"Customers are likely to see regressions with Windows 7 ongoing servicing" | Hacker News Reader

"Customers are likely to see regressions with Windows 7 ongoing servicing"

blogs.windows.com

64 pointspetethomas176 comments

I have outgrown a few laptops since 2006 when I finally gave up dual boot and just ran with Linux. Linux admittedly does have the occasional mixup (especially about competing graphical interfaces and init systems) and does sometimes need a little experimentation to get things working as I would like; however, these seeming inconveniences are mostly caused by newly presented "options" and are not about forced lock-in. Besides, Linux also has some very positive qualities that have become essential to me. Linux maintains compatibility with old code (sometimes very very old code) that is still useful to me. Linux puts an astounding array of tools at my fingertips that help me automate work and learn new things. Linux also keeps me secure, virus-free and conveniently keeps everything installed on disk up-to-date... and it gradually (every 6 mos for me) gets better all the time -- for free. I can't see a reason why I would ever want to return to an OS as restrictive and inconvenient as Windows.

MS Office

Run a Windows VM on Linux (Windows 7 runs great), problem solved

Install, back up the VM image, a lot less problems than having it as your main OS

Or, if you want a great desktop experience that is really stable and has stood the test of time - run Windows as the host and Linux as guest.

MS Office is a good point. But:

MS Office is available even for Android these days.

Otherwise Wine should work, and ain't there some cloud MS Office these days?

Except it doesn't. Office 2007 is over eight years old and runs with significant bugs.

The cloud versions are incomplete and don't work with plugins like Endnote. The cloud version of PowerPoint struggle with movies and large resources.

The vast majority of people using MS Office would do fine with Libre Office or gnumeric and Abiword.

Not if they need to swap documents with other Office users.

This is, unfortunately, very true.

Try collecting some accounting records in LibreOffice Calc and then finding your accountant uses Excel. Time lost fixing the mess is probably worth more than the cost of MS Office for a single incident. If you need this kind of interoperability more than very occasionally, that alone could be a deal-breaker.

Also, LibreOffice 5 on Windows 7 appears to be a disaster. We installed it for the first time a few weeks ago, on one new PC at work just to try it out, and it's exhibited numerous very obvious graphical glitches, crashes and performance problems so far even just doing basic spreadsheet work. It also seems to have arbitrarily changed a bunch of things from earlier versions, such as the default colours available for colouring or highlighting cells in Calc. Maybe the stability is better on Linux, but even then the changes from LO4 are presumably still the same and just as frustrating.

Can you be more specific?

In regards to changing defaults, that's often the case. Microsoft do the same thing, possibly worse.

Sure. The first example we noticed was that we loaded one of our most important spreadsheets into Calc, and found that most of the colours we use to code different cells don't seem to match the default palette any more. Where we used to just click a couple of times on the toolbar, now it seems we have to manually configure the exact colour or use format painting. Someone in our organisation has to update this particular spreadsheet very often, and that kind of change is going to be horribly frustrating for them (or would be, I suppose, since presumably we're not going to actually migrate any existing systems to LO5 in its current state).

Is this just in the one spreadsheet, or is it across the whole app?

Can you change the default colour palette?

Choose Tools - Options - Charts - Default Colors

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Default_colors

All I can really say is that it was immediately apparent that a lot of the colours we used to use, which came from the default palette in older LO versions, aren't in the default palette any more, and if you go to the corresponding places in the format dialogs those colours do show up as "User" in LO5.

We'd have to look into the sorts of changes you mentioned if we were going to stick with 5, so thanks for the suggestions. However, given the graphical glitches and instability, which unfortunately make it borderline unusable on our test system, I don't think we'll be considering a larger scale migration any further until (I assume) some future updates that fix those things have arrived.

The glitches and instability appear to be across the whole suite, BTW. Basic stuff like drawing menus, toolbars and tabs is broken in very obvious ways, all the time. I'm guessing there's some fundamental problem with the routines LibreOffice uses to draw those graphical assets instead of the standard Windows functionality. Either that or there's some horrible conflict with the graphics drivers on the new machine, which is always a possibility but would be surprising at this point given how many other programs do seem to work OK.

That could actually be the issue.

Try turning off OpenGL:

You can do this by going to to Tools ▸ Options ▸ LibreOffice ▸ View.

P.S. I'm biased about LibreOffice as I have commit access and I'm working on the code at the moment. I do acknowledge its frustrating when things don't work, and I don't want to deny there are issues preventing you from adopting.

If it's not too much bother, can you file a bug?

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi

Sorry, turning the "Use OpenGL for all rendering" setting off made no difference.

I honestly wouldn't know where to start with filing useful bug reports. I'm a software developer myself, so I appreciate the need for useful information and ideally reproducible test cases, but at the moment we're seeing graphical glitches in everything from menu displays to dialogs to the tabs for different sheets, far too many different areas to isolate and investigate each one. It seems more likely that some combination of hardware/software isn't playing nicely on the test system, since presumably if everyone were seeing what we are the LO team would be seeing plenty of feedback already. If you'd like to investigate or try to triage it somehow, I can ask someone to get in touch by mail, and maybe that would lead to something specific enough to be worth putting in a bug report for more detailed investigation?

Sure, I'll do my best :-) even if I can't sort it out I can help point to the right places of maybe ask the right folks for suggestions on what's going on.

chris.sherlock79 at gmail.com is my email address, or hop onto #libreoffice-dev on Freenode and ask to speak to chris_wot (that's the IRC channel I hang out on the most frequently).

Not true.

There are use cases where OpenOffice is a vastly better tool for the task at hand. For instance, reading a CSV file that happens to use extended UTF-8 characters with some fields that have important preceding zeroes. In these situations it is possible to import the data into OpenOffice without the prospect of it being mangled by 'clippy'. Sure you can create a new spreadsheet and import a CSV file from disk into it with the data read as 'just text' in UTF-8 but the people I send CSV files to do not do that with their Microsoft ways. Consequently you get so far in and realise you actually need to re-read the source data because it has been Microsofted with bizarre things like capitalisation.

Excel obfuscates data and obfuscates filenames. It also promotes arcane ways of working, e.g. vlookup things held together with blu-tak and string when a simple table join on the original data does what is required correctly with no hand-crafted nonsense.

Too often I see things being solved in Excel where a small bit of code does a better job of creating the report or things like Fusion Tables do a better job of fancy presentation.

I no longer lock in to Excel world, I don't see it as a professional tool.

That there are some things Excel does badly does not magically mean other tools provide decent interchange with Excel users.

Not if you have to teach every new intern how to use LibreOffice when they know to do stats and calculations in Excel.

that, and the Adobe Creative Suite.

Gaming

More and more games are console "ports" (Both the PS4 and XbOne are basically an AMD x86 PC). And those that are not are "indie" games that work across all platforms supported by the likes of steam.

Wine and / or PCI pass through to a windows VM. The second one takes a bit of setup, but it works wonderfully.

