This hit the news yesterday.
Microsoft released Windows 10 four weeks ago today, and now the company is providing a fresh update on its upgrade figures. 14 million machines had been upgraded to Windows 10 within 24 hours of the operating system release last month, and that figure has now risen to more than 75 million in just four weeks.
As somebody who uses Windows every day, and who upgraded to Windows 10 a few weeks before it was released, let me make a statement about all the positive Windows 10 reviews that not everyone is going to like. There are only two reasons Windows 10 is getting positive reviews. First, because it’s free. This one’s a given. Second, and more importantly: Windows 10 is getting positive reviews because none of the reviewers have forced themselves to use nothing but Metro applications.
Here’s the cold and harsh truth as I see it: despite all the promises, Metro applications are still complete and utter garbage. Let me explain why.
I was going to write a detailed review of Windows 10, but as I started using it, I realised I didn’t really have a whole lot to say – because quite honestly, Windows 10 isn’t nearly as big an update as they want you to believe. It’s still a desperate attempt at merging the Windows of old – Win32, if you will – and the Windows of supposedly tomorrow (which I still call Metro). If you were already okay with Win32 in Windows 7 and Windows 8, you’ll still be okay with Win32 in Windows 10. Little has improved in this regard. Consequently, this also means that if you’re happy with Windows 7 or Windows 8 with a Start menu replacement, there really is no need to upgrade to Windows 10 – other than that it’s free.
On the Metro side of things, however, a lot has changed from Windows 8.x, it’s just that the changes haven’t resulted in Metro applications actually being any good.
Windows 8 was released three years ago. This means that after three years of Metro, we still have no high-quality, delightful, killer Metro applications, despite – I presume – Microsoft’s brightest minds working on them for 5-6 years now (if you include Windows 8’s development cycle). One word keeps popping up in my mind when I think about Metro: pathetic.
I’m going to give you a whole lot of examples of things that are wrong with Metro in Windows 10, and I want to start with a specific example that really illustrates everything that is wrong with Windows today.
Currently, in Windows 10, there are, at least (I stopped counting), 12 differently styled and designed context menus. I’m not joking. This is no hyperbole. I’m not talking about merely the contents of the menus being different, but their actual design, style, and in some cases, even the way they function. There are applications in Windows 10 that have classic Win32 context menus while also having several differently designed context menus within the same application window.
In my view, nothing illustrates the current state of Windows better than Windows 10’s context menus: chaotic, unfocussed, willy-nilly, a complete and utter lack of attention to detail. This lack of attention to detail is the big red thread running through Metro in Windows 10, and it makes Metro applications – which are now clearly the future, pinky-swear – frustrating to use.
Let’s take Microsoft’s new browser, Edge.
Can you spot the URL input field? Neither can I, because it’s hidden. For some reason, Microsoft disables and hides the URL input field, forcing you to use the search bar in the middle of the page instead. The problem is: when you open a new tab, said search field is not activated. You have to click it first before you can start typing. After hitting enter, the page loads, and the actual URL field appears. You can actually click inside the area where the URL input field eventually appears, but you need to click twice to actually be able to use it; first to ‘unhide’ it, and then to actually activate it so you can input text.
Then there’s the URL input field’s dropdown. This dropdown, which appears with suggestions as you type, is white. Without borders. Without shadows. If you’re on a website with a white background, it effectively vanishes. If you’re on a white website with lots of black text, like, say, Wikipedia, and, well, it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so incredibly frustrating and sad.
The URL input field has another problem. Like other browsers, Edge hides the HTTP prefix of the URL for a cleaner look. So far, so good – I don’t see the point but I’m not bothered by it either. When you click on the URL input field, the prefix will reappear, and in order to make room for it, the rest of the URL shifts to the right.
The problem is that – like so many other things Windows – the hiding is only skin-deep; it’s purely visual. So, when you want to select part of the URL or place the input cursor somewhere specific in the URL to, say, fix a typo, the URL will shift to the right to make way for the prefix, and you will misclick, and your cursor will end up somewhere to the left of where you originally wanted it to be.
In other words, if you want to fix the typo “www.osnews.cor”, and you click right of the “r”, the cursor will actually appear somewhere around the “w” in “news” instead, because the entire URL shifted to the right to make way for the prefix. Infuriating doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Moving on, Edge’s implementation of tabs is so utterly broken it should never have shipped in a final release. The user interface of tabbed browsing in Edge is such a giant – excusez le mot – clusterfuck, I just cannot believe somebody looked at this a few months ago and said, with a straight face, “yup, ship it!”. This thing must be some sort of cosmic joke.
