It's bizarre that people continue to think of Windows PCs as being predominantly owned by individuals or even individuals with a specific interest in technology.
Maybe I'm misreading your comment but I think you're implying that people who care (like gamers) are less likely to be using Windows 10, but it's the opposite - 50% is far higher than the total market share Windows 10 has.
If I misunderstood your meaning, then this comment can just be a clarification instead of a correction :)
More than 700m of the world's 1.5bn or so computers continue
to run on Windows 7, a piece of software three generations old
Win 7, Win 8, Win 10; 2 generations old. Preeeetty easy to check, WSJ. If your lede carries such a glaring mistake, why do I trust anything in this article.
Maybe they're including Win 8.1? In that case it is 3 generations. Although Win 8.1 was an update to 8 so you could argue whether or not it should be included but lots of version lists list it separately.
I have a dual boot PC which is Arch Linux and Windows 7.
The Windows 7 machine is only for gaming / steam, I never browse the internet on there and have pretty strict firewall ruleset. To be honest, I would consider upgrading it to 10, but I missed the free window, so I really don't fancy paying for it.
My hope is that by the time that Windows 7 goes EOL, I can delete it and game just on Linux. Either that or I will get a console (as most of my gaming takes place in my living room anyhow, using a steam box).
You didn't miss any free window, you can still just download the image from Microsoft and upgrade. Upgrade to Windows 10. Windows 7 is archaic, especially for gaming as its primary use.
You need Windows 10 to use DirectX 12, that's probably the biggest advance. The Windows Display Driver Model is also updated, I don't know if this actually matters for most games though.
In an interesting twist on the ordinary plot I now code in Windows (picking up C# and want to use standard setup for now) and boot into my Linux machine every time I'm tired and want to play CSGO (often works wonders when I am sleepy) because it seems like I get somewhat better performance from my non-gaming laptop on Linux now
.
Similar here. Mac & Linux for work. Mac for home. I only keep Windows for gaming. In fact, I only recently upgraded to Windows 7 on my gaming computer. XP was working fine, but for DirectX 10 compatibility (baked into win7 and above, only) I had to upgrade. Were it not for this one "feature", I'd still be happily using XP.
But I've decided that this is the end of the line for me and Microsoft. They lost me forever due to the spyware / monitoring debacle of Win10. If ever there is a technological forced upgrade to 10, then I'm simply out of luck -- no more upgrades past 7. I'm done.
> But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10. <...> Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.
Linux gets refugees both from Windows and MacOS because MS just keeps messing Windows up (seems to be happening every other version), and Apple simply lets MacOS rot by not giving it any attention.
You just made three subjective claims. I don't see Linux's market share growing by large numbers. Apple updates macOS every year. Which features do you want? I haven't used Windows in a while but Microsoft seems to be making faster progress in updating Windows, browser, etc.
I hear complaints from MacOS users about the bit rot all the time. Where is OpenGL 4.5 for instance? And not just graphics. Many simply feel it's completely stagnated, because Apple are too busy with their mobile delirium, and don't care about desktop anymore.
Absolute numbers are large. I'm more interested in the trend here. Still, there should be more push for Linux on the desktop. This sick situation exited for way too long.
That won't happen until desktop Linux is usable by non-tech people, and they have easy access to it (pre-installed, simple install, etc.). There's been a lot of progress, however there are still plenty of issues. Not to mention application support.
Seeing someone trying to work with it sometimes reminds me of someone trying to hold a hot potato in their hands. For example, today someone tried to display two PDFs and a word doc on a large screen. Well. I guess you know how long that took to work out.
Which windowing system does it more easily and more obviously than Windows 10 though?
Here's a 2 minute demo of "Snap Assist" which is turned on by default in Windows 10. Near the end you can see the user snapping three documents into place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8yTBLEj3c
Exactly. It's a shame Apple didn't adopt Vulkan and went with their own proprietary Metal API. Yet another reason for game developers to keep ignoring the platform.
> There have been some issues, specifically around certain drivers, issues with Mesa and Intel hardware. I’m hoping all of those are behind us and will remain so. Unlike a lot of other communities, Linux users are quite aware of a lot of the issues with their platform and will usually be OK to wait for an update to fix their issues.
This is opposed to OSX where the updates break things horribly. The support for the OpenGL standard in their drivers has been lacklustre for years and it's only getting worse. They now want developers to move to their proprietary API Metal, but I'm jaded enough not to fall for that. And don't even get me started on having to shell out £3000 for a mid spec dev machine.
It would be nice if Apple even supported their own OpenCL drivers so that I could get semi-decent performance out of Blender without getting an Nvidea eGPU.
It was a bad decision to continue with Metal instead of updating OpenGL, but the operating system is not neglected. One example of a feature you personally want (that I do too) does not constitute neglect. It gets regular updates.
Not sure how else you can spin it, but not updating graphics drivers for years IS neglect. It shows a complete lack of care, since they easily could fix this. Or may be you are implying it's an intentional act of letting it rot to force developers to use Metal and such? That would be actually even worse, and I'd say should encourage both developers and users to ditch Apple even sooner.
Case in point, I've heard several times how people were saying, they are ditching MacOS, because Wine developers aren't going to support DX11 games there, courtesy of Apple not updating OpenGL.
Your subjective "desirable" qualifier leaves it open for you to no-true-Scotsman away any response as "not desirable", but I can show you several.
Sierra brought tabbed applications and a bunch of other end-user features [1]. As for the more technically minded, there's a new filesystem coming this year [2].
I won't defend Apple's treatment of Mac hardware recently, but the software itself does get regular updates for security, performance, and features, regardless of how one subjectively feels about them. Personally I think it's a rather visually ugly operating system and has weird quirks like awful keyboard shortcuts, and I'm mad that they removed a feature (the battery time remaining) but generally functions well for my specific use case.
Apple releases a major update to MacOS every year with new features. They're releasing a new filesystem this year, and do security updates regularly. The Mac hardware could be called neglected, but the OS is anything but.
Well, the most secure OS is something that's going to be endlessly arguable, but its probably the most secure Windows considering how people use computers today and how many attack surfaces a modern OS has.
A lot of security features found in the previously stand-alone EMET are slowly being ported over natively to Win10, for example. It comes with a built-in AV which is pretty good. Smartscreen is unusually good at warning about suspicious executables and I've seen it stop ransomware attacks. VBS makes it harder for hackers to modify system or protected files. Secureboot and bitlocker support are useful in some scenarios. Device guard is supposed to helpful but I'm not sure how it works. Windows hello can replace the traditional password with camera or fingerprint auth cooked-in, which is probably a step in the right direction, although I'd rather see passphrases become more common. Cameras and fingerprints seem gimmmicky and not all my computers have those things.
Windows Hello is the new platform for authentication. I imagine that all authentication APIs are grouped into Windows Hello, including traditional passphrases.
Regarding hard drive encryption backed by TPM, a) this has been a thing since Win7, and b) google tells me it only works OOTB on Win10 if you sign into Windows with your Microsoft account; how many people do that?
If that's the secret sauce that makes Win10 so much better, color me unimpressed. And neither of those features offer additional protection against zero-days (neither does VSM), which are what the TFA discusses.
It only works OOTB with a Microsoft Account because the OS needs a place to backup the key. The alternative is that if the user forgets their password, they lose their data forever. You can still turn it on manually very easily with a local account.
I am running Bitlocker without a Microsoft Account. You can just print out the recovery key instead (or you can just configure bitlocker through command line).
> With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult.
Physical attacks aren't part of my threat model on a desktop PC. Indeed these protections feel more like DRM - trying to protect the computer from the (legitimate) user.
Preventing unsigned code from running, and choosing which sources of software you do want to trust, is not just for DRM. It severely reduces the attack surface of a device and makes it much harder for user error to cause a compromise. Accidentally getting compromised is possible for advanced users, let alone the most tech-illiterate person in the company.
iOS being totally locked down in this way is no small part of why exploits for that platform sell for so much more money than exploits for other platforms. Of course, it is also used for DRM on that platform.
And to add to my previous comment, I can't see why you would want to keep your laptop or desktop unencrypted. If someone steals your computer, they have access to all of your data.