I have a linux gaming rig. It's actually a dual-boot setup but I'm in Linux 99% of the time. Depends on the games you want to play, but there is a decent selection of games on Linux, and with frameworks like Unity it's pretty easy for devs to make Linux builds. Most games I play are native Linux builds, and then I have Wine for other games. I do use the windows partition as a last resort but it's rare (since building the computer I've used it once for GTA5)

I can't see a reason why I would ever want to return to an OS as restrictive and inconvenient as Windows.

I have never been a Windows users, but there are some reasons why I use another 'restrictive' OS after using Linux and BSD for 13 years (including on laptops):

- Microsoft Office. LibreOffice is simply not compatible enough. Though, people are moving more and more to Google Docs, so this issue might disappear in the future.

- No GUI isolation in Linux. It scares the hell out of me that any application can read any other applications keystrokes, mouse events and viewports. When you have some vulnerability in some client (browser, mail), it could listen in on passwords that you type in a terminal as well. AFAIR Wayland will solve this. But the ecosystem did not move there yet.

- The lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts across applications.

- Supposedly stable upgrades that break stuff (especially in Ubuntu and to some extend RHEL, never had this problem in my many years with Slackware).

- The lack of cutting-edge hardware with good driver support. I love my 12" MacBook and wouldn't want to go back to anything heavier and worse keyboard/trackpad.

For other users, I can imagine that these are also problems:

- Installing applications outside the distribution's repositories is still unnecessarily hard.

- There is a lot of inertia - people do not want to invest the time to learn something new.

- Business my still have many older win32 applications that do not run on other systems.

---

Anyway, I don't think the traditional Linux desktop or Mac OS X are serious threats to Windows. It's Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS.

Edit: I don't want to sound too negative about desktop Linux. I just wanted to give some possible reasons why not everybody may be happy to switch.

You are complaining about compatibility and you believe that people are moving to Google Docs to handled this?!?

No. People are using Google Docs for (some) new documents, because it handles collaboration far better. When you are using Windows or OS X, you can use both.

There's also office 365 which runs in Chrome (and probably Firefox) on Linux. The office/Windows lock-in is definetly a thing of the past.

It's indeed becoming a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the web version is not there quite yet feature-wise. But it's definitely getting better all the time.

I suppose I shouldn't speak for the editing side of things. If I do editing, it's basic Word and Excel stuff. It has been perfect for viewing though, which was what used to keep me stuck with an Office install.

Aren't Chrome OS and Android Linux flavors? That's my understanding.

Chrome OS is a variant of GNU/Linux. Android isn't, it only has Linux kernel, but the userland is mostly incompatible with any existing GNU/Linux distros (there is some resemblance, because of *nix roots and POSIX compatibility, but not much)

That's why I said the traditional Linux desktop. Android uses the Linux kernel, but has a completely different stack on top of it. Also, more and more functionality is moving to the proprietary Google Play Services and proprietary Play Store apps. Chrome OS switched away from X11 and is just a system that boots to Chrome for the average user (and its normal use case).

(Yes I know that you can switch Chrome OS to developer mode and install Crouton.)

I had never even heard of the issue of GUI isolation before people started using it as a way of promoting the Wayland idea. It was well known that keystroke loggers were particularly easy to do in *nix type systems but once you own a user in most any environment in practice getting keystrokes (or anything else associated with that user) isn't that hard. You really have to go further and explicitly sandbox a potentially malicious program.

This sort of issue is why Android (also Linux based but doesn't use X) runs apps as separate users.

I realized that this is an issue because the SSH documentation gives warning about this in the context of remote X11:

X11 forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the user's X authorization database) can access the local X11 display through the forwarded connection. An attacker may then be able to perform activities such as keystroke monitoring.

but once you own a user in most any environment in practice getting keystrokes (or anything else associated with that user) isn't that hard. You really have to go further and explicitly sandbox a potentially malicious program.

Definitely. But I think the trust model has also changed over the years. We have gone from trusting a handful of well-vetted programs (10-15 years ago I primarily used a browser, Pine, CenterICQ and a handful of traditional UNIX utilities) to more and more programs that are all newer and typically connect to the net, embed browsers, etc. Consequently, we should trust our applications less.

As you say, you really have to sandbox each program. Apple has pushed this quite hard: applications have UI isolation and App Store applications are sandboxed. In the meanwhile, much of the Linux community has been outright hostile to this idea (except the SELinux, AppArmor, and systemd folks) because it builds walled gardens and applications are provided by trusted distributors anyway.

The reality is that people want to install applications outside what is provided in the distro repos. And perhaps, we don't even want to trust every possible application packaged in a distribution.

We should really go to a small and trusted core operating systems where everything else is sandboxed by default.

Windows suffers from the same "No GUI isolation"-thing.

Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries. Windows has always been better at this.

An example of a *nix with good backwards compat is FreeBSD. The FreeBSD cluster has binaries from FreeBSD 2 (1994) that still run. Try that with Linux -- I guarantee you the kernel and glibc broke compatibility. Hell, there are Linux games from early ~2000s that won't run anymore.

Linux a.out binaries also still run - provided you have the a.out shared libs. But if you have the old binary, why wouldn't you have the old libs?

Also the Linux games from early 2000s do run - you need the libraries they were built against.

True, Linux binaries are not as backwards compatible as Win32 binaries. However, with Wine and Mingw64 being around, Win32 binaries are a totally valid way of distributing software for Linux.

With qemu and other virtualization technology, even software emulation in 2016 will be faster than real hardware was in the 90s. And unlike Windows there are no legal problems with licensing.

> Linux is not that great at compatibility with old code or old binaries.

The default on Linux is source code availability. If the ABI changes but the fix is to recompile or change a couple of lines then it's a much smaller issue than it would be on Windows when you can code. And even if you can't, since the default is also redistributability, someone who can may have done it already and the fix will be in the package manager before you even knew it was a problem. Or you can submit a bug which, when the fix is that simple, some random hacker will fix it for you because it looks good on a cv or github history.

This compared with Windows where you have e.g. some driver with sources unknown that needs to be updated to support AMD64, which already supported x86 and was 64-bit clean for some RISC architecture, but now you can't do it at all. Or even more frustratingly, you have the driver source and the fix is very simple but you can't actually use or redistribute it because you're not up for the five grand and six months it takes to get a certificate for code signing.

On Windows, the usual solution if you can't get source or someone else won't fix it (sometimes even if you can, because figuring out how to set up a build environment to recompile everything is a hassle when you could just change a byte or two... especially if you're not necessarily going to "develop" any further) is to patch the binary. Maybe this is why I find RE tools on Windows have been far better than with Linux or other Unix-like environments.

Or even more frustratingly, you have the driver source and the fix is very simple but you can't actually use or redistribute it because you're not up for the five grand and six months it takes to get a certificate for code signing.

There are easy solutions to getting unsigned drivers working. I do notice that the Windows and Linux community attitudes toward this are different though --- the latter seems to be "no source, can't do anything" while the former is more like "no source, we'll still fix it". We're not all as helpless and controlled by Microsoft as you may think. ;-)

(I'm someone who recently patched a driver for hardware that I had absolutely no familiarity with before. It was literally a 2-byte change after about 3 hours, most of which was spent learning about the device.)

