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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a Lenovo sporting Windows 10 and decided to give it a fair try. I've been using Windows exclusively on my personal laptop for about 2 months and so far it's a good experience. This is after 16 years of running linux (or briefly a mac) on the desktop.

The window manager is tolerable (not as good as Xmonad, but equivalent to Unity). Windows subsystem for linux is letting me get my work done with no problems. Anaconda lets me do scientific python work natively from within windows. Emacs seems to work just fine. Cortana is actually pretty cool.

Overall, I haven't felt the need to race back to Linux. I'm surprised to say this, but Windows might be an acceptable linux.

(A while back I wrote about my failed attempt to use OS X: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787411 )

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My experience has been the complete opposite.

I've got a Lenovo Y50 running Win10. With a HiDPI display, it is pretty much unusable. While OS elements scale rather well, most of the software doesn't, even using the "DPI fix." [1] There are also ads on lock screen. [2] The "terminal", PowerShell, is slow to launch, path completions are crawling.

The subsystem for linux is great, and certainly a move in the right direction. There's ConEmu with Bash, which is also usable. Admittedly, if it weren't for aforementioned DPI issues, which have been around for far too long, I'd probably use Windows as my primary OS.

Also have to mention that VS Code is a fantastic editor with an MIT license. So definitely there are strides in a good direction. Compared to e.g. Facebook's "open source" offerings, while great products, yet containing a `PATENT` file in every repo

[1] http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/

[2] http://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-w...

>ads on the lock screen

You understand that you approved these ads when you set up windows initially, and that they can be removed with the flick of a switch in the lock screen settings?

They aren't even the default now, right?

My windows machine does not display them, and I don't remember even being asked.

IIRC the wording wasn't "let us display ads", it was cloaked in some deceptive language.

I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something akin to, "Show Microsoft's images on my lockscreen" or somesuch similar.

It wasn't clear there might be ads there.

I actually have that option turned on, and it's exactly what it says on the tin. Pictures of landscapes/buildings/etc... that you might see in some mid tier gallery and a link to a short description. It's bland, but marginally more interesting than the basic lock screen.

Yeah, I've noticed that HiDPI support is basically a roll of the dice in 3rd-party Windows software.

FWIW, the "ads on the lock screen" thing is a wee overblown. Microsoft is the single-party provider of any of their so called "suggested content". Aka, you saw Tomb Raider not because Square Enix paid to be on the lock screen, but because Microsoft was trying to push that you can get AAA games in the Windows Store. The Surface has been up there, I think they put a movie-related one up once or twice, again, referring you to their own Movies app. And they have no animations, moving bits, or arbitrary code.

They're not targeted ads, so they're not using a data profile on you to power them or anything like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they know how many screens displayed them, but there's not a lot of interaction tracking you can really do with a static lockscreen. So it doesn't have the sort of privacy implications of normal advertising either.

So, while you may not like their choice of wallpaper because it is related to a product they are releasing, it's not really much more egregious than the fact that it downloads daily wallpapers on the lockscreen to begin with: It's all stuff selected specifically by Microsoft. And as others have pointed out, it's really easy to shut off.

>you saw Tomb Raider not because Square Enix paid to be on the lock screen, but because Microsoft was trying to push that you can get AAA games in the Windows Store

I would still consider this to be an ad.

Not any more than "upgrade to Windows 7 Pro to access these features" that they've had for years.

I'd consider that an unacceptable ad as well, but I've never had 7 Home.

I never said it wasn't still an ad. But as I explained, it has essentially none of the problems that are associated with ads. Ergo, complaints about it are more that it offends your special snowflake sensitivity against ads, than that there's an actual problem that needs to be addressed.

My operating system showing me ads is inherently a problem.

In what way? Assuming you've already decided you're okay with rotating wallpapers on your lockscreen downloaded periodically (the only way in which you'll see these "ads"), what is the detrimental effect on your operating system?

We can both agree, I'm sure, that your OS tracking you is a clear problem, and I'm not unable to be convinced on this one here, but I'm going to need to see a line of reasoning on how it harms you.

An ad is inherently antagonistic. It doesn't add to the product I'm using (in this case the operating system); its only function is to try to trick me into buying more things.

Are you suggesting the mere display of a wallpaper from the latest Tomb Raider game is capable of deception? Of "tricking" you into buying it?

Is it going to trick me in particular? Probably not; I'm not likely to buy that type of game anyway.

Would it be using my computer as a marketing tool to promote a product? Yes. A more obvious example might have been if it said something like "Drink Coke".

It's a banner ad, but now bundled automatically into your machine. Even if banner ads didn't track you, I'd still block them. There's a reason marketers pay for them.

They fixed the DPI thing in the early build. At least for the native stuff, like device manager.

>> The "terminal", PowerShell, is slow to launch, path completions are crawling.

