Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I received a Gigabyte Brix i5 and wanted to run Windows 7. The process was painful.

The Brix has no USB 2.0 ports and no legacy USB in the bios - So keyboard and mouse were non functional. Presumably the ISO was built pre-USB 3.0 era. So I had to customize a untouched image with USB 3 drivers. Drivers had to be downloaded from Gigabytes website. All to learn that MS update doesn't work with Kaby Lake. Great.

Windows 10 setup was quick & easy.

Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS. It updates when it wants and I have no way of turning it off. It is connected to numerous IPs I have no control over except to painfully block in hosts. Onedrive has no official uninstall option, Windows updates can no longer be postponed with 1607 and burns 15-20 mins productivity when restarting. There are a handful of services I don't need or want that I cannot disable (Wifi password sharing anybody?). It is the exact reason why I wanted to run Windows 7 in the first place.

To me it feels like another forceful tactic to push me to use Windows 10 for which I have no desire. Win 7 is supported till 2020 so don't choose for me but that doesn't matter.

> Yesterday I received a Gigabyte Brix i5 and wanted to run Windows 7. The process was painful.

Allow me to rephrase that: "Yesterday I received quite modern hardware and wanted to run Ubuntu 9.04. The process was painful."

Would you sympathize with anyone who made such a claim? I certainly wouldn't. Does anyone even remember its "cute" codename? Nope. It's that old.

And Windows 7 is as old as Ubuntu 9.04. It's about as obsolete as it gets. It's time to let it go, man.

And Windows 7 is as old as Ubuntu 9.04. It's about as obsolete as it gets. It's time to let it go, man.

Problem is, there's still no reasonable alternative if you need to run Windows software. Windows 7 is the last stand of Windows that doesn't actively hate and work against the user, so there are some very real reasons to stick with it.

Hopefully when Windows 7 "extended support" runs out, ReactOS will be able to run Photoshop and Cubase so there is an escape route for those of us who still need to run legacy Windows applications. More likely it'll be Windows 7 with GPU passthrough in a sandboxed VM with no Internet connection forever.

What's so unreasonable about Windows 10 that you prefer to suffer all that pain and get less out of your hardware?

2020, Year of Reactos on the Desktop?

Claiming that an operating system is obsolete because it is old is like complaining that hammers are obsolete because they are old.

I think Windows 7 SP1 (out in February 22, 2011) is closer to Ubuntu 11.04, but your point remains fully valid.

>Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS.

I suspect MS still want to run Windows on consumer devices like tablets and phone, which really have to be as automated and simplified from the user's perspective as possible. Because they don't have a commercially viable standalone mobile OS, they're still trying to push W10 there to extend their desktop success into mobile success.

This leads directly to the sort of worst-of-both-worlds scenario Apple fans are so worried about, in which MacOS becomes as locked down and unconfigurable as iOS. Except that possible dystopian future is the here and now in Microsoft Land. But the flexibility of Windows has always been it great strength. I worry that they are giving up that advantage, but will never be able to reap the rewards they hope that might lead to.

I'm sure you've already seen it, but using https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/ helps alleviate some of these issues. I completely agree with you though, the whole thing feels dirty.

Thank you will look at that.

Just finished installing this OS. I generally enjoy MS products but this has changed my opinion. The OS isn't really any faster than 7 and the amount of road blocks I have encountered to change things to how I want them is remarkable.

I have found two great resources if anyone is in the same position as me. For Uninstalling the store bloat and disabling geo-location services and other anti-privacy I used:

1) https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

disable-services.ps1 and disable-windows-defender.ps1

2) https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script/...

Disabled too many things to list and I'll set this up to run on restart and restrict the file write perms for security. I've used pretty much the defaults but most importantly

"DisableTelemetry", "DisableWiFiSense", "DisableSmartScreen", "DisableWebSearch", "DisableStartSuggestions", "DisableLocationTracking", "DisableFeedback", "DisableAdvertisingID", "DisableCortana", "DisableErrorReporting", "RestrictUpdateP2P", "DisableAutoLogger", "DisableDiagTrack",

3) Glasswire firewall or of your choice to monitor network connections.

> except to painfully block in hosts

Are you sure that's working for you? Microsoft ignores the hosts file for most addresses used in phoning home.

It's not ignoring but using ip addresses not hostnames. If you want to block you use a firewall. Even the built in one works.

> Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS. It updates when it wants and I have no way of turning it off.

That one part is only partly correct. Windows 10 already contains the APIs required to have completely fine-grained control when to download updates, when to install updates, and even which ones to install now and which ones to leave on the list.

The difference is that with earlier OSes MS did make this choice easily accessible to every user of Windows regardless of their level of expertise. This resulted in massive security issues that hurt the internet at large.

Windows 10 still contains all the controls, but it has stopped providing easy and obvious GUIs for it and instead expects you to use administrator-level interfaces to talk to those systems if you desire so, thus effectively gating them behind a learning process.

Onedrive can be uninstalled through 'add/remove programs', similar to third-party apps.

While there ,be sure to remove the automatically-downloaded games you didn't want nor ask for.

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