Microsoft has just officially announced that it will release Windows 10 on 29 July.
Familiar, yet better than ever, Windows 10 brings back the Start menu you know and love. Windows 10 is faster than ever before, with quick startup and resume. And Windows 10 provides the most secure platform ever, including Windows Defender for free anti-malware protection, and being the only platform with a commitment to deliver free ongoing security updates for the supported lifetime of the device.
Marketing blabber aside, the update will be free for the first year for all Windows 7 and 8 users. You’ll get a notification in your notification area which will allow you to reserve your Windows 10 upgrade.
I’ve been running build 10122 for a while now, and while things have improved, this acts and feels like an OS that’s at least five years behind OS X in many many respects:
1. The UI is outright ugly. The new icon set in this build is better, but still painful to look at. Bright orange and almost completely flat (?!!)
2. WiFi connectivity is extremely unreliable when roaming between AP’s (my house has three). A reboot is required. Did they port discoveryd or something?
3. The settings situation is very confusing. Still some stuff in the classic settings (which are mostly better than the metro ones, by the way)
4. Tons of UI tearing and lag on 4K monitors. External monitor handling is otherwise good though.
5. The Windows 7 start menu is still VASTLY better than the crap they’re cooking up for Windows 10 (which is there to not hurt the feelings of the Windows 8 start screen people – I see no other rationale for the stupidity of this thing.)
6. 3rd party developers making File Explorer alternatives have nothing to fear – it still sucks in more ways than you can imagine.
Edited 2015-06-01 10:39 UTC
IMO it’s still a big improvement over windows 8. But it certainly has a lot of issues that I guess won’t be fixed in time for the release.
And thus it will be viewed as Vista reborn. Given the position Microsoft’s in right now with Windows, they’d be better off taking another year to get it right in one rather than release this alpha quality software to users en masse especially when you remember that most home users don’t upgrade Windows anyway.
Alpha quality software is a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?
This is really, really a shame. Microsoft should just put a big middle finger on the box with the caption ‘power users’ under it. I don’t care at home because I can just install Directory Opus. But at work, I don’t have that option and am forced to use this POS. This is a source of misery for me on a daily basis, and I’d trade every other improvement made to Windows 10 in exchange for a file manager that didn’t suck.
This release should not have been pushed out without a fully ‘Metro’ (i.e., using the new tools, APIs, etc.) Explorer UI/file manager. Right now they’re replacing all the applications with ‘Metro’ ones… Except the Explorer UI and file manager.
Baffles the mind, really. It now stands out like an eyesore, and you’re looking at it all day.
To me, what baffles the mind is why on Earth they’re replacing desktop applications with Metro crap in the first place. It’s like Windows 8 didn’t teach anything. I dont’ want my desktop to look and feel like a phone, period.
It’s not going to. That’s the whole point of Windows 10. These ‘Metro’ applications look and function like regular desktop applications (windowed, resizable, movable, with titlebars, etc. etc.).
the current netflix, ABCNOW and other network tv apps absolutely suck as a metro app, I have this on a home theater machine those apps are not navigable with a remote…but for some reason they work pretty good in xbox360
The Windows 10 SDK is not finalized, and as such, very few of the current apps on the Store take advantage of the changes.
I don’t believe the same application can be both optimal for mouch and touch at the same time. Microsoft needs us to believe in that holy grail because a) they’ve got no mobile ecosystem and, b) what they’ve got is a massive userbase of desktop users that they need to leverage.
Same basic plan as Windows 8, only slightly better executed this time and much better marketed.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but virtually nobody is making desktop apps anymore. So it’s either you run web apps on your desktop or tablet apps, so I guess Microsoft decided that the latter was the lesser of two evils. And personally? I agree with them. Of course, I’d rather have native apps that are built from the ground up to run on a desktop, but that ain’t gonna happen.
That may be true for consumer programs but pro tools like Audio and Video editors, and magazine layout tools are all still and will be for awhile desktop apps.
My question is what happens at the end of the year? Do I then have all sorts of people going “Hey my Windows expired and I have to pay for the new one can you reinstall Windows 8 for free?” Does anybody know?
This has been covered over and over and over and over again:
WINDOWS 10 WILL NOT EXPIRE. WINDOWS 10 IS NOT A SUBSCRIPTION.
Microsoft has said multiple times, including in this release announcement, that once you get a Windows 10 license, it is yours (With perpetual upgrades) for as long as your hardware is still supported.
As in, if you’re running 32-bit Windows, you will get all Windows upgrades for free, forever, until they stop supporting 32-bit processors.
The “Free for a year” thing only means that, if you don’t upgrade within the first year, you’ll have to pay for a license.
Cool thanks for the reply.