And without Secure Boot and/or TPM-backed key management, hard disk encryption becomes vulnerable to someone planting a modified boot loader or firmware on your system.
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...
No, I wasn't being sarcastic. I've never used BSD, of any flavor, but I recall that was was focused obsessively on security.
Absent evidence to the contrary, I presume that OpenBSD is more secure than any Windows, even Windows 10, but has considerably fewer features. Do you know of actual evidence?
I question it. In my opinion, OpenBSD is the most secure OS that is likely to be used on a home computer. As for the most secure OS devised for any commercially available computing-capable device, I'd probably pick VxWorks.
But for an RMS-level of paranoia, I might have to go with RTEMS on a FPGA acting as a J-Core (SuperH-2) CPU.
The thing is, people don't upgrade Windows, in the large. They use the version of Windows their computer came with until they replace it. Microsoft has done more work getting people to upgrade to 10 than any previous version of Windows. I don't see what more they can do.
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 + learning to navigate the new system + solving whatever goes wrong during the process). And that this is not just limited to "novices": I've heard wonderful things about Arch Linux, but my Ubuntu system works well enough and I've been using it for forever, so the incentives are pretty low and the time to be invested pretty high.
Because developers want to make more money. This is why the app store format is so incredibly popular amongst the developer crowd - it forces people to keep paying you to upgrade app to follow breaking Apple/Google changes just to keep the functionality of the app the same and it appearing for users of new phones. 15 year old software that works well and you buy once does not bring a steady income.
I think that you're wrong about why developers love app stores. It's about someone else solving all of the problems which aren't "make your app". It handles updates, feedback, discoverability, CC info, password resets, etc.
I've never had the experience you describe; which app(s) are you talking about which need to be bought repeatedly with no new functionality?
Not a fan of the app store model, but I've literally never heard of people paying for updates on app stores. In fact I've heard many developers complain about the lack of paid upgrades on the Mac App Store.
I get (maybe) your argument when it comes to Windows 7 -> Windows 10, but I think you're overestimating how hard it is to get up and running with Arch Linux. Following an Arch install tutorial shouldn't take anyone here on Hackernews more than 2 hours to get their DE, networking etc. up and going.
fwiw, I find the long term support pretty minimal. I'm only slightly more conservative in my use of`pacman -Syu` than I would be with `apt-get dist-upgrade`. If I notice a kernel or DE upgrade, I might hold off until the weekend on the off-chance that it needs a bit of extra maintenance. I appreciate handling these changes in smaller batches, as opposed to the 6-month system-wide major upgrade cadence. Of course, if I was just jumping between LTS releases, maybe only dealing with serious maintenance every other year would be an appealing trade-off.
(of course, I don't mean to undermine the argument for hesitating to jump to Arch on the grounds of maintenance. It certainly takes thinking about maintenance more often.)
I found this to be a real problem with using Arch in production. Updating is a bit of a catch-22: if you upgrade frequently, the workload of keeping up with the minutiae of not breaking your system is overwhelming. And the longer you leave it, the closer the chances of breakage when you do approach 100%. Result: you inevitably fall off the update treadmill at some point, usually during some sort of crunch time, and then never update again because who wants to tell their boss they spent a day debugging a self-inflicted problem? Safer to leave it alone and get on with your work.
This is why I switched back to Debian. Updating is stress-free and there's no downside to doing it as often as you like.
Arch isn't that hard to set up - I'll agree with you there. Where it falls down, though, is when you need to install something where there isn't a package for it.
Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want. But let's say you didn't want to do that, because you got tired of having a system full of cruft due to all these funky pieces of software scattered about the system that the package manager had no clue about - oh my!
So - you want to install the software as a package under Arch. Oh - and just to make things more fun, the software is something proprietary and closed-source. There is more than a few bits of useful Linux software out there like this - much of it niche areas where a) probably no one else in the Arch community uses, and b) it's proprietary - so you can't distribute it anyhow.
What does Arch require you to do in this situation? Well - last time I looked anyhow - and that was a couple of years ago, so maybe something has changed... It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.
That's basically the process I read about for any kind of software package for Arch; it was a very heavy manual process. While other package management schemes do require some manual effort, none of them that I recall seemed to require as much effort as Arch's did. This wouldn't normally be an issue with most open-source software, because once you made that package, it could be distributed and used by the community. But for a proprietary software package, only you could use it - so it was a ton of extra work for little gain in the end.
Don't get me wrong - I liked Arch, and their community support and forums, wiki, etc - is pretty top-notch (I like to use that part of the ecosystem myself for help and hint purposes when I need it). I honestly think it is a great distro, but it does have some drawbacks to it (and they probably don't have good solutions, either).
> It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.
This might be technically correct (not completely sure), but hugely misleading. Packages are defined by PKGBUILD scripts. When you run `makepkg` to create a package, it creates a directory called $pkgdir. In your PKGBUILD, you just delegate to whatever installer came with the source code & tell it to install into $pkgdir. e.g. `make install --prefix=$pkgdir`. makepkg takes all the files in $pkgdir and tars them and bam - there's your package.
If you look in most PKGBUILDs, they contain some metadata (where to get the sources, etc), and then it's more or less:
build() {
cd "$srcdir" && make
}
package() {
cd "$srcdir" && make install --prefix="$pkgdir"
}
cr0sh posited that the application being packaged was not in source form. So perhaps the hugely misleading thing is to argue against xem based upon how one packages up things that are in source form. (-:
Well as long as it ships with an installer, the above method still works - just omit the build step altogether (do a chroot if the installer doesn't offer a choice of where to install). If it doesn't have an installer, but comes self-contained, then just `cp $srcdir $pkgdir/opt` & call that good.
And if you're dealing with a non-source package that doesn't have an installer and isn't self-contained, then installing/packaging it is difficult on any OS - not just Arch!
In fairness, that's pretty much how you are going to have to package a binaries-only software with most package management systems. Install the binaries. Make a package description of those binaries.
I didn't touch OpenBSD from, let's call it, the latter half of George Bush's presidency through the first half of the Obama administration. My first install of OpenBSD in years was a moment of "oh this old thing still?" followed by "huh, that was just as easy as I remembered."
It's all about audience. OpenBSD's installer is a thing of beauty for technical people. I can see where it would be daunting and texty to someone who's never touched a command line, but that isn't the audience.
At this point, I feel forcing technical users through a plodding GUI install wizard is as cruel as making grandma install OpenBSD with a complicated RAID configuration and volume encryption.
> 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?
I find I care about the applications I use: my IDE, git client, console, and the various web apps I use. I don't so much care about my browser UI, as long as it gets out of the way and shows me what URL I'm on and renders the page.
Likewise, I don't care about the UI of the OS itself, as long as it does its job properly: lets me start and switch between apps, connects to wifi, manages the display power, and sleeps and wakes up.
When I'm looking at the computer screen, I'm looking at what I'm doing, not the UI chrome. Even now, I'm only paying attention to this comment text box and your original message.. Everything else -- all the other tabs I have open, the visible bits of the OS, the other window open on my next monitor -- all blends into the background and gets ignored.
The users may perceive operation satisfying, yet it may not be so, eg. because of security issues, which on the other hand pose dangers to other users as well, so the it doesn't matter to me attitude doesn't stand.
Given that the upgrade was free just as in the case of a linux upgrade the good enough point should consider these factors as well.
I agree with you, but looking at the problem from Microsoft's perspective, they have to sell you something, whether you 'need' it or not. It's interesting that Microsoft is the only company still selling a consumer OS, everything else comes free with the device, including updates. This problem might be part of the reason for that.
The best way to maximize sales is to align your interests with that of your customers. I wish Microsoft would realize that, because Windows 10 is heading in the opposite direction.
World has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
All the time I've invested in acclimating to Windows 10 feels like a burden, while all the time I have spent tweaking OSx feels delightful. People don't hate change...we hate change that is painful. Windows 10 (to me) embodies painful change.
A lot of people resist change to things they are familiar with.
Between each significant revision of Apple's desktop OS, my mother would get frustrated at settings that were moved elsewhere/renamed/removed entirely, for example. OSX is no stranger to unnecessary changes (or at least that's what my mother thinks of them).