> The default on Linux is source code availability.

You live in quite the dream world.

Same here. A friend switched me to Debian in 2002 and I haven't looked back since. These days interacting with Windows (even 7 which is similar to what I remember) feels unpleasant.

I use a tiling window manager and again I would never want to go back.

My job does not require me to modify other people's Office documents and for reading them LibreOffice is acceptable. My own documents I usually write in AsciiDoc and share them as a PDF. For something that I really care about I will break out TexStudio and the result will blow Word out of the water.

Most of my time is spent in either Firefox, vim, or a terminal for which Linux is also ideal.

Gimp + Inkscape cover all of my occasional photo / diagram needs.

For video there really is nothing better than mpv (mplayer successor) and ffmpeg.

I do have a Windows 7 VM that I use for Outlook and Lync at the office and it works fine, but it's just another Linux app. ;-)

What tiling window manager do you use? I've been using Awesome but it completely messes up when dragging Chrome tabs on your non-primary monitor. It is very frustrating.

Or maybe the bug is in Chrome and has nothing to do with tabs and Awesome...

I also use Awesome WM, which is ... awesome. :-)

I think I see what you mean - is it the crazy flickering when you drag the newly created window around? I was able to get rid of that if I set the parent Chromium window status to "floating" (Mod+Ctrl+Space in Debian default config).

Sadly not that. What I mean is when Chrome is on my non-primary monitor the second you begin to drag a tag it pops out the window, goes to the primary monitor and refuses to be merged back into any Chrome window not on a primary monitor. It's really strange and quite obnoxious.

I went in the other direction. I used to use Linux (Ubuntu) but I got tired of essential things breaking after updates, like Nautilus, and the constant battle with getting the printer to work. Eventually I just got too frustrated, went out and bought Windows for $300 and considered it cheap.

Now I need Linux for work (software dev) again, so I gave dual-boot a try. I installed OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and Debian a total of 7 times since Christmas, each time ending up with something unbootable within days. And I spent a couple thousand dollars of my time getting them to work, fixing the horrible fonts on OpenSuse, etc. Eventually I gave up and bought VMWare where Ubuntu now sits happily isolated from real hardware, a configuration that it's somehow more stable in. And at least I have automatic snapshots on every reboot, so when something goes wrong I just roll back.

Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time. I really like Windows, not because it's a pleasure to use (Windows 8 with that metro crap was terrible!) but because it just works. If I can't get desktop Linux to work nicely as software engineer, what chance does your average person have? Unless some company does to Linux what Apple did to BSD (SteamOS?), I don't see any hope for it ever being anything but a niche desktop OS.

I wonder if you used hardware than is actually supported by the distributions you tried? If you need/want Linux I would highly recommend buying something pre-installed. You don't have to use the pre-installed OS but at least you can reasonably assume that drivers will be available.

Nothing exotic: NVIDIA 970 graphics card, Gigabyte motherboard with Intel NIC, Haswell CPU, Samsung SSD and a couple HDDs.

I seriously don't recommend checking Linux compatibility on laptops this way (component by component). What about the wifi? How about your system's screen brightness controls? Trackpad? Etc. Getting something that is OK is takes work and getting something really good is a lot of work.

For comparison. Try installing Windows on a Chromebook. It'll suck. Install Linux on a made for windows laptop and it'll sort of work if your lucky and suck if you're not.

If you want to use Linux just buy laptops that are certified -- it's easy and there are several options these days (I'm not going to name any but google for them).

I use a desktop.

You are either unlucky or doing something very weird then.

It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. I have routinely had hardware that was perfectly supported by one distro or another immediately break on the next update.

Kernel versions are particularly picky. With Debian, I have historically regularly had to jump around between stable, testing, and unstable because one thing or another wouldn't work or the machine wouldn't even boot, because of the version of the kernel used.

The amount of hardware regressions I've run into honestly stagger me. Video is another one that's notoriously bad. I've had to abandon Linux installs on multiple distros because after some update or another, suddenly some or all of video functionality just ceased to work. Debian broke my OpenGL. Fedora developed a system freeze when upgrading to 23. Ubuntu routinely fails to recognize common hardware or even existing hardware that ran previous versions, defaulting back to ugly VGA resolutions and software-only rendering.

I frankly would take any pre-installed Linux laptop's claims of compatibility with a generous grain of salt, and basically expect that it too would eventually fail on some future version.

I wonder if part of the problem is people going outside of the OS's curated repositories.

With Debian at least the curation of the repositories is one of the biggest attractions for me. Everything in there is tested at length and is known to work well together. I've never had problems staying within the repos.

Friends on the other hand always want to install the latest version of whatever package and install tens of external PPAs to achieve that, without consideration for what that means for the stability of their system.

They still carry their windows experiences and think that to install software you have to go find the software authors website and read their instructions - which much of the time apply to other distros and not the one you are using. I have to keep teaching people the Linux way to install software, use your local repos.

It turns out the OP borked one of his attempts at Linux by trying to install Spotify in OpenSuse...

I.e. exactly what you are saying.

I stopped using Linux in the early-mid 2000s, when applying a security patch to sendmail required (at least then) that I learn its arcane compiler/build process. Burned at least a half day with no success. That was the last straw in a series of straws.

I was trying to build a business and was losing too much time. Went back to Windows, installed a free version of mailenable via point and click, then configured it through an intuitive GUI within minutes.

I'm sure I lost some tech cred on that transaction and it offended my sensibilities around MS at the time. But, man it just worked and that was priority one. I was already the CEO, developer, and customer support rep. There was just no value in adding Linux SA to the list.

Have never regretted it nor looked back.

EDIT: Interestingly, downvotes don't make any of my experience less true.

Maybe downvoted because things changes on the space of 10 or more years...

Perhaps. But, then, here I am replying to someone who is sharing essentially the same experience in the modern Linux era.

> Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time

I had the opposite experience. I do tech support for my extended family and I grew tired of cleaning up viruses and chasing up drivers from questionable sites.

3 years ago, I started pushing everyone to Linux (Mint). I must say, I have saved myself a lot of time (yes, I do value my time)

> Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time.

Can't agree with this more. All the "control" and "freedom" you have over PC fades quickly in the shadow of man hours needed to make things work on linux.

Oddly enough, I've had exactly the opposite experience. I'm locked into Windows due to industry standards (translation tools are all Windows-only, and the vast, vast majority of business documentation runs on Microsoft Office), but with my last machine, I installed Ubuntu as the host OS and run Windows 7 in a virtual machine - and love it.

I even have the opposite of your unbootability experience - towards the end of 2014 I rendered my Windows machine unbootable, without hope of recovery. I did manage to boot Linux from a USB drive and rescue my files. Late last year I did a similarly stupid thing with Linux - but I was able to reinstall the kernel without needing to reinstall everything, as Windows had required.

Although you're right about the average-person thing. I shudder to think about walking my mom through a kernel reinstall.

