I guess it is the trend in software now. 'Move fast and break things'. Started with games, now with Operating Systems.
I agree, there was a lot of duality in Windows 8 with Metro and classical Windows menus/programs, and they still seem to exist with 10. I even have "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" option in control panel and yet I upgraded from a clean install of Windows 8.1.
I actually need the "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" option as, as far as I know, there is no other way to do the disk image backup or restore of my Windows computers without having to use the third party programs. The problem there is naming it "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" and not just "Disk Image Backup and Restore" or something like that. The funny name comes from some managerial decision to hint that it's "unmodern" (hey, an old Windows version!) way to do the backup now with the push for ho-ho clouds.
> as far as I know, there is no other way to do the disk image backup or restore of my Windows computers without having to use the third party programs.
Since Windows 7, Microsoft has provided imagex.exe; it's typically used in high-volume disk imaging applications, but you can easily use it to snapshot or restore an entire installation.
> you can easily use it to snapshot or restore an entire installation.
"Easily"? Any link? As far as I know imagex.exe has less functionality than the "backup and restore" application, former being a simpler command line utility (1). Specifically, how would anybody without any programming experience (step by step)
- perform the regular backup in order to be prepared for the case his hard disk "dies."
- restore from his backup once the new hard disk is inserted in the computer. As far as I know, especially the repartitioning steps are far from being trivial and not done by imagex.
"Backup and restore" are GUI based tools, easy to be explained and used by non-professionals to do the full local backups of their computers. The same thing we can still do with iPhone and iTunes (a button in iTunes starting the complete backup of the iPhone, and restoring simply with the another button). Why should I purchase the third party program or do unknown amount of programming to do something like that on a Windows computer?
I call it web-ification. More and more programmers likely get their feet wet doing JS/PHP on some site or other, and bring their rapid iteration thinking from there on to compiled projects.
As long as the functionality is there and basic improvements have been made, I'm not at all upset. I got my upgrade for free, and I'm enjoying several of the new features (especially multiple desktops, welcome to the 21st century Microsoft).
We've all released minimum viable products before. Hell, "early access" is dominating video games in particular. As long as they continue to improve and have a stable, steady release schedule with tangible results, then I think it was a good move on Microsoft's part. Especially since the longer they waited the more entrenched users of Windows 7 & 8 would become, just like they did with XP.
Windows 10 appears to suffer from the "pick a date" style of project management. A date was chosen before the project started and that's the day it was released regardless of any issues that cropped up in development.
And rolling release is a good model and it seems to be working fantastically for browsers but it's predicated on not releasing features until they are ready. But Windows 10 is a marketed product with features that all had to exist on day 1. So instead of a stable core to work from we get a big ball of muddled together.
I'm hoping now that the date is passed and the features are all in there that there is nothing left to do but fix everything. The (slow) rolling releases of XP worked well so I too have high hopes for Windows 10. But I'll be waiting for a while before I upgrade.
I don't really agree with the author. I find Windows 10 to be a step up from 8.1. Also, a fair comparison might be to verion 8 when it first came out, right?
I think Microsoft and Apple are on a good path: keeping the same major version number for their OS, and just continually bring out little changes.
This keeps getting mentioned in various places, but it's nonsense. We're talking about a tiny number of obscure Java programs which do the insane thing of checking OS version by string rather than with numbers.
For the five people on Earth actually affected by this, there's always compatibility mode.
When this first started to be mentioned, I saw multiple people claiming drivers checking for 95/98 was the driving factor. There are a lot of obscure drivers still in production and I don't know of a 'compatibility mode' for drivers.
They probably also thought ahead a bit on how it would wind up getting abbreviated, used, or misused by the public. I recall when the XBox One came out and everybody called it the XBone, several folks on the XBox One team were upset about it.
If there's a Windows 9 it might eventually turn into Roman numerals, so then you've got Windows IX, which could turn into Winix or Wix, or in a particularly bad case "Windows Icks".
Then why not Windows 11? These guys are just not ambitious enough.
