4 ms·

Yeah, I just bought a new laptop (Acer Swift with Ryzen 7/Vega chipset, great Linux laptop btw!), and the hour or so I spent with Windows 10 was beyond infuriat

Yeah, I just bought a new laptop (Acer Swift with Ryzen 7/Vega chipset, great Linux laptop btw!), and the hour or so I spent with Windows 10 was beyond infuriating. From the voice assistant constantly harassing you to pop-ups in every single app trying to make you use Edge, to the poor user experience that Edge is itself. Also the default Windows installation didn't have the right graphics drivers for the Ryzen/Vega APU, the pixel scaling was way off, etc... It's amazing to me that people still use Microsoft products. Even though I installed the alpha version of Ubuntu 18.04 (beta now), it's already far more usable (and less buggy) than the Windows 10 that came on the laptop. Ubuntu improved battery life (when does it ever do that?), had up to date graphics drivers, and no shitty pop-ups. Oh well, MS' increased hostility is a sign that they're scared for their market share, and a sign that they're waning. I for one have had enough of their crap.

homero 9y ago
Windows 10 uninstalled apps without telling me, I ended up wiping it and reinstalling Windows 7
- krylon 9y ago
  Wow. I am so glad my work laptop still runs Windows 7. I thought about upgrading to 10 because of WSL, but coworkers that already run Windows 10 are fighting problems constantly, every update is a roll of the dice, stuff breaks randomly, it is like the "good" old days all over again.
bitwize 9y ago
Most of Hackernews seems to think that Windows 10 with WSL is a better Linux than Linux. I think they need to put down the shrooms and start drinking milk again, because I'm with you -- I just don't see it. I spent a good chunk of the weekend nursing my one Windows PC along and it was a shitshow nearly from start to finish: * Disk I/O is incredibly slow. This is, in part, because Windows Defender intercepts all disk I/O routines, and all disk I/O goes through it so it can spot suspicious activity... like intercepting the disk I/O routines. Want to turn it off? Too bad! Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time. If it hasn't happened already, Microsoft may disconnect this button from any useful function, making it a placebo like NYC walk-signal pushbuttons. * At one point, while slogging through a Visual Studio install, Windows decided to nag me with a modal-over-everything dialog: "We have an update for you. Windows is a service, and updates are part of that service. So... yeah, if you could go ahead and restart now, that would be terrific." That last sentence is an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I don't want to be passive-aggressed to by a piece of equipment I bought with my own money. Oh, and the computer was thrashing so hard with all this derring-do that it took the better part of a minute with absolutely no response for the click to register and the dialog to dismiss. I felt like I was back on my old 386SX trying to make Windows 3.1 go in 2 MiB of RAM. Doubtless some bureaucrat who lives inside NTOSKRNL.EXE noticed that it took me longer than average to press the button -- and that I chose to delay the Windows Update while Visual Studio finished installing -- and made a note in my personnel file for further review by management. I'm expecting another dialog to pop up informing me that Windows has put me on an action plan. * Somehow, the update process obliterated my Microsoft Office license, requiring me to "repair my installation" (meaning redownload and reinstall Office and reauthenticate in order to reregister and reactivate the reinstalled copy). So no, I simply don't see how people live with this day to day, let alone prefer it to Linux. Ubuntu could drop you into FVWM from 1995 and it'd still be more productive than this. Even the rudest Unix environment is not this actively hostile.
- gruez 9y ago
  >Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time you can permanently disable this with a group policy setting as for the rest of your issues, I never encountered them, but I think they can be chalked up to no ssd (not that it's excusable to require SSD for your computer to function smoothly), and not using LTSB.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Windows Home doesn't have group policy settings. Microsoft unchangeably sets the policy for most of the consumer-owned computers out there. I know how to change the (magic, undocumented) registry setting but most people don't. My Linux machines run decently fast with spinning rust. SSDs are faster, but last about four years before going completely kaput. I don't think it's too much to ask that I not have to buy a $300 OS for my $300 computer (it was a refurb), just to get the baseline levels of performance and non-obnoxiousness that I get from Linux for $0.
    - flukus 9y ago
      I don't know if MS still follow the dogfooding philosophy, but it's certainly obvious that no one on the windows team has a spinning drive. An SSD is a requirement for windows 10, not a nice to have. I installed linux on my cheap dell and the performance difference is amazing, it doesn't choke on basic things like opening the start menu.
ta456545 9y ago
On top of some of those frustrations, the one that really boiled my blood a few times was, right at the end of the day as I was shutting down apps and packing up, Win10 decided now was a great time to install it's gigabytes of updates and I'd have to wait 30 minutes while it did it (I could presumably disconnect and pack up but who knows where that'd leave the install). Forcing when the updates install on you is absurd. Not to mention the umpteen issues with 4K display, still fscking problems with data access components and different versions of Access/SQL Server, spyware settings I can't change etc. They really don't seem to learn (I've since gone to Linux Mint full time and it's a breath of fresh air, with LibreOffice and Steam now offering a few decent titles I've got no need to dual-boot luckily).
sjellis 9y ago
"Yeah, I just bought a new laptop (Acer Swift with Ryzen 7/Vega chipset, great Linux laptop btw!), and the hour or so I spent with Windows 10 was beyond infuriating." I recently installed Windows 10 Enterprise on a clean laptop, and the thing that astonished me was the appearence of icons for applications that I had definitely not installed. Touch one of those icons, and the application would start installing. This is the Enterprise edition.