Unbootable within days? As in, you install a linux distro and it can boot, you switch between using it and using windows for a few days, and then after a few days linux can't boot? That's very strange; I've never seen that in over a decade of using various linux distros and dual-booting. My guess is that some "security" related mechanism in the firmware or windows is checking on and reverting the uefi boot setup somehow.

Since virtually no one buys a laptop designed for linux, but rather hopes that linux has adapted (with all the driver "quirks" necessary) for that hardware, it's really just that linux gives you the tools and the freedom to figure things out and set them up how you want. It can't do it for you. Sometimes it's just an impractical amount of work. But depending on what you do, it's often worth it.

On OpenSuse it was a software install that went bad. The much vaunted snapshot feature didn't work out of the box! It actually could not boot snapshots in that nice little grub menu. I had to reinstall after spending hours trying to rollback to a snapshot.

On Ubuntu it updated the kernel, which made it unbootable. I could still boot the old kernel, but after taking out a ticket and being asked to upgrade my BIOS, that became unbootable as well.

On Debian it was just too much work to get to a point where it supported the real resolution of my displays and my multi-monitor setup. I eventually just threw in the towel and went and installed Ubuntu in a VM, which at least got me up and running quickly.

I'm leaving out a variety of colorful failure stories, but the bottom line is very little worked out of the box, it was insanely time consuming and difficult to get things into a decent state, and then it didn't stay in that state for long.

>Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time.

Counterpoint: I also value my freedom, privacy, mental health, and the longevity of my hardware.

Freedom: I can install it whenever I want on whatever I want. I groan whenever I have to deal with "activation" headaches. It also works just the same on ARM - and anything else! All the programs I use are open source so they come right along too.

Privacy: Even setting aside the Windows 10 debacle, Windows is incredibly noisy on the wire. Linux doesn't make a peep unless I ask it to.

Mental health: System updates happen when I say. It doesn't strong-arm me into restarting when I'm busy doing something else, or hold my system hostage while it does god-knows-what on boot. As for application updates, I have a package manager, so I'm not bugged by a dozen different things like flash updater, java updater, etc. In fact, stuff doesn't spontaneously "happen" in general. If a system service starts chewing up resources or otherwise behaving badly (a rare occurrence) I can a) notice, because it's not lost in the noise of normal system chatter and b) actually find out what it is instead of it being hidden behind "svchost.exe". The primary interface (command line) is comparatively stable - I don't have to keep relearning where things are (it's not perfect in this respect, but it's better than Windows).

Longevity of hardware: I'm writing this on my 2007 EeePC 901. It has 1 gig of ram and runs Debian flawlessly. I never need to restart it and my load average is somewhere around 0.2. Can any Windows do that?

Look, I don't mean to come across as belligerent. You're entitled to choose whatever system makes you comfortable and allows you get work done. But I find Windows wastes far more of my time than Linux.

I'm actually somewhat surprised at the number of people writing that Linux saves them time. Clearly not everyone has had the horrible experiences I have. I'm curious what distro you people use and on what hardware. I tried Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Debian. All of them, excpting Ubuntu, needed so much work out of the box just to get to parity with a fresh windows install as to cost me more than a Windows license. Ubuntu was the least stable after install. Updates would frequently break it. I didn't even make it a week this time, and my past experience with it (LTS version) has been that every few months something new would break after updates.

Ubuntu LTS versions on totally unsuitable made-for-windows laptops (my next one will not be). I've never (touch wood) had an Ubuntu LTS release break during an update. However, I do a fresh install for each LTS release (takes about 45 minutes -- I keep my /home on it's own partition and the new install finds and uses it).

EDIT And I don't get how a Linux distro can take more work than Windows to get into a useful state. With Linux I just apt-get the software I want and start work. With Windows installing even a minimal python/R/unix tools/compiler/ssh client/office package/tex distribution/browser/video viewer set of software etc takes ages, lots of baby-sitting and frankly nerves as one navigates around the malware.

Debian needs serious help to get the multiple monitors configured and working at full resolution. OpenSuse had that problem plus terribly ugly fonts. It took a lot of reading up online and trying things before I figured out how to fix that. Ubuntu actually had a broken apt-get for me on some recent installs, it turned out to be an issue with using the us subdomain repos, switching to de made apt-get painfully slow, but solved the problem. Luckily I haven't had this issue on my new VM install, so I'm hoping it was resolved. All of them had issues booting (black screen) with the default open-source display driver and required the proprietary drivers to be installed (this is not an issue in a VM.) Just to get Spotify to run on OpenSuse was a herculean effort that I eventually gave up on, but not before buggering up the system.

> Debian needs serious help to get the multiple monitors configured and working at full resolution

I must have some pretty reduced needs. I just use one xrandr command to tell all my monitors what position to be in and it works - and I think my wife uses the GUI program in Ubuntu's Unity desktop without any pain.

> Ubuntu actually had a broken apt-get for me on some recent installs, it turned out to be an issue with using the us subdomain repos

Did you submit a bug report about this? Seems like a bad bug for a distro like Ubuntu.

> Spotify

Spotify is not supported for OpenSuse (it's beta at best on Ubuntu -- but runs very nicely). Trying to run propriety software on unsupported platforms seems like a very bad idea. And of course installing a bunch of random things in random places will spanner an OS. Btw if you want to run Spotify on unsupported platforms I think that there is an addon for Clementine that works nicely and the addon gets installed in your home dir so won't break things (haven't used it for years because the Spotify client works fine for me so things may have changed).

EDIT

I was wrong Ubuntu doesn't install Nvidia drivers for you. You need to install them after install and the process looks annoying.

Yeah, it sounds like you've had some really bad luck with hardware.

Since you asked, for what it's worth, I invariably run Debian-based distros. I haven't touched Ubuntu since they decided to get weird with the interface. This laptop is a ThinkPad X61T running Linux Mint + Cinnamon, which is only "okay" - little laggy at times but it works fine. Surprisingly, the fastest-feeling, stablest, easiest-to-use machine I have is... the ancient EeePC. Standard Debian + MATE desktop. The thing about Debian is, if you can put up with somewhat out of date software, is it just does. Not. Break.

I don't really understand where your problems with multiple monitors come from. I just plug 'em in and they work. It's been a while since I had a desktop with an NVidia chip - all my laptops have Intel graphics - but NVidia's self-extracting installers have always worked for me (although they're built against the kernel so you might have to re-run them every upgrade).

I've had the repository problem you describe, long ago - the UK repos were being weird so I switched to France, which worked fine. Nowadays though all you have to do is use http://httpredir.debian.org/, which will always serve you the file from the fastest place it's available from. Never had an issue with it.

I guess I won't deny that it can sometimes be a hassle getting things working just right on a fresh Linux system. But at least you only have to do it once.

> Honestly, desktop Linux is the most expensive OS out there if you count the value of your time.

I think these words are actually on the cover of the 2004 edition of the Microsoft Anti-Linux Talking Points Guide.

It's not that it isn't credible that you had a bad experience, it's that people have bad experiences with Windows too, and often.

And the Windows problems are harder because the solutions are typically some kind of hideous workaround to the fact that the real problem can't be fixed, instead of the much-maligned Linux solutions that involve typing things into a terminal but, if you type the things into the terminal, it actually fixes the problem.