I imagine it did play some role but as a child comment notes, the regex checks for Windows 9\d* in order to capture both 95 and 98 in a few languages that exposed versions like that probably played a much larger role. Accommodations that were made for those incredibly old systems could very easily have caused some big problems if they matched on Windows 9.
I too find it to be a step up from Windows 8, but it broke some things related to tablet use, which Microsoft got right with 8.
I did a similar personal review when 8 came out, and did not write about it, because while Metro was outrageous, it was more or less well confined (you could use the desktop and not worry about it). Now they went further with the integration but still left it unfinished/unpolished.
Except that OS X versions are generally not this buggy on release IMHO. Really the dual interfaces to the same thing are the worst part of Windows 10 right now.
I have been using it for the last 5yrs or so. While I have run into 1-2 little issues here and there I have never experienced the level of duplicate interfaces that do the same thing and not knowing where to go to do something. While I use OS X as my primary I need to use (and test) with Windows for some things. I feel utterly lost in Win10 (and largely in 8 as well) because the interfaces they force on you make statements about OS X "Fisher-price-y ease of use/dumbing down" pale in comparison. That's what I focused on in my comment:
> Really the dual interfaces to the same thing are the worst part of Windows 10 right now.
If they keep the trend there will also be at least 4 different folders called Photos in 4 different places by default, and none of them goes to the same photos.
The technical debt will catch Apple, it's not if, but when, and from my view it's getting worse with every release. I'm curious to see if Google's willingness to just abandon things that are holding them back will pay off.
Apple's obviously not just letting the technical debt pile up. They've put a lot of effort in to addressing it in a lot of areas. Some of it hasn't resulted in a usable replacement (ZFS, discoveryd), but other areas have been modernized (LLVM, launchd, Core whatever frameworks, Gatekeeper).
Microsoft historically released a good OS version at about every 2 major versions... could Windows 10 be the start of a good version at every 3 major release?
I know this is internet canon, but is questionable, in my experience.
x DOS - passable
o Windows 1 - bad
o Windows 2 - bad
x Windows 3.1x - good
x Windows NT 3.5 - good
x Windows 95 - good
x Windows NT 4 - good
x Windows 98 - better
x Windows 2000 - great
o Windows ME - bad
x Windows XP - better than 9x/ME, on par with 2000, eventually long in the tooth and outdated
o Windows Vista - bad
x Windows 7 - good
o Windows 8 - bad
o Windows 10 - ???
The NT lineage was reasonably good prior to Vista (in the context of that OS family). The DOS lineage was reasonable good until ME (again, in the context of that OS family).
XP was a significant improvement over the DOS lineage, however, Microsoft had a reasonably good run in the 90s and early 00s.
I'd include the point releases in that. XP once it was patched was awesome, but I recall nothing but problems prior to SP1-2. There's also 8.1, which fixed a lot of people's W8 complaints.
I pretty much agree with you except for the fact that NT3.5 and NT4 should not be included in this list because they were not consumer versions... and I would rate DOS as good. Also, I am not sure if 8.1 should be considered a major as I never used it.
I think this guy brings up a lot of good points about windows 10, but isn't that the point of this OS, to be incrementally updated based on all the user data they are pulling from us?
They could use more polish, but I they got rid of one thing that bugged the hell out of me from windows 8. Apps. Every time I slid my mouse to the right I inevitably was on the edge and opened the last app. Infuriating. I had to disable that feature every time.
Windowed apps are an improvement, and I really hope they listen to their customers and improve the OS.
That COULD have been the point but when you push (hard) to get everyone to upgrade on release day you can't really hide behind that IMHO. Using Win10 previews regularly made me want to pull out my hair (which was my general feeling with Win8 as well).
Didn't they actually try to slow people down from upgrading release day? I mean what I read everywhere is that (paraphrasing), "when windows 10 is ready on your PC you'll see a pop up, but register now."
Then you could just go and force the upgrade if you are impatient (like me).
I would not blame you, although the press seems to think that most people have been 'skipping' Windows 8/8.1 remaining on 7.
