[whalesalad]

This is the achilles heel of Microsoft. They will cannibalize a successful part of their business in order to subsidize/bootstrap/launch or even straight-up force the adoption of new service.

Every Windows release gets progressively worse when it comes to Microsoft's integrated services and how obtrusive they are.

The cherry on top is the fact that Windows 10 Pro is $199 and yet you'll still feel like you are flying Sprit airlines when you boot it up.

[meibo]

It's such a shame too. Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon, but they just had to go and push out a new "modernized" version and fill it up with ads.

I wonder what you pay to be in the Windows 10 Pro start menu and if it's really worth selling out their professional userbase.

[userbinator]

I really wish people would stop using the word "modern" in marketing rhetoric as if it was a good thing, because more often than not they're using it and other buzzwords because they don't have any better compelling reasons to convince you to use their product.

No, I do not care that the newer version is more "modern", "stylish", "sleek", "clean", or any other number of useless buzzwordy adjectives. Tell me concretely what's actually better about it and how it will improve my (my, not your!) "experience". An OS should not be a fashion statement nor an advertising platform. It's a tool people use to get real work done.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

monkey paw curls

Introducing Windows 12, the worlds most powerful post-modern computing experience.

[joquarky]

If you think Microsoft Bob was whimsical, hold on to your seat.

[jussij]

Is Windows 10 really that good?

It's been some time now, but I still remember the first time I upgraded away from Windows 7 and feeling disappointed.

Since then my hardware is massively more powerful, but I'm still to be convinced my current Windows 10 setup is better than that older Windows 7 setup.

[marcodiego]

I know two people who bought similar new but low specced laptops that came from factory with windows 10 about 10 months ago.

Their laptops got visibly progressively slower. Considering what I read here, I asked them if they installed many software. They said they use the laptops for work only and haven't installed anything beyond office and antivirus. I asked them to take a look. After minutes after turning on, windows said it was installing updates... we waited... the battery went kapuft... we plugged the powerbrick, turned it on again and waited... windows said it was installing updates... after a new reboot and 40 minutes total of waiting I just gave up.

Now, this is not how an EXPENSIVE OS should behave. An expensive OS that behaves like this and still has ads is definitely something I'd only use if there was no other choice.

[gigel82]

The first thing you do with a laptop (or any pre-built PC for that matter) is wipe it clean and install a fresh OS.

The most likely culprit for the slow-downs is OEM crap pushed on the device, not Windows itself.

In my personal experience (I'm running 6 Windows PCs in the house for the family and myself) I never had any issue with Windows 10 becoming slower or updates getting in the way or any ads for that matter (except when they switched to the new Edge where a notification of sorts showed up once after boot and was easily dismissed).

For full disclosure, I am running PiHole on my network so it's possible that's somehow blocking some ad-related activity (though I'm yet to see any evidence of actual advertisement being shown in the OS except for stuff about integrated software like Edge and now Teams - hoping this doesn't change with Windows 11). I'm also running fairly powerful machines (nothing older than 4 years, even the kids have beefier laptops), so don't have experience with old / slow machines.

[bitwize]

Windows 10 is a really great OS marred by unfortunate business choices: ads, telemetry, settings scattered to the four winds, everything being so frickin' bloated you need 8 GiB and an SSD just to run Word acceptably.

It's funny because Windows went from "too unstable to be relied upon for anything" in the 9x era to "death by a thousand papercuts" today. It's like it's ruled by a law of conservation of awesome: for every feature there must be an equal and opposite misfeature.

[nyanpasu64]

Windows 10 is better at HiDPI support, and worse at performance on low-spec hardware (from what I hear on HN, and my experience with a 5 year old laptop which I don't know if it's my machine and drivers, or Windows 10 itself).

[mixmastamyk]

Windows Terminal is arguably the only feature worth upgrading for in the last decade. I'm tempted to say two, but there were a number of important security improvements to go along with the UI regressions in that era.

[JohnFen]

> Is Windows 10 really that good?

Compared to Windows 8, yes. Compared to most anything else, no.

[mkr-hn]

They launched it at -90/10 and it's up to 7/10.

[flutterwascrap]

Like flutter?

Edit: Seriously, they fixed 5000 flaming bugs in 2.2 release. God knows how many more are there.

[thomastjeffery]

It has its pros and cons.

Pros:

It's generally stable and in my experience works at least as well as windows 7.