Indeed, Win7 being good enough and not degrading in any way is a big challenge facing Win10 adoption, and that has been said times enough before. Once Win7 is out of support, may it be from popular applications or simply security updates, we may see things changing.
There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption.
Note:
Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.
Windows 2000 was the best version I've ever used. Back in the day, when XP was relatively new, if I bought a machine and it came with XP I would try and retro fit 2000 onto it. The 2000 installation would be noticeably faster for what appeared to be a similar set of features.
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 points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.
I upgraded to Windows 7 over XP for mainline x64 support and new window management feature (aero snap). Also, being able to sort system tray icons, as well as the taskbar were very welcome.
Profit. How else is Microsoft (or any other company) going to make money off software no one needs or wants? Other than rehashing the same old product and pushing it onto users for more money, more surveillance, or both, they have nothing of value to sell on the software side. Even if they did have something of value to sell, over 90% of the people have already bought their product. Gotta keep the cash rolling in so they tweak the UI, maybe in a way that people hate like removing the start menu. Or they add surveillance features you can't turn off and monetize that way while pretending to somehow be secure. Or forget all that, let's just push the new update forcefully onto people's computers and pretend that it's not malware.
When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.
There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.
Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately.
I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.
> There's been some really good progress made on the tablet mode in Win10. It's not really apparent if you're using it as a Desktop OS.
It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.
I don't quite follow. You seem to be saying that Microsoft make changes just to justify the release of a new OS version. But they announced quite a while ago that they would never release a new major version. There will never be a Windows 11, you will never pay to upgrade Windows to the new version again. They adopted the macOS platform, where the OS sticks to a single version and gets an incremental annual update (macOS has been on version 10 for 16 years, with no plan to ever create "OS XI", and stopped charging for updates 4 years ago). So why would change for change's sake relate to profit at all?
Microsoft change its policy way to quickly and often (eg. about XBox One features, Windows Phone) for this announce to be taken at face value. Maybe its true but if the Windows 10 market penetration does not go as expected (as it seems to be) the strategy will change.
Because MS makes money off of selling software vice Apple's model of making money off of selling hardware. If they continue to emulate Apple's policy of free upgrades, they'll see an eventual revenue drop since they'll be dependent upon users upgrading their hardware.
OSX/macOS promoted their point releases to be something between service packs and major version releases, keeping it at version "X" for marketing purposes. From what I can see, between Cheetah and Sierra the expected workflow of the system has changed strongly a few times.
Right now Win 10 Home is $119.99. If Microsoft actually said what you claim, they're lying. Either way, they're doing it for the money. Whether that money comes from the actual software, hardware, ads, user data, or some other way, it's the reason why Microsoft will continue to push their software onto people, including people that don't want it. In fact, with the addition of ads and user tracking, I wouldn't be surprised if they drop the actual dollar cost of the software in favor of data cost a la Chrome OS and other Google products. And it still wouldn't change anything. Profit would still be the reason for them adding new features and forcing people to upgrade.
That's because in most cases the "change" is 90% costs externalized by the vendor, IT, or both.
Imagine if it was 1955 and we thought it was a good idea to randomly go into every company every year or two and say "Alright, this inventory system, this time tracking system, this customer service system... All of it, right out. Progress is here folks, and you don't want to be change averse. Time for some new fresh paper."
It's ludicrous. One thing you learn very quickly in business is that companies have little or not stomach for doing things that do not make them money. Every minute or dollar you spend on them appears to be money down the toilet. So if Microsoft wants people to use Windows 10 they need to offer more than hand-wavey bullshit about features and progress and security, because all of that stinks to high heaven of a company trying to convince its customers to give it more money because it wants more money - not because it's offering anything of real value to the customer.
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 Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later which was an upgrade recommended by Microsoft. Windows XP embedded had a security flaw later patched in later versions of Windows.
The point-of-sale terminals have vendors that produce them in large quantity and they should have the expertise to upgrade the software of the machines that they built.
One can always hire experts with a proven track record to help with the install of the new OS.
Incidentally, many people may have trouble with upgrades to the new OS because
1. Running old hardware
2. Not running quality hardware -- e.g. for Windows laptops traditionally Thinkpads.
3. Do a fresh install. E.g. don't upgrade, but backup the data, clean the disk, do a fresh install.
I use Mac and did the fresh install of Sierra 10.12.1 and then upgrades for point version updates.
I also have been running Windows under Parallels and on Thinkpads prior to 2011 and not had problems with new versions of Windows.
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 push button process.
Shouldn't these stores standardize on vendors? Why would they use different vendors which only adds to complexity unless they've bought out a different store chain and are integrating existing systems?
Also, they should pay the vendors contracts for maintenance instead of trying to do the upgrades themselves. The vendors are generally more likely to do the testing necessary and have the skills for upgrading systems across from various customers.
At any rate, as you put it, eventually they still should do the upgrade.
Even if they do standardize on vendors, they're then also dependent on, say, Oracle Retail supporting a given platform.
If you want your POS to talk to your marketing automation system, that's another integration and maybe another vendor who Oracle may or may not wish to support etc.
There's no way for a bank to standardize on vendors as it's back office systems might have been designed in the 1980s. If it wants to add an iPhone app or mobile payments, it has to rely on another vendor almost automatically.
Making these stacks work generates huge revenues for people like CA, Automic, IBM. Process automation is big business. Big meaty huge Fortune 500 companies held together with the software equivalent of sticky tape.
Of course, but I was talking about the incentives of an average user, which I'm not sure care about security as much as we do.
Just to make what I'm saying more concrete: most people in my home town in Sicily think it's perfectly OK to bring their phones and laptops to some random guy owning a tech-assistance shop and tell him their Facebook/Email passwords straight away so he can reinstall stuff and save their login for them. Do you think they care about upgrading because of "improved security"? I'm not sure they even understand what a security issue is...
Is Windows XP still "good enough"? Even if it still got security fixes, the actual security model it was built on is definitively no longer adequate for the modern world. I'd very much argue Windows 7 is rapidly falling into that territory as well. It's easy to make this "forever Windows 7" argument today, just like it used to be that people could say they were never leaving XP.
But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP.
While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.
Windows 7 did get a majority of the Windows market.
Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.
I don't think moving people from one version of Windows to another counts as an increase in market share.
And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.
And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.
Pro tip: when a for-profit company does something that appears to be uncharacteristically altruistic...
...Aw, heck, you know what? Never mind. Enjoy the garden.
There were advantages for users and advantages for Microsoft. Both sides won.
As for your "garden", anybody can build their own Windows PC and sell it, without restriction. Anybody can write Windows software, and sell it. Anybody can use a Windows PC and software for any purpose they choose.
If you want to attack people for restrictions, you can find far more of them in other parts of the tech world.
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.
> 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?
Even if people would prefer macs and perceive them to be superior (regardless of whether this is true), most aren't willing to shell out the cash for one.
Plus the crowd who cannot have data go to external servers. I would love to use something like Chromebooks but the lack of a local storage server and user management kill it. I got to follow the rules after all.
If I could get a group of Chromebooks that sync with an on-site server then do my backups to someone like Tarsnap, I would be happy and following the local rules.
My experience too. My chromebook has easily been the best value for money computer I've ever purchased, but it's just not the right device for development outside of the web browser. Maybe sometime soon browser based cad tools will become more widely adopted but there are some serious limitations imposed by web browsers that make that difficult to see happening anytime soon.
Personally I'd be quite happy if the market for PC's bifurcated into thin clients on one side and powerful workstations on the other. The user experience for professionals has been compromised by the need to support 'normal' users on both Windows and OS/X.
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.
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 knows if Android/Fuchsia or whatever OS is a proper alternative than.
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, along with Macs, iOS, Android, etc. devices. There's simply no serious effort being put into any UI alternatives. There's some stuff going on in Linux-land that has a minuscule marketshare, but that's about it; even there, the most popular desktop is Gnome3, which is on the same bandwagon in many ways.
Your second point doesn't really hold up - I'm a Windows 10 user, and I don't spend any time even considering Linux UI alternatives because you could show me one that I liked twice as much as Windows and I still wouldn't want to use Linux for my day to day stuff.
I actually don't mind the Windows 10 UI as it happens, but if there were the variety of options for Windows that there are for Linux, I'd certainly see if I could find one I liked more.