As for the next version, Microsoft made a big claim that this is the "last" windows version because they have made everything in the system upgradable. Thus all future upgrades will come as package changes through Windows Update and the "version" will forever be Windows 10 (so why not just call it Windows? I don't know)
I'm curious about future versions too. It's possible there will be no more, and Windows 10 is just a rolling release. If that is going to be the case, then you'll need to wait until people tell you that the updates up to that point were enough to make it "OK enough".
Funny, I'm on Windows 7 and when 8 came out, I thought "I'm skipping 8 and waiting for the next one."
Now that 10 is out, it looks like it fixes a lot of the issues I had/read about with 8. Granted, I'm definitely not going to install until 10.1 (aka "SP1") but assuming they don't try to turn the OS into a cloud-connected clusterfuck, I'm going to give it a shot.
I did have Windows 8 in a VM and absolutely hated it. The whole "shove tablet interfaces down your throat even on desktop" thing soured the whole OS for me, and the start screen itself is a joke. I'm glad they brought back the start menu.
From what I've noticed, MS releases a shitty version of Windows every other release since 98. 98 was fine, ME was crap, XP was good, Vista was crap, 7 is great, 8 is crap, so hopefully 10 will follow suit and actually be better than 7.
Whatever. 7 people in my office just upgraded from 7/8.1 in under a hour with all their documents, programs and settings unchanged and then continued working like normal. That's unreal considering how many different hardware combinations exist. People seem to like it and its only going to get better.
I think it has been documented quite well the settings have changed and they have introduced a slew of very unsettling new settings that many view as a security and privacy concern.
My Debian installation has been being updated for years now and went through three different machines, all without any bigger issues. It's also worth noting that this is a version called "unstable".
Unrelated, but I've often found that upgrading hardware is usually easier to do when you're running Linux, and it complains far less. I run Arch primarily, though, so I don't think my commentary with regards to upgrade processes is worth much--being a rolling release distro, it's always in a state of flux so there's no real "major" upgrade unless I've forgotten to run updates for a month or two.
That said, I have updated (dist-upgrade) recent (12.04+) Ubuntu installs more or less unattended with no trouble. So I think the OP was probably a troll.
My existing (home) Arch install has survived through a couple different hard drives, copied over directly from a USB stick, with various hardware changes off and on since. Prior to that, I've had Gentoo and Ubuntu installs persist across substantial hardware changes mostly unscathed (Gentoo required preparations beforehand, mostly because I was an idiot and did extensive kernel customizations I probably didn't need).
I don't understand the trolling, though. There are far too many variables that might affect one particular OS/hardware combination more than others, and that's to say nothing of PEBKAC-related issues...
Especially when you consider that most people here, at least in their personal lives probably don't run Windows as their primary OS (I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts). Surely we've moved past 2002 era Slashdot polemics.
What a nonsensical attitude. Ostensibly, any "bashing Windows for UI/Updates/Privacy/whatever reasons" (which is an extremely odd way to say "criticism of Windows") is now equivalent to a Slashdot polemic?
Programming is the only technical field I know where this anti-intellectual sentiment of shutting off criticism and resorting to slogans like "If you don't like it, don't use it!" and "I don't care about X, it works for me!" is somehow considered acceptable.
Except you can't shut down everything - it's impossible to disable the sending of "Diagnostic and usage data" in anything but Win 10 Enterprise, for example.
There really isn't that much complexity from different hardware configurations. Almost all computers can be covered by drivers for AHCI,EHCI,xHCI,HDAudio, and vendor-specific drivers for graphics and network. There's no longer any need to worry about interrupt sharing or other conflicts between subsystems, so introducing new alternatives doesn't have a multiplicative effect.
Warning: VirtualBox doesn't work in Windows 10. We're a very Vagrant-dependent shop here, so one of my coworkers was forced to spend his entire day in meetings rather than doing real work.
Thanks for the heads up that's going to be a big deal for developers. I'm sure it'll get fixed. This is probably why our IT folks don't want us jumping on the newest OS right after deployment, even though I did it for my personal machine.
I'm getting a not supported error about upgrading to Windows 10 when inside 8.1 in VirtualBox. Apparently the VirtualBox display driver isn't supported.