DPI scaling is quite reliable and performant.

Vendor drivers are installed automagically by windows update's background process. It's a bit annoying that you can't disable or pause this process without killing it, so waiting for AMD's 300mb video driver to download over a slow connection is a bit confusing, but it's nice you can skip the usual install step and set a decent resolution without browsing to a webpage in 640x480 first. I would rather have an explicit user-controlled package manager, but this is a step in the right direction.

Cons:

They deprecated control panel in favor of the settings app, but the settings app is missing several important settings, so you still occasionally need to dig through control panel, which is a frustratingly fragmented experience.

"Fast boot" (a minimal hibernation mode) is enabled by default, which locks all of your ntfs partitions on shutdown, so you can't mount them read/write in Linux until you leave windows via reboot or disable fast boot.

The bootloader installs in the first EFI system partition it finds, even if it's on another disk and doesn't have room.

If you have a working internet connection during install, you are forced to create a system user that is linked to and named the same as your Microsoft account. Disconnecting from the network during that install phase gives you the option, though.

Exclusive fullscreen mode has been quietly replaced with an optimized windowed borderless mode. It's nice until you want to cut out that tiny extra latency, and then it's a nightmare. You used to be able to check "disable fullscreen optimizations" in properties for your binary, but that doesn't work anymore. You can add some registry entries for the binary, but that only works sometimes.

You can't shut down without installing updates anymore. Not even via the alt-f4 from the desktop modal like you could in 7.

You can delay updates for a limited period of time, and you can set "active hours" when updates won't be forced. Assuming everyone follows a fixed schedule and wants updates installed ASAP is frustratingly authoritative.

Updates try and fail to install when you don't have enough free storage. Is it that hard to just check first? It's this just a passive-aggressive way to remind users to free space? All I know is that it sucks.

There is a lot of bundled garbage, mostly links to app listings like candy crush on the Microsoft store. Just more clutter no one wants.

You can't opt out of all telemetry, which is a frustrating privacy violation.

[thaumasiotes]

> Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon

Possibly related to Microsoft explicitly saying "there will be no further versions of Windows after Windows 10".

[Nition]

I semi-seriously wonder if they did it because Apple finally decided to increment their number to Mac OS 11.

I also wonder if Apple went to 11 because Microsoft got to 10.

[lostlogin]

> Windows 10 is a great modern OS

I’m an infrequent user of it but have a starkly different opinion. It feels like a layer on top archeology and the number of places you have to go to find settings and controls is unhelpful.

[bombcar]

I’m convinced that 80% of the hatred of modern Windows could easily have been avoided if they just made both settings areas have, you know, all settings.

[8note]

I'm not convinced that's a thing they can do.

Too many settings are in 3p apps

[bombcar]

Yeah but Windows itself has two control panels for its own settings, no 3P installed at all.

Left over from the half-hearted touch Renaissance.

[wvenable]

In older Windows, the control panel was extendable by 3rd party applications and drivers. So it sticks around mostly for that and mostly because re-writing a UI for changing really esoteric IT-admin level settings is a waste of time.

[dboreham]

I think this has changed in 11.

[phkahler]

I hate how the File menu in all the office apps turned into some weird thing with no text on it. And when I do remember that's where it went and click it, not a menu but a whole fricking nother version of control panel slides out covering what I was doing...

[nonbirithm]

Perhaps there's a version of Moore's Law concerning the amount of innovation left at the OS level, and we're only starting to run out of it just now.

What legitimately useful features can we expect out of the release of iOS five major versions down the line? Will there be any new features that change the status quo, and that we'd be practically unable to live without? The significant features like the app store and multitasking have already been done long ago. As for macOS, it seems that the new security controls and notifications are significantly impacting some people's user experience, but they're still "improvements" from Apple's standpoint.

And yet Apple and Microsoft are still somehow compelled to keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to imagine there will be a "final" or even long-term-support version of iOS. But those companies aren't going to market their new OS versions as changing nothing, so something has to change.

I'm honestly very curious to see what will happen ten years from now when the vendors will struggle to meet their own arbitrary standards for innovation with each new OS version when, by nature, there are not many more significant breakthroughs left to be had.

[joquarky]

There are a lot of simple usability changes that could still be added to Windows.

