Two years after Windows 10: Windows 7 is still threatening a 2020 EOL meltdown
theinquirer.net
theinquirer.net
Windows 10 is a complete non-starter until microsoft provides:
- A way to COMPLETELY disable and remove the Cortana/Search system.
- A way to COMPLETELY disable (and keep disabled) all the telemetry.
- A way only EVER install updates manually.
The "Everything" search utility from Void Tools is basically exactly what I want from the filesystem search tool.
I've looked at the W10 LTSB variant, and it's a hell of a lot more attractive then the normal variant.
"Mac OS has dropped from 7.66 to 5.85." (-1.81) "Linux ... from 1.68 to 3.37" (+1.69)
I speculate that many of the ex-Mac users are moving to Linux.
It also begs the question, what did Apple do wrong in the last 2 years?
The neglect of user needs in the hardware department doesn't totally explain the software shift, though.
Also a decent range of graphics options, as well as large RAM options. I don't feel any of the current 'pro' level hardware offerings come anywhere near the requirements of a professional, at least in terms of costs when compared to other options from smaller vendors.
I cannot think of a single enterprise environment (including education) that upgrades to the latest macOS version on release day (or year) anymore.
Many I know are still running El Capitan and will move to macOS Sierra when High Sierra comes out due to core apps no longer working / lacking updates to the latest macOS offering.
Maybe they should switch to simply 'macOS 2017' then 'macOS 2018'. Not really working for MS but an OSX update is less of a significant update than a Windows major version.
If you're a small company paying for outside support having someone do the upgrade would likely have been $100+ per machine, for what gain?
I'd expect a surge of replacements this fall as Office 2007 goes EOL and systems get replaced instead of upgraded (unless there's a shift to Office365 subscriptions) since non-subscription Office upgrades will die with the machine, at least for companies with decent IT staff or contractors. Note that this is for small companies not doing volume licensing, which is its own separate and special hell.
The Win10 features I like are the multiple desktops and bash on windows. I don't think these alone warrant an upgrade. Win10, however, has become much better since launch, when I found it to be utter trash.
They could have delivered that with Windows 8, but we all know what happened. God knows how much money they wasted in that process (Nokia deal, Win 8 failure, Win Phone failure).
Instead of learning about their mistake, they kept this strategy going with Windows 10, but UWP is not taking off and Windows Mobile is dead.
Also, Windows 7 was just really an incredible operating system. When something is that good, it's really hard to move on.
Me though, I'm enjoying 10 quite nicely.
Windows 10 is unattractive for well-documented reasons, and it seems Microsoft is still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge or deal with them.
Apple's recent hardware has been disappointing, and after a series of questionable developments, macOS no longer has the reputation for being rock solid that it did a few years ago either.
The only thing we've seriously considered buying recently was a small number of Linux laptops, which do fine if you're mostly using web-based software anyway and/or you're doing techie things where Linux might have better tools available anyway.
I'm still slightly wondering whether, somewhere in the corner offices of one of the IT giants, there might be a team of executives discussing whether they can make a serious play for the general purpose desktop computing market in 2020 while Microsoft and Apple are both asleep at the wheel. Sadly, as much as I'd love that to happen, I suspect no-one could be far enough along to pull it off in time and yet to have nothing leaked yet. Which means that yes, in 2020, a lot of bad things are probably going to happen in the industry one way or another.
"We are not restricting the upgrade offer to specific assistive technologies. If you use assistive technology on Windows, you are eligible for the upgrade offer."
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows10upgra...
If you're worried about the ethics of saying you use an assistive technology when you don't think you really do, take a look at the Windows 10 Ease of Access settings. Anything in there obviously qualifies you, and many of them can be useful for just about anyone. For example:
Do you get tired of the crazy Windows 10 Start menu animation, and the downright awful cursor animation in Word and Excel? (Really, what were they thinking: when you click on a cell in Excel, the box cursor animates from the old cell it was on to the cell you clicked on! Who in the world cares about the old cursor location when clicking on a new cell? And when you type text in Word, the blinking cursor animates across the screen as you type instead of moving in sync with your keystrokes like every other program in the world.)
You can fix that: Ease of Access / Other Options / turn off the "Play animations in Windows" setting.
What if you have a high-DPI display and find the default one-pixel cursor width a bit hard to see? You can make it thicker in that same panel.
Have a keyboard with a numeric pad and would like to be able move the mouse cursor using the numeric pad? Ease of Access / Mouse / turn on Mouse Keys.
Don't have a numeric pad, or you would like to be able to move the mouse cursor from the home row keys? Get my JKLmouse program that gives you IJKL or HJKL mouse cursor movement: http://www.jklmouse.com/ - forgive the shameless plug, but it is really useful to be able to move the mouse cursor precisely pixel by pixel. MouseKeys or JKLmouse let you do that, and either one also qualifies as an assistive technology. (And sorry my installer isn't signed, but if you prefer, you can get the source code from GitHub and run it under AutoHotkey - just put a shortcut to the script in your Startup folder.)