Let’s start with the big one: Edge has no titlebar. Tabs on top, which I think Chrome introduced first (although it might have been configurable as such on Opera before, I don’t remember), is a great idea and universally adopted now, but tabs on top or no, you need a titlebar – even more so on Windows, where clicks inside inactive windows are always passed on to the window. Take a look at the screenshot below, and try to figure out how you would go about switching to Edge without performing some sort of action like clicking a bookmark, a button, or switching tabs.
Exactly: it’s pretty much impossible (only clicking the red area will not perform any action). Only a small part of the titlebar is always visible (all the way to the right), but because the titlebar buttons have no borders, you’ll end up clicking them (or the new tab button) more often than not (they are much, much larger than their icons seem to imply).
Tabs themselves have a number of issues, too. Dragging the last and only tab from window A to window B will spawn a new, empty tab in windows A; in other words, it won’t close, and just sit there until you manually close it. So, every now and then, you’ll be wondering where all those empty Edge windows are coming from. In addition, because the tab you’re dragging is – you guessed it – white, it’s easy to lose track of it when dragging across sites that are predominantly white.
The second application I want to talk about specifically, is Mail. This one is getting a lot of accolades in reviews, but in my few months of using it every day, it has proven itself to be a dreadful email client.
First and foremost, it has major issues actually, you know, receiving email. More often than not, emails will arrive 5, 10, 15 minutes late, and on my Windows 10 machine, notifications are incredibly unreliable and they have stopped working for Mail altogether, so I just can’t trust Mail. Considering virtually all contact with my clients takes place via e-mail, this could potentially cost me work.
Attachments are another problem with receiving mail. Often, e-mail that’s supposed to have attachments, will not have attachments in Windows 10’s Mail. They simply won’t show up. Attachments also sometimes do not download automatically, and said downloading also tends to take a very, very long time – and Mail will throw up an error message if you try to reply while it’s taking its sweet time downloading a 25kB attachment.
Then there’s the user interface. Since Mail is just an application designed for Windows Phone but scaled up, it doesn’t support multiple windows. What does this mean? Well, the reading pane is also the new mail pane; so if you reply or want to create a new email, the editor will take the place of the reading pane. Typing up an email but need to check something in an email you received? Tough luck, you’ll have to close your draft, browse to the email in question, find the draft you just closed, and open it again. It’s a terrible workflow, forced upon desktop users because of limitations on smartphones.
Much like in Edge, the sparseness and whiteness of Mail also leads to usability issues, such as threading being difficult to follow, as well as it being unclear where clickable areas begin and end – a running theme in Metro on the desktop for three years now.
Aside from these two specific applications I decided to pick on, there’s myriad other problems all across the Metro parts of the user interface in Windows 10. One of my favourites is that Metro applications can have two different types of fullscreens, and thus, two different fullscreen buttons. One of them is the traditional, Win32-esque fullscreen button that still shows you the titlebar chrome and taskbar, while the other is a Metro fullscreen button that hides the titlebar and taskbar (similar to the fullscreen mode in OS X).
Some applications, like Tweetium, get utterly confused by this. You enter Metro fullscreen with the double arrow button, after which the double arrow button disappears, and you have to leave Metro fullscreen with the Win32 fullscreen button. I wish I was making this stuff up.
One more version
Many people will argue these are just bugs, tiny problems that will go away over time. Windows 10 is new! It will work itself out!
And here’s whet I get agitated, because that’s utter hogwash. This is the perpetual Windows Phone hypecycle all over again – it’s always one more version, it’s always the next release that will fix everything, it’s always next month’s set of updates that finally make Metro not suck. Windows’ Metro has been in our hands for three years now, and Microsoft has been working on it for far longer than that. Why are we giving them a free pass every time they repackage this crap?
When I take a step back, when I take a look at the greater picture that is Windows 10, I see disinterest. A lack of focus. Lack of vision. Randomness. A complete lack of attention to detail. Too many cooks in a kitchen so big they can’t even see each other. Windows 10’s Metro is a hodgepodge, a messy assortment of disparate ideas about user interface design slapped on top of buggy and unreliable application backends.
Windows 10, like Windows 8 and 8.1 before it on the desktop, and Windows Phone 7.x and 8.x on smartphones, is nothing more than yet another beta release. Another unfinished product that, like the others, will supposedly one day be really good, I promise, just wait for the next update! The next version! It’ll finally get good!