Is it really that surprising in an office environment? They're probably all using the same model of computer that was purchased around the same time and from a reputable vendor like Dell, etc.
If you read the article though you would see this person's complaints are not with the upgrade process but with the memory usage, touch interface, and other behavior of Windows 10.
Having used Windows 10, yes, Control Panel is still there and full of junk, but you need it much less in Windows 10 than Windows 8 since Settings is now so much larger.
The only time I've needed control panel so far was for mouse acceleration. That should be in settings, but they've done so much work I expect they'll sort it soon.
Still on the last stable preview release (1 month old) and tons of issues with crashes/freezes, weird UI funkiness and game compatibility. Hoping the final version fixed many of these issues but it's sounding unlikely.
My initial impressions remain the same. Compared to 7; lots of invasive privacy policies, much slower (especially bootup), takes WAY more space on my sad little SSD, adds little to no value (I had multiple desktops already using a reliable plugin). Wish I didn't upgrade...
A former coworker of mine worked with one of the areas in Microsoft that dealt with error reporting. They actually analyze the data and provide feedback to the vendors of crash-happy programs. It's an important thing that helps generally improve quality of life.
I would think by now everybody knew that you had to wait at least one year before adopting a new Microsoft OS. OK, with the "new Microsoft"* you can probably shorten the delay to 6 months, but any shorter than that you're an early adopter and shouldn't complain.
* anybody that used their softwares for 2 decades can see how much they improved
Or wait a year before adopting any OS. Microsoft botches just about every other version of Windows, but recently Apple has been doing some really stupid things in OSx, and a few years back Ubuntu screwed up their default interface.
Unless you're on a really stable version of linux/BSD, it really makes sense to wait to install any OS until the kinks are worked out.
Almost all of the author's complaints revolve around the Control Panel. Most users won't ever see the Control Panel, just the Settings app.
The Control Panel is a legacy piece they decided to keep around for the "enterprise"; just like Windows 10 also still includes the old Internet Explorer.
> but the RAM usage has gone up when compared to 8.1. On a device with just 2 GB of RAM, this matters, but not nearly as much as what’s coming next…
In that entire article, increased RAM usage was the only thing that piqued my interest. The rest of the issues were styling inconsistencies and changes to how some settings are accessed, both of which are problems Windows has had since Vista.
At the same time, though, it's impressive that a modern operating system can operate on just 2GB of RAM. The last time I had that little RAM, I was running Windows 98.
in fact even increased RAM use doesn't matter at all if it makes the system faster and more responsive. for some reason, people keep looking at it from a warped perspective.
An Arch Linux install with i3 as the window manager will consume <300MB of RAM and be (subjectively) more responsive than Windows. On the same machine, a default Windows 7 install will take 1.6GB of RAM.
I think it's a baseline like this that leaves people wondering why Windows by default needs to consume large amounts of RAM.
My mostly stock install of Win8.1 seems to use less than 600MB at idle. I 100% agree with you that Linux can be more efficient (that screenshot was taken from a VM running on Linux, which is my primary OS), but Windows isn't that awful memory wise.
"History" is still not available in Spartan: "You'll see your browsing history here in the not-too-distant future". Is History that hard to implement?
Spartan does not respond properly to ShellExecute(). My app launches a PDF and... Spartan just sits there, without displaying the PDF. Yes, you can open it manually with the PDF Reader, but my users expect it to launch automatically.
I was in the insider preview, and they changed the UI style they were going for a few times. I suspect its just a matter of scale: they eventually settled on a given style, but didn't have a chance to upgrade the six million dialogs in the system in time.
Importantly, its not just look but the app technology that needs to shift. The new stuff is in the Universal App framework, some other stuff in WPF, and the ancient stuff in forms. I imagine as the updates come in, one after another dialog will be updated.
Wow. Windows 10 is too hard for
Microsoft. What a mess. Right,
I'll say with Windows XP or
Windows 7.
Time for Windows 11.
What a disaster.
And for what I'm really interested
in, security, and compatibility,
if they can't get some simple
GUI dialogs correct, there's no
hope for the rest. Looks like
Windows 7 is the most recent
usable Microsoft OS.