Yes, I remember the talk about total cost of ownership. But it's entirely valid in my experience. I wouldn't ever use desktop Linux again outside of a VM. The bottom line is that my experience with Windows is rock solid. It looks good out of the box (metro asside), works out of the box, even supports SLI, gaming, multiple monitors without any fight. Even "dist upgrades" work. I've never had an issue with malware because I know what to do and what not to. And it's so nice that third-party software runs and runs well on Windows. Many companies don't support Linux or only offer a stripped-down product that barely works.

> I think these words are actually on the cover of the 2004 edition of...

So what? The words that you're saying are on the tips of every Microsoft-hating Linux fanboy's tongue.

> ...the Windows problems are harder because...

Oh please. The Linux problems are harder because most of the time the solution doesn't exist at all ~ (e.g. Does a driver even exist for a particular device? Does it actually work though? Can I get a particular piece of industry-standard software? Probably not (but oh - here's an actually hideous emulation (WINE) of a much better GUI system (Windows) that you can TRY and run it on... ).

> ...if you type the things into the terminal, it actually fixes the problem.

Good one - please tell me what to type to be able to run Linux on a touch screen tablet, so I can run Linux in the same places I can run Windows. Also, what do I type to get a decent desktop GUI experience?

I only have a computer with Windows for two reasons currently - games, and for debugging frontend web code on an actual Windows machine (more uncommon - pretty much only has been for open source work).

Otherwise, I too have found Linux/OS X to be sufficient. However, for many of my friends, other reasons tie them to Windows, such as music DAWs.

I would pay an arm and a leg to be able to use Linux (specifically Ubuntu) as my day to day OS. I miss the tools, ecosystem, flexibility and most importantly the shell. I have been toying with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the past few months. Managed to get it up and running after an intensive weekend.

Few days later I forgot to wake up the laptop from sleep before disconnecting the external monitor.

All hell literally broke loose...

For me personally, support for W7&8 has ended months ago when they tried to sneak in the same privacy invading updates that infest windows 10. Windows update has been disabled since then, can't even install updates manually since I can no longer trust that the package does what the wiki page says.

Damn, yeah, same for me actually. After I found out that Microsoft was including that crap in updates for Windows 7 & 8, I also completely disabled Windows Update.

It would be really nice if there was some site that kept an up-to-date database listing of all the KBXXXXXXX update numbers that include this crap (up-to-date being the key here since Microsoft actually renames old KBXXXXXXX numbers every once in a while to include the same crap the old KBXXXXXXX did).

Even Susan Bradley don't bother and simply recommends disabling the Diagnostic Tracking Service instead. It is not exactly the same as in Win10 BTW.

I don't think they rename them. They make a new version that unhides the update, but it keeps the same KB number.

There have been some updates in the past that people are suspicious have been renumbered¹, although I suppose that without confirmation from Microsoft, we can’t say for sure.

――――――

¹ — http://www.eightforums.com/windows-updates-activation/66805-...

It would be really nice if there was some site that kept an up-to-date database listing of all the KBXXXXXXX update numbers

Possibly of interest?

https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/459263

For me too. With proprietary software it's all about trust. You can't trust Microsoft anymore. What they have done with recent Win7/8 security updates and Win10 is obscene and more than just shaddy business. Win10 also has hardcoded whitelisted domains and IPs in the kernel mode network code - the only way to avoid the phone home crap is to run in behind a thight hardware firewall (good luck with a notebook/tablet/phone). Only with the expensive LTSB license the admin can deactivate all the bad elements of Win10. With Win10, the user is the product. How dare you! Why do they get away with this? No other operating system is such a trainwreck, not even close. Why is Microsoft such a mean company?

> Windows update has been disabled since then

That does not seem very smart to me. I think personally that Microsoft is adding telemetry to make Windows more secure and compete with Apple and Google who do the same. But if you don't trust it, it seems better no not use it at all.

Google has no desktop PC OS. Apple offers options in the settings to opt-out and doesn't change those with an update.

Google has something way more powerful than a desktop OS: Android devices know your every move, everyone you know, all your communication, etc. These devices are packed full with sensors and know way more about you than a desktop ever can. They send all that home, by default, for a big chunk of the world's population, yet this is perceived very differently than what Microsoft does.

The topic is about the desktop PC.

Yes all this is somehow true, yet they offer an opt-out in Settings that doesn't change with updates behind your back. I'm sure you'll understand by now what I'm pointing at with recent MS practices.

The topic is Windows. Windows is not only a desktop OS anymore. The exact same code (since a few weeks even the same build numbers) is running Windows Phone and Windows tablets too.

This is what is causing the issues that the OP is about: new hardware (both x86 and ARM) comes with new features in power management and virtualization (i.e. connected standby) which Windows needs to abstract and they find it too hard/risky to backport the OS and driver changes to every device now running Windows 7.

They don't send that out by default.

They ask about it in the welcome wizard. Once the preference is set, it is not changed behind your backs by updates.

For a few years, Microsoft seemed to have really cleaned up their act and showed promise to become an ethical OS vendor that you could trust. The loss of that Microsoft is the tragedy here, the loss of the last commercial mainstream computing platform that didn't want to do everything it possibly can to snitch, spy, analyze, advertize or gamify the living hell out of its... "customers."

Yeah literally every single apple, android app uses telemetry to improve the app.

Microsoft plays catch up, and then everyone loses their minds about it.

It's not about telemetry, it's about MS trying to sneak W10 into your W7/8 PC disguised as a casual update.

Apple and Google who do the same

What? I use Little Snitch to monitor all outgoing connections. I don't see a log of outgoing connections to Apple outside my iCloud account, location services (which has to be enabled explicitly during the installation) and Spotlight searches. And these are easy to disable. In fact, Preferences App has the obvious Security & Privacy prefpane:

https://imgur.com/EPCSQL6

Isn't Little Snitch relying on the OS? If you are going to inspect the OS itself is doing, you need to do the packet sniffing from another computer.

Let's disambiguate OS first: do you mean the kernel or userland?

If userland: Little Snitch loads a kernel extension and monitors every userland process.

If kernel: The XNU kernel is open source, so you can check that it doesn't work around Little Snitch and Apple doesn't do telemetry in the kernel (which would be... weird).

Of course, theoretically, Apple could work around this using e.g. malicious code in the EFI firmware. But I am pretty sure that someone would've already found this by monitoring at a router.

If you disable Windows Update, you're dumb. Either re-enable it or stop using Windows altogether.

I remember when XP shipped and people bemoaned the Tinker Toy GUI that it came with. Years later people are still complaining about change in the UI of operating systems by Microsoft. At least with Windows 10 they seem to be dedicated to sticking with something for a while as they plan to continuously update the same OS for a long while.

I remember when XP shipped and people bemoaned the Tinker Toy GUI that it came with.

One that could easily be turned back into the look of the previous version, with the Windows Classic theme. Because it was bitmap-based, it also enabled a lot of interesting theming possibilities. Not so with Win10.

