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The woes of Windows 10

economist.com

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Re: The woes of Windows 10

#261

Post by tdkl »

bayeslives wrote: post #178

I've been using both Windows (work) and Linux (home) on the desktop for many years. I far prefer Linux (I tried many distros, settled on Arch and Mint now). Package management and window management is way better in Linux. To name just a few. To me, Windows10 is not better than Windows7. The package management is still a mess. Forced updates, no rollbacks, reboots, you name it. Permissions are also strange: why are ad…

>The package management is still a mess. If you mean for system updates I'd agree, but software package management is a shit show on Linux and it shows why less people bother writing software with & why Electron is popular there.

What's more easier then clicking an .exe ?

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#262

Post by oldsj »

casparz wrote: post #212

Stopped reading at: "There is no question that Windows 10 is an impressive piece of software, and quite the most secure operating system ever devised."

Yea that was really strange to see. I had to look up and double check what website I was on when I saw that

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#263

Post by chris_wot »

fooey wrote: post #203
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…

Microsoft has successfully trained me that OS upgrades can be very traumatic. I consider myself an early adopter, and I always run cutting edge on my phone or win laptop, but I only ever upgrade my primary workstation when it dies and I have to. Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.

Not just OS upgrades - even updates alone are problematic.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#264

Post by oldsj »

tdkl wrote: post #261
bayeslives wrote: post #178

I've been using both Windows (work) and Linux (home) on the desktop for many years. I far prefer Linux (I tried many distros, settled on Arch and Mint now). Package management and window management is way better in Linux. To name just a few. To me, Windows10 is not better than Windows7. The package management is still a mess. Forced updates, no rollbacks, reboots, you name it. Permissions are also strange: why are ad…

>The package management is still a mess. If you mean for system updates I'd agree, but software package management is a shit show on Linux and it shows why less people bother writing software with & why Electron is popular there. What's more easier then clicking an .exe ?

And (although I don't think its Win10 specific) but there's chocolatey now too which is great

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#265

Post by bhauer »

Arizhel wrote: post #35
frik wrote: post #25

No wonder that Win10 fails like Win8 - Microsoft doesn't care about users, they only care about their shareholders. Win8 and Win10 looks like designed by color blind designers with a bad taste the brutalism of UI design plus the phone-home spyware features that cannot be deactivated. Windows 7 is too good and the perfect OS, if you don't install some recent spyware updates it will last at least until 2020 - and who k…

Look, I don't like the flat-UI trend any more than you, but there's two simple facts here: 1) It's not just MS pushing the flat-UI trend. Apple and Google are too, along with every other Web/UI designer out there. Everyone's doing it. MS's version does seem to be the ugliest though, mainly because of the horrible color picks. 2) The users you seem concerned about like this stuff. They're all buying and using Windows,…

> MS's version does seem to be the ugliest though, mainly because of the horrible color picks.

For whatever it's worth, Windows 10 is one of my favorite looking user interfaces, especially with its dark theme. I am not sure why so many mainstream operating systems do not offer viable dark themes.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#266

Post by selectodude »

vbezhenar wrote: post #241
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 somewhat agree. I have to use Windows from time to time and it's usually Windows 10. I disliked Windows 8 so much, but Windows 10 is overall good IMO. But, honestly, comparing to something like Windows NT 4.0, I can't really say, why Windows 10 is better. There might be tiny things here and there, but overall experience is similar. The only Windows releases I remember were those particularly bad (Vista, 8) and thos…

When is the last time you used Windows NT? I find new features are so ingrained in my workflow that I don't even realize they're new.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#267

Post by Shywim »

jacquesc wrote: post #182

I got a Windows 10 laptop (Razer) for Christmas for gaming / media / browsing purposes (been a Mac user for 10+ yrs). It's buggy as hell. The shortcut icons on the desktop and taskbar kept going away (replacing all the icons with a "not found" placeholder), forcing me to reinstall the OS. Now none of the search functions work (e.g. windows key -> search for app.. no results). Whatever, I just use 2 apps anyways (Chro…

Almost all the issues you describe are not directly related with Windows though, but with OEM and third-party softwares.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#268

Post by antisthenes »

deburo wrote: post #147
chinathrow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some say Windows 2000 was good enough already. Everything worked well.

Currently checking the history of Windows 2000. Seems W2K was aimed at enterprises while ME at consumers. A bit less than 2 years after W2K's launch, WinXP came out and unified the consumer and enterprise line. Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain po…

Personal reasons for upgrading to 7 in order of importance:

64-bit memory space support (crucial, considering enormous browser bloat after the FF 3.5 era)

TRIM support for SSDs (I switched to 7 when consumer SSDs started to become affordable)

DX11+ for gaming (DX10 was a wash in Vista, but by the time I switched to 7, there were some games that actually did look noticeably better with DX11)

Half-Open connection fix for torrenting.

But I'm a power user, so reasons for regular users may vary.

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#269

Post by oldsj »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #89
nxrabl wrote: post #11

> There is no question that Windows 10 is ... quite the most secure operating system ever devised. Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?

Compared to BSD? (One of the BSDs, that focuses on security, I forget which one.) Yeah, I don't buy it. But I bet the writer at The Economist never heard of BSD...

OpenBSD, if you weren't being sarcastic

Re: The woes of Windows 10

#270

Post by kupiakos »

cm2187 wrote: post #246
zekevermillion wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the tragedy of win10. It's actually a great OS but the lack of respect for user preferences around privacy and updates ruins it for power users. I have to think that the engineers who did the work to make win10 as efficient and stable as it is had cortana and dark UI patterns shoved down their throats. cortana is clippy, we all know that. Who thought it was a good idea to bring back clippy?! Could not have be…

There are plenty of bad parts too. The start menu keeps freezing regularly for me on multiple machines. Searching in the start menu returns random results. Settings scattered across multiple control panels is just absurd. In-OS advertising is a complete no go to me. The nagging to use edge too. The frequent forced reboots and full screen notifications are a nuisance. And it makes it really difficult to change default…

The most frustrating thing for me is the automatic updates that are difficult to turn off. If I leave a Windows 10 VM running on my laptop for too long, it will decide it's "idle" and start consuming my resources. Even if I let the updates finish, it then continues for another week, whenever I leave it "idle", to perform AoT .NET compilation, pegging my CPU. Incredibly annoying.
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