I still don't really get why people would not want to upgrade. As far as my experience goes, Windows 10 is superior to 7 and 8 in almost every conceivable way.
I still don't understand this. What's the point of a UI refresh if you're going to do it really half-assed.
I also had a sticky problem where it was convinced I had a Canadian French keyboard even after deleting it from both keyboard control panels. I ended up having to solve that with a registry modification.
That's not a concern most of the people resisting W10 have.
> I still don't really get why people would not want to upgrade.
For lots of people, Windows has been good enough since XP SP2. For those people, Windows 10 is better in ways that are mostly irrelevant to them and the benefits are less than the cost of changing. They use their computer for four things and that's about all they know or want to know about the computer. In other words, if it isn't broke, don't fix it.
EDIT: and that's not even getting into the privacy issues of Windows 10.
I'm glad Microsoft has decided to settle on W10 for the long haul. I just wish their LTS operating system were a little skinnier. I'd rather have things like Cortana be an installable (or at least removable) application rather than a core part of the OS. I don't want it or need it so for me, it's just using resources and lowering the security of my machine and network.
I simply don't want to deal with new interfaces. I feel that Windows has reached its interface peak around Win7 and Office around version 2003. Everything since has been driven by the need to justify having a team which develops new interfaces for each platform.
Incidentally I feel the same way about OSX - I stopped upgrading my machine with 10.9.5. Don't like the new look and feel that there isn't anything worth upgrading to in the new version that will make me look at that candy-store like design all day long.
Will hold out as long as I can - probably until I get a new machine.
Why are customers expected to accept all changes pushed down their throats?
Fear of new, or having to learn new. Some people may have only just adapted to Metro.
For others, justifiable privacy concerns; having to run third party scripts and manually vet and select updates to avoid telemetry while keeping security is just not feasible.
There's also question of policy. I don't have the company laptop upgraded, because win10 has not been tested with everything yet, so it's not approved across the domain at the moment.
Not asking much imo.
In no small part because Apple's median user age is so much lower than MS and their higher price point selects for more educated consumers. That, and the Win10 forced upgrades are mostly for managing and trying to convert unpaid copies.
Vista removed 3D Sound Card support (because it could be used to circunvent HDMI audio DRM), and made many CRT features unusable to incentive people to use HDMI cable and DRM-supporting monitors (CRTs, because they are inherently analog, doesn't work with DRM at all).
Vista also doesn't supported parallel port properly (thus anyone using parallel port to contorl stepper motors, be it parallel-port scanners, CNC machines or hobby hardware had to stick with XP).
When I had to buy a laptop after moving, Linux-based machines were usually 120 USD more expensive, even when they had 100% identical hardware, I bought a Win8 laptop, wanting to replace WIn8 with Linux, but my laptop has buggy UEFI and even disabling Secure Boot it keeps preventing boot of anything that is not the OEM windows.
Win8 is terrible, and did something that REALLY annoyed me, upgraded to Win8.1 forcefully when I was busy, it just showed a dialog box written it was going to update now and reboot, and a "reboot" button, but no way to re-schedule, cancel, anything, not even a "X" (it showed a metro-style modal box, over my desktop environment).
When Win10 was announced, I liked what was described, and wanted it badly... but then I learned of the extremely hard to turn off telemetry and update policy, and other shady policies, and became suspicious of it, then MS started to nag people to install it, this made me not want it.
Then I had to install Win10 on some of my parents business computers... and then I learned how nightmare Win10 is.
1. On Win10, the only software some of the users use for e-mail, that is Windows Live Mail, doesn't work properly, MS even made an update in december that deliberately sabotaged it. (update, as you remember, install mostly mandatorily, specially if you don't have windows 10 enterprise, or a windows 10 server to control windows 10 pro with policy).
2. Win10 updates frequently break random shit, usually banking or tax related (my country is heavily moving toward online-only bureaucracy, and is also the world leader in bureaucracy amount...)
3. Printers randomly stop working on Win10, when they work fine on Win7.
4. Tested some games on my Win8.1 machine and Win10 machines, and older DirectX is very broken there, depending on your hardware the broken DX + Hardware combo make some games completely unplayable.
5. MS promised 3 or 4 years ago to fix the broken DX emulation, and has an employee in the official forums gathering all bug reports in a thread, but released not even a preliminary fix.
I had to build a new PC (the laptop was failing, and I couldn't use a WinXP era machine anymore...), since most new games doesn't work on WinXP anymore, then I finally installed Win7 for the first time...
Almost best Windows ever, so far (I installed Win7 a month ago, thus I don't used it much yet).
I am hoping Linux people will stop some desktop-user hostile behaviour and that Linux will be actually useable on desktop before Win10 become "mandatory" for hardware reasons, so I don't have to ever install it on my personal computer.
Of course, MS can attempt to get goodwill again by reversing all their crappy policies, but they did that (crap policy, reversing it, unreversing it) now so many times (example, launch Games for Windows + Xbox 360, that was terrible, kill it off, only to "relaunch" it in the form of Xbone + UWP + DX12 Win10 only) that I doubt I personally will trust them again.