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I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it'

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it's reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it's come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from. Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WSL2 and the other developer-focused improvements in tow, most of these are a shitlist of nitpicks, than things you'll run into every day. I switched from macOS about two years back, and couldn't see myself going the other way anymore ever again. But, that said, I can see why people want to stay there! That's the beauty of choice. These types of posts are based on historical grudges, rather than modern experiences with Windows. Sure, there's going to be annoying things to change out of the box, but every machine, with any OS, has that.

zsrxx 7y ago
See, your comment is the typical comment of someone who comes from macOS. The angry posts come from people who've been using Windows since forever.
- inscionent 7y ago
  I honestly miss actively using both. Better to be angry with everyone.
- owenwil 7y ago
  I was historically a Windows user and started my career as a Windows sysadmin for a few years—I switched to macOS for a few years and came back as it became increasingly buggy and Microsoft's development story changed. The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.
  - zsrxx 7y ago
    I've been using LTSC/LTSB for years. What's wrong with it?
    - owenwil 7y ago
      Sure, it's Windows 10 without any of the cruft—but also, none of the good bits. Believe it or not, but the Windows Store is great; managed updates of everything from Slack to Spotify, without individual updater components. Photos app, with support for HEIC files and so on, built in. These things are actually useful!
- magashna 7y ago
  The missteps were W8-8.1 and WS2012. W10 and W2012R2 and beyond have been much better. Not perfect, but leagues better than the those disastrous years between. Remember when Windows Server 2012 didn't have a start menu button, but instead a pixel? I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
  - owenwil 7y ago
    Oh man, I'll tell you—Windows 8 was a beast of its own. I think that is how people remember Windows, and assume that Windows 10 is the same. But god, don't remind me of that awful full-screen server start menu..............I remember that's when we actively started to try and go full headless with Windows Server, but it was also half-baked back then.
- Numberwang 7y ago
  I've been on Windows since forever and could not be happier. It's a great OS and apart from 10 minutes of customization it works fine. If I was on Linus I'd spend all my time on configurations and customization instead of more important things.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  I was a windows guy, then did the "I got a mac and never looked back" and now I'm back on windows 10 and, yes I'm pissed off, but this comment is pretty well realistic. People have a tendency to say "never" when you really shouldn't say never.
willis936 7y ago
A serious and legitimate gripe with windows is how messy it is to automate things. It's hard to look at the command prompt the same way I look at bash. I resort to almost anything other than batch when I can.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Also try JScript. It's underrated.
- JeremyBanks 7y ago
  It's hard to look at Bash the same way as I look at PowerShell. I resort to almost anything other than Bash when I can.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  If you are using batch scripts on Windows in 2019 you are most definitely Doing It Wrong. PowerShell (which for my money is better than bash) is the "official" scripting environment on contemporary Windows and batch file support is only included for backward compatibility with legacy scripts. Don't use it, ever.
- pizza234 7y ago
  As Joel Spolsky put: > What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    > Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
    - 7y ago
hackcasual 7y ago
Some people are tired of an OS that by default phones home about actions you do on it, include advertisement in your start area, and regularly push updates to add new features that also break existing software.
- owenwil 7y ago
  The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.
  - fkdo 7y ago
    > every OS is calling home to some degree. It's funny to speak in absolutes. Plenty of operating systems don't phone home regularly, just not ones popular with consumers.
  - eslaught 7y ago
    > Safari harasses you about being the default browser But does it advertise to you by default? This seems not comparable at all. Pretty much every browser will want you to set it as default (and at least the option to stop the nagging is usually front and center). Maybe this is just me, but advertising by default in something as basic as a start screen seems very user hostile....
    - plorkyeran 7y ago