Have a high-DPI display and want the better support that Windows 10 offers for it? Or do you ever use a screen magnifier to see individual pixels - either the one built into Windows or one of the many others available? Same story.
Anything along these lines legitimately qualifies you for the upgrade, so you don't have to feel guilty for clicking the "Yes, I use assistive technologies" button.
(That's a common tool that you didn't list by name -- it's one I use.)
I don't recall whether it was in Excel 2016 all along or if they added in some update, but the option is definitely there now in the Mac version.
30 minutes might be a bit hyperbolic, unless your computer has a 2 core atom, 2GB ram, and 5400 HDD. also, updates happen once a month, maybe twice for out-of-band updates.
If true, it's incredible that this seems to be biting directly into Apple's marketshare: the Generation Z "I'm a teenager/college student who just wants to use Facebook and do all my homework" demographic now has an alternative to the millennial's "I need a MacBook to be cool and work effectively." Tremendous ramifications for those of us who still make desktop software, especially in the professional multimedia space.
From the article, no the chromebook is not the reason for the bump in linux. It would be interesting to know exactly why chrome os is not counted.
My guess on Apple's dip is that Apple's current offerings are not that great compared to where they stood 4-5 years ago.
It would be interesting to hear why logistics prevent reporting this. And it would be REALLY interesting to see the ChromeOS figures.
Apple and MS both ruining the desktop.
I'm currently developing a product in a Windows environment. We're trapped in Windows for historical reasons- the first draft of the codebase 10 years ago was for Windows, and even just a few years later there was already too much momentum for the guys who tried to do a *nix port to make any headway.
I've been in meetings with business partners where we pushed for an upgrade to Win10, only to hear that they're so risk-averse to upgrading that some of their systems are still XP.
I do agree desktop OS feels like a race to the bottom- I can't believe, given the resources available on modern hardware, that windows 2000 remains my favorite MS OS, with both win7 and 10 unable to replicate its stability and core competency of being good at just running what I asked it to run.
However, I think offices and commercial applications are going to continue to lean heavily on desktop OS-es for decades to come.
I'd say that's risk ignorant rather than risk adverse. I hope those XP systems are tightly locked away with no network access of any kind, but I doubt they are.
Over my cold dead body, matey.
When people complain about Windows 10 its because of things it does really well (spying on you, forcing updates); its failures are product failures, not technical failures.
Apple's hardware still seems to be much more reliable than Microsoft's hardware of late, but that is its own can of worms.
In my experience the latest versions of macOS have been more stable than ever. My MacBook Pro from 2013 came with OS X 10.9 Mavericks installed, and with that OS version I would get an occasional kernel panic. With macOS Sierra, and before that with El Capitan, I haven't experienced a single OS (or Finder for that matter) crash for over two years. I only need to restart the computer for updates once every few months. I could go on and on..
Are Apple products perfect? No not at all, Xcode crashes once per day, I've seen people having glitches with the Touch Bar etc. But the base system? Stable as a rock. So what's going on with your system?
Another example, once or twice a week when waking up from sleep the wifi adapter doesn't reattach, and hovering over the wifi status in the menu bar yields a beach ball. My only recourse is to power cycle the laptop.
About a year ago my Plantronics bluetooth headset stopped reliably pairing, or rather it does pair, but the audio quality is so horrible I gave up and went back to wired earbuds.
So yes, far from perfect. I would say the product team has been distracted with convenience frills like Handoff, AirDrop, auto-unlock via Apple Watch, and so on, when what I would prefer is reliable sleep/wake and i/o devices that work every time.
Nonetheless, this is still leaps and bounds ahead of the Windows 7 laptop the corporate office insists I use. And it's a reputable brand and everything, and not a fluke (they've swapped out the laptop multiple times but every one has some fatal flaw.)
Waking from sleep takes ages. It doesn't on my home MacBook. Think waking a windows vista device from sleep.
Back in the fall, the OS's file save/open/select dialog would hang any apps that tried to use it. Imagine writing an email in Gmail, going to make a link, and then needing to restart your entire browser because you accidentally clicked the 'attach file' button. My fear of file operations lingers.
That experience prompted me to update to sierra - I was reluctant to upgrade because el cap trashed my apps (notably the fancy new office that I depended on at the time). That solved the file upload issue, but it also broke Preview's page numbering for my textbook PDFs.
My home MacBook now has glitchy Bluetooth. I'm constantly having to restart it, and the UI seems to have a 50/50 chance of being consistent with reality.
I saved the best for last: every time I plug in my DAC/amp to my work computer (I like nice headphones that need an amp), macOS resets the balance to heavily favor the left channel. I spent so much time fiddling with cables trying to figure it out. I thought the equipment was broken, or maybe my hearing, or maybe my sanity. The workaround is easy, but as a result, I have to go into system settings daily. It sucks, but at least my home computer isn't affected.
It seems whenever I turn on my Windows 10 machine, there's a service using all the resources.