11 ms·

I'm just curios, disregarding performance aspects, what is there to like about w10 over, say w7? Two things that have put me off upgrading to w10 is the inconsi

I'm just curios, disregarding performance aspects, what is there to like about w10 over, say w7? Two things that have put me off upgrading to w10 is the inconsistency of the UI, and the fact the user has less control over the system in a variety of ways.

username223 10y ago
W10 gets rid of w7's endless, sneaky "upgrade to w10" crap.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Can't tell if facetious
  - justusthane 10y ago
    Yes.
nerdy 10y ago
I truly think these things are overblown. This article references "sync" providers, but having sync disabled I've never seen the ads they show. I also disabled Cortana and most of the new W10 stuff but never looked back after switching. Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads. W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it. Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor. I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal. There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.
- wtallis 10y ago
  Of the three things you can find to praise Windows 10 for, two are power user features that Microsoft has long provided through power toys and sysinternals utilities. The last one sounds like Microsoft rediscovered Fitt's Law. I'm not prepared to give them any kudos for fixing such a glaringly obvious and simple flaw. But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    There is only one switch on a win10 machine that needs tweeking by the privacy-conscious user. If you really care about privacy you really need a non-proprietary OS.
    - wtallis 10y ago
      The Windows 10 Settings app has a Privacy section. On its General tab, there are 6 options. There are also 15 more pages of options for different categories. Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        The switch to Linux, I presume...
      - sandworm101 10y ago
        The off switch.
      - cm2187 10y ago
        And the problem is not just to cover everything (I set up a script for that). But also to actively maintain the list for all the new intrusions on every "security" update. This is an absolute waste of my time by Microsoft.
    - 10y ago
Silhouette 10y ago
As far as I can tell, 10 has no killer feature, but has incremental improvements in a few areas that will be more relevant to some than others. It has better built-in support for modern hardware: common examples are USB3, NVMe, high-dpi monitors and touchscreens. It has some improvements under the hood in terms of security. It has DirectX 12 for gamers.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Well, I happen to like Hyper-V in the box, it tends to work better than VirtualBox or VMWare for that matter (at least in my experience)... Windows 8 pro comes with it too, but Win10's UX is finally there, where I hated windows 8's and would always revert to Classic Shell. I also disabled Cortana and most of the search features beyond basic indexing and likewise don't use sync... I don't like the occasional Edge browser ad above my Chrome icon in the taskbar though. I'd still rather W10 than Linux... I use Ubuntu on my HTPC, and really like Unity, but it's just not quite as good, and there's the pretty regular quirk after updates run that I spend hours hunting down a solution for a few times a year. I also happen to mostly like my macbook, but there's not a viable solution to replace my main desktop.
  - Zardoz84 10y ago
    Try KDE. You can customize everything!
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I don't want to customize everything, I want nice defaults, where advanced features are tucked away... I also don't want to spend another 2 hours a few times a year fixing whatever problem the latest round of updates have caused. much more rare in windows in my own experience, I know two people who have had bad aftermath from updates, but one turned out to be bad ram that caused the issue. All the same, I would much rather have macOS with a start/taskbar a little closer to windows... the instance previews are nice, and it's a bit easier to work across multiple monitors... Most of my time is spent in VS Code and a couple browsers, so as long as I have bash (comes with git in windows), I'm pretty much good in any OS...
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Faster booting to a truly usable desktop rather than 1 minute to get a non-functional screen then another minute for enough of the OS to be brought up to do anything. Page compression for low memory PC's is nice to have too.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Boot time is a non-issue if your boot partition is on an SSD, which is the case for most serious users today. I actually measured the difference. My Windows 7 used to boot in ~20-22 seconds. With Windows 10 it went down to ~15-17 seconds. Sure, Windows 7 was a bit slower. However, it also didn't have forced reboots like Windows 10 does, which in my eyes more than makes up for it.
  - xaldir 10y ago
    Clearly 5 sec on the occasional normal boot is meaningless. Unexpected reboots with awful long "installing updates" screen is an issue however.
lewisl9029 10y ago
There are a lot of legitimately great features that have been added for power users and developers since Windows 7. To give a few examples of things I make use of literally every single day: - Windows Subsystems for Linux. I don't think this needs any further introduction. - Client Hyper-V. It's a type-1 hypervisor that just works out of the box with completely seamless GPU passthrough (only to the root OS, i.e. the Windows 10 instance with Hyper-V enabled, but it's enough for gaming and running neural nets). Docker for Windows depends on this. - Storage Spaces. A storage pooling system that supports thin provisioning, mirrored and parity redundancy, tiered caching, bit rot detection and correction (when used with their new ReFS filesystem), and works seamlessly with removable drives (I use a cluster of 2 2.5" external 4TB drives in mirror mode because I travel a decent amount, and 2 2.5" external drives are so much more pleasant to travel with than any NAS on the market). - Huge improvements to window management, including virtual desktops, arrangement by snapping to all 4 corners on every monitor on multi-monitor systems, a super intuitive UI that lets you choose a different window to snap to the other side with 1 additional click, along with keyboard shortcuts for everything. - First class pen support. I have a convertible laptop with a Wacom pen, and some of the features in the ink workspace like sketchpad and screen sketch have become indispensable to my workflow, and so damn convenient to use. Windows 10 really is an excellent OS in its own right. It's such a shame that they keep undermining all the progress they've made by pulling crap like this.
- chrisper 10y ago
  You forgot the great and updated CMD where you can finally select and copy properly ;)
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    Honestly, I prefer the old rectangular-selections because it's great for copying individual columns of output from `dir`, for example.
    - grrowl 10y ago
      In many applications you can Alt+drag to select vertically.
cheald 10y ago
Performance is the big one. Win 10 - when it's good - feels like a super-polished Win 8. They fixed the "metro" app stuff to not be awful. It does a good job of getting out my way and letting me run what I want to run. It's when it intentionally gets into my way that I get cranky.