      I get semi-regular notifications in macOS telling me I should give Safari another try and I haven't found any way to turn them off.
      - ymolodtsov 7y ago
        That’s interesting, I switched to Chrome months ago and haven’t seen any — even though I might open Safari from time to time.
president 7y ago
From a feature standpoint, Windows has definitely improved in the last few years, however, I don't see much improvement in terms of UX. To me, Windows development was always about "let's get this feature in so we can claim that we do X" but Microsoft has never proven themselves in terms of providing a cohesive experience in terms of inter-app behaviors or just UI/UX streamlining. This is extremely apparent when you look at their office apps (Outlook, Word, etc).
- owenwil 7y ago
  The UX is incrementally improving in every release. Through just the last few major releases, you've gotten Airdrop-style sharing (the new Share menu), full system-wide indexing and instant search, a unified control panel and a ton of other things. They're moving fast, but incrementally enough that it may not be noticable—but I vastly prefer the fast-follow improvements over the 1-3 yearly 'big bang' releases Apple has done with macOS.
  - Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
    I’m not following the reasoning here. macOS is delivered anew once per year with more often than not big new feature (like a new File System). Those last year, macOS was released for free - and without tracking or ads. Windows is evolving twice per year, for the same free price, or at least till a new major version is out. The two update more or less offer big change in only one of those. For me, it feels the same at the end, with the exception of ads and tracking - that is a major difference.
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    That's basically the problem: If they stay on cours improving the UI, in 5 years or so we reach the consistency, polish, performance and usability that windows 2000 used to have. There are some nice improvements since then too, but also a lot of user-hostile functionality. It doesn't seem wort the trade off to me.
    - wvenable 7y ago
bpyne 7y ago
I use macOS at home but have Win10 in the office. I've been using Windows in some capacity since 3.1. Win10 is the first one I've found usable. Going from Win XP at home to OS X, I found it astounding that my PowerBook could go months without a reboot. Likewise, my MBP astounds me daily that I can't remember when I last rebooted. My employer's Win10 laptop is like that as well: I don't think about rebooting it anymore. MS is on a good trajectory, finally, with its os.
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I'm not a real power user - so my only real grudge with Windows 10 at that moment is the fact that control panel is a bifurcated mess - I really just want to get back to the classic window control, but I have to fight through the windows 10 UI until I get there.
sdegutis 7y ago
I think my main gripe with Windows is that it has one less app-accessible modifier key. As a power user, this is invaluable to me and Mac has it.
charlesdaniels 7y ago
As someone who has used Linux (with a few brief stints into macOS and BSD) for quite some time (since about 2012) coming from Windows before that, I don't understand the people who constantly defend Windows in these types of posts... In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great. The issue that I have had is that every version of Windows I have used (from XP up to 10) has had serious reliability and performance problems. As a specific example, it seems that the one Windows machine that I keep around to play games on needs a complete re-install every 6-12 months, usually because Windows tries to update and bricks itself so badly that even "Windows Recovery" cannot salvage the install. This is a relatively nice machine (Haswell i5, 24GB DDR3), and I tend to stay on the happy path of just running the vanilla install plus Steam and a small number of games (never any programming, web browsing, etc.). In cases where I've had to use Windows for work, I've found that most of the built in programs lag and take a long amount of time to respond to keyboard or mouse inputs (in the specific cases I'm thinking of, this was on top-of-the line Dell Precision notebooks at the time). Most of my code seemed to run subjectively much slower natively on Windows than it did in a Linux VM running on the same machine. I'm not trying to be a power user of Windows, as I generally try to avoid using it as much as I can due to the bad experiences I've had in the past. I'm not doing any crazy registry editing or anything like that. Just pretty basic development work and gaming over the years. In that time, I've never had a Windows install where the features reliably worked, and the install remained stable for any period of time. This is all anecdotal of course. It's possible I've just be incredibly unlucky, or that I've had a string of a half dozen machines that have hardware that's somehow broken in a way that only affects Windows. So what I'm wondering is: all you people who keep chiming in on these types of posts claiming that Windows works well for your use case -- what are you doing? What's the secret to having it actually function reliably? I've not been able to replicate any such success.