Off the top of my head, I'd like to be able to drag or minimize a parent window when it has a modal dialog open. This is especially frustrating when using an application that uses nested modals and you need to reference the grandparent window to fill in some information on the current modal.

They should buy the code for the file search utility named "Everything" and build that into the OS.

Also, the Amiga had multi-character drive names and path mappings/assignments in 1985. It was nice to type DOCS: or GAMES: into a file dialog to go directly to where I organized those resources. Sure, I could do this with single-letter drives but that requires me to remember what each letter maps to.

[rocqua]

There is plenty of innovation to be done on security and performance. But very little that is a great 'sales pitch'.

Perhaps much better interface for multi desktop and other multitasking.

[thomastjeffery]

Just get feature parity with the average Linux distro, and I'll be happy.

Windows is so behind, and every step they take in the right direction is an authoritative foot-gun.

Most of its problems are, at their heart, symptoms of Microsoft's proprietary closed-source design style.

Apple made huge strides in the right direction by basing OS X on BSD, then proceeded to make every step from then on in the wrong one. Walled gardens are pretty, not functional.

[eloisius]

I get so sick of Apple reshuffling their interface around just to make it "new" and "modern" every major release that I can almost seriously see myself using Serenity OS as a daily driver one day. I have no idea what's going on over there, but it's like they adopted all the worst design trends from web (things changing on hover, hamburger menus hiding everything to look "clean") to pulled it into macOS.

[PostThisTooFast]

How is it a "great modern OS?" Internally?

Because its UI and user experience are a shitshow. Settings are scattered everywhere. Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping. Menu bars are missing. There are access-prohibited shadows of user directories all over the place in Explorer. The color-scheme editor is simply gone. It's still full of peek-a-boo and Easter-egg UI, with controls disguised as text or simply invisible unless you accidentally roll over them.

And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded.

When my parents have an issue that I could log in and solve, guess what? I can't. And no, Microsoft, I'm not "upgrading" them to a "pro" version of your broken shit. I'm going to buy them a Mac, and that's the end of Windows in any of my family's homes. And this is coming from a former Windows enthusiast / professional developer / Mac scorner.

You don't realize how unusable Windows has become until you try to set someone up on it. Its E-mail program is absymal, defective in design and function. Outlook isn't included anymore. If you do make the mistake of installing another glorified spam conduit, Office 365, you'll be treated to defects that literally render it unusable to some people: I increased the system-wide font size for my parents, but Outlook didn't honor it. E-mail subjects in the In box remained microscopic and illegible.

And of course there's the endless goddamned harangue to log in with your Microsoft account. A huge portion of the population is laden with an ever-growing pile of accounts and passwords. An account to log into your computer. Another for E-mail. Another for Apple products. Another for your cable provider. ENOUGH. They have no idea which one I'm asking for when I need to get their password to help them with something.

It's easy for the Hacker News demographic to forget that PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS MESS. And so they are writing down their IDs and passwords on Post-Its and putting them on their computers. They are using the same password on every site that demands that they use an E-mail address as a user ID, because they think that this is required.

Then the users feel dumb and blame themselves for problems, which pisses me off even more. They're being TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY MICROSOFT and others, rendering their computers essentially unusable and their security at risk. It's disgraceful.

[userbinator]

Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping.

...and let's not forget removing color from the active window's titlebar, so it was eye-searingly white like all the others, then reluctantly adding it back as an optional setting in an "update" later.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-resto...

When stuff like that seems to happen almost regularly, I really wonder who's running the show at MS. Destroying two decades of UI refinement takes active (and IMHO almost malicious) effort, not mere ignorance.

[BuyMyBitcoins]

Bleach white minimalism is the thing I lament the most about 21st century design. And, when designers reluctantly put color and contrast back in, they tend to just give you light grays.

[mycall]

I'm looking forward to the return of baroque UX. It's been a few hundred years, but what the hay.

[vladvasiliu]

Well, regarding the color thing, I figured it was a taste thing, and mine might be outdated or something.

But I particularly like it when I open a new window, it appears on top of the old ones, it looks like it's accepting input (the cursor blinks) but when I type, nothing happens. I have to actually click inside it for it to actually gain actual focus.

I'm thinking in particular of new Edge windows.

[exporectomy]

I use a custom active window title bar color but frustratingly Google Chrome is about the only application I notice that doesn't respect it.

[marcodiego]

They won't change until they have competition.