If people actually cared about it that much, at the very least there'd be some 3rd-party program available for Windows that would improve the UI, and it'd be selling like hotcakes. I've never heard of any.
I think the windows 10 platform doesn't lend itself very well to 3rd party UIs. It's quite closely coupled to the actual OS.
In a sense though, this is what I consider to be the strength of the windows UI. With the tight coupling, you can make guarantees on the UI covering all possible configuration options. At the same time, it allows a fixed standard of how to implement configuration. (Some of this comes from windows being monolithic)
The end result is a 'unified' UI where there are user-friendly ways to configure a system. Most notably, it is a lot easier to 'explore' the configuration options of windows as opposed to any linux distro.
This is the first I've heard of it. Just like I said before, if the Windows UI were really that hated and unpopular, this thing would be common knowledge and selling like hotcakes. It isn't. Maybe the word just hasn't gotten out enough, but I doubt it.
I do have to say, $9.99 is a pretty good price for this. But this again reinforces my point: if people really hated the Win10 UI that much, a $10 purchase should be nothing to fix it.
Also, I only looked over the link cursorily, but does this fix the whole Metro interface? That's my big complaint with Win10; when you're on the regular desktop, it isn't much different from Win7. It's when you want to load a new program, or use the Settings, or stuff like that you suddenly find yourself in the purple hell that is the Metro UI. If this Windowblinds program is only letting you skin the desktop stuff and not changing the whole start menu, then it's not really fixing the problem, just making the crappy, clunky Win7 desktop more pleasant to use.
WindowBlinds is a very old program - consider it started on OS/2. It used to be very popular back in 90s and 2000s, but its popularity have dropped the last few years. Still, if you find any alternative Windows theme on places like DeviantArt chances are it is made for WindowBlinds. It isn't wildly popular, but it isn't unknown either.
It sounds like it really doesn't affect the whole Metro UI part of Win10, which is the part I have the biggest complaints about UI-wise.
I don't like the Windows desktop that much (I like the start menu and such, I don't like the look and feel and other things, which is why I'm a KDE fan). But I can deal with it fine; it's the Metro stuff that's really horrible to me.
She wasn't implying you should switch to Linux to get the UI alternatives available there. She was saying that there is nobody working on UI alternatives/innovations except for a few people in the Linux space. That everyone had settled on the same basic UI.
She was saying that the alternative UIs aren't popular, and my point is that their low market share is down not only to the UIs themselves but also because of the software they are compatible with.
> 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.
I rather like the clean aesthetic of Windows 10, and am now using it as my main OS. Sure, it's by no means perfect, and there is still work to be done. But by and large I am happier with Windows 10 than with MacOS, Ubuntu, GNOME, and so on.
Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.
No. I have Pro and I can do it. And I think you can download the Group Policy Editor in other versions of Windows, and even if you can't, you can modify the pertinent registry keys.
>Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway.
I think we shouldn't take the defeatist position with respect to surveillance. I know that techies like us can block this kind of traffic at the network edge or chase down the multiple settings it takes to turn this off, but not all users will be this sophisticated.
We should be pushing back against surveillance in how we use our own computers.
> User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.
User analytics and tracking everywhere (including IRL with for instance face recog in shops),
Facebook curious to know if they can manipulate the mood of their users,
Google/Microsoft/Amazon investing in "big AI",
Money doesn't grow on trees,
Do the maths.
Just fix fucking font rendering, I did use Windows machine as my workstation for 4 year (although being in love with linux), But I had to switch to Ubuntu, because of ridiculous font rendering. I don't have money to pay for new monitor every 2 year, and I am quite happy with my dual monitor 27 inch 1080p until windows 10 changed font rendering to DirectWrite. It is fucking disaster in low dpi monitor.
As always Microsoft ignored their current users in pursue of new users. I haven't seen this attitude from any other company. I haven't seen apple make font rendering on old MacBook worse to force people to switch to new MacBooks. Or I haven't seen something similar from Google.
This is fucking total disaster.
As someone who reads text for whole day (programmer) I care about my eyes and it fucking hurts my eye to see font rendering in new UI (UWP) and Edge.
p.s. Old/win32 application do use old rendering engine and are acceptable.
Yeah, I honestly thought I had a hardware issue on a computer I built for my son with a 24" 1080p monitor and it turned out to be Windows 10 font rendering changes.
I use Ubuntu at work and my other Windows 10 machine has 1920x1200 monitors at a distance that makes the rendering regression not easily noticeable.
It's great for small 1080p screens on laptops and 4k monitors though. :-/
We're re-vamping some of our Windows products this year to support high-DPI usage under Windows 10, so if you could be so kind, I would be curious as to what exactly you're seeing that is causing your issue: is it that older Windows applications look blurry because they aren't high-DPI-aware and Windows 10 auto-scales them, or is it that you don't like the high-DPI look because it's too sharp/jagged, looks weird on older monitors, etc. ?
I don't want to piss off our customers by making their usage experience poorer under Windows 10, so I would really appreciate any input you can provide.
Quite the opposite, Microsoft changed their font rendering engine to introduce GreyScale (IIRC), But the problem with this new engine is it is horrible on low-dpi monitor.
Traditionally Windows does have problem with high dpi monitors, but I think there is workaround it (scaling and etc), but with windows 10, fonts on low dpi (by low dpi I mean most of the monitors sold until 1,2 years ago, 20+ inch with 1080p) windows looks like shit (literally). If you are using old framework (WPF and etc) it is okay, because underlying framework is same. Same good old rendering (not in par with Mac or FreeType, but quite acceptable). But if you are using UWP, then quite honestly you are in trouble, in low-dpi monitors. Because Microsoft UWP only does have DirectWrite engine.
The problem with old engine (which is used in Win32, WPF, etc) was it was slow on mobile, and as always Microsoft wanted to compete with Apple and Google on Mobile platform and because they have 99% market share of mobile os. So what is better option than ruining people experience in desktop to force them to switch to WinRT/UWP bullshit ? (I am being sarcastic)
Correct. I use Linux at home. Ubuntu and Mint have nice rendering OOTB, Arch got that great with the Infinality package.
OSX also has decent rendering (albeit too fat for my taste), Windows' subpixelrendering + matching fonts used to give sharp letters, yes too skinny, but legible.
With their new engine, texts are less legible. The letters are still skinny, but now they're also blurry.
All this to cater to the very small fraction that uses Windows on a mobile device; throwing existing desktop users under the bus.
Oh. Is that why the text on the Win10 lock screen on my 1080p monitor looks like it's rendering on a 640x480 display? I'd wondered why it seemed so damn ugly.
This is so strange. I assume I'm blind to those types of things? I can't find any difference between apps here that you can see so clearly. Do you know of a site that goes into detail on what the differences are? I could just be font-rendering blind in the same way some people don't mind bad aspect ratios on their widescreen TV...
There was huge discussion about it in Reddit, I don't know any technical site or blog post about this issue. But the conclusion was Microsoft is not going to fix this issue, unless users make noise.
Thanks, I'll do some searching myself and see what I can find. I'm slightly afraid it's one of those things that will suddenly bother me forever once I notice it though. :)
It got better for Edge after anniversary update. But I would not call that "fixed", because it is not on par with ClearType.
Microsoft can go fuck himself, I am not going change my monitor/hardware everytime he wants. I would be much much happy with my Fedora/Ubuntu, or if I want good support there is always apple much superior to Microsoft.
Exactly, They know their hardware, and trying to optimize their software for their hardware.
Microsoft do know what hardware people use (in third world country I would say 99% of people do use low dpi monitor), but they changed and ruined people experience anyway. That is the main point, they don't care about existing user.
I bet if apple monitors was low-dpi monitor, apple would do everything they can to improve font rendering in their low-dpi monitors.
While 8 tried to make tablet the priority use case, and thus breaking the muscle memory of many long term users, 10 abandons the notion of the owner of the hardware being in charge (sadly one that is increasingly taking root in FOSS circles as well).
Thus you have things like updates being ramrodded through even if the user says no, and keep saying no.
Damn it, i keep having to roll back the driver of my igpu because for some reason MS keep trying to update it along with the dgpu. This even though the support has been discontinued by AMD...