- owenwil 7y ago
  I've been using Windows 10 as my daily driver for web (PHP/Node/JS) development for over two years without the need to recover/format/reinstall at all. This is the exception, rather than the rule, at this point: https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-from-mac-in-2019 https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-...
tootie 7y ago
I really wish developers at least would be more indignant about Apple's closed ecosystem. The fact that you can't run OSX VMs, can't run iOS simulators anywhere but OSX, can't run builds without OSX. You have to pay Apple to deploy software to your Apple phone from your Apple computer. Microsoft was never this bad.
- kakwa_ 7y ago
  Well, at least for OSX, you can technically run VMs, I've been doing it for a few years now (I needed one to troubleshoot CMake issues specific to OSX). For iOS, I would grant that. One last point is that OS X is partially Open Source (at least Darwin is) even if in actuality, nobody really cares about it (like building something on top of Darwin). In the end, neither of MS or Apple is my preferred choice anyway. I much prefer an OS I roughly understand (at least to some degree) each pieces and on wihch I could generally troubleshoot things (Linux, *BSD), even if I do acknowledge I'm far from your typical user being a "dev/sysadmin/devops/whatever it's called these days".
  - Osiris 7y ago
    He meant that you can't run OS X inside a VM.
tomc1985 7y ago
Many of us don't want new features, we want a stable OS that we control that stays out of our way. Windows 10 is not that.
bbmario 7y ago
I don't think the issues with Windows 10 bloat is historical. In fact, I recommend removing 10 and using 7 instead. 10 is just a bad joke that makes a brand new PC look like times square.
stoolpigeon 7y ago
I did a fresh windows 10 install on a brand new machine within the last month. There is advertising in the launcher (can't remember what windows calls it but the start menu). There are popups on the desktop from Microsoft that I haven't been able to stop. (Something about "Teams" and it's tied to having installed MS Office). I had to be sure I bought the Pro version, there are a lot of skus that don't include full disk encryption built in. Setting up bitlocker is not nearly as easy as setting up full disk encryption on Apple or Linux. I don't really consider that an optional feature so I don't understand why it's considered some kind of premium thing. Did you see in the linked article what it takes to turn off telemetry? Are you saying that this is not longer necessary and now it can be done in an easy, convenient way? It took me a while to clean up all the garbage apps MS bundle into it. The things that I see listed in the link are current and real.
Scramblejams 7y ago
I'm glad you like it, but I use Windows 10 daily and I have a bunch of ongoing issues with it. I had to have IT reimage a Win 10 Enterprise machine because Cortana had somehow gotten so screwed up (how? I turn it off) that my Start Menu stopped returning results and I couldn't launch anything by typing. On another Enterprise machine, my Start Menu periodically starts coming up black and then disappears. I have to force kill the Cortana process to get it working again. When I switch from corp to outside networking, DNS and routes often stop working correctly and I have to run a magic dance of network reset commands to get things going again, unless I want to reboot. Which I don't. A few months ago I started up a batch job to run overnight on a Win 10 Pro box. A Windows Update dialog popped up saying it was going to reboot my machine. I clicked the button to reschedule it for the next day. An hour later I passed by the machine and saw it rebooting and applying updates. (After that user hostile experience I switched the machine to Mint and haven't looked back. It ain't perfect, but it's much better, and I actually feel like I own the OS now.) To stop the telemetry I have to use a Pihole-like setup, which is great ... until I take my laptop somewhere else. Let's talk maintenance. When something goes wrong, Windows can be brutally complex to troubleshoot. That's why when you start having non-obvious problems with a Windows machine, most IT's knee-jerk answer is to reimage. And that's not even irrational. It's a rational response to the difficulty of diagnosing problems occurring in a complex black box. It ain't worth the time, so just wipe the thing. In contrast, I've never had to reinstall a production Linux machine due to misbehavior -- troubleshooting has always solved the problem. And force installing Candy Crush?! https://www.howtogeek.com/342871/hey-microsoft-stop-installing-apps-on-my-pc-without-asking/ https://www.howtogeek.com/342871/hey-microsoft-stop-installi... No no no no. Microsoft's treatment of their OS users can feel so exploitive. For me I place high value on feeling like I own my OS, and that includes requiring a modicum of stability and troubleshooting ease. For my sample size of however many Win10 machines I've dealt with over the years, that bar has not been cleared.