[ziml77]

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problem...

Nice things are that it doesn't disable the ability of the remote end to see what's happening and that it requires active input from both ends to make the connection so the machine isn't open to a fully remote takeover.

[belltaco]

>And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded.

Before calling someone the hard R word maybe first know about what you're talking about.

https://superuser.com/a/1302011

https://rktechstudio.com/enable-disable-remote-assistance/

[fomine3]

You can use "Quick Assist" app on non-Pro to support other's PC, rather than remote desktop. It can connect to PC under NAT. RDP don't support NAT traversal by default so not suitable for support use case. Even WinXP supports "Remote Assistance" (I don't remember how it work). Did you tried RDP to PC in other house past? Please don't expose RDP port in the wild.

For user id claim, it's not only due to MS but all services. MS and others improving situation by supporting FIDO and password manager.

[cameronh90]

Hasn't this behaviour been the case since at least Windows 98? I'd say Windows has improved a lot since then! Remember Active Desktop, the Channel Bar and MSNBC?

I may have misgivings about certain things in modern desktops but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge absolutely deliver a better experience for an average user compared to XP, Microsoft Briefcase, Windows Messenger and IE6 - and XP was one of the good ones!

[phkahler]

>> but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge...

My company issued laptop came with all that. After installing some important software (embedded compiler and IDE, wsl, etc) my one drive complained it was full, which needs to be addressed or it will keep complaining. The recommended solution is to upgrade to a paid onedrive with more then 5GB. I didnt know I was using onedrive, so I turned it off. All my important files created over that last few months disappeared. I could buy more onedrive space to restore them or they did show them all in some folder so dragged them back to various places. This was 100 percent wasted time since the machine came with something on the order of 100 times the 5GB onedrive freebie limit.

Now months after having turned off onedrive, it's full again. Must have got turned on again, but not by me.

Teams is another one I dont even want to get started on. And edge is just chrome with MS corruption and starting at Bing.

[max46]

>Teams is another one I don't even want to get started on.

At least this one is actively used by most companies (at least outside of IT/devs firms) and they generally find it acceptable.

OneDrive on the other hand... Even when I was an IT consultant, I haven't met a single person who has tried it and didn't absolutely hate it. I have seen employees playing out of pocket for dropbox or gDrive even when OneDrive came for free with the MS Office subscriptions provided by their employer because of how frustrating it was to use and work mysteriously disappeared or got corrupted on a regular basis.

[hulitu]

> >Teams is another one I don't even want to get started on.

> At least this one is actively used by most companies (at least outside of IT/devs firms) and they generally find it acceptable.

Yes they find it acceptable in the way a slave prostitute finds the client acceptable. I have to use Teams because it is company policy. On my computer such a parody of a program has no place. Using it is an exercise in masochism.

[pixel_fcker]

Teams is a strong contender for most aggravating software ever written.

[rocqua]

It's written horribly, butstillbetter than Skype for business

[vladvasiliu]

> I may have misgivings about certain things in modern desktops but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge absolutely deliver a better experience for an average user compared to XP, Microsoft Briefcase, Windows Messenger and IE6 - and XP was one of the good ones!

I'm not familiar with Briefcase (never knew what it did) and I'll give you Edge vs IE6.

But Teams vs Windows Messenger? No way. I'm running Teams on a computer orders of magnitute more powerful than what I had at the time of XP, and it STILL lags. I'm not a particularly fast typer, but it STILL can't keep up with me. This is, hands down, the worst piece of software I have to use today.

And I bet if it wasn't pushed "free" by MS to companies already using their stuff, no one would know about it.

[recursive]

Apple has done this for a long time too. I used to be an ipod believer, but then I tried to put music onto one using anything other than itunes. Obviously, that was a long time.

But woe be unto the apple user who wants to interoperate with a non-apple thing.

[garbagecoder]

Say what you will about the walled garden, at least there is one working way to do the thing.

[thrower123]

The LTSC enterprise/MSDN-only versions are almost perfect. All the crap is ripped out, it's fantastic. It's what Windows should be.

[0x0nyandesu]

It's sort of amazing to me that most people through word of mouth don't already know this. Your work or university has probably already paid for a license dozens of times over.

[denimnerd42]

don't even get a hevc license with windows 10 pro..

[nixpulvis]

But who else will save us from the tyrannical Apple cultists!?