Or until their marketing department decides its time for Windows 11. Note that I’m not disagreeing with the overall tone of your post, I’m just not as enthusiastic as you for the long-term prognosis of Windows 10
They are doing what Windows 8 should have been in first place, WinRT gets to replace the Win32 APIs.
Sure they are still there and with the project Centennial can be made to run as Universal Apps.
But the writing is on the wall, in the long run Win32 will join Carbon on API Heaven.
I assume to reduce the learning curve for those moving from windows 7 (or before). Changing the explorer would be such a massive deal for so many users they probably decided it wasn’t worth it at this stage.
it will come, but the current implementation is functional and familiar for most users.
So that’s why they stuck a ribbon in it in Windows 8. I’d wondered.
More and more i am thinking that Big Media is pushing hard to bury direct file system access.
Instead everything is to be manipulated via custom apps and databases.
This in turn allow DRM to take hold.
iOS was like this from the start, and Big Media loved it.
Android is inching its way there with every release as well.
So the point of a comment field is to allow for subjective opinions on a piece. Learn how to use the Internet please.
Sure it is, appearances matters to people, and consensus is that Windows 10 is butt ugly.
But most of all, it’s a usability contest, and bad contrast and 200 flat icons that looks mostly the same, well, loses.
[citation needed] How do you know this? Have they run surveys on this kind of thing?
Edited 2015-06-01 13:32 UTC
I quite like it. Maybe I should fill in the survey too?
adrienz,
I will reserve judgement on windows 10 until I actually try it, but if it continues from 8 then I will say this: Ugliness doesn’t matter to me, but usability does and one of the things I hated with windows 8 is how difficult it was to use because I could not easily distinguish UI elements. Compounded with how much I use remote desktop and the active windows don’t stand out it turned into a usability problem for me personally. Maybe my vision could be better but the thing is I don’t have this problem at all with interfaces that make better use of visual clues. The aversion to strong features and indicators is being done for subjective asthetic reasons. However our eyes are highly evolved to recognize strong patterns immediately, and not taking advantage of this in UI seems to be objectively inferior for usability.
Consensus? Based on.. what? Loudness on the Internets? You do realize that it’s almost always the people who have something to complain about are the loud ones, but the ones who don’t have anything to complain rarely make any sort of splash at all?
You are only showing your own bias and ignorance with your comment.
Lmao “consensus”. What a joke.
They could allow for more customization though.
They could but then they’d have to re-invent the cashew.
A better release date would be 9/11 but they don’t have any sense of humor.
What? It already looks like a plane crash, no naming hints needed.
Ah, yes. 9/11 jokes. Hilarious.
I already have the “get Windows 10” icon in my task bar, no thank you, take it away please, I don’t want it even if you pay me to have it.
Do they really expect people to install that rubbish over a Windows 7 installation? Must be mad!
Wouldn’t be so bad if they made a ISO available for download, but as it is, unless you image your hard drive first so you can go back, it just installs as a “upgrade”. Downgrade more like!
If like me, just the thought of Windows 10 makes you shiver, you can get rid of the “Get Windows 10” notification by UN-installing KB3035583.
I kinda like 10, I am using a vm of the preview. I hope they can get the tiles editable and navigable with a remote. I was kinda of disappointed when I upgrade to windows 8 I wanted to use the tiles instead of Windows Media Center. Sadly windows 10 is not going to include windows media center, that was one thing I thought MS got right.
Aesthetically and usability-wise, Windows 10 is still awful… A repackaged botch job. I guess, too many cooks spoil the broth.
As for the “Free for a year” plan, that is the old “hook, line and sinker” routine.
For the first year. What happens Year 2?
Just like that 0% credit card that rockets it’s way to 22% after the introductory period is over.
Covered here: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?611730
Apparently people were going to confuse Win9 with Win9x aka Windows 95 through Windows ME.
F— the free upgrade. I like my drivers working.
UI discussions aside, my partner has been trying to use Win10 as his daily desktop OS for a while now. The sheer amount of technical problems is a bit scary for something they want to release in a couple of months – random automatic updates have led to bluescreens on boot several times, windows don’t redraw, the start menu app dies (and doesn’t restart), and he has had weird issues with onedrive sync (including the memorable time it deleted everything on onedrive and he had to recover it from a recently synced machine that by chance was offline).
Oh, and “refresh windows” formatted every drive in the machine for him yesterday, including a USB stick that happened to be plugged in and a linux drive, before it reinstalled windows to a different drive than it used to live on. No data loss (backups are a good thing), but mildly surprising.
I’m looking forward to August when a lot of customers come in and want Windows “fixed” so it looks like it did before. Classic Shell to the rescue.