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Comment by ivan1783 | Hacker News Reader

Have to partially disagree here. Remember Windows XP? Do you want to go back to that after having used W10? In W10 everything just...works. Think about how much time you spent fucking around with drivers or registry settings or TCP/IP settings or whatever to get things to work in XP, all of that is gone in W10. I can do a fresh install in 2 hrs and the computer is back to "like new" and not have to spend an additional 4 hours on drivers and updates and configuration. For me, OS updates have been nothing but a positive (lets set security/privacy aside).

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"Do you want to go back to that after having used W10?"

I have seen this type of reply repeatedly in response to any comment that some software or the web was a better experience in the past. In this case, it ignores the point being made which is not that the past was better, it is that upgrading hardware while not upgrading software is a much nicer user experience than upgrading software without upgrading hardware, or upgrading both at the same time (buying a new computer). The former was and still is stymied by companies like Microsoft and now Apple. Plus we have to contend with "business strategies" like planned obsolesence and "automatic upgrades". Arguably W10 was a "forced" upgrade, minimising if not eliminating any user choice. IMHO, we as users miss out on the full enjoyment of improvements in hardware because developers usurp those improvements for themselves. The user's computer resources are donated to the OS developer, without any prior permission from the user. That is the price of having the OS pre-installed,

You make a slightly different point, perhaps I missed the original point of the comment. I agree with you that upgrading HW without SW is much nicer than SW without HW. No argument there.

I often do want to go back to XP, yes. My experience is approximately the inverse of yours. W10 is better for included drivers for sure. I've had to do many more registry and group policy changes on W10 than I ever needed in XP. Sometimes it feels like the GUI is lying to me about how the system can be configured. The most obvious example is that from the Windows Update GUI is appears updates can only be delayed temporarily, and must be completed before another temporary delay. This isn't the case; they've broken the connection between GUI and the settings, then lied about the existence of the setting. This isn't entirely new (95/98/XP had TweakUI), but it feels more deceptive or controlling now vs. just not exposing a feature. The cumulative updates are a huge improvement.

> I can do a fresh install in 2 hrs

I can do a fresh install of OpenBSD in 5 minutes.

However I won't have to, because unlike Windows 10, the system doesn't gradually rot over time.

Can you expand on this? I can't remember ever having a registry problem caused by XP itself, nor any issues with TCP/IP. Drivers are a fair call, though.

Nothing caused by XP itself, mostly issues which come up that seemed (at least to me - as a non-SW guy) to be connected with the immaturity of XP. Its been some years but I remember often playing around in the TCP/IP panel to fix internet issues when setting up new wifi networks - this seems to just work in W10. I don't mean special networks with static IPs or some special configurations, I mean just moms network at home. Today its very plug and play. Concerning registry it was the same - no issues concerning XP specifically but I remember having to change a lot of things in there to get things to work how I wanted them. Seems these settings are just in a menu now in W10. Its more a user experience thing rather than specific bugs or issues.

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