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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better.

Now, if they would only improve the licensing process for Windows so that it doesn't drive people insane, that would be amazing.

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I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this headache so I could play games. I can't wait for more AAA Linux support, please take it home Valve.

Windows 10 is more like a new product than not. It's going to take some time. I think that's okay, as long as the fundamental features of the OS are good, the compatibility and stability will catch up.

Maybe you are the unlucky one. I wouldn't trade windows 10 for anything else.

Windows 10 is 90% great for me.

The 10% that annoys me is mostly around the way update works. If you have long running processes (like security camera DVR software, big render jobs, etc...) having the OS decide to reboot in the middle of the night is a bit of a headache. I know you can disable the update service, but it would be nice if they just put that in the windows update UI.

The other part that bugs me are the re-appearing bloatware apps like 3d builder, weather, contacts, xbox, groove music, etc.... The flipside of the reappearing apps issue is Microsoft uninstalling my VPN client. They don't think it's compatible with W10, but it works perfectly for me so I have to reinstall it every time.

To get back on topic though, Microsoft's Azure is fantastic. The earnings boost is well deserved.

I agree about the updates. Regarding the apps I think I developed app blindness - I just don't notice them, my brain ignores it completely.

> I know you can disable the update service

No, you can't in Windows 10.

IIRC if you have pro/enterprise you can disable it through a group policy.

This worked for me:

http://www.trishtech.com/2016/01/how-to-quickly-enabledisabl...

I disabled Windows Update service on my laptop which is using Windows 10. Search for Services, scroll down to Windows Update, disable the service. I live in a country with very expensive data bundles. I simply can't afford to keep Windows Update service on.

We did this for our QA team because of our organization's configuration management policies. Previously Microsoft updates would install broken drivers for their test equipment.

At least only major service-pack level updates actually cause everything to install/reinstall. It's kind of funny how Microsoft has their official "one version of Windows" marketing when there are clearly different versions with difficult names ("anniversary update").

But I laugh at your comment because I, as well, spent a day uninstalling the re-installed bloatware apps and re-installing my VPN client.

>"one version of Windows" marketing

You completely misunderstood the whole point. The one windows does not imply it is one thing which runs on many thing , not at all. one windows whole point is you can use same design/API for your program and target as many device as possible, kinda like Java.(but not compile once , run everywhere part)

Sorry I meant the "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows" marketing. The anniversary update was a whole new version of Windows and not just part of continuous stream of updates.

Ah, to be young. Bad Desktops: Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows ME, Windows 3.1, O/S 2 Warp Good Desktops: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows NT

The difference is that those (well maybe not ME) got better as they aged due to bug fixes. 10, seems to create more bugs than it fixes with every update.

I have to assume that, with a codebase this large and entangled, when you fix one bug, you add a couple elsewhere. Plus, they are adding features, not only fixing stuff.

Windows 10 seems to be degrading rather than getting better. It seems to have reached windows ME levels of stability on most of my devices. Leaving the win7/8 machines looking pretty good. The cool kids are always messing with it, so the stodgy maintenance programmers never get a couple years to fix all the crap they break.

Plus, the non stop UI "quirks" are probably worse than I can remember. The whole OS has turned into the windows file copy dialog. This is what I always hated about linux on the desktop, 1/3 of the crap doesn't work right..

For example, last night I was sitting in bed with my 9Y/O daughter when she pressed the battery saver icon on the tablet, and the estimated time dropped from 9 hours 31 mins to 8 hours 50 mins. To which I responded it seems like pressing the battery saver icon forced it to recompute the estimated time remaining, where before it had been showing a stale value. Pressing it on and off a couple more times we got it to shift up to 10 hours some minutes. Its like they can't smooth the power consumption for longer than a few seconds, and the recompute timeout is longer than the smoothing, so the value has large jumps instead of smoothing changing.

I could go on and on but its pretty obvious that no one is actually testing the UI, they are just letting some random people throw crap into it, and ship it. Worse its like their user metrics come down to, if less than 50% of the installs are using something then its ok to remove it (say classic mode).

According to Reddit, Microsoft laid off all their QA people in November of 2014:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...

This is bad. This is really really bad. This completely matches my personal experience. Microsoft QA under Nadella is only part of company I think underperforms.