At least with Windows 10 they seem to be dedicated to sticking with something for a while as they plan to continuously update the same OS for a long while.

It won't be "the same OS" for long if they "continuously update" it... that and the forced updates mean that MS can effectively completely change the UI any time they want, and there's very little users most users can/will do about it. Even the fact that it will still called "Windows 10" means it gets a lot harder to refer to what exactly the OS is. It's a new era of learned helplessness and corporate control.

"...the fact that it will still called "Windows 10" means it gets a lot harder to refer to what exactly the OS is..."

Perhaps a date based naming scheme like CentOS might help as updates are universal outside the corporate sector?

https://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/General#head-dcca41e9a3d5ac4c6d9...

It's already being done. November update to win10 is the 1511 version...

So now we have to encourage all users reporting issues to give the date reference...

Windows XP was very close to Windows 2000. I have not met any windows 2000/XP user that missed windows 98, even in the first few minutes of using it.

Plenty of people complained about lots of hardware didn't work after that transition. Drivers for dos/9X didn't work on NT / 2K / XP at all.

I heard quite a few people who (even after Windows 7 came out) were complaining that MS made DOS harder to boot into with Win 95.

We should have never moved away from our trusted 16bit systems.

DOS + Windows 7 = DosBox ;)

> Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft.

Well, if they hadn't made both Vista and Windows 8 such piles of fail perhaps Microsoft wouldn't have had this problem.

Lots of people stayed with XP for a very good reason ... drivers for hardware that worked reliably for better than a decade simply wouldn't work with Vista.

Similarly lots of people are staying with Windows 7 for very good reasons ... Windows 7 was actually decent, Windows 8 sucks, and Windows 10 is a resource pig which someone who hasn't upgraded a computer in 3-5 years can't run.

Last year I rebuilt my machine. I reused my aging Intel Q6600 building a Windows 10 machine for my wife from spare parts. Works fine for her needs of light office work and web browsing. That processor is 8 years old.

Yet it's a quadcore, which Intel still tries very hard not to sell. Laptop i5s and desktop i3s are still dual-core.

Windows 8 is fine. Like its actually fine. I use it at home every day. I use Win10 at work. I can't even tell them apart.

Edit: Fuck your downvotes. You can't provide an objective list as to why Win8 is garbage because it's not. If you simply ignore the metro screen and swap out the Start Menu with Classic Shell it's the same damn thing as Win7 but with a variety of minor improvements.

You understate the difficulties actual people have. My parents were VERY confused and frustrated with windows 8 until I "fixed" it to work exactly like 7 which they could not figure out how to do on their own.

Most users don't even change defaults or even know how to find and install alternatives this is why software intended to be used by noobs really requires good defaults.

Let's start a list (a mix of 8 and 8.1):

Notifications appear as big banner accross the screen which is extremely disruptive

When you do a right click, the contextual menu appears at the bottom of the screen, very very very far from your mouse on a 4k monitor.

Full screen apps, with often no intuitive way to get out. Why full screen apps in a world of 4k monitors???

When you install the system you have to click on some really non obvious sub menu to opt out of using microsoft accounts over local accounts. I am not completely computer illeterate and I missed it the first time. This is really cavalier.

Two control panels, like if the win7 control panel wasn't confusing enough already.

Enormous buttons that look ridiculous when clicking them with a tiny mouse cursor.

Hidden (but critical) buttons requiring to move the mouse to the edge of the screen, again a long way on a 4k monitor.

I am sure that if I start using it again I can double this list. There is a reason why Microsoft fired the head of the windows division shortly before he even announced windows 8.

Full screen apps: Do you mean "modern" UI apps/tools that ship with Windows? Don't use those. You likely don't need any of the built in win8 apps like Mail. And you never ever need to go to the start page or any other part of the modern UI. Everything can be done from desktop (I'm talking about Win8.1 now, not 8). I agree the control panel thing is a fiasco (barely sorted in win10) but have found the classic one to still cover e everything I need.

4K: In Win7 I thought you couldn't even have per-screen scaling settings, so 4K was practically useless unless you were on a single screen or all screens had the same dpi scale? At least in win8 that feature is clearly better than win7.

On modern apps, I agree, I actually created this very morning a script to uninstall all of them in one go. But I still have to fight windows' defaults, and reassign a decent default application for each extension.

On 4k, some people use 4k to get high dpi, I am rather into the big screen, native resolution category. I need the real estate space more than the high resolution (provided the screen is big enough to allow it). As probably most people who do any development.

> If you simply ignore the metro screen and swap out the Start Menu with Classic Shell it's the same damn thing as Win7 but with a variety of minor improvements.

Yes, you can do that stuff now.

The problem was that it took Microsoft several years to get to that point all the while they were jamming Windows 8 down everybody's throat.

The problem is that Windows 8 may very well be a decent operating system NOW, but Microsoft burned its opportunity. When people upgrade and then have to downgrade to get back to a usable system, they're not going to upgrade ever again short of a nuclear bomb.

Several years? Classic Shell came out contemporaneously or nearly so with Windows 8.

I actually miss the Windows 8 "Charms" (the menu that appeared when swiping in from the right) and Metro IE when using it as a tablet without keyboard.

On the desktop, Windows 10 is a relief compared to non-tweaked Windows 8.

I still swipe from the right when I want to shut down or restart my laptops. Probably doesn't help that I'm using a server edition of Windows that still has that at work.

Glad I'm not alone in missing that.

Definitely not seeing Windows 10 as a resource pig. I installed it on an ancient 2006 Core Duo 32-bit 2GB RAM machine and was really impressed, it feels faster than anything before. Metro can be really slow at times, but mostly it feels fine.

We use Windows 10 for Education on staff and some student PCs at work. An Atom processor based small form factor PC with 2Gb of RAM is running Windows 10 for Education much more smoothly than it ran the previous Windows 7 install.

No speed demon, but usable. Switching between Outlook, MSIE, a couple of Office 2010 applications, perhaps OpenOffice for conversion, and the interactive whiteboard software does result in some swapping and time for pages to load back into working memory but I guess this is saving us the cost of a client hardware refresh on something like 500 to 700 screens for another few years.

The only thing I don't like is that strange effect when you are typing text into a window (e.g. Word or Outlook email message) when the appearance of the character on the screen tries to simulate a typewriter so it appears then the cursor slides across to the next space for a character.

I actually love that smooth animation and miss it on the OS X version of office. However, it's not a typewriter effect -- a typewriter, if you have never used one, stamps letters on a piece of paper immediately. There's nothing smooth about it.

Also, you can disable the effect in the Preferences window.

I'll see if we users have the needed admin rights to switch off the effect. It drives me nuts on this fairly low spec machine.

By 'typewritter effect' I meant the actual taking of time to move to next typing position.

If your apps don't work on edge, could you please give them a heads up? It would be nice if we all moved on from msie were possible.

We don't have edge web browser. I assumed that was a Windows 10 for Education thing, or perhaps policy has been set by local admin.

You can disable the typing animation in Office 2013 via a registry hack.

http://m.winsupersite.com/article/office-2013-beta2/office-2...