- slenk 7y ago
  While I agree with some points, the computer restarting, DNS not working, etc seem like restrictions implemented by your corporate IT - not issues with Windows 10
mcny 7y ago
The main pain points for me come from Windows not being Unix-y enough (or at all). WSL2 will probably help with this. I am still at 1803 on my work computer so not holding my breath for WSL2 any time soon. It isn't really Windows' fault that my work computer has an i5-8500 six core processor coupled with a single DIMM of 8 GB and a $20 hard disk. I won't blame Windows for that. I won't blame Windows for Symantec Endpoint Protection that just has to check every single file just as I need to do npm install. My manager is sympathetic but we are powerless. I want to say something good about Windows as well: as far as I can see, there is no memory leak in Windows. Windows 10 is pretty solid. I still think there are two very low hanging fruits: 1. Prohibit OEM partners from shipping Windows 10-based PCs booting from a mechanical hard disk (yes even "SSHD"). Vendors can add a mechanical hard disk but may not boot from it. 2. By default, no automatic reboot without manual consent especially for consumers. Long term, look very hard into what kind of update requires a reboot and why. Be willing to break compatibility where required.
switch007 7y ago
WSL2 is going to cement this episode of Embrace, extend and extinguish, in part as it requires Hyper-V and therefore prevents the use of VirtualBox, VMware Workstation/Player etc. The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten as people take the easy path of running WSL2 on the OS their computer came with. Is this a sufficiently-modern criticsm for you? A blog post from late 2018, which references things like an October 2018 Windows update, counts very much as a modern experience with Windows. I don't think it's fair to try to smear the author in that way.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  VirtualBox can use the Hyper-V/Windows Hypervisor API to create full speed VMs even when Hyper-V is active. https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#hyperv-support https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#hyperv-support
  - switch007 7y ago
    I did not know that. However, a couple of caveats (from your link): > This is an experimental feature > When using this feature, you might experience significant Oracle VM VirtualBox performance degradation on some host systems.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  > this episode of Embrace, extend and extinguish Hyper-V is over ten years old. If it hasn't killed VirtualBox in that time, Microsoft offering a convenient Ubuntu VM is not going to be the death knell, trapping people who don't want to use Hyper-V in a nightmare situation of "having a removable Linux VM". > The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten I've never noticed this as a complaint about developers using macOS for its Unix underpinnings, that they and Apple are not giving sufficient weight to the importance of a Linux bootloader.
aznumeric 7y ago
Windows 10 October 2018 update (1809) deleting users files from the My Documents folder hardly counts as historical.
Arn_Thor 7y ago
A substantial portion of requests blocked by my pi-hole is Windows telemetry. And I can't turn it off. That alone justifies a high level of righteous anger at Microsoft. And then, in the last update, it installed Teams, and caused it to always open on startup. Never did I agree to that installation. How can one trust a company that does that?
maxheadroom 7y ago
>...implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. Haven't we already learned the underlying issue with the moniker of "free" from the likes of Facebook and Google?
pergadad 7y ago
I bought a new HP Envy for 900€ but spent more than an hour getting rid of all the bloat. There's McAfee and HP stuff due to McAffee but it's my first new win10 laptop (previously just upgrade 8->10 and I am utterly appalled by the amount of crapware Microsoft included. Pre-installed MS software, and ads and unwanted products everywhere. Candy crush and similar junk included in a fresh clean start menu. Microsoft OneDrive in autostart. Cortana permissions pretty much make you agree to ads and constant listening (no thanks!). Lots of telemetry. Self-installing updates that reset settings. Nags to use Edge and Microsoft services everywhere. It took me far too long to even find (and even recognise) all the different always-hidden and ambiguously phrased buttons to switch all these features off - and the next update will turn them on again. Why do I pay around €80 of the sales price for a license and still have to deal with all this intrusive upselling and ads?