username223 10y ago

W10 gets rid of w7's endless, sneaky "upgrade to w10" crap.

andrepd 10y ago
Can't tell if facetious
- justusthane 10y ago
  Yes.

nerdy 10y ago

I truly think these things are overblown. This article references "sync" providers, but having sync disabled I've never seen the ads they show. I also disabled Cortana and most of the new W10 stuff but never looked back after switching. Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads. W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it. Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor. I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal. There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.

wtallis 10y ago
Of the three things you can find to praise Windows 10 for, two are power user features that Microsoft has long provided through power toys and sysinternals utilities. The last one sounds like Microsoft rediscovered Fitt's Law. I'm not prepared to give them any kudos for fixing such a glaringly obvious and simple flaw. But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  There is only one switch on a win10 machine that needs tweeking by the privacy-conscious user. If you really care about privacy you really need a non-proprietary OS.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    The Windows 10 Settings app has a Privacy section. On its General tab, there are 6 options. There are also 15 more pages of options for different categories. Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      The switch to Linux, I presume...
    - sandworm101 10y ago
      The off switch.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      And the problem is not just to cover everything (I set up a script for that). But also to actively maintain the list for all the new intrusions on every "security" update. This is an absolute waste of my time by Microsoft.
  - 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

As far as I can tell, 10 has no killer feature, but has incremental improvements in a few areas that will be more relevant to some than others. It has better built-in support for modern hardware: common examples are USB3, NVMe, high-dpi monitors and touchscreens. It has some improvements under the hood in terms of security. It has DirectX 12 for gamers.

tracker1 10y ago
Well, I happen to like Hyper-V in the box, it tends to work better than VirtualBox or VMWare for that matter (at least in my experience)... Windows 8 pro comes with it too, but Win10's UX is finally there, where I hated windows 8's and would always revert to Classic Shell. I also disabled Cortana and most of the search features beyond basic indexing and likewise don't use sync... I don't like the occasional Edge browser ad above my Chrome icon in the taskbar though. I'd still rather W10 than Linux... I use Ubuntu on my HTPC, and really like Unity, but it's just not quite as good, and there's the pretty regular quirk after updates run that I spend hours hunting down a solution for a few times a year. I also happen to mostly like my macbook, but there's not a viable solution to replace my main desktop.
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  Try KDE. You can customize everything!
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I don't want to customize everything, I want nice defaults, where advanced features are tucked away... I also don't want to spend another 2 hours a few times a year fixing whatever problem the latest round of updates have caused. much more rare in windows in my own experience, I know two people who have had bad aftermath from updates, but one turned out to be bad ram that caused the issue. All the same, I would much rather have macOS with a start/taskbar a little closer to windows... the instance previews are nice, and it's a bit easier to work across multiple monitors... Most of my time is spent in VS Code and a couple browsers, so as long as I have bash (comes with git in windows), I'm pretty much good in any OS...

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

Faster booting to a truly usable desktop rather than 1 minute to get a non-functional screen then another minute for enough of the OS to be brought up to do anything. Page compression for low memory PC's is nice to have too.

enraged_camel 10y ago
Boot time is a non-issue if your boot partition is on an SSD, which is the case for most serious users today. I actually measured the difference. My Windows 7 used to boot in ~20-22 seconds. With Windows 10 it went down to ~15-17 seconds. Sure, Windows 7 was a bit slower. However, it also didn't have forced reboots like Windows 10 does, which in my eyes more than makes up for it.
- xaldir 10y ago
  Clearly 5 sec on the occasional normal boot is meaningless. Unexpected reboots with awful long "installing updates" screen is an issue however.

lewisl9029 10y ago

There are a lot of legitimately great features that have been added for power users and developers since Windows 7. To give a few examples of things I make use of literally every single day: - Windows Subsystems for Linux. I don't think this needs any further introduction. - Client Hyper-V. It's a type-1 hypervisor that just works out of the box with completely seamless GPU passthrough (only to the root OS, i.e. the Windows 10 instance with Hyper-V enabled, but it's enough for gaming and running neural nets). Docker for Windows depends on this. - Storage Spaces. A storage pooling system that supports thin provisioning, mirrored and parity redundancy, tiered caching, bit rot detection and correction (when used with their new ReFS filesystem), and works seamlessly with removable drives (I use a cluster of 2 2.5" external 4TB drives in mirror mode because I travel a decent amount, and 2 2.5" external drives are so much more pleasant to travel with than any NAS on the market). - Huge improvements to window management, including virtual desktops, arrangement by snapping to all 4 corners on every monitor on multi-monitor systems, a super intuitive UI that lets you choose a different window to snap to the other side with 1 additional click, along with keyboard shortcuts for everything. - First class pen support. I have a convertible laptop with a Wacom pen, and some of the features in the ink workspace like sketchpad and screen sketch have become indispensable to my workflow, and so damn convenient to use. Windows 10 really is an excellent OS in its own right. It's such a shame that they keep undermining all the progress they've made by pulling crap like this.

chrisper 10y ago
You forgot the great and updated CMD where you can finally select and copy properly ;)
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  Honestly, I prefer the old rectangular-selections because it's great for copying individual columns of output from `dir`, for example.
  - grrowl 10y ago
    In many applications you can Alt+drag to select vertically.

cheald 10y ago

Performance is the big one. Win 10 - when it's good - feels like a super-polished Win 8. They fixed the "metro" app stuff to not be awful. It does a good job of getting out my way and letting me run what I want to run. It's when it intentionally gets into my way that I get cranky.