I am a manager at a small architecture firm and Windows 10 has brought nothing but woe to my office. We have spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars troubleshooting and fixing problems (many of which remain unresolved) that occurred as a result of this draconian forced upgrade (and updates that followed). So what if we got the upgrade for free. I've paid for it many times over in labor!
They had a dialog saying "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you closed it or said no it would leave you alone for a bit.
Then it would pop up and say "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you said no it would leave you alone but if you closed it it would assume you were okay with it.
I know a lot of people who woke up one morning and their computer was running Windows 10 without their approval, despite having said 'no' to previous questions.
Right, I am not saying that these dialogs did not exist, were not terrible, and some people did not take the time to read them and inadvertently scheduled an update...
However, I am interested in how this happened to an entire business and they did not simply roll back the upgrade? Instead, they chose spend thousands of dollars trying to work around software issues for apparently no gained benefits.
When I hear complaints like this, basically any complaint about a major technology in use around the world, I am always baffled that the people who have trouble end up blaming the technology, rather than their policies and implementation.
This technology works (almost) flawlessly for hundreds of thousands of people and organizations, the idea that the issues you're experiencing are legitimately the fault of the technology feels... unlikely.
I get that the best technology adapts perfectly to your individual needs, but the idea that you don't have to change a single thing about your business to use a technology just feels, on its face, absurd.
Every time I hear about updates being "forced," yes, Microsoft did some shady things to trick non-tech people into the upgrade which I agree is shady. However any competent IT manager would know how to stop that from happening. Even a cursory google search shows you how to remove the windows update that starts the upgrade. Also all computers on a network domain will not auto update. Each time I read of an IT manager who says he/she was "tricked" into upgrading all I read is "Incompetent IT Manager Makes Massive Mistake"
EDIT: I should probably reference the single small command that stops the bugging notifications and upgrade. Open admin level command line:
Not trusting vendors is part of the job. IT departments will typically turn off automatic updates from vendors, and instead role them out in an automated way that they control.
If they are too slow in doing that, then they are doing it wrong sure. But Microsoft updates do brick computers, undo obscure enterprisy settings, or role out unevenly across your estate so people are on different versions. You want to see if that happens to someone else before you roll out.
This is even more true with windows based servers, where you'd probably want to switch in an alternative or do everything at 3am on Saturday morning.
Black UI magic, to shove users into a certain direction, that needs to be yanked from the registry and forbidden via group policies- and that can be defended?
You know a OS is in a bad spot, if it gathers followers, who attack criticizing experience reports and anecdotes. Who needs truth if one has beauty?
Windows job was to provide a easy, trap-free OS, one where you wouldn't spend weeks with a bomb-defusal kit, looking at the upgrades blowing up systems.
Well at least the victims of the landmine dont have to worry about shipjumping converts of the holy church of the foreboding fruit snapping at them for heresy.
No offense mate, but if you're a manager at an architecture firm and you struggle with Windows upgrades and configuring the updates then perhaps you should find another profession, or hire better help. This stuff isn't rocket science.
IMO the success of Windows 7 was an exception, not the norm. Comparing the adoption rate of Windows 10 to that of Windows 7 might be a little harsh. 24% isn't actually that bad, considering Windows 7 is still good enough.
Windows 10 is a great operating system, but if you have an existing business-critical workflow, why would you update your major version? Stick with what works unless you have a reason to update. It's why some multinational companies are still running COBOL programs after nearly sixty years.
Microsoft is their own worst enemy. My wife can't transition fully from XP to the Windows 7 PC I built for her, because it doesn't have Outlook Express or any reasonable substitute. We can't upgrade the living room PC because Windows 10 doesn't include Media Center.
I'm also not fond of the way Windows 10 updates are so aggressive, you'll essentially be replacing your OS every so often without any say-so. If I had any faith that this would be painless I might be tempted to try it, but see above. Windows 7 is darn near perfect, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Are you sure it doesn't let you just turn the service off in services.msc? I can't find any references online to the Home edition having that behavior.
Because it already came with Windows and was exactly what we needed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If the PC dies someday and needs to be replaced, I might look into avoiding Windows altogether.
Media center was pretty good when it was released but it's kind of "meh" these days. I understand "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." but sometimes it's actually nice to have something new.
There was a version of it for Windows 8 as well. I was completing the chain for anyone curious about application lineage that wasn't opposed to Windows 8+.
Yes, there were substitutes available, but didn't meet one requirement or another. And Windows 7 appears to fall into a gap where Microsoft was changing email strategies and left it completely uncovered.
It's a paid option, but I've found Postbox to be the least annoying those rare instances when I need to check my email on my gaming PC. https://www.postbox-inc.com
>The business world has been even more recalcitrant. In a recent study by Softchoice, an info-tech consultancy, corporate computers were found to be running a whole gamut of legacy versions of Windows. Fewer than 1% of them had been upgraded to Windows 10.
One thing I've learned over the years: you don't need a high IQ to run a successful business. Without a lot of smarts you're never going to compete with google, but you don't need to compete with google to make a living running your own business.
>Chromebooks are now outselling MacBooks in the crucial education market, where long-term preferences tend to be established.
It's unfortunate that proprietary software ever came to dominate schooling. Hopefully ChromeOS will open things up just enough so that cross platform tools become the norm. Schools using both Windows and Chrome will be more aware of proprietary/incompatible software and file formats and choose to use open formats.
>It is impossible to retrofit older Windows versions with the sort of defense-in-depth that has been built into Windows 10. Nor would Microsoft do so even if it could. If anything, it is about to do the opposite. Windows 7 users will soon lose access to a stand-alone toolkit for mitigating zero-day exploits.
Another reason why Windows is a joke OS for serious tech enthusiasts.
>A word of warning, though: such upgrades do not necessarily go without a hitch. A Windows 10 tablet your correspondent relied upon for much of his mobile computing was broken irreparably when a recent update corrupted the display driver, rendering the touchscreen useless.
......... makes you wonder why they lock these things down, are tech enthusiasts even designing them?
>But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10.
Yes I prefer Linux to Windows in most cases too. I never have good long term experiences with Windows.
>It used to be that only free software came with advertising; users paid a fee, if they chose to do so, to get the software free of advertising. Microsoft charges top dollar for Windows 10 ($120 or $200, depending on the edition) and now wants to bombard users with sales pitches to boot—without so much as by your leave, let alone the option to turn the nuisance off. Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.
Yeah these days pretty much the only people who are using Windows are people who don't know any better. Most people aren't even exposed to Linux except those of us in the tech sector, and it seems to be just as popular as windows and OS X at the shops I've worked at.
What makes a serious tech enthusiast? I consider myself one and I enjoy using Windows 10 as my desktop PC. I have had almost no issues or qualms with how Windows 10 has performed for me since launch.
I dont know why name Windows 10 a fail, when the bigger competitors of Windows are... Windows! Mac and Linux mostly are used for niche users (as us). I'm really really happy we CAN upgrade for a new Windows version easily, just compare with Android. More: the reason to most people dont upgrade isn't why "Windows 7 is better than Windows 10", but the actual reason is they are comfortable with Win7 and dont want/can take time to "learn" a new OS. Even Win7 being an awesome OS, took years to take most of XP users (even today there are a lot of loyal XP users out there...)
Android and iOS have probably surpassed windows in number of consumer installations.
The PC will be invaded by Android at some point, and it will be like a blitzkreig when it happens. Google would make all their money back shortly off of appstore sales.
As much as I enjoy using Android on mobile, Google's horrible track record with security updates means I'll be appalled if after all the noise people have made about Win 10's privacy, they accept Android with Google everywhere + security updates EOL after 3 years...
That's already happened, PC sales have already declined in favor of mobile years ago. And contrary to what people may think, appstore sales are also not really on the rise, and most users don't install any new apps in their phone monthly.
I also don't think you can have this discussion without talking about the influence the NSA and OGA's are having on big tech companies products. If game developers really pulled their shit together and started doing AAA/AA titles on linux you would quickly see the piss taken out of the likes of M$.
I'm normally very fond of The Economist, but this is one of their "blog posts", which seem to not receive quite the same careful, nuanced care that their other articles for their weekly edition do.
