to nobody using Narrator in their day-to-day computer use because it took so long to be developed to any usable degree. One of the most popular Windows screen readers (JAWS) also costs hundreds of dollars - thousands over a user's lifetime if they purchase upgrades along the way. Apple are definitely winning there. Everything is free and just works, and I'm quite happy for them to brag about it.

Where it starts to fall apart is when you want to actually get things done outside of a core set of Apple apps. For example, Office support is pretty lacking, with poor or no accessibility for advanced word processing and spreadsheet features. The terminal support is so bad that an enterprising blind user made his own terminal screen reader to combat it[1].

There are other problems, such as the screen reader's slow performance making the entire OS feel sluggish. Plus, if there are any bugs in it, you have to wait for an entire MacOS update before it gets fixed. That's annoying when it's a Window Manager bug, but can be completely disruptive when your only gateway to your computer won't read your email for a while without crashing.

There are also tons of more opinionated stuff that users can (and do) argue about, like the efficiency of the way you browse the web with VoiceOver on MacOS vs the way Windows screen readers do it. But once you've assessed that the core accessibility experience isn't going to work for you, debating the rest is pretty pointless. Plus (and this is entirely anecdotal) it can become exhausting trying to have a discussion about these problems, only to have hordes of users tell you that you're wrong even though they're unemployed (or employed in a different field) and don't have people relying on them to get anything advanced done in the first place. Sometimes I think there's a tendency to want to justify how much money they've spent on expensive Apple hardware which, realistically, they didn't really need, especially if the cost of a cheaper Windows laptop plus JAWS would've been less or the same anyway. And these days, there's a fantastic free, open source screen reader for Windows[2].

[1] https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr [2] https://www.nvaccess.org

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#108

Post by bytematic »

radus wrote: post #71

Counter-anecdote: I'm the happiest I've ever been with Windows both as a development platform and for everyday use. The release of WSL has solved a lot of daily annoyances, and I'm hoping that the new Windows Terminal app will soon be usable so I can replace cmder which has been great, but a little clunky and slow in my experience. Other new features that I enjoy: Windows Sandbox, new Snip and Sketch, the current ite…

Also the basic one that essentially all games work best on windows, if they even work for other platforms. And most applications have windows binaries keeps me using it at home. Love my mac for work dev, but once I'm home I feel very comfy with my windows 10 machine

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#109

Post by bassman9000 »

owenwil wrote: post #37
hackcasual wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and every OS is calling home

There's OSes beyond Windows and OSX.

Re: If you must run Windows 10

#110

Post by AcerbicZero »

If Win10 would just let you do what you want instead of forcing you down various half baked paths it wouldn't be too bad. I ran Server 2016 for awhile, which had a few drawbacks, but overall was a much better experience. The lack of customization for basic stuff is obnoxious both in Win10 and Server2016, and third party solutions to core windows things (Start Menu is a good example) can be hit or miss.

I'd be a little more generous if this most recent round of Win10 update hadn't messed a bunch of stuff up which was working, and rather than spend 4 hours googling esoteric windows registry settings I think I'll just switch to Server 2019.

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