Just… No. Stop it. We’ve been promised enough when it comes to Metro, either on phones or on desktops. I’m done, I’m through, I’m fed up, this is bananas. We’re three years in, and Win32 applications are still universally better than their Metro counterparts, despite all the promises. I’ve opened myself up to try Metro applications at every release, and every time, it’s been a disaster.
No more.
Much like Windows 8.x before it, I advise you to ignore this Metro nonsense, and just focus on the traditional desktop side of Windows. It’ll be a little harder this time around because of the superficial, skin-deep Metro layer atop the taskbar and its applets (any action that requires more than two braincells to perform require Win32 applets anyway), but it’s still very much possible to use Windows 10 without ever having to endure or waddle through its Metro nonsense.
Well, there’s always the next batch of updates.
I updated on a test machine. I reverted to Windows 7, because there’s not enough there interesting or useful to have to deal with: 1) locking down privacy 2) figuring out updates 3) Metro junk 4) schizoid UI. I’m sure there’s more.
So, revert back to Windows 7 and carry on as before.
I’ll give ya one…the fonts and icons! OMFG who thought that fugly hard to read white on white flat shaded mess was a good choice? Or icons that would look right at home on Win 3.1 would be the right choice in 2015?
I have seen cheapo phones with better icons than MSFT’s flagship OS, seriously what were they thinking?
Very good article, this is why i come to OSAlert year after year. Good work Thom.
Article/ Rantarama – relax people …
re: switching to Edge
..you can switch to Edge by clicking on the expansive blank space…. relax and contemplate the emptiness and realize that it does not actually matter if you simultaneously activate the hidden browser-address-bar … and also PSST ==>> there’s actually no such thing as a metro app any more
Are you just being pedantic about the name? What is the official term now: Modern? RT ? Microsoft Store Windows Applications for Touch Based Interfaces?
A pig by any other name…
On metro:
https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/windows-phone/3000/ex-microsoft-desi…
http://www.dailytech.com/Windows+8+Designer+Metro+is+the+Antithesis…
Win32?:
Thom also indirectly implies that what he calls “Win32” apps have been depreciated in favour of .Net/Xaml based apps, this is another mistake with this rather excellent post
Edited 2015-08-28 15:35 UTC
Win32 is dead going forward. Anyone who believes otherwise hasn’t been paying attention.
It’s deprecated.
Someone should tell win32 that. And the MS office team.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-microsoft-is-taking-on-the-cross-p…
The rumors of its demise are greatly exaggerated every 4-5 years.
Edit:
Win32 API: it’s always dead with the next version
Edited 2015-08-28 16:52 UTC
This is nonsense Thom. Win32 is not going anywhere and you know it. And if you don’t, you should have a look here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/desktop/hh920508.aspx
If Win32 is deprecated and soon to be dead, please explain DirectX12.
Please explain which technology is used to write Office, SQL Server, Windows itself…you know, all those programs that actually earn billions for Microsoft every 3 months.
Or explain this sentence: Windows Runtime apps and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps can use a subset of the Win32 and COM APIs. This subset of APIs was chosen to support key scenarios for Windows Runtime apps that were not already covered by the Windows Runtime, HTML/CSS, or other supported languages or standards.
Win32 is what 95% of Microsofts own software and their entire ecosystem is built on. Saying that that is deprecated and dead going forward is WAY beneath your level.
That’s like saying we are still in the glorious steam engine age because the basic principles behind the steam engine are still used in nuclear power plants.
There is so much wrong with your analogy Thom. And yes, I know that steam is actually used in nuclear powerplants.
You really seem to be hung up on the fact that “Metro/Modern” is here to replace Win32 right now although there is no evidence for that at all. Quite the opposite actually as the focus from Windows 8.1 and 10 was to improve the Desktop Experience (Win32) while making Modern apps behave more like Desktop apps. Modern might, someday, replace Win32 as the primary development target, but that is still a few years in the future.
Replace Modern/Win32 with Wayland/X11 and you get a nice comparison where the new takes about a decade to develop, mature, become a viable platform and still the old will be needed for backwards compatibility.
But at least it is nice to hear you think that Modern is like a nuclear reactor instead of a steam engine
I haven’t installed Windows 10, so can’t comment on the quality of metro/universal apps (or the lack thereof), vs how they are on Windows 8. But if your main complaint is the lack of consistency, how is that any different than Win32 apps? Those haven’t been consistent for at least a decade; seems that every software dev thinks they have to gussy up the UI so that the app looks completely different from every other app on the computer.
Personally, I like consistency in my apps, so find this EXTREMELY aggravating. If I want to do any skinning, I’ll do it at the OS level.