Part of the challenge of Windows 10 was the transformation of Windows from a large-release product into a trickle-release service with much faster cycle times with an incremental and continuously-learned approach to ongoing product changes.
At it's core, that's a valid and (I think) mostly welcome change, but Microsoft's solution to the impedance mismatch between the two categories of offering was to force it down and ask for forgiveness later. :/
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 423 ms ] threadhttps://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-hardware-survey-windows-10-ad...
If I misunderstood your meaning, then this comment can just be a clarification instead of a correction :)
How can I trust your nit-picky, pedantic complaint when you believe the article is in the WSJ rather than the Economist?
The Windows 7 machine is only for gaming / steam, I never browse the internet on there and have pretty strict firewall ruleset. To be honest, I would consider upgrading it to 10, but I missed the free window, so I really don't fancy paying for it.
My hope is that by the time that Windows 7 goes EOL, I can delete it and game just on Linux. Either that or I will get a console (as most of my gaming takes place in my living room anyhow, using a steam box).
More like a threat ;)
But I've decided that this is the end of the line for me and Microsoft. They lost me forever due to the spyware / monitoring debacle of Win10. If ever there is a technological forced upgrade to 10, then I'm simply out of luck -- no more upgrades past 7. I'm done.
It will replace the start menu with one that is actually functional and usable. With it installed, I actually rather quite like Windows 10 now.
http://www.classicshell.net/
Linux gets refugees both from Windows and MacOS because MS just keeps messing Windows up (seems to be happening every other version), and Apple simply lets MacOS rot by not giving it any attention.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=...
> Apple updates macOS every year.
I hear complaints from MacOS users about the bit rot all the time. Where is OpenGL 4.5 for instance? And not just graphics. Many simply feel it's completely stagnated, because Apple are too busy with their mobile delirium, and don't care about desktop anymore.
Having access to it pre-installed which you mentioned too is however the issue.
Here's a 2 minute demo of "Snap Assist" which is turned on by default in Windows 10. Near the end you can see the user snapping three documents into place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8yTBLEj3c
It gets a major update every year?
Yeah, so where is OpenGL 4.5?
> There have been some issues, specifically around certain drivers, issues with Mesa and Intel hardware. I’m hoping all of those are behind us and will remain so. Unlike a lot of other communities, Linux users are quite aware of a lot of the issues with their platform and will usually be OK to wait for an update to fix their issues.
This is opposed to OSX where the updates break things horribly. The support for the OpenGL standard in their drivers has been lacklustre for years and it's only getting worse. They now want developers to move to their proprietary API Metal, but I'm jaded enough not to fall for that. And don't even get me started on having to shell out £3000 for a mid spec dev machine.
Case in point, I've heard several times how people were saying, they are ditching MacOS, because Wine developers aren't going to support DX11 games there, courtesy of Apple not updating OpenGL.
Sierra brought tabbed applications and a bunch of other end-user features [1]. As for the more technically minded, there's a new filesystem coming this year [2].
I won't defend Apple's treatment of Mac hardware recently, but the software itself does get regular updates for security, performance, and features, regardless of how one subjectively feels about them. Personally I think it's a rather visually ugly operating system and has weird quirks like awful keyboard shortcuts, and I'm mad that they removed a feature (the battery time remaining) but generally functions well for my specific use case.
[1] http://au.pcmag.com/macintosh-os-x/43679/feature/10-things-y...
[2] http://www.cultofmac.com/435718/apfs-new-apple-file-system/
Telemetry aside, can anyone comment on this?
A lot of security features found in the previously stand-alone EMET are slowly being ported over natively to Win10, for example. It comes with a built-in AV which is pretty good. Smartscreen is unusually good at warning about suspicious executables and I've seen it stop ransomware attacks. VBS makes it harder for hackers to modify system or protected files. Secureboot and bitlocker support are useful in some scenarios. Device guard is supposed to helpful but I'm not sure how it works. Windows hello can replace the traditional password with camera or fingerprint auth cooked-in, which is probably a step in the right direction, although I'd rather see passphrases become more common. Cameras and fingerprints seem gimmmicky and not all my computers have those things.
* BitLocker: Hard-drive encryption backed by TPM & Secure Boot
With the above two and DMA protection, physical access attacks become very difficult.
* Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) - separate OS running on the hypervisor that can perform sensitive operations. Which enables:
1. Device Guard - Runs code integrity protection, i.e. only allowing signed code to run, from within the VSM.
2. Credential Guard - Runs user-mode security subsystem (LSA) inside VSM.
If that's the secret sauce that makes Win10 so much better, color me unimpressed. And neither of those features offer additional protection against zero-days (neither does VSM), which are what the TFA discusses.
Physical attacks aren't part of my threat model on a desktop PC. Indeed these protections feel more like DRM - trying to protect the computer from the (legitimate) user.
iOS being totally locked down in this way is no small part of why exploits for that platform sell for so much more money than exploits for other platforms. Of course, it is also used for DRM on that platform.
And without Secure Boot and/or TPM-backed key management, hard disk encryption becomes vulnerable to someone planting a modified boot loader or firmware on your system.
Absent evidence to the contrary, I presume that OpenBSD is more secure than any Windows, even Windows 10, but has considerably fewer features. Do you know of actual evidence?
But for an RMS-level of paranoia, I might have to go with RTEMS on a FPGA acting as a J-Core (SuperH-2) CPU.
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 + learning to navigate the new system + solving whatever goes wrong during the process). And that this is not just limited to "novices": I've heard wonderful things about Arch Linux, but my Ubuntu system works well enough and I've been using it for forever, so the incentives are pretty low and the time to be invested pretty high.
I've never had the experience you describe; which app(s) are you talking about which need to be bought repeatedly with no new functionality?
You should try it. It's fun!
This is why I switched back to Debian. Updating is stress-free and there's no downside to doing it as often as you like.
Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want. But let's say you didn't want to do that, because you got tired of having a system full of cruft due to all these funky pieces of software scattered about the system that the package manager had no clue about - oh my!
So - you want to install the software as a package under Arch. Oh - and just to make things more fun, the software is something proprietary and closed-source. There is more than a few bits of useful Linux software out there like this - much of it niche areas where a) probably no one else in the Arch community uses, and b) it's proprietary - so you can't distribute it anyhow.
What does Arch require you to do in this situation? Well - last time I looked anyhow - and that was a couple of years ago, so maybe something has changed... It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.
That's basically the process I read about for any kind of software package for Arch; it was a very heavy manual process. While other package management schemes do require some manual effort, none of them that I recall seemed to require as much effort as Arch's did. This wouldn't normally be an issue with most open-source software, because once you made that package, it could be distributed and used by the community. But for a proprietary software package, only you could use it - so it was a ton of extra work for little gain in the end.
Don't get me wrong - I liked Arch, and their community support and forums, wiki, etc - is pretty top-notch (I like to use that part of the ecosystem myself for help and hint purposes when I need it). I honestly think it is a great distro, but it does have some drawbacks to it (and they probably don't have good solutions, either).
> Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want.
Yep, stop right there, do that.
This might be technically correct (not completely sure), but hugely misleading. Packages are defined by PKGBUILD scripts. When you run `makepkg` to create a package, it creates a directory called $pkgdir. In your PKGBUILD, you just delegate to whatever installer came with the source code & tell it to install into $pkgdir. e.g. `make install --prefix=$pkgdir`. makepkg takes all the files in $pkgdir and tars them and bam - there's your package.
If you look in most PKGBUILDs, they contain some metadata (where to get the sources, etc), and then it's more or less:
That's all you need for quite a few packages.And if you're dealing with a non-source package that doesn't have an installer and isn't self-contained, then installing/packaging it is difficult on any OS - not just Arch!
For reference, here's a PKGBUILD for a non-source, proprietary application. It's pretty much as above, but includes some fancy .desktop files & such, too. https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=disco...
It's manifest, by the way.
Not really.
Arch was a PITA. FreeBSD has a smoother install (not a compliment to Arch).
Followed the instructions, hit a few snags, and resolved them by reading the wiki.
It's all about audience. OpenBSD's installer is a thing of beauty for technical people. I can see where it would be daunting and texty to someone who's never touched a command line, but that isn't the audience.
At this point, I feel forcing technical users through a plodding GUI install wizard is as cruel as making grandma install OpenBSD with a complicated RAID configuration and volume encryption.
