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The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since the

The telemetry, ads and forced online accounts are the only major changes since Windows 7 that I can think of. What useful features has Microsoft added since then to make you consider it at its peak currently? I haven't been using it as heavily and I'm genuinely interested if there's something great I've missed.

bad_user 3y ago
For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.
- xxs 3y ago
  While wsl2 is great, it has more to do with developers being forced to use windows/teams to begin with
- taway1237 3y ago
  So the greatest thing about Windows 10 is Linux? (Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    It's not even snark, it's just fact.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used. All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.
  - bad_user 3y ago
    Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal. Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment. I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.
the_pwner224 3y ago
Night mode (blue light filter) is naitvely supported/builtin Dark theme HDR support Auto HDR for many older games Native system wide support for surround sound in headphones with hrtf Win+Shift+S screenshot tool It took a long time to get here, but the settings app is now better than the old Control Panel imo If you're a gamer then HDR/surround/raytracing can potentially be huge upgrades if your hardware supports it.
- xxs 3y ago
  >Dark theme Windows has had themes/color schemes since 3.0 - yes the early 90s Ray tracing has nothing to do with Windows, either
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903. Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.
    - xxs 3y ago
      > It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry. Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8) [0]: https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/ https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/
6510 3y ago
https://sl.bing.net/kic6UBky9mK https://sl.bing.net/kic6UBky9mK Not much apparently. The funniest: icons like chrome, round corners like mac. edit: On the up side, Bing is actually much better than Google now.
alkonaut 3y ago
It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens. Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  How many of these are worth the cost of the telemetry?
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Depends: If it’s anonymous usage data with little perf overhead then I’d say all of them (I’m pro telemetry so long as my PII stays on my machine).
  - freeone3000 3y ago
    Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.
    - alkonaut 3y ago
      Are you sure that’s an official difference in N? Thought it was only some bundles like media player, Skype etc that were removed
      - freeone3000 3y ago
giancarlostoro 3y ago
Notepad has tabs and is insanely fast, Screenshot utilities are built-in, there's a clipboard manager, there's a "Terminal" app that lets you use PowerShell or even CMD and supports tabs. I didn't even need to go out of my way to install a special terminal or WSL just to SSH into another box. There's loads of things in Windows 11 that are useful, but Microsoft spits on the face of all of it by letting Marketing have any say in what goes where. Windows Marketing should happen outside of the software, not inside of it, period. Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.

bad_user 3y ago

For developers, the great addition has been WSL2. But that's about it. For regular users, Windows 7 has been the best, and after noticing how my parents struggled with the updates, nothing can convince me to think otherwise.

xxs 3y ago
While wsl2 is great, it has more to do with developers being forced to use windows/teams to begin with
taway1237 3y ago
So the greatest thing about Windows 10 is Linux? (Sorry for the snark but I couldn't resist)
- moffkalast 3y ago
  It's not even snark, it's just fact.
giancarlostoro 3y ago
Terminal app is another good thing, the clipboard manager that's built-in, snipping tool being built-in, Notepad having tabs, there's all sorts of other enhancements I can't recall. Not to mention Visual Studio is arguably one of the best IDE's I've ever used. All the really nice bits of Windows 11 are lost to time because you don't notice them, but they all add up. The fact we're mainly worried about telemetry over anything else says it all.
- bad_user 3y ago
  Terminal is cool, but it's just an app that's not even shipping with Windows. The best terminal app for macOS, iTerm2, isn't built by Apple. It says something about the Windows ecosystem that it took Microsoft to come up with Windows Terminal. Visual Studio is a good IDE, but at least back in the day it needed ReSharper to have the smarts that Jetbrains IDEs usually have. And the fact that it only works on Windows is a dealbreaker for me, as many people want to develop on the same operating system that they target for deployment. I can certainly buy into small improvements, such as Notepad having tabs. And I'm not the one that mentioned telemetry. But now that you've mentioned it, I'll say ... such marginal improvements aren't worth the creepy spyware, or the ads, or the useless breakage in UX.

the_pwner224 3y ago

Night mode (blue light filter) is naitvely supported/builtin Dark theme HDR support Auto HDR for many older games Native system wide support for surround sound in headphones with hrtf Win+Shift+S screenshot tool It took a long time to get here, but the settings app is now better than the old Control Panel imo If you're a gamer then HDR/surround/raytracing can potentially be huge upgrades if your hardware supports it.

xxs 3y ago
>Dark theme Windows has had themes/color schemes since 3.0 - yes the early 90s Ray tracing has nothing to do with Windows, either
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903. Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.
  - xxs 3y ago
    > It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry. Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8) [0]: https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/ https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/

6510 3y ago

https://sl.bing.net/kic6UBky9mK https://sl.bing.net/kic6UBky9mK Not much apparently. The funniest: icons like chrome, round corners like mac. edit: On the up side, Bing is actually much better than Google now.

alkonaut 3y ago

It's lots and lots. Just around things like DPI scaling and multi monitor there is quite a bit. You might not notice because maybe when you ran Win7 you had one non HDR standard def. Then maybe you had two. But today you might have multiple monitors with different scaling, some being HDR and so on. And that mostly just works in the later versions of Win10/11 where as the features just weren't there in Win7. When you dragged a window between a screen with 100% scaling to one with 200% scaling in Win7, it became tiny. Or it became blurry. Now the OS sends the app the info that needs in order to resize and stay crisp as it switches screens. Windows Defender while not being great, at least means you don't need to start off by installing a third party Antivirus. DirectX 12 also comes to mind.

phone8675309 3y ago
How many of these are worth the cost of the telemetry?
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Depends: If it’s anonymous usage data with little perf overhead then I’d say all of them (I’m pro telemetry so long as my PII stays on my machine).
- freeone3000 3y ago
  Obviously none, but that’s the point — you cannot have one without the other in the rest of the world. The EU believes this to be wrong to the point of being illegal. Which is why EU versions of windows — the N SKUs — ship without it.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Are you sure that’s an official difference in N? Thought it was only some bundles like media player, Skype etc that were removed
    - freeone3000 3y ago

giancarlostoro 3y ago

Notepad has tabs and is insanely fast, Screenshot utilities are built-in, there's a clipboard manager, there's a "Terminal" app that lets you use PowerShell or even CMD and supports tabs. I didn't even need to go out of my way to install a special terminal or WSL just to SSH into another box. There's loads of things in Windows 11 that are useful, but Microsoft spits on the face of all of it by letting Marketing have any say in what goes where. Windows Marketing should happen outside of the software, not inside of it, period. Much like Apple and Linux, windows even though it always had an API for it, supports Virtual Desktops finally.