homero 9y ago

Windows 10 uninstalled apps without telling me, I ended up wiping it and reinstalling Windows 7

krylon 9y ago
Wow. I am so glad my work laptop still runs Windows 7. I thought about upgrading to 10 because of WSL, but coworkers that already run Windows 10 are fighting problems constantly, every update is a roll of the dice, stuff breaks randomly, it is like the "good" old days all over again.

bitwize 9y ago

Most of Hackernews seems to think that Windows 10 with WSL is a better Linux than Linux. I think they need to put down the shrooms and start drinking milk again, because I'm with you -- I just don't see it. I spent a good chunk of the weekend nursing my one Windows PC along and it was a shitshow nearly from start to finish: * Disk I/O is incredibly slow. This is, in part, because Windows Defender intercepts all disk I/O routines, and all disk I/O goes through it so it can spot suspicious activity... like intercepting the disk I/O routines. Want to turn it off? Too bad! Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time. If it hasn't happened already, Microsoft may disconnect this button from any useful function, making it a placebo like NYC walk-signal pushbuttons. * At one point, while slogging through a Visual Studio install, Windows decided to nag me with a modal-over-everything dialog: "We have an update for you. Windows is a service, and updates are part of that service. So... yeah, if you could go ahead and restart now, that would be terrific." That last sentence is an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I don't want to be passive-aggressed to by a piece of equipment I bought with my own money. Oh, and the computer was thrashing so hard with all this derring-do that it took the better part of a minute with absolutely no response for the click to register and the dialog to dismiss. I felt like I was back on my old 386SX trying to make Windows 3.1 go in 2 MiB of RAM. Doubtless some bureaucrat who lives inside NTOSKRNL.EXE noticed that it took me longer than average to press the button -- and that I chose to delay the Windows Update while Visual Studio finished installing -- and made a note in my personnel file for further review by management. I'm expecting another dialog to pop up informing me that Windows has put me on an action plan. * Somehow, the update process obliterated my Microsoft Office license, requiring me to "repair my installation" (meaning redownload and reinstall Office and reauthenticate in order to reregister and reactivate the reinstalled copy). So no, I simply don't see how people live with this day to day, let alone prefer it to Linux. Ubuntu could drop you into FVWM from 1995 and it'd still be more productive than this. Even the rudest Unix environment is not this actively hostile.

gruez 9y ago
>Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time you can permanently disable this with a group policy setting as for the rest of your issues, I never encountered them, but I think they can be chalked up to no ssd (not that it's excusable to require SSD for your computer to function smoothly), and not using LTSB.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Windows Home doesn't have group policy settings. Microsoft unchangeably sets the policy for most of the consumer-owned computers out there. I know how to change the (magic, undocumented) registry setting but most people don't. My Linux machines run decently fast with spinning rust. SSDs are faster, but last about four years before going completely kaput. I don't think it's too much to ask that I not have to buy a $300 OS for my $300 computer (it was a refurb), just to get the baseline levels of performance and non-obnoxiousness that I get from Linux for $0.
  - flukus 9y ago
    I don't know if MS still follow the dogfooding philosophy, but it's certainly obvious that no one on the windows team has a spinning drive. An SSD is a requirement for windows 10, not a nice to have. I installed linux on my cheap dell and the performance difference is amazing, it doesn't choke on basic things like opening the start menu.

ta456545 9y ago

On top of some of those frustrations, the one that really boiled my blood a few times was, right at the end of the day as I was shutting down apps and packing up, Win10 decided now was a great time to install it's gigabytes of updates and I'd have to wait 30 minutes while it did it (I could presumably disconnect and pack up but who knows where that'd leave the install). Forcing when the updates install on you is absurd. Not to mention the umpteen issues with 4K display, still fscking problems with data access components and different versions of Access/SQL Server, spyware settings I can't change etc. They really don't seem to learn (I've since gone to Linux Mint full time and it's a breath of fresh air, with LibreOffice and Steam now offering a few decent titles I've got no need to dual-boot luckily).

sjellis 9y ago

"Yeah, I just bought a new laptop (Acer Swift with Ryzen 7/Vega chipset, great Linux laptop btw!), and the hour or so I spent with Windows 10 was beyond infuriating." I recently installed Windows 10 Enterprise on a clean laptop, and the thing that astonished me was the appearence of icons for applications that I had definitely not installed. Touch one of those icons, and the application would start installing. This is the Enterprise edition.