zsrxx 7y ago

See, your comment is the typical comment of someone who comes from macOS. The angry posts come from people who've been using Windows since forever.

inscionent 7y ago
I honestly miss actively using both. Better to be angry with everyone.
owenwil 7y ago
I was historically a Windows user and started my career as a Windows sysadmin for a few years—I switched to macOS for a few years and came back as it became increasingly buggy and Microsoft's development story changed. The complaints seem to come from heavily technical folks that think LTSB branches are reasonable things for normal people to run. I wouldn't want to run one on my own machine.
- zsrxx 7y ago
  I've been using LTSC/LTSB for years. What's wrong with it?
  - owenwil 7y ago
    Sure, it's Windows 10 without any of the cruft—but also, none of the good bits. Believe it or not, but the Windows Store is great; managed updates of everything from Slack to Spotify, without individual updater components. Photos app, with support for HEIC files and so on, built in. These things are actually useful!
magashna 7y ago
The missteps were W8-8.1 and WS2012. W10 and W2012R2 and beyond have been much better. Not perfect, but leagues better than the those disastrous years between. Remember when Windows Server 2012 didn't have a start menu button, but instead a pixel? I hope someone was fired for that blunder.
- owenwil 7y ago
  Oh man, I'll tell you—Windows 8 was a beast of its own. I think that is how people remember Windows, and assume that Windows 10 is the same. But god, don't remind me of that awful full-screen server start menu..............I remember that's when we actively started to try and go full headless with Windows Server, but it was also half-baked back then.
Numberwang 7y ago
I've been on Windows since forever and could not be happier. It's a great OS and apart from 10 minutes of customization it works fine. If I was on Linus I'd spend all my time on configurations and customization instead of more important things.
mikelyons 7y ago
I was a windows guy, then did the "I got a mac and never looked back" and now I'm back on windows 10 and, yes I'm pissed off, but this comment is pretty well realistic. People have a tendency to say "never" when you really shouldn't say never.

willis936 7y ago

A serious and legitimate gripe with windows is how messy it is to automate things. It's hard to look at the command prompt the same way I look at bash. I resort to almost anything other than batch when I can.

mehrdadn 7y ago
Also try JScript. It's underrated.
JeremyBanks 7y ago
It's hard to look at Bash the same way as I look at PowerShell. I resort to almost anything other than Bash when I can.
Analemma_ 7y ago
If you are using batch scripts on Windows in 2019 you are most definitely Doing It Wrong. PowerShell (which for my money is better than bash) is the "official" scripting environment on contemporary Windows and batch file support is only included for backward compatibility with legacy scripts. Don't use it, ever.
pizza234 7y ago
As Joel Spolsky put: > What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. See https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/12/14/biculturalism.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  > Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
  - 7y ago

hackcasual 7y ago

Some people are tired of an OS that by default phones home about actions you do on it, include advertisement in your start area, and regularly push updates to add new features that also break existing software.

owenwil 7y ago
The 'phones home' argument doesn't really add up—there's plenty of control over this at this point, and every OS is calling home, macOS included, to some degree. The advertisements thing happens out of the box, and is trivial to remove (if my memory is correct, Safari harasses you about being the default browser, too, if you try to change it). The updates to add features thing.... isn't an issue for me, but YMMV.
- fkdo 7y ago
  > every OS is calling home to some degree. It's funny to speak in absolutes. Plenty of operating systems don't phone home regularly, just not ones popular with consumers.
- eslaught 7y ago
  > Safari harasses you about being the default browser But does it advertise to you by default? This seems not comparable at all. Pretty much every browser will want you to set it as default (and at least the option to stop the nagging is usually front and center). Maybe this is just me, but advertising by default in something as basic as a start screen seems very user hostile....
  - plorkyeran 7y ago
    I get semi-regular notifications in macOS telling me I should give Safari another try and I haven't found any way to turn them off.
    - ymolodtsov 7y ago
      That’s interesting, I switched to Chrome months ago and haven’t seen any — even though I might open Safari from time to time.

president 7y ago

From a feature standpoint, Windows has definitely improved in the last few years, however, I don't see much improvement in terms of UX. To me, Windows development was always about "let's get this feature in so we can claim that we do X" but Microsoft has never proven themselves in terms of providing a cohesive experience in terms of inter-app behaviors or just UI/UX streamlining. This is extremely apparent when you look at their office apps (Outlook, Word, etc).