I find I care about the applications I use: my IDE, git client, console, and the various web apps I use. I don't so much care about my browser UI, as long as it gets out of the way and shows me what URL I'm on and renders the page.
Likewise, I don't care about the UI of the OS itself, as long as it does its job properly: lets me start and switch between apps, connects to wifi, manages the display power, and sleeps and wakes up.
When I'm looking at the computer screen, I'm looking at what I'm doing, not the UI chrome. Even now, I'm only paying attention to this comment text box and your original message.. Everything else -- all the other tabs I have open, the visible bits of the OS, the other window open on my next monitor -- all blends into the background and gets ignored.
Given that the upgrade was free just as in the case of a linux upgrade the good enough point should consider these factors as well.
Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.
Between each significant revision of Apple's desktop OS, my mother would get frustrated at settings that were moved elsewhere/renamed/removed entirely, for example. OSX is no stranger to unnecessary changes (or at least that's what my mother thinks of them).
It used to be that cmd-h hid an application and moved it to the end of the application stack. If you wanted it back you could use cmd-shift-tab.
Some suit, in their wisdom, decided to change that so cmd-h now only hides the app.
It's a tiny change ...that's a stone in my shoe every single day. IMHO that change is was completely unnecessary and breaks my workflow.
There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption.
Note:
Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.
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 points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.
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.
When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.
Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately.
I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.
It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.
OSX/macOS promoted their point releases to be something between service packs and major version releases, keeping it at version "X" for marketing purposes. From what I can see, between Cheetah and Sierra the expected workflow of the system has changed strongly a few times.
I don't recall them saying that.
Imagine if it was 1955 and we thought it was a good idea to randomly go into every company every year or two and say "Alright, this inventory system, this time tracking system, this customer service system... All of it, right out. Progress is here folks, and you don't want to be change averse. Time for some new fresh paper."
It's ludicrous. One thing you learn very quickly in business is that companies have little or not stomach for doing things that do not make them money. Every minute or dollar you spend on them appears to be money down the toilet. So if Microsoft wants people to use Windows 10 they need to offer more than hand-wavey bullshit about features and progress and security, because all of that stinks to high heaven of a company trying to convince its customers to give it more money because it wants more money - not because it's offering anything of real value to the customer.
For example, Target and Home Depot were hacked because they failed to upgrade their point-of-sale hardware from Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later which was an upgrade recommended by Microsoft. Windows XP embedded had a security flaw later patched in later versions of Windows.
One can always hire experts with a proven track record to help with the install of the new OS.
Incidentally, many people may have trouble with upgrades to the new OS because 1. Running old hardware 2. Not running quality hardware -- e.g. for Windows laptops traditionally Thinkpads. 3. Do a fresh install. E.g. don't upgrade, but backup the data, clean the disk, do a fresh install.
I use Mac and did the fresh install of Sierra 10.12.1 and then upgrades for point version updates.
I also have been running Windows under Parallels and on Thinkpads prior to 2011 and not had problems with new versions of Windows.
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 push button process.
Also, they should pay the vendors contracts for maintenance instead of trying to do the upgrades themselves. The vendors are generally more likely to do the testing necessary and have the skills for upgrading systems across from various customers.
At any rate, as you put it, eventually they still should do the upgrade.
If you want your POS to talk to your marketing automation system, that's another integration and maybe another vendor who Oracle may or may not wish to support etc.
There's no way for a bank to standardize on vendors as it's back office systems might have been designed in the 1980s. If it wants to add an iPhone app or mobile payments, it has to rely on another vendor almost automatically.
Making these stacks work generates huge revenues for people like CA, Automic, IBM. Process automation is big business. Big meaty huge Fortune 500 companies held together with the software equivalent of sticky tape.
http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Wind...
Just to make what I'm saying more concrete: most people in my home town in Sicily think it's perfectly OK to bring their phones and laptops to some random guy owning a tech-assistance shop and tell him their Facebook/Email passwords straight away so he can reinstall stuff and save their login for them. Do you think they care about upgrading because of "improved security"? I'm not sure they even understand what a security issue is...
But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP.
While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.
Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.
And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.
Pro tip: when a for-profit company does something that appears to be uncharacteristically altruistic...
...Aw, heck, you know what? Never mind. Enjoy the garden.
As for your "garden", anybody can build their own Windows PC and sell it, without restriction. Anybody can write Windows software, and sell it. Anybody can use a Windows PC and software for any purpose they choose.
If you want to attack people for restrictions, you can find far more of them in other parts of the tech world.
If you have hardware that only runs in XP you don't care.
I have more than a few Windows 7 installations that are nothing but hosts for virtual machines that run XP.
Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.
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?
If I could get a group of Chromebooks that sync with an on-site server then do my backups to someone like Tarsnap, I would be happy and following the local rules.
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.
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, along with Macs, iOS, Android, etc. devices. There's simply no serious effort being put into any UI alternatives. There's some stuff going on in Linux-land that has a minuscule marketshare, but that's about it; even there, the most popular desktop is Gnome3, which is on the same bandwagon in many ways.
I actually don't mind the Windows 10 UI as it happens, but if there were the variety of options for Windows that there are for Linux, I'd certainly see if I could find one I liked more.
Same goes for MacOS, iOS, and Android.
In a sense though, this is what I consider to be the strength of the windows UI. With the tight coupling, you can make guarantees on the UI covering all possible configuration options. At the same time, it allows a fixed standard of how to implement configuration. (Some of this comes from windows being monolithic)
The end result is a 'unified' UI where there are user-friendly ways to configure a system. Most notably, it is a lot easier to 'explore' the configuration options of windows as opposed to any linux distro.
I do have to say, $9.99 is a pretty good price for this. But this again reinforces my point: if people really hated the Win10 UI that much, a $10 purchase should be nothing to fix it.
Also, I only looked over the link cursorily, but does this fix the whole Metro interface? That's my big complaint with Win10; when you're on the regular desktop, it isn't much different from Win7. It's when you want to load a new program, or use the Settings, or stuff like that you suddenly find yourself in the purple hell that is the Metro UI. If this Windowblinds program is only letting you skin the desktop stuff and not changing the whole start menu, then it's not really fixing the problem, just making the crappy, clunky Win7 desktop more pleasant to use.
I don't like the Windows desktop that much (I like the start menu and such, I don't like the look and feel and other things, which is why I'm a KDE fan). But I can deal with it fine; it's the Metro stuff that's really horrible to me.
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.
However, I averted all of the oft-complained about issues of Windows 10 by specifically installing the Win. 10 LTSB (N) version.
Some perks to note of:
* No bloatware
* Updates every 60-90 days (as opposed to the oppressive every 5-7 days); choice to reboot auto or not.
* No Windows Media Player
* No MSFT Edge; Only Windows Explorer classic
* Classic calculator
* No Windows App Store
* No background apps
* No upselling shenanigans annoying my experience
* No MSFT cloud
* Cortana is removed completely not disabled
* Mission-critical updates only...avoids needless flair in favor of stable security.
All in all, I would highly recommend it.
Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.
Where is that option? Also, it's easy to get a browser that doesn't phone home and a plugin that stops websites from doing it.
I think we shouldn't take the defeatist position with respect to surveillance. I know that techies like us can block this kind of traffic at the network edge or chase down the multiple settings it takes to turn this off, but not all users will be this sophisticated.
We should be pushing back against surveillance in how we use our own computers.
User analytics and tracking everywhere (including IRL with for instance face recog in shops), Facebook curious to know if they can manipulate the mood of their users, Google/Microsoft/Amazon investing in "big AI", Money doesn't grow on trees, Do the maths.
You calling things "tropes" or "user analytics" doesn't change anything, and having to use euphemisms tells me deep down inside you know this, too.
Also, no.
Design language is getting an update.
As always Microsoft ignored their current users in pursue of new users. I haven't seen this attitude from any other company. I haven't seen apple make font rendering on old MacBook worse to force people to switch to new MacBooks. Or I haven't seen something similar from Google.
This is fucking total disaster.
As someone who reads text for whole day (programmer) I care about my eyes and it fucking hurts my eye to see font rendering in new UI (UWP) and Edge.
p.s. Old/win32 application do use old rendering engine and are acceptable.