As far as I can remember from "How Google tests software" , Google doesn't have whole QA division too (other than a elite kinda testers) and testing is integrated to developers job(SDET). This was not true for Microsoft for long time. It would take a lot of time for Microsoft to become on par with Google in testing.

That's not what happened. Layoffs were across the company but mostly focused on "redundancies" with the Nokia purchase. Of the non-Nokia-related layoffs, SDE, SDET, and PM were all affected. SDET took a bigger hit but it was nowhere near all of them. The discipline was renamed "quality".

Later, the quality org was merged with engineering, "eliminating" the testers by making them devs. This change happened across the company but not simultaneously.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee, but this has all been reported on. e.g. Ars Technica covered part of this:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-mi...

I'm in the opposite camp. I haven't had any problems with W10. It's an improvement from W8 and way faster than W7. The only thing that was annoying me was the updates, but I disabled those with a tool.

I have worked mainly on OSX for my career, and recently had to switch to Windows for VR work. I started on Windows 7 and absolutely hated it. I hated the visual style of it, the awful UX of it, and just found it to be painful all-the-way-around. Sitting down at my desk in the morning, I'd almost always utter a small sigh of frustration just logging in.

When we finally got cleared by IT to go ahead with Windows 10 I was cautiously optimistic but after using it for a few months I was totally bought in. I will/would never go back to any pre-10 release.

I'm back on OSX now (new job) and still miss Windows 10 most days. I'm going to be building a personal machine soon, and unless the new MacBook Pro's can astound me it'll be a Windows 10 rig – no question.

>I was totally bought in.

why?

I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to learn maybe).

I was making a list of things I like from Windows 10, but some are as good in Linux and OSX. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I'm sticking to Windows 10. I think it is comfortable to use and I have no reason to leave it either. It is installed in the computer, it gets big updates every now and then. It looks stunningly beautiful compared to any other Windows before.

In any case here's a list of things I like right now:

- It just works

- PowerShell and PowerShell ISE

- Office and especially Outlook (with an Exchange server) and OneNote

- I've got Bash now, which runs Linux binaries, with apt-get and in a terminal that sucks less than cmd. I had a tingling feeling the other day compiling a Go app in my WSL window. I know Go is multiplatform, but it was fun to compile a Linux binary in a Windows OS and run it.

It feels a lot how OS X used to make me feel years ago. It just worked. The difference is that here I've got all the Windows software and I can choose laptop from Macbook-like stuff to a £149 Lenovo Ideapad 100S, passing through tablets of all sorts. The OS is the same.

I don't feel like I'm tied to a platform when I'm working on my laptop. I guess having multiple putty sessions to Linux servers opened helps a lot :)

I'm not so sure about Cortana and Edge. I want to like both, but so far my feelings are just "meh".

On the other hand, the updates are definitely more insistent than before; but I don't think I ever got an ultimatum without prior notice of pending updates. I too defer many times (after all, if I'm looking at the computer means I'm probably busy), but it helps me keep up to date. Now that I think about it, I think I've found my computer restarted and installed updates overnight a couple of times in the last year.

One Note runs on Mac.

I honestly haven't tried it on Mac. It also runs on Android and iOS which is great.

I'm in the market for a cheap-ish ultraportable with good battery and I'm considering a second hand Air or MacBook. When it comes to the OS, why would I go back to macOS?

(Note that I would go back if I've found a cheap enough Air ;))

I'm not saying you ncessarily should. Windows has gotten better, but still has some infuriating stuff for development, like the 260 character path-length limit. Mac has more native Unix stuff, if you don't care about that there really aren't huge differences in experience anymore.

"It just works" - in my experience it really doesn't.

- I run win10 on a Vaio Canvas Z, a pretty recent machine. Graphics driver crashes regularly, although it remains stable doing so, screen freezes for around 2 seconds.

- when I wanted to install international keyboard profiles it has become way worse then older windows versions, which already weren't great. On OSX this is a totally solved problem. On Windows it would often show me the wrong thing installed until reboot, couldn't switch over to something newly added, the whole list is buggy.