I can't. My work PC is a client in a large network and registry access is not available.

Please all devs: UI choices are important for end users.

That's a myth, Windows 10 is lighter than a fully patched Windows 7. It allowed Firefox to function on an old 1GB Eec PC which couldn't even boot without slowing to a crawl with Windows 7 that it shipped with. That being said, it worked better yet with Debian.

You're suggesting that because Microsoft's updates have managed to turn a previously working Windows 7 system into something unusably slow, it's a better bet to move to Windows 10, which works today but has mandatory updates? That seems illogical.

Despite I didn't like the 8.x because of the UI decisions and same with 10 which also forced telemetry, I agree with you. Both versions are actually an improvement vs. Windows 7. Which is the most sad part, because if they didn't went ape shit into the "one UI to rule the all" and "all your data are belong to us" mentality, the system would be pretty awesome. The closest now is the LTSB Enterprise edition, without the Metro crap and manageable telemetry and spyware. Even MS describes it as "system for mission critical computers".

Sorry Mr. Nadella, I thought that the PC my niece bought with her money is mission critical enough to work when expected, without being rendered unbootable with dodgy updates.

Not surprising. Last week HN celebrated the "death" of IE, but this week will bemoan the passing of their dear Windows 7. Windows XP was ended last year. Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft. The "legacy systems" explanation of maintaining outdated software is vanishing with the rise of the modern web browser and the cloud. The local machine has less and less responsibility to run anything beyond a browser. And coders recognize they can no longer lock users onto Windows XP using IE 7, or the modern equivalent. Progress marches on, and at an ever quickening pace.

If windows 10 didn't have that metro ui and wasn't plagued with spying accusations most people wouldn't be bemoaning the death of windows 7. However because windows 10 comes with many different ways to track users, I see this not as an effort for "progress" but just another screw for microsoft to turn against their users.

Yep spyware and metro UI. But I can't imagine it would be this hard to code 2 GUI/Themes, and put in a checkbox to disable all spyware.

> this hard to code 2 GUI/Themes

You realize they're more than just themes. Aero and Metro are more different than QT and GTK in my opinion. Sure, old apps look okay with the metro UI theme, but Metro is also a design paradigm similar to material design which expects a fundamentally different layout and design.

Windows is still themable, but it's not the theme that people are complaining about, it's the fundamental UI changes. Those are hard to switch between, and it's difficult for both developers and customers to deal with that.

> put in a checkbox to disable all spyware

The definition of spyware is subjective. The fact that google stores your search queries for later suggestion is spyware to some and convenience to others.

There are a set of checkboxes under advanced options in the Windows 10 install to "disable spyware" and, it turns out, having those checkboxes didn't stop people from complaining. Even though it can be turned out, the fact that it's there and on by default (where spyware is mostly "send info to microsoft so that they can attempt to improve the product presumably. Which has no value if it's opt in because no one will do that).

Neither of those is as easy to address as you make it out to be.

> The fact that google stores your search queries for later suggestion is spyware to some and convenience to others.

There is one very significant difference. The fact, that the Google search is being done at Google servers, so you have to send out the query - and you are aware, that you are sending the query over network to another computer.

Not so with Windows 10 - search in start menu (with Cortana and Bing integration disabled) still sends your query to Bing. Why? It cannot do anything with the search, your local machine is being searched, why should be the query sent at all? The solution would be to firewall SearchUI.exe from sending out anything. But it turns out, that this was intentionally made difficult:

a) The firewall rules include exe version numbers.

b) The exe versions, their respective firewall rules and your preferences are changed by updates.

c) You cannot forbid or manually vet the updates.

So basically a+b+c together, Microsoft can (and does) change anything behind your back, without you noticing.

> There are a set of checkboxes under advanced options in the Windows 10 install to "disable spyware" and, it turns out, having those checkboxes didn't stop people from complaining.

As mentioned above, they are there for good feeling, if they are there. They don't really work as a reasonable person would imagine they would. For some things (i.e. telemetry, update vetting), there are no check boxes at all. It does not help, that even for check/combo boxes that are there, they are silently reset with updates.

No wonder that people think, that this is unreasonable and talk loudly about that. And yes, it is easy to address - just don't do things behind people's back, be transparent with data you are sending out, allow out outs (you can ask at OOBE, without hiding choices) and don't silently change preferences. You know, behave how a honest person would behave.

I wonder: can we get something like complete list of servers accessed by those Microsoft trojans? If you try to block SearchUI.exe on system level Microsoft will always find a way to bypass it. If you do that with firewal on your ROUTER then you are protected, at least at home, while being in your own LAN.

> There are a set of checkboxes under advanced options in the Windows 10 install to "disable spyware" and, it turns out, having those checkboxes didn't stop people from complaining.

Are these the checkboxes that are greyed out in the UI with no way to make them active?

There's nothing wrong with metro ui, people just didn't like full screen start menu in win8. Win10 has the old start menu back

I had briefly the misfortune of working with Windows 8. Double clicking on a PDF resulted in some sort of PDF reader opening up in fullscreen, without any obvious way of turning it into a normal window. I eventually resorted to installing a third-party PDF reader. If that's the new black, I can understand why people would want to stick with Windows 7.

Even on 8 that full-screen pdf reader now has a title bar with close button (since 8.1). And on 10 it's a normal window.

Yes, MS messed up the UX on windows 8.0. They realized it, they fixed it.

Nonetheless, if that's representative of Metro, I'll just say "no thanks".

The problem is that Metro is apparently intended for phone/tablets. It may be good for this kind of scenario, the little I've seen of it is disastrous for desktop use. I want the best use of screen real estate, not an ersatz Android intended for small touch screens.

They "fixed" metro by reverting back to the old UI.

I don't know what crack the Microsoft UX team were smoking, but the utterly ballsed up on Windows 8, so badly that it made Vista look tame. Windows 7 has been around for a long time because of the mess that was Windows 8.

They assumed that the primary windows 8 user was going to be someone on a 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop. I used windows 8.0 on such a device, and liked it a lot. Windows 7's UI was a really poor fit for that device.

I don't disagree. Shoehorning a tablet interface into a desktop was equally ridiculous.

I disagree - a number of things in Windows 10 (like Metro) are not necessarily bad conceptually, but feel unfinished at best.

A number of tools have half-complete functionality requiring falling back into the old mechanisms for doing things (Network Connections comes to mind), or removing methods of accessing useful information (ex. how are you supposed to find out what the total capacities of the respective batteries in modern laptops with more than one are, or even which battery it refers to as "battery 1"?).

Some things are even strangely broken (either Win8 or Win10 added a nice abstraction layer for consistent transition of headphones/speakers/... without needing to reinit your sound output or relying on the sound card hiding it from you. This behavior worked great in Win8, but now sometimes crashes any program outputting audio when headphones are unplugged.)

The tile-based UI experience is somewhat painful without a touchscreen, and I'm glad that Windows 10 migrated away from requiring that experience regardless of your ability to touch - but for the "last version of Windows", it definitely feels like most people are going to be waiting for an equivalent of 10.1.

I think the windows 10 UI feels terrible when used with a mouse. These massive dialog boxes and menus are ridiculous, as the idea that a UI should be all shades of grey. They reduced the density of the information presented on screen, which means more clicks to do the same thing.

From a UI point of view I think the only real improvement over windows 7 is explorer, which was really slow and doing a lot of unwanted things in the background. Deleting files would leave windows7 thinking about it for seconds for no obvious reasons.

But there can be other reasons to upgrade. Virtualization in windows 7 is no good. And win10 is the only way to get http2 in IIS.

The search on the windows 10 start menu is oddly broken. Really a lot of 10 is quite buggy right now.

I noticed this too but it came right after upgrading to build 1511.

The most ridiculous "bug" is: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-...

But I'm just using Everything as search app, it's much better than any other search function.

I think the limit of 512^H^H^H2048 start menu items that can be searched is more ridiculous, not sure if they fully fixed that yet. All too easy to hit with programs that install a dozen entries.

And it also comes with lots of bloatware. What annoys me is that they all are set up with firewall rules that enable them to do pretty much what they want.

As for the get skype! Get onedrive! Get office! nagging bloatware, now even building your computer makes you feel you purchased a cheap laptop at walmart/tesco...

> Win10 has the old start menu back.

I couldn't get it working like windows 7. It looked like a lazy attempt to create this talking point about windows 10.

Anyone who must use windows 10 should install Spybot Anti Beacon

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Works on Windows 7 & 8 too for older tracking/phonehome stuff.

And Windows 7 users should install GWX control panel to prevent forced upgrades

http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/

I would be curious to know what spybot anti beacon can't block. Is it enough?

well since you must keep up with windows updates I am sure there is some information passed to microsoft that cannot be blocked during that process

it might be possible someday like xprivacy on android to send empty or bogus information for data that cannot be blocked

But the other thing is that it relies on group policies to block windows features. But I do not know is what data leak cannot be blocked with group policies (if any), even in the current version of windows.

IE wasn't exactly a preferred browser because it had less issues.

I'd argue the opposite for newer Windows versions compared to Windows 7 (specially the shitshow around Windows 10 regarding privacy, updates and stability).

There's zero reasons or features to push Windows 10, but I guess they just manufactured one.

The "legacy systems" explanation of maintaining outdated software is vanishing with the rise of the modern web browser and the cloud. The local machine has less and less responsibility to run anything beyond a browser.

...and the freedom, control, and privacy the user has over his/her computing experiencing is also vanishing along with it. That is the biggest and scariest issue surrounding this trend.

> Last week HN celebrated the "death" of IE, but this week will bemoan the passing of their dear Windows 7.

Almost as if it's possible for the same company to make a good product and a bad product, somehow.

Stop pretending that people sticking with Win7 is nothing but boneheaded, reactionary fear of change. You know very well that the resistance to 8 and 10 is because 8 and 10 kind of suck for many users. Embracing "the march of progress" only makes sense if each new product is better.

Nobody wants to support two major versions, but competent developers address that want by making sure each new version is at least as good as the last, not by just doing whatever and then cramming it down their customers' throats.

Win8 and Win10 are objectively worse than 7.

It's not our fault Windows 7 was the last good thing Microsoft ever did, in terms of operating systems.

Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft.

Ideally not. The thing is, though, some of the stuff I work in is sold to customers who expect it to work for more than five minutes, and it's been sold with indications of how long support will be provided as standard and options for enhanced support contracts and so on. So we have an obligation to support older versions for a significant period, because that's what our customers were buying.

It's true that we focus on the latest version for new features, but sometimes we also provide them on the previous generation, and pretty much everyone gets updates if there's a major security issue regardless of the age of their system. This arrangement is inconvenient at times from our point of view, but it doesn't concern us unduly because supporting long-standing customers is the cost of doing business with professionals. We find customers tend to move to our newer products naturally over time anyway, because the newer versions are significantly better in ways that our customers actually want.

That's a very narrow perspective. Web apps are all very trendy around HN, but the vast majority of business software is still running client-side. Microsoft had better hope it stays that way, too, because otherwise no-one has any reason to use either Windows or Office any more, in which case it might be a good time to start shorting Microsoft stock.

Progress marches on, and at an ever quickening pace.

You and I have very different understandings of what constitutes progress. Personally, things moving around in UIs all the time drives me crazy. From a business perspective, the concerns about security and confidentiality that arise with online services often far outweigh any benefit they might provide. And from both perspectives, the trend towards software phoning home or running remotely generally makes everything less reliable than it used to be. This isn't progress, it's a new low on several different fronts.

> Do you want to support two major versions of your software for years? No? Well neither does Microsoft

Maybe they shouldn't have promised support until 2020 then. I don't mind Microsoft reducing support periods for new releases, but dropping support mid-cycle for systems that are already out there is ridiculous.

They're only dropping it for new systems. Arguably, someone buying a new system with a processor released in 2016 shouldn't expect support for older systems.

This isn't just updating software, this is developing entirely new drivers to make new hardware compatible with Windows 7.

> They're only dropping it for new systems

Wrong. They are also dropping support for existing Skylake systems.

Point taken. I sort of considered Skylake as new, but I misspoke.

Have any Skylake systems not on Microsofts' approved list been sold with Windows 7 preinstalled? If yes, I'd consider that a problem, but not otherwise.

I don't think it's their responsibility to support new devices that (according to this post) require significant restructuring of the OS to support.

What does the title phrase actually mean? That's not a use of "regression" I'm familiar with.

The new hardware systems discussed will result in driver updates for pre-existing hardware to take advantage of/fix bugs with Skylake/Tablets/SoCs. Once Windows 7 is no longer the primary mainstream version, vendors will spend less QA effort on not breaking Windows 7 with a driver update.

It does look like it is almost time to upgrade. The OS of the majority of steam users (ie. the best supported) is getting close to going from 7 to 10...

Windows 7 64bit 34.81% -0.82% Windows 10 64bit 31.25% +2.44%

"After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these [Skylake] configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices."

I think this only refers to driver updates and the like, right?

Security updates, etc too. PCs in the past few years have been growing more and more towards being Systems on Chips that have a few more interesting ports on them. One of the reasons MS is doing this is because the underlying hardware is changing pretty severely, so the OS needs to change to match.

If a corporate app needs Windows 7, can it be run in a client Hyper-V VM on top of Windows 10?

Yes, this should be fully supported.

Yep, but I have heard it doesn't work very well on laptops, that having hyper-v running messes up with the sleep features. On a desktop, windows 10 hyper-v is very good.

That might be the case for Surface but I'm running Hyper-V on two laptops without issues. One is a Macbook actually.

the line: > enables up to 30x better graphics and 3x the battery life reminds me of these "save up to 50%" sales.

Yeah, that line was odd in particular because they're comparing Windows 10 to Windows 7, not Windows 10 to Some Other OS. They're effectively saying, "Wow, Windows 7 is really bad; you shouldn't use that crap. But Windows 10 is great!" Which is kind of an odd sales pitch, even if you ignore how exaggeratedly outrageous those numbers sound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com