This is a bit complicated subject, but part of the problem is that theming gets really hard once applications get their own image and font assets. In classical Win32 (and Linux UIs) you had a theming engine like uxtheme.dll that would render the widgets in their proper theme. This gave the consistency that Thom and you are asking for.
But since then we had the world of websites each with their own style and looks. An application restricting itself to just using the controls offered by uxtheme will find itself to look really dated (it will look like a MFC application). Basically the system used by uxtheme isn’t flexible enough to create visually rich applications ala what you see on a website.
So what you’re seeing going on in Windows 10 is that half the context menus use uxtheme (mostly explorer and such). The other half uses their own custom design. And Microsoft isn’t being consistent about it even when the custom designed menus are supposed to follow a general OS theme.
I’m not that well versed in WPF/XAML, but my guess is that either there is no theming engine at all, or its way too primitive to support the applications. You can see similar inconsistencies in newer Visual Studios too where there’s an occasional label here and there with a wrong font size.
And how much of this ‘visually rich’ stuff actually enhances the application in some tangible way, rather than just being eye candy?
Hehe, well personally I like candy.
I generally don’t disagree that we “lost something” usability-wise since Windows 95 where everything was built using common controls. I just think that appearance of an application matters more than most developers realize. It is kind of like it shouldn’t matter if a game is ugly if it has good gameplay. In the end both things matter and you need a good balance.
Even if I agreed with this (which I don’t as long as the app is user-friendly), I think we’ve swung too far in the ‘just make it look pretty’ direction to the point where a major update for most apps these days mainly consists of slapping a new coat of paint on it, while removing a feature or three in the process, all in the name of ‘elegant’ app design.
And even if apps do get new features, it’s usually useless shit like, ‘share xyz with your friends!!’, which is mainly designed for advertisers to track you than it is actually providing value to the end user.
Allowing designs is no guarantee that the designer knows what he is doing. Still, when done right I find it very pleasing to look at, and if two programs/websites are roughly functionally identical I will pick the pretty one. More importantly, if I don’t know which is best I will try the pretty app the first.
Problem is, too many people are choosing looks over functionality. Well, that’s not technically a ‘problem’, until you consider where most of the dev work is going… not only in software, but in hardware too.
Case in point… Samsung decided that a breakable glass back was more important than a removable battery on the S6 and Note 5. Who in their right mind thinks this is a good idea?
I don’t dispute any of that. Good industrial design naturally does not sacrifice functionality.
The need for “visually rich” design in UI’s comes from small simple practical things like the address field in your browser. In FF for example it shows a drop down menu with an icon and two lines of text for each item. This is highly specialized for browsers as it conveys exactly three things: 1) the site icon, 2) the site title, 3) its URL.
Now the problem is that any common control theme system (like uxtheme) has a really hard time abstracting this. The closest you have is a ComboBox control which doesn’t support this complex listing and also doesn’t support stuff like the reload button being inside the control. Another example would be the address field in File Explorer.
The hilarious part of supporting “visually rich” apps is that everyone’s gone for this minimalistic flat style that reduces usability, while turning all the visuals into whiteness, squares and rectangles.
I gave the Metro apps in Win 10 a chance, I really did. I might even give the Metro version of Wunderlist another go when they update it for Win 10.
The apps I use every day are all “desktop” apps. The move to Metro always loses you a lot of functionality, even beyond the worse UI… compare the Metro OneNote in Win 10 to the desktop OneNote from Office 2013.
– chrish
Haha, I never said that I think “flat” designs are beautiful, or that they are visually rich.
I personally think the blueish gradients in Windows 7 became a bit tiring after looking at them for 5 years. Current OS X looks nice to me without taking it too far in the flat direction (iOS on the other hand..). I also like the Windows 10 window frame, but hate the System Settings grey color. YMMV.
I beta tested Win10. I have it installed on most of my machines. I was wondering if there was something wrong with my setup because I was not impressed. While every review I saw said that Win10 was awesome. I thought it was “meh”. Not the tortuous dual interfaces of Win8 or the general crappiness of Vista. But it was very “meh”.
MSFT still can’t decide if they want “Settings” or “Control Panel”. I thought they would fix that before RTM.
This problem was NEVER going to get solved. The whole premise of scaling up applications designed for a 4-5 in screen and having them compete with full desktop applications is just wrong. It’s why tablets, despite everyone declaring the beginning of the post-PC era, have gone nowhere in terms of displacing desktops/laptops. The simplified interface paradigm for metro (and iOS/android) apps requires sacrificing most of the information and control that a full desktop application provides, with commensurate reduction in usefulness. Fine when screen size needs to be small, otherwise unacceