Then there's the forced update system, which allows you to define a time interval where it won't automatically install updates, but it can't be set to more than a 12hs window. It just feels like an OS that thinks it knows what's best for you, but it actually results in an inferior experience compared to the previous versions due to its limited configurability.
I haven't played around with the registry and internals that much since Win'95, just because it adds all this unneeded overhead without any option to remove it from within its own settings.
Don't get me wrong, it certainly works and I'm getting used to all its new features and changes, but Win10 makes it really hard to optimize it to your specific needs for seemingly unnecessary reasons, so I can understand why people want to stick to their Win7 or even Win8 installs.
Windows defender cannot be disabled. Well, you can, but it will turn itself back on, no matter what you tell it to, and it even tells you that in settings. Like, as you don't know what you're doing, we're deciding for you. I mean, if you're going to decide what's best for me,in my machine, why bother making a setting?
Then there's all privacy checks auto enabling with each update, though at this point given what they've done with the 'upgrade experience', that was foreseeable...
The inability to minimize and customize Windows 10 is really starting to grate on me.
Win 10 keeps making decisions for me and does not let me choose.
I have had to configure Windows 7 and Windows 8 Embedded for work so I am used to being able to configure Windows to minute detail.
I wonder if MSFT will even release Win 10 embedded.
There is "Windows 10 IoT Core" that they threw together to jump on the Raspberry Pi bandwagon [1], which suggests that they'll do a Windows Embedded 10 at some point.
In short, Microsoft can trim down Windows 10 just fine, they've just made it hard for customers to do so.
You are laboring under some really weird assumptions from the jump. Namely that you have to "trim down" anything at all. My Windows desktop is almost exclusively for games (occasionally a little C#). The only changes from the default settings I made is to use a local account instead of a Microsoft account, fiddle with the times for Windows Update
When I am idle, the machine is idle. There is no unnecessary disk activity (there is indexing, but I want that and the switch is in the exact same place it's been since XP). There is negligible CPU usage. There is no network activity unless Steam decides to do something in the background.
This is the future. We're in it. And if you are buying reasonably new hardware, stuff really just works.
Perhaps this is the case for the majority of Windows 10 installations. Or perhaps you're a lucky — and exceptional — case.
I can only add my anecdotes to your anecdotes, and I have no large scale statistically significant figures to claim my anecdotes are the general case.
But my anecdotes completely disagree with you. Two Windows 10 installations under my care in the past exhibited wild, mind-of-their-own-esque resource usage when they were supposed to be idling. One was a upgraded-from-Windows-7 physical installation (with no malware, I can attest to that) on which explorer.exe would start consuming ~ 60% CPU usage when left idle, another was a virtual installation of fresh Windows 10 without any apps installed on which the host hypervisor reported arbitrary, persistent (upto tens-of-minutes at a time) CPU usage rise.
And the sheer lack of things I could do about it frustrated me. Ultimately, I had to replace the Windows on the physical computer (a friend's laptop) with Kubuntu (thankfully, she liked the new experience), and replaced the virtual machine with Windows 7.
My Win10 install was showing a constant 100% disk usage right after upgrading from Win8.1. I read online that it can be caused by Windows search indexing all the files, so I simply left it running. After 2 days I had enough, stopped all the search related services, and disabled them where possible. Then the Cortana update got released and the exact same thing happened again with search processes taking up all the available disk I/O.
Network speed was also an issue where Win10 kept on downloading updates while the PC was in heavy use instead of doing so when in idle status. That's when I found out about above mentioned 12hs update window, where it kept on downloading stuff in the background whenever I had a late/early gaming session.
CPU usage was not as bad as the disk usage issues, in my case, but there are the occasional spikes from Windows processes even when in idle status.
That's why I had to start looking into options in regards to trimming down Windows to its bare minimum features, as the system was barely usable with its constant disk usage spikes.
PC configurations differ, so of course your milage may vary. Just from my own personal experience I know people on both ends of the spectrum, where everything just worked for them, or it was so bad that it rendered their PC useless and they went back to their previous Windows version. In my case I just had to figure out how to prevent Windows from doing certain tasks that would end up having a noticeable effect on the system performance.
Win10 refuses to stop updates, the antivirus (defender), turning off cortana is a mess, it even forces reboots as early as every 12 hours. Completely unusable for a professional. I'll have to upgrade to win 10 pro, and even then they don't make it easy, I have to edit the group policy.
This is nuts for anyone in pro audio. Even though I have thousands invested in Windows compatible software and hardware, I'm seriously considering switching to osx. Windows touch has no equivalent, this is an awesome underrated opportunity and they are blowing it.
Also the iPad is more fragile, twice as expensive, and has a fraction of the storage for audio, compared to my Asus ultrabook. I only use the iPad in the studio.
It's much cheaper to get started on Windows, the plugins and programs are vast and often free compared to the Mac equivalent. The majority of my stuff also works on Mac but I'd have to relearn my workflow.
I do have a Mac but using it feels like I'm in the office compared to Windows touch experience. As an app dev I'm always trying to push the boundaries in music interfaces.
Those are forced only on Windows Home.
I think upgrading to Windows 10 and blocking the telemetry with something like Spybot’s Anti-Beacon is a better option than getting stuck in the past.
"There it is generation has grown up". Most people want to stick with 7 because it was last windows. Ugly, inconvenient in comparison with past versions, but still windows. Nostalgia is when you stick with 95-2000.
We want to stick with 7 because 8 was atrocious, and 10 doesnt offer enough improvements for the standard user to change the UI in useless ways.
If Microsoft removed the metro UI style, the tile interface, the Windows Store, Cortana, and forced updates (or allowed the user to disable those things), I'd be running Windows 10 now.
Oh, I disabled that early on so I forgot about it. The only one of significance was the start menu corner, but that was also remedied in 8.1.
>settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place
The settings panel is the same as Windows 10. I'd definitely argue against all settings being in one place on 7 though. There's dozens of different locations: control panel, the registry, local/group policy editor, folder options, the "advanced" system settings panel (contains completely unrelated settings such as environmental variables, performance toggles, DEP, and remote assistance). Then there's lots of weird quirky menus like the one you get by entering "control userpasswords2" into the run dialog.
I see the new settings panel as a cleaner frontend to the existing settings. Hopefully over time they'll be consolidated there.
>flat UI elements
I love it.
>two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh).
I don't see the conflict, but the start screen worked just fine on mouse for me. It took a week to relearn some muscle memory and then I was over it. In the end I found it much more efficient. The targets were larger and it didn't waste a ton of screen space like the current start menu does.
On my wife's, I remember something about the top-right corner, or along the edge there, and I think it had to do with wifi settings. Those are what I was thinking of. Oh, and swiping away from the lock screen.
> Settings
All the settings that I actually use are in the control panel. I end up in the registry less than annually, and I've never touched the policy editor, most of the things in the mmc, etc. Things like folder settings aren't what I'd consider OS-wide; it makes sense to have them in Explorer, because that's where they take effect.
>dual interfaces
Everyone's got their own opinion. It seems like change for the sake of change, to me, and better suited to a tablet UI than a PC one.