| 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. |