I use Ubuntu at work and my other Windows 10 machine has 1920x1200 monitors at a distance that makes the rendering regression not easily noticeable.
It's great for small 1080p screens on laptops and 4k monitors though. :-/
Do you see the irony? Microsoft does suffer from mismanagement.
You should never ever mess with your current user experience to improve your imaginary users experience.
I don't want to piss off our customers by making their usage experience poorer under Windows 10, so I would really appreciate any input you can provide.
Traditionally Windows does have problem with high dpi monitors, but I think there is workaround it (scaling and etc), but with windows 10, fonts on low dpi (by low dpi I mean most of the monitors sold until 1,2 years ago, 20+ inch with 1080p) windows looks like shit (literally). If you are using old framework (WPF and etc) it is okay, because underlying framework is same. Same good old rendering (not in par with Mac or FreeType, but quite acceptable). But if you are using UWP, then quite honestly you are in trouble, in low-dpi monitors. Because Microsoft UWP only does have DirectWrite engine.
The problem with old engine (which is used in Win32, WPF, etc) was it was slow on mobile, and as always Microsoft wanted to compete with Apple and Google on Mobile platform and because they have 99% market share of mobile os. So what is better option than ruining people experience in desktop to force them to switch to WinRT/UWP bullshit ? (I am being sarcastic)
OSX also has decent rendering (albeit too fat for my taste), Windows' subpixelrendering + matching fonts used to give sharp letters, yes too skinny, but legible.
With their new engine, texts are less legible. The letters are still skinny, but now they're also blurry.
All this to cater to the very small fraction that uses Windows on a mobile device; throwing existing desktop users under the bus.
UWP (which most of the internal app are porting into it), does use DirectWrite and there is no way to change its font rendering engine to ClearType.
Discussion of technical challenge is here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...
Microsoft can go fuck himself, I am not going change my monitor/hardware everytime he wants. I would be much much happy with my Fedora/Ubuntu, or if I want good support there is always apple much superior to Microsoft.
Microsoft do know what hardware people use (in third world country I would say 99% of people do use low dpi monitor), but they changed and ruined people experience anyway. That is the main point, they don't care about existing user.
I bet if apple monitors was low-dpi monitor, apple would do everything they can to improve font rendering in their low-dpi monitors.
Do you see the mindset?
While 8 tried to make tablet the priority use case, and thus breaking the muscle memory of many long term users, 10 abandons the notion of the owner of the hardware being in charge (sadly one that is increasingly taking root in FOSS circles as well).
Thus you have things like updates being ramrodded through even if the user says no, and keep saying no.
Damn it, i keep having to roll back the driver of my igpu because for some reason MS keep trying to update it along with the dgpu. This even though the support has been discontinued by AMD...
What are you talking about? The modern prevalence of binary firmware blobs is the only concern I can think of in this area.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/232599-microsoft-slapp...
https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-pays-woman-10000-over-fo...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=windows+10+forced+upgrade
The X button as an agree thing goes a bit too far though, i think.
Either way, I love my win 10. shrug
Then it would pop up and say "Hey, do you want to upgrade?" and if you said no it would leave you alone but if you closed it it would assume you were okay with it.
I know a lot of people who woke up one morning and their computer was running Windows 10 without their approval, despite having said 'no' to previous questions.
However, I am interested in how this happened to an entire business and they did not simply roll back the upgrade? Instead, they chose spend thousands of dollars trying to work around software issues for apparently no gained benefits.
This technology works (almost) flawlessly for hundreds of thousands of people and organizations, the idea that the issues you're experiencing are legitimately the fault of the technology feels... unlikely.
I get that the best technology adapts perfectly to your individual needs, but the idea that you don't have to change a single thing about your business to use a technology just feels, on its face, absurd.
EDIT: I should probably reference the single small command that stops the bugging notifications and upgrade. Open admin level command line:
wusa /uninstall /KB:3035583
If they are too slow in doing that, then they are doing it wrong sure. But Microsoft updates do brick computers, undo obscure enterprisy settings, or role out unevenly across your estate so people are on different versions. You want to see if that happens to someone else before you roll out.
This is even more true with windows based servers, where you'd probably want to switch in an alternative or do everything at 3am on Saturday morning.
But at the same time, for an OS company being trustworthy is part of their job.
You know a OS is in a bad spot, if it gathers followers, who attack criticizing experience reports and anecdotes. Who needs truth if one has beauty?
Windows job was to provide a easy, trap-free OS, one where you wouldn't spend weeks with a bomb-defusal kit, looking at the upgrades blowing up systems.
Well at least the victims of the landmine dont have to worry about shipjumping converts of the holy church of the foreboding fruit snapping at them for heresy.
Temporarily stops; that update didn't reliably stay dead.
I'm also not fond of the way Windows 10 updates are so aggressive, you'll essentially be replacing your OS every so often without any say-so. If I had any faith that this would be painless I might be tempted to try it, but see above. Windows 7 is darn near perfect, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
If you have the pro version, you can control this. I don't even have regular updates install automatically.
Did you try with Mozilla Thunderbird?
One thing I've learned over the years: you don't need a high IQ to run a successful business. Without a lot of smarts you're never going to compete with google, but you don't need to compete with google to make a living running your own business.
>Chromebooks are now outselling MacBooks in the crucial education market, where long-term preferences tend to be established.
It's unfortunate that proprietary software ever came to dominate schooling. Hopefully ChromeOS will open things up just enough so that cross platform tools become the norm. Schools using both Windows and Chrome will be more aware of proprietary/incompatible software and file formats and choose to use open formats.
>It is impossible to retrofit older Windows versions with the sort of defense-in-depth that has been built into Windows 10. Nor would Microsoft do so even if it could. If anything, it is about to do the opposite. Windows 7 users will soon lose access to a stand-alone toolkit for mitigating zero-day exploits.
Another reason why Windows is a joke OS for serious tech enthusiasts.
>A word of warning, though: such upgrades do not necessarily go without a hitch. A Windows 10 tablet your correspondent relied upon for much of his mobile computing was broken irreparably when a recent update corrupted the display driver, rendering the touchscreen useless.
......... makes you wonder why they lock these things down, are tech enthusiasts even designing them?
>But he has also dusted down his four-year-old Apple MacBook Pro and upgraded his Windows 7 desktop to the latest version of Linux Mint rather than Windows 10.
Yes I prefer Linux to Windows in most cases too. I never have good long term experiences with Windows.
>It used to be that only free software came with advertising; users paid a fee, if they chose to do so, to get the software free of advertising. Microsoft charges top dollar for Windows 10 ($120 or $200, depending on the edition) and now wants to bombard users with sales pitches to boot—without so much as by your leave, let alone the option to turn the nuisance off. Despite their idiosyncrasies, Macintosh and Linux have never looked so attractive.
Yeah these days pretty much the only people who are using Windows are people who don't know any better. Most people aren't even exposed to Linux except those of us in the tech sector, and it seems to be just as popular as windows and OS X at the shops I've worked at.
The PC will be invaded by Android at some point, and it will be like a blitzkreig when it happens. Google would make all their money back shortly off of appstore sales.
As much as I enjoy using Android on mobile, Google's horrible track record with security updates means I'll be appalled if after all the noise people have made about Win 10's privacy, they accept Android with Google everywhere + security updates EOL after 3 years...
Windows 7 Home Premium (Upgrade) $119.99
Windows 7 Home Premium (Full) $199.99
Windows 7 Family Pack (Upgrade, retail only) $149.99
Windows 7 Professional (Upgrade) $199.99
Windows 7 Professional (Full) $299.99
Windows 7 Ultimate (Upgrade) $219.99
Windows 7 Ultimate (Full) $319.99
$150 seems completely in line with pricing of previous windows versions.
Somehow Chrome always freezes every few minutes. Didn't do this on Win8.1 or Win7 :/
Part of the challenge of Windows 10 was the transformation of Windows from a large-release product into a trickle-release service with much faster cycle times with an incremental and continuously-learned approach to ongoing product changes.
At it's core, that's a valid and (I think) mostly welcome change, but Microsoft's solution to the impedance mismatch between the two categories of offering was to force it down and ask for forgiveness later. :/