owenwil 7y ago
The UX is incrementally improving in every release. Through just the last few major releases, you've gotten Airdrop-style sharing (the new Share menu), full system-wide indexing and instant search, a unified control panel and a ton of other things. They're moving fast, but incrementally enough that it may not be noticable—but I vastly prefer the fast-follow improvements over the 1-3 yearly 'big bang' releases Apple has done with macOS.
- Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
  I’m not following the reasoning here. macOS is delivered anew once per year with more often than not big new feature (like a new File System). Those last year, macOS was released for free - and without tracking or ads. Windows is evolving twice per year, for the same free price, or at least till a new major version is out. The two update more or less offer big change in only one of those. For me, it feels the same at the end, with the exception of ads and tracking - that is a major difference.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  That's basically the problem: If they stay on cours improving the UI, in 5 years or so we reach the consistency, polish, performance and usability that windows 2000 used to have. There are some nice improvements since then too, but also a lot of user-hostile functionality. It doesn't seem wort the trade off to me.
  - wvenable 7y ago

bpyne 7y ago

I use macOS at home but have Win10 in the office. I've been using Windows in some capacity since 3.1. Win10 is the first one I've found usable. Going from Win XP at home to OS X, I found it astounding that my PowerBook could go months without a reboot. Likewise, my MBP astounds me daily that I can't remember when I last rebooted. My employer's Win10 laptop is like that as well: I don't think about rebooting it anymore. MS is on a good trajectory, finally, with its os.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

I'm not a real power user - so my only real grudge with Windows 10 at that moment is the fact that control panel is a bifurcated mess - I really just want to get back to the classic window control, but I have to fight through the windows 10 UI until I get there.

sdegutis 7y ago

I think my main gripe with Windows is that it has one less app-accessible modifier key. As a power user, this is invaluable to me and Mac has it.

charlesdaniels 7y ago

As someone who has used Linux (with a few brief stints into macOS and BSD) for quite some time (since about 2012) coming from Windows before that, I don't understand the people who constantly defend Windows in these types of posts... In principle, the feature set that Windows 10 ships could be useful. I don't find it appealing personally, but if it works well for you then that's great. The issue that I have had is that every version of Windows I have used (from XP up to 10) has had serious reliability and performance problems. As a specific example, it seems that the one Windows machine that I keep around to play games on needs a complete re-install every 6-12 months, usually because Windows tries to update and bricks itself so badly that even "Windows Recovery" cannot salvage the install. This is a relatively nice machine (Haswell i5, 24GB DDR3), and I tend to stay on the happy path of just running the vanilla install plus Steam and a small number of games (never any programming, web browsing, etc.). In cases where I've had to use Windows for work, I've found that most of the built in programs lag and take a long amount of time to respond to keyboard or mouse inputs (in the specific cases I'm thinking of, this was on top-of-the line Dell Precision notebooks at the time). Most of my code seemed to run subjectively much slower natively on Windows than it did in a Linux VM running on the same machine. I'm not trying to be a power user of Windows, as I generally try to avoid using it as much as I can due to the bad experiences I've had in the past. I'm not doing any crazy registry editing or anything like that. Just pretty basic development work and gaming over the years. In that time, I've never had a Windows install where the features reliably worked, and the install remained stable for any period of time. This is all anecdotal of course. It's possible I've just be incredibly unlucky, or that I've had a string of a half dozen machines that have hardware that's somehow broken in a way that only affects Windows. So what I'm wondering is: all you people who keep chiming in on these types of posts claiming that Windows works well for your use case -- what are you doing? What's the secret to having it actually function reliably? I've not been able to replicate any such success.

owenwil 7y ago
I've been using Windows 10 as my daily driver for web (PHP/Node/JS) development for over two years without the need to recover/format/reinstall at all. This is the exception, rather than the rule, at this point: https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-from-mac-in-2019 https://char.gd/blog/2019/the-state-of-switching-to-windows-...