- the terminal... god I hate it. It's stuck in the mid 90ies. Even Apple who supposedly doesn't care about power users anymore, has continuously improved its terminal application and it has become pretty great. On Windows I can't even have a decent color setting that would make all the standard unix colors readable without doing all kinds of hacks in .bashrc. Yes it's MinGW, but it uses the MS given terminal as-is.

- preinstalled PDF support is still a joke. Can't even annotate or rotate or really do anything with it.

- I can't get the preinstalled Mail/Calendar to reliably connect to gmail, gave up after an hour of fiddling around. That thing is a complete joke. And I hate Outlook's UI even though I've developed for it in the past.

About terminal, After Nadella they are improving terminal as fast as possible, but it may take a little while to become available for end user:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

Is it really better than Ubuntu though? I guess I don't use Microsoft office at all, so that could be a compelling reason, but Linux can be Linux with any kind of UI you want. Which for me is anything other than the touch-centric metro monstrosity with pages and pages of menus. You can make it your machine instead of microsofts auto-restarting spyware bundle of bugs

Define better :)

I don't think it's better than Ubuntu, but it's not worse. There are some aspects where Windows would be a no-brainer (gaming) and others where it is catching up with Linux (development outside Visual Studio? I'm just a hobbyist).

I never got 3 monitors to work reliably on Ubuntu or Fedora, though. Apart from that, I could probably switch back to Ubuntu and be as happy.

Personally, for me though Pre-W10: Average UI, Great UX. W10: Nice UI touches, No-so great UX.

Interesting. I have the opposite opinion. My measure of quality is how quickly i can do common tasks, and i found that Win10 gets in the way so much, that i am now installing win7 in my new laptops. Imho win7 hit a gold standard for usability in many years

Off-topic: Is it now possible to keep a Windows 7 machine on W7 and fully prevent it from being upgraded to 10 (without an absurd amount of effort being required)? My daily usage is probably 90% Linux/10% Mac but recently I've been considering setting up a W7 VM on my laptop. I do NOT want W10 at all, however, and don't want to even bother if it's just going to end up with W10 anyways (I've heard plenty of "forced upgrade" horror stories). If it matters, this would be a W7 Pro volume license.

https://www.google.gr/search?q=prevent+windows+10+upgrades&g...

I don't even remember if i followed said procedure, but my win7 installs no longer beg to be upgraded. Maybe MS pulled back its aggressive policy (also, i m in europe).

The forced updates have really screwed with our CI process, as well. We have one choice of cloud provider for Windows 10 SKUs - Azure - and it's been brutal.

Their Q&A for Windows also seems to have taken a big dive, despite all the feedback Microsoft is getting now with the permanent "preview" version of Windows 10 - or perhaps because of it, as a way for Nadella to cut costs with Q&A.

Yeah, windows peaked at 7

Strange, I see many people saying the same thing, but Ive hardly had any issues at all, though it was/is undoubtedly less stable than Windows 7. I decided to just let it auto-update though, perhaps that or other different config/usage is why.

In some aspects Microsoft has changed for the best (e.g. open source, developer community relationship) and in others it is changing for the worst. This is my list:

- Skype protocol centralization and crashing all the time

- Surface Book Issues

- Updates and malware detection that can't be turned off

- Windows 10 leaking information to Microsoft that you can't control.

- Windows Phone (down)

- Azure changing their price all the time and an admin console that is subpar

- We were trying to renew our MSDN Premium subscription for the last three months and they cannot do that because we are from Argentina and they are changing the internal system.

- State of the art notebooks like the latest Dell XPS with driver issues and lack of support for high DPI screens in Microsoft Office.

What have been your problems with the Surface Book?

Please check https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search?q=surface+book+issue...

Visual Studios integration with so many other non-microsoft languages and packages is excellent. As a former msft hater, I have to agree with the parent.

I disagree. Windows is more awkward than ever. VS is more bloated than ever. All[0] of their developer solutions are geared towards the Enterprisifacation[1] of everything.

[0] I love generalizations.

[1] IE: Overengineered for the sake of developer resumes everywhere.

"over engineered for the sake of developer resumes " ?

I disagree that anything is better. They're incrementally keeping up with technology. In fact, from my perspective, it feels like they hold us all back by leveraging their hold on offices.

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