Just in what people do: If they can't
do the simple work on the
easy to see
label on the bottle right, then
can't have confidence in the
more difficult work less easy to see
for the contents of the bottle.
Have you worked on software projects before? Differing priority levels for GUI consistency and base functionality is not an odd thing, and being bad on one does not really mean you're bad at the other.
Plus the people making the label for the bottle are almost never the same ones putting stuff in it.
From Microsoft, by now for too long I've seen
too much poor quality work, apparently
bottom to top in the stack and left
to right for the applications. I hate to
say this and am betting my startup
on Windows as the platform, but
for too long there
have been too many security problems,
poor documentation, bugs, "buffer overflows"
still, even design issues (Vista), etc.
Windows 10? That's a lot, from Windows
3.1, NT, ..., 8.1, and now 10, along with
Windows Server, etc. -- that's a lot of
software that is supposed to be really
serious. So, we have to expect that by
now Microsoft could get the routine things
right for Windows 10 and not ship
something that will need 10 service
packs, with lots of user struggles with
lots of problems along the way,
to get to a solid chunk of code.
E.g., the OP looked like just a fast
review of 10 but still found some serious
problems. So, it looks like Microsoft
never did a serious critical review
and fixed the obvious issues.
I've seen some good work from Microsoft,
but there's also been too much poor
work, and some of that seems to be in 10.
Not good.
Microsoft shipping bad code for their
main product is an old story that
needed to end a long time ago.
I just want Microsoft to put their
game face on, come ready to play,
take bugs, errors, etc. seriously,
and design and write good code.
E.g., I'm concerned: Clearly Microsoft
wants to push their users into
Windows 10. Well, if 10 has problems
it shouldn't have, then I will have problems
I shouldn't have.
At this point, I'm very concerned about
the basic quality of Microsoft's work.
113 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI agree, there was a lot of duality in Windows 8 with Metro and classical Windows menus/programs, and they still seem to exist with 10. I even have "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" option in control panel and yet I upgraded from a clean install of Windows 8.1.
Since Windows 7, Microsoft has provided imagex.exe; it's typically used in high-volume disk imaging applications, but you can easily use it to snapshot or restore an entire installation.
"Easily"? Any link? As far as I know imagex.exe has less functionality than the "backup and restore" application, former being a simpler command line utility (1). Specifically, how would anybody without any programming experience (step by step)
- perform the regular backup in order to be prepared for the case his hard disk "dies."
- restore from his backup once the new hard disk is inserted in the computer. As far as I know, especially the repartitioning steps are far from being trivial and not done by imagex.
"Backup and restore" are GUI based tools, easy to be explained and used by non-professionals to do the full local backups of their computers. The same thing we can still do with iPhone and iTunes (a button in iTunes starting the complete backup of the iPhone, and restoring simply with the another button). Why should I purchase the third party program or do unknown amount of programming to do something like that on a Windows computer?
1) https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Cc749003%28v=WS....
It's great to be able to use the commander without mouse. Just plain keyboard. Really boosts productivity (especially for a developer like me).
We've all released minimum viable products before. Hell, "early access" is dominating video games in particular. As long as they continue to improve and have a stable, steady release schedule with tangible results, then I think it was a good move on Microsoft's part. Especially since the longer they waited the more entrenched users of Windows 7 & 8 would become, just like they did with XP.
If we were talking about issues in a brand new kernel, maybe. But not basic UI issues.
Using the wrong UI framework for dialogs or having links going nowhere is easily avoidable, it just needs manpower.
I just brought up the kernel thing because I was pandering to someone inventing poor excuses for MS. I shouldn't have pandered.
And rolling release is a good model and it seems to be working fantastically for browsers but it's predicated on not releasing features until they are ready. But Windows 10 is a marketed product with features that all had to exist on day 1. So instead of a stable core to work from we get a big ball of muddled together.
I'm hoping now that the date is passed and the features are all in there that there is nothing left to do but fix everything. The (slow) rolling releases of XP worked well so I too have high hopes for Windows 10. But I'll be waiting for a while before I upgrade.
