On a fundamental technical level, windows 10 is a pretty finely tuned os.
On any other benchmark you might choose (privacy, invasiveness and advertising, user control, user experience, active user deception) windows has been going downhill for years.
Almost nobody could claim that it's a bad OS from a technical standpoint, though there are certainly significant improvements to be made. The real issue is lack of any semblance of privacy, user unfriendliness, and frankly the closed-down nature of it is never going to do it any favours.
In my view, apart from gaming, it has nothing going for it.
What Windows has going for it is that it supports a lot of different desktop/laptop hardware very well.
macOS doesn't support a lot of hardware. Linux supports a lot of hardware but much of it not very well.
If I list my desired specs for a laptop or desktop and then go ahead and buy the one that best meets my criteria, chances are pretty high that Windows will run best on it.
I have been a Mac user for many years. I'm using a Mac mini right now. But if I had to replace it today I wouldn't know what to replace it with.
I don't think that's the case. It's not that Windows itself supports more hardware, but the fact that drivers for said hardware are built only for Windows. It could even be seen as a vicious cicle: 1) HW manufacturers create drivers for Windows because It's more popular; 2) Users use Windows because "It Just Works (TM)" and so userbase grows; 3) goto 1
> Linux supports a lot of hardware but much of it not very well.
Hence I think Linux supports more HW but driver support isn't as good.
I get what you're saying though.
Damn it, Foxconn managed to ship a desktop motherboard that would produce junk ACPI data unless the OS identified itself as Windows on boot.
For Linux to compete with Windows realistically for average computer users it needs to have a distro that is like macOS in that it's idiot proof. I should be able to sit someone down in front of a computer running it with no instructions and the OS should do the teaching without telling them to open a terminal and look at man pages.
If you speak about this in /r/linux, the people there will tell you that "if people are not willing to learn how to use the terminal to install apps, then they're just lazy/too stupid". This is the kind of mentality we're dealing with and that's why there's 288 ditros without any chance of mass adoption.
Yeah, I understand that Windows wasn't like this, so people can get upset about the recent changes Microsoft is pushing onto. On the other hand Android has been like that from the beginning, so there might not be much expectation. But still I don't care Windows-as-a-service because nowadays pretty much every software I use is provided like that. It's just that the OS becamse not an exception.
On Windows the entire system and most well known applications are closed source, therefore not trustworthy, but on Android things are not that different: Android makes heavy use of closed source device drivers and so far any attempt to get a completely open system while keeping all the underlying iron useable has failed because most device manufacturers keep their hardware undocumented, save for Google and a few big players under NDA.
The point is that security is an OR: a chain whose strength depend on the weakest link; if one closed blob can contain a keylogger, having just one in an otherwise 100% open phone still makes the phone 100% potentially not secure.
Security is a process not a if/else choice, and Android is more secure than Windows because it is open source and you can replace Google parts. Good luck doing that on Windows.
And yes, Linux (and BSD) is also potentially insecure (or less secure if you prefer), which is the reason why the same effort who brought us a lot of quality Open Source verifiable software now should be directed towards obtaining also Open Hardware. We need to build a culture as we did with Open Source software so that people will understand the importance and associated risks.
I hope you don't use web apps, ChromeOS or Android then.
You're critical of Windows for collecting data, but use other software that collects similar data, saying "that's fine I have 3rd-party privacy tools". These same tools have existed for Win10 since week 1.
He has entirely FOSS stacks for his devices? Quite literally no proprietary code wherever possible?
They're not "3rd-party privacy tools" he's making a point of, outside of a browser which isn't what the complaint is about on Windows, since that is outside the bounds of OS-specific complaints, but he mentioned it nonetheless since you asked about it.
Windows 10, never again.
It could be the indexing service for files. There is the NTFS MFT which is used by tools such as Everything by "void tools", but Windows also has its own Windows Search (WSearch) service which indexes files and contents. I believe this is similar to the Indexing Service found on Windows XP that would give you hopeless results (duplicates between its database and the actual file system). This is meant to make Cortana be able to give you helpful results when you search for things like files locally.
I have found it to be slow to type something into the Start menu (just type), particularly compared to the results from Everything (mentioned above) or Apple's Spotlight. It is very odd because Microsoft has its own SQL Server division (and SQLite is free if they want to use that!) as well as embedded SQL Server for file-based database systems yet their start menu search is horribly slow so as to be useless (for me at least).
I recommend buying Windows Internals 6 volumes 1 & 2 to understand what is going on, at least under Windows 7. There are not versions released for Windows 10 yet (and will there ever be? It's a constantly moving target).
Moving Chrome profile to a RAM disk helped somewhat, as did turning off some icon update stupidity or something like that in hidden Chrome settings.
But as you mentioned, if even the Start menu is lagging, I have no patience and no desire to investigate further, this is it. So instead of buying some utilities to make windows less crappy, I've finally had enough and installed Ubuntu on that last PC. Just to think about it, I was an MCSE+I and MCDBA some time ago, now I only boot windows for games.
Though worst from MS on spinning drives has to be using Visual Studio on a web project (or node dev for that matter)... it's painful.