Powershell often seems to hang on startup when it's actually already up and running. You're left looking at an empty terminal, waiting for a prompt. If that happens, you can try pressing enter, at which point you'll most likely get your prompt, er, promptly.

Hi. PM for Bash & Windows Console here:

Glad you're digging Bash & WSL :D

May I ask which Win10 build you're running. If you're on Win10 AU (build 14393.x), you're not yet seeing the huge raft of changes that we've been releasing weekly to those on the Windows Insider program.

Key among the improvements that will be released broadly when Windows 10 Creator Updated ships (ETA spring 2017) include: * MANY improvements to Bash/WSL enabling MANY more dev tools, platforms, an tech to work even more smoothly, plus fixes for networking features inc. ifconfig & ping, traceroute (incoming). Also adds ability to invoke Windows exe's from Bash and vice-versa. * Lots of DPI fixes including many fixes to correctly scale desktop apps and pop-up dialogs (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/12/07/annou...)

HTH.

I'm a massive fan of .NET and MVC as a development stack and think VS is the bees knees when it comes to my IDE (with a Vi plugin of course). But I'm hugely excited about .NET Core for the sole reason of abandoning the Windows OS. It really is a horror, it comes bundled with crapware which gets reinstalled when a major update is applied, the major updates are foisted upon you whether you want them or not, after a major update they re-pin their own products to the start bar, there is numerous thing you have to switch off to opt out of their data gathering (and I believe there's some data gathering it's not possible to switch off), they don't allow you to uninstall certain software such as Edge, they don't give the user the means to change OS and re-install Windows if your copy of it was bundled when buying the computer, and that's about all I can think of at the moment.

But pretty much everything I listed above is Microsoft willfully doing things at the expense of the user for their own sake. I could list loads of other things that I'd prefer they did another way but I wanted to highlight things that weren't just subjective preferences.

What bothers me is that all the data collection is on by default. If I purchase something I expect it to have my best interests at heart, if I get something for free I expect it to have the providers best interests at heart. Since you buy your computer, all data collection should be opt in. If Microsoft wants to give me a free computer, then make it opt out.

That's a good way of articulating the issue.

There is something particularly sinister about your OS gathering your data. You can switch out any other software for an alternative but changing OS is a whole other ball game (and one only the technically minded would go through).

Back when Ubuntu brought in their Amazon spyware partnership I jumped ship for Linux Mint. Even turning this stuff off doesn't provide any peace of mind, the system for gathering your data is still in place and why should the user trust that turning the anti-feature off will be honored or that the switch won't be reset during an update.

Windows in general does not respect you as its user. I refuse to use software like that. If you want to use software that respects you you'll usually have to use open source. But indeed, what makes it especially egregious is the fact that you're even paying for it.

(It will update itself whether you want to or not and reboot by itself unless you're on Enterprise, etc.)

Even a development tool like .Net core phones home to send telemetry data.

I also got a new win10 HP laptop and new gaming win10 desktop recently, but has different experiences.

I absolutely hate the constant force update/reboot from Win10 and the huge amount background / network activities/connections.

After most of the win10 background networks connections are blocked and force update/reboot is disabled with Windows firewall, the system are usable now.

I tried and found the new Linux subsystem not useful at all. Real Linux inside virtualbox worked much better for my own use.

Searching the net with firefox/google is much faster than Cortana. I found and installed the 8 year old discontinued "Google Desktop Search" Windows App and it can search files in my location system with 100 times better results and so much faster than latest Cortana/SearchUI.

VSCode is very good.

Visual Studio 2015 is just huge complex monster. Took hours to download and install. I tried download a few popular opensource packages (Python, winscp, ... etc) and used VS2015 community edition to build - all failed to build for one reason or another.

> constant force update/reboot from Win10

Really? How often? I have "active hours" set and I rarely get more than one reboot per month. Same with network connections, and what they're doing. Some recorded facts would be more interesting than your impressions...

I have the same experience, it seems everytime I open my win10 laptop the damn thing does updates for many minutes. my windows desktop is more well behaved though. it seems it needs to be actively used so it always stays updated. not an apple fan by a longshot but my office macbook is always ready to be used whenever I open it, even if I do it after weeks.

MS really needs to get their shit together especially on the laptops.

If you have an unusual usage pattern -- eg you only turn your laptop on twice a month or so -- I guess you're going to get a backlog of updates. If you check the update settings, you can set "active hours" when it won't update, or a custom update time when your machine will be on.

Our laptops are not having problems but they are in regular use...

  [dozzie@alojzy dozzie]$ uptime
   02:29:42 up 53 days, 11:03,  2 users,  load average: 0.11, 0.19, 0.18

  [dozzie@wolfram dozzie]$ uptime 
   02:29:49 up 9 days, 14:20,  1 user,  load average: 0.25, 0.24, 0.26

One is my desktop, the other is my laptop. What was it with this "unusual usage pattern" thing?

Run "netstat -nob" in a admin prompt and you will see what I mean.

I block all those apps now with Windows firewall except firefox, chrome and Windows defender.

Also you can check out the default windows firewall config and see how many out going connections are allowed AND CONNECTED by default.

I always configure my system network security by default disable ALL and only selected app/ports are allow connect to internet.

Win10 firewall is completely opposite - its default configure for outgoing are "Allow ALL".

You should try out VS2017 (RC). It is much better in terms of performance and setup. And they improved the update thing in the early build. They are giving you a better choice regarding reboot / installing updates.

I have not used windows in a while, but the 2 things I found annoying with Microsoft and the reasons why I switched around 8 years back were:

1) Most of the windows laptops doesn't age very well. By the 3rd year the computer starts feeling like its become quite old. I needed hardware upgrades every year to keep my computer running. One of my friends suggested me to try Apple. I am running a Mac pro which is almost 5 years old but still runs everything and I am confident that I can use it for 2 more years. I can't say that for Windows laptops, partly the reason is the hardware is manufactured by Dell/Lenovo or some other vendor. I hope Microsoft surface books provide some longetivity.

2) My internet experience with Microsoft pushed me to move out of Linux. There are so many viruses/malwares out there trying to corrupt your system. You cannot live without an anti-virus and even then chances are that you will end up corrupting your system and has to do re-install windows or format your hard disk. I am done with that shit now..I don't remember doing any OS re-install or formatting in last 7 years. As a developer I can focus on writing code and browing internet.

Just before writing this comment, I had to work in a client's remote windows machine and it was still a terrible experience. Windows still doesn't have a decent way to tail the logs!!!

One more thing If I am running a server, Can someone tell microsoft :

1) why I need a GUI running on it? 2) The user home folder has "Music" & "Movies" folders. What is the purpose of those folders in Windows Server OS?

I agree that Microsoft is becoming more open as a company and embracing new technologies. But I really think they should drop Windows completely and build a new OS from scratch(Just like they dropped IE & started edge browser) rather than doing patch works and improving it. It has some serious underlying architecture issues.

Not much of a Windows fan but https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd184075.aspx

> I needed hardware upgrades every year to keep my computer running.

I'm finding this hard to understand. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 all seem to be about the same, spec-wise, and it doesn't sound like you were upgrading anyway. I don't understand in what sense you would need to upgrade your hardware, which, in any case, is the same hardware used in Macs - Intel processors and so forth.

> You cannot live without an anti-virus and even then chances are that you will end up corrupting your system and has to do re-install windows or format your hard disk.

For many, many years now, Microsoft has provided Microsoft Security Essentials, AKA Windows Defender, which is all that most people need.

I have a laptop from 2006 and a desktop from 2009, both of which are my (a developer) primary/sole work and recreation machines. I have never had to reinstall Windows or format my hard disk.[1] In my experience these were things you had to do in the Windows 95/98/2000 era, but not since, barring some catastrophe like a trashed filesystem caused by a failing harddrive.

[1] Though in the interests of full disclosure, I did elect to replace the laptop harddrive with a solid state drive, and at that time I did install a new version of Windows rather than bother with transferring data from the old drive. As to why I did this, well, in 2016, an Intel Core 2 Duo is pretty slow but the easiest thing to upgrade is the harddrive.

>Windows still doesn't have a decent way to tail the logs!!!

    cat -Wait foo.log

You could just reinstall Windows every year instead of buying new hardware.

>Windows subsystem for linux is letting me get my work done with no problems

While it's not bad, they blew the terminal completely!! Why couldn't they at least use something like cygwin's terminal?

You can't delete text properly.

You can install Xming and then you can use a linux GUI terminal emulator.

The terminal doesn't support as many features, but I can say I have yet to segfault it -- which I can't say any day this week for cygwin or MSYS mintty.

Note: MS employee, doesn't work in Windows division.

I use WSL inside Cmder/Conemu. It's probably not as good as a "true" Linux terminal, but I found it to be better than using the Windows console (which to be honest, became much better in Windows 10, but still not enough). With Cmder, at least I can have tabs...

Yeah, the Windows terminal is an albatross since time immemorial. The problem was that the last attempt to rewrite it got vicious scope-creep and we ended up with powershell instead of just a non-stupid terminal.

Powershell is cool. I mean, what's wrong with it? It's the most un-windows-y part of windows. It's a modern shell, I wish bash was that nice to you (quick example: command option completion).

There are plugins for command option completions

>Cortana is actually pretty cool.

A fellow Windows user (with a decent experience on Linux as well). Is there a way to use Cortana from PowerShell/cmdline?

I assume you want Cortana via typing? I press the windows key and just type.

I assume you want to be programmatic with Cortana? - Look up Cortana Skill Kit. It's kind of like Echo's SDK, but cross platform:

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/12/13/cortana-sk...

I have good luck with VirtuaWin in terms of a better window manager.

The linked to mac experience is 6 years old.

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