I think Microsoft and Apple are on a good path: keeping the same major version number for their OS, and just continually bring out little changes.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_wind...
For the five people on Earth actually affected by this, there's always compatibility mode.
If there's a Windows 9 it might eventually turn into Roman numerals, so then you've got Windows IX, which could turn into Winix or Wix, or in a particularly bad case "Windows Icks".
I imagine it did play some role but as a child comment notes, the regex checks for Windows 9\d* in order to capture both 95 and 98 in a few languages that exposed versions like that probably played a much larger role. Accommodations that were made for those incredibly old systems could very easily have caused some big problems if they matched on Windows 9.
> Really the dual interfaces to the same thing are the worst part of Windows 10 right now.
Coming from a company that only sells on a narrow range of hardware, these is even more unacceptable.
I'm surprised Microsoft still hasn't fixed the dual interfaces problem, though.
XP was a significant improvement over the DOS lineage, however, Microsoft had a reasonably good run in the 90s and early 00s.
If you include Windows 3.1x, then why not 3.0? Also if there's NT 3.5, then why not NT 3.1 and NT 3.51?
They could use more polish, but I they got rid of one thing that bugged the hell out of me from windows 8. Apps. Every time I slid my mouse to the right I inevitably was on the edge and opened the last app. Infuriating. I had to disable that feature every time.
Windowed apps are an improvement, and I really hope they listen to their customers and improve the OS.
Then you could just go and force the upgrade if you are impatient (like me).
http://techreport.com/news/28579/microsoft-plans-phased-roll...
Microsoft traditionally releases a revised edition within a year or so, and so I intend to wait for this revision before upgrading.
Will it be named Windows 10.1? Will it be named Windows 11, or even Windows 12? I am unsure about the name, but I will hold out for this OS.
As for the next version, Microsoft made a big claim that this is the "last" windows version because they have made everything in the system upgradable. Thus all future upgrades will come as package changes through Windows Update and the "version" will forever be Windows 10 (so why not just call it Windows? I don't know)
Now that 10 is out, it looks like it fixes a lot of the issues I had/read about with 8. Granted, I'm definitely not going to install until 10.1 (aka "SP1") but assuming they don't try to turn the OS into a cloud-connected clusterfuck, I'm going to give it a shot.
I did have Windows 8 in a VM and absolutely hated it. The whole "shove tablet interfaces down your throat even on desktop" thing soured the whole OS for me, and the start screen itself is a joke. I'm glad they brought back the start menu.
From what I've noticed, MS releases a shitty version of Windows every other release since 98. 98 was fine, ME was crap, XP was good, Vista was crap, 7 is great, 8 is crap, so hopefully 10 will follow suit and actually be better than 7.
Had to reboot it.
That said, I have updated (dist-upgrade) recent (12.04+) Ubuntu installs more or less unattended with no trouble. So I think the OP was probably a troll.
My existing (home) Arch install has survived through a couple different hard drives, copied over directly from a USB stick, with various hardware changes off and on since. Prior to that, I've had Gentoo and Ubuntu installs persist across substantial hardware changes mostly unscathed (Gentoo required preparations beforehand, mostly because I was an idiot and did extensive kernel customizations I probably didn't need).
I don't understand the trolling, though. There are far too many variables that might affect one particular OS/hardware combination more than others, and that's to say nothing of PEBKAC-related issues...
Programming is the only technical field I know where this anti-intellectual sentiment of shutting off criticism and resorting to slogans like "If you don't like it, don't use it!" and "I don't care about X, it works for me!" is somehow considered acceptable.
Just press windows type privacy and shut everything down if you want.
VirtualBox 5.0.0 on relatively modest hardware. I haven't tested it beyond running a couple Linux VMs though.
I had trouble with it months ago in technical previews, but I've been running it successfully for a while now.
That said, I haven't moved to the RTM version yet. Could be another new issue.
If you read the article though you would see this person's complaints are not with the upgrade process but with the memory usage, touch interface, and other behavior of Windows 10.
YMMV basically.
The only time I've needed control panel so far was for mouse acceleration. That should be in settings, but they've done so much work I expect they'll sort it soon.
My initial impressions remain the same. Compared to 7; lots of invasive privacy policies, much slower (especially bootup), takes WAY more space on my sad little SSD, adds little to no value (I had multiple desktops already using a reliable plugin). Wish I didn't upgrade...
A former coworker of mine worked with one of the areas in Microsoft that dealt with error reporting. They actually analyze the data and provide feedback to the vendors of crash-happy programs. It's an important thing that helps generally improve quality of life.
* anybody that used their softwares for 2 decades can see how much they improved
Unless you're on a really stable version of linux/BSD, it really makes sense to wait to install any OS until the kinks are worked out.
I think the same applies to most software.
The Control Panel is a legacy piece they decided to keep around for the "enterprise"; just like Windows 10 also still includes the old Internet Explorer.
In that entire article, increased RAM usage was the only thing that piqued my interest. The rest of the issues were styling inconsistencies and changes to how some settings are accessed, both of which are problems Windows has had since Vista.
At the same time, though, it's impressive that a modern operating system can operate on just 2GB of RAM. The last time I had that little RAM, I was running Windows 98.
I think it's a baseline like this that leaves people wondering why Windows by default needs to consume large amounts of RAM.
Are you sure about that? https://i.imgur.com/jXRrEJS.png
My mostly stock install of Win8.1 seems to use less than 600MB at idle. I 100% agree with you that Linux can be more efficient (that screenshot was taken from a VM running on Linux, which is my primary OS), but Windows isn't that awful memory wise.
that is the reason twitter exists people.
Spartan does not respond properly to ShellExecute(). My app launches a PDF and... Spartan just sits there, without displaying the PDF. Yes, you can open it manually with the PDF Reader, but my users expect it to launch automatically.
I was in the insider preview, and they changed the UI style they were going for a few times. I suspect its just a matter of scale: they eventually settled on a given style, but didn't have a chance to upgrade the six million dialogs in the system in time.
Importantly, its not just look but the app technology that needs to shift. The new stuff is in the Universal App framework, some other stuff in WPF, and the ancient stuff in forms. I imagine as the updates come in, one after another dialog will be updated.
Time for Windows 11.
What a disaster.
And for what I'm really interested in, security, and compatibility, if they can't get some simple GUI dialogs correct, there's no hope for the rest. Looks like Windows 7 is the most recent usable Microsoft OS.
What connection do you think that GUI dialog styling and security/compatibility have?
Just in what people do: If they can't do the simple work on the easy to see label on the bottle right, then can't have confidence in the more difficult work less easy to see for the contents of the bottle.
Plus the people making the label for the bottle are almost never the same ones putting stuff in it.
Yup.
From Microsoft, by now for too long I've seen too much poor quality work, apparently bottom to top in the stack and left to right for the applications. I hate to say this and am betting my startup on Windows as the platform, but for too long there have been too many security problems, poor documentation, bugs, "buffer overflows" still, even design issues (Vista), etc.
Windows 10? That's a lot, from Windows 3.1, NT, ..., 8.1, and now 10, along with Windows Server, etc. -- that's a lot of software that is supposed to be really serious. So, we have to expect that by now Microsoft could get the routine things right for Windows 10 and not ship something that will need 10 service packs, with lots of user struggles with lots of problems along the way, to get to a solid chunk of code.
E.g., the OP looked like just a fast review of 10 but still found some serious problems. So, it looks like Microsoft never did a serious critical review and fixed the obvious issues.
I've seen some good work from Microsoft, but there's also been too much poor work, and some of that seems to be in 10. Not good. Microsoft shipping bad code for their main product is an old story that needed to end a long time ago.
I just want Microsoft to put their game face on, come ready to play, take bugs, errors, etc. seriously, and design and write good code.
E.g., I'm concerned: Clearly Microsoft wants to push their users into Windows 10. Well, if 10 has problems it shouldn't have, then I will have problems I shouldn't have.
At this point, I'm very concerned about the basic quality of Microsoft's work.