tootie 7y ago

I really wish developers at least would be more indignant about Apple's closed ecosystem. The fact that you can't run OSX VMs, can't run iOS simulators anywhere but OSX, can't run builds without OSX. You have to pay Apple to deploy software to your Apple phone from your Apple computer. Microsoft was never this bad.

kakwa_ 7y ago
Well, at least for OSX, you can technically run VMs, I've been doing it for a few years now (I needed one to troubleshoot CMake issues specific to OSX). For iOS, I would grant that. One last point is that OS X is partially Open Source (at least Darwin is) even if in actuality, nobody really cares about it (like building something on top of Darwin). In the end, neither of MS or Apple is my preferred choice anyway. I much prefer an OS I roughly understand (at least to some degree) each pieces and on wihch I could generally troubleshoot things (Linux, *BSD), even if I do acknowledge I'm far from your typical user being a "dev/sysadmin/devops/whatever it's called these days".
- Osiris 7y ago
  He meant that you can't run OS X inside a VM.

tomc1985 7y ago

Many of us don't want new features, we want a stable OS that we control that stays out of our way. Windows 10 is not that.

bbmario 7y ago

I don't think the issues with Windows 10 bloat is historical. In fact, I recommend removing 10 and using 7 instead. 10 is just a bad joke that makes a brand new PC look like times square.

stoolpigeon 7y ago

I did a fresh windows 10 install on a brand new machine within the last month. There is advertising in the launcher (can't remember what windows calls it but the start menu). There are popups on the desktop from Microsoft that I haven't been able to stop. (Something about "Teams" and it's tied to having installed MS Office). I had to be sure I bought the Pro version, there are a lot of skus that don't include full disk encryption built in. Setting up bitlocker is not nearly as easy as setting up full disk encryption on Apple or Linux. I don't really consider that an optional feature so I don't understand why it's considered some kind of premium thing. Did you see in the linked article what it takes to turn off telemetry? Are you saying that this is not longer necessary and now it can be done in an easy, convenient way? It took me a while to clean up all the garbage apps MS bundle into it. The things that I see listed in the link are current and real.

Scramblejams 7y ago

I'm glad you like it, but I use Windows 10 daily and I have a bunch of ongoing issues with it. I had to have IT reimage a Win 10 Enterprise machine because Cortana had somehow gotten so screwed up (how? I turn it off) that my Start Menu stopped returning results and I couldn't launch anything by typing. On another Enterprise machine, my Start Menu periodically starts coming up black and then disappears. I have to force kill the Cortana process to get it working again. When I switch from corp to outside networking, DNS and routes often stop working correctly and I have to run a magic dance of network reset commands to get things going again, unless I want to reboot. Which I don't. A few months ago I started up a batch job to run overnight on a Win 10 Pro box. A Windows Update dialog popped up saying it was going to reboot my machine. I clicked the button to reschedule it for the next day. An hour later I passed by the machine and saw it rebooting and applying updates. (After that user hostile experience I switched the machine to Mint and haven't looked back. It ain't perfect, but it's much better, and I actually feel like I own the OS now.) To stop the telemetry I have to use a Pihole-like setup, which is great ... until I take my laptop somewhere else. Let's talk maintenance. When something goes wrong, Windows can be brutally complex to troubleshoot. That's why when you start having non-obvious problems with a Windows machine, most IT's knee-jerk answer is to reimage. And that's not even irrational. It's a rational response to the difficulty of diagnosing problems occurring in a complex black box. It ain't worth the time, so just wipe the thing. In contrast, I've never had to reinstall a production Linux machine due to misbehavior -- troubleshooting has always solved the problem. And force installing Candy Crush?! https://www.howtogeek.com/342871/hey-microsoft-stop-installing-apps-on-my-pc-without-asking/ https://www.howtogeek.com/342871/hey-microsoft-stop-installi... No no no no. Microsoft's treatment of their OS users can feel so exploitive. For me I place high value on feeling like I own my OS, and that includes requiring a modicum of stability and troubleshooting ease. For my sample size of however many Win10 machines I've dealt with over the years, that bar has not been cleared.

slenk 7y ago
While I agree with some points, the computer restarting, DNS not working, etc seem like restrictions implemented by your corporate IT - not issues with Windows 10

mcny 7y ago

The main pain points for me come from Windows not being Unix-y enough (or at all). WSL2 will probably help with this. I am still at 1803 on my work computer so not holding my breath for WSL2 any time soon. It isn't really Windows' fault that my work computer has an i5-8500 six core processor coupled with a single DIMM of 8 GB and a $20 hard disk. I won't blame Windows for that. I won't blame Windows for Symantec Endpoint Protection that just has to check every single file just as I need to do npm install. My manager is sympathetic but we are powerless. I want to say something good about Windows as well: as far as I can see, there is no memory leak in Windows. Windows 10 is pretty solid. I still think there are two very low hanging fruits: 1. Prohibit OEM partners from shipping Windows 10-based PCs booting from a mechanical hard disk (yes even "SSHD"). Vendors can add a mechanical hard disk but may not boot from it. 2. By default, no automatic reboot without manual consent especially for consumers. Long term, look very hard into what kind of update requires a reboot and why. Be willing to break compatibility where required.

switch007 7y ago

WSL2 is going to cement this episode of Embrace, extend and extinguish, in part as it requires Hyper-V and therefore prevents the use of VirtualBox, VMware Workstation/Player etc. The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten as people take the easy path of running WSL2 on the OS their computer came with. Is this a sufficiently-modern criticsm for you? A blog post from late 2018, which references things like an October 2018 Windows update, counts very much as a modern experience with Windows. I don't think it's fair to try to smear the author in that way.

jedieaston 7y ago
VirtualBox can use the Hyper-V/Windows Hypervisor API to create full speed VMs even when Hyper-V is active. https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#hyperv-support https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#hyperv-support
- switch007 7y ago
  I did not know that. However, a couple of caveats (from your link): > This is an experimental feature > When using this feature, you might experience significant Oracle VM VirtualBox performance degradation on some host systems.
jodrellblank 7y ago
> this episode of Embrace, extend and extinguish Hyper-V is over ten years old. If it hasn't killed VirtualBox in that time, Microsoft offering a convenient Ubuntu VM is not going to be the death knell, trapping people who don't want to use Hyper-V in a nightmare situation of "having a removable Linux VM". > The freedoms of Linux (such as not having a boot loader assume it's the only OS on the disk) will be forgotten I've never noticed this as a complaint about developers using macOS for its Unix underpinnings, that they and Apple are not giving sufficient weight to the importance of a Linux bootloader.

aznumeric 7y ago

Windows 10 October 2018 update (1809) deleting users files from the My Documents folder hardly counts as historical.

Arn_Thor 7y ago

A substantial portion of requests blocked by my pi-hole is Windows telemetry. And I can't turn it off. That alone justifies a high level of righteous anger at Microsoft. And then, in the last update, it installed Teams, and caused it to always open on startup. Never did I agree to that installation. How can one trust a company that does that?

maxheadroom 7y ago

>...implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. Haven't we already learned the underlying issue with the moniker of "free" from the likes of Facebook and Google?

pergadad 7y ago

I bought a new HP Envy for 900€ but spent more than an hour getting rid of all the bloat. There's McAfee and HP stuff due to McAffee but it's my first new win10 laptop (previously just upgrade 8->10 and I am utterly appalled by the amount of crapware Microsoft included. Pre-installed MS software, and ads and unwanted products everywhere. Candy crush and similar junk included in a fresh clean start menu. Microsoft OneDrive in autostart. Cortana permissions pretty much make you agree to ads and constant listening (no thanks!). Lots of telemetry. Self-installing updates that reset settings. Nags to use Edge and Microsoft services everywhere. It took me far too long to even find (and even recognise) all the different always-hidden and ambiguously phrased buttons to switch all these features off - and the next update will turn them on again. Why do I pay around €80 of the sales price for a license and still have to deal with all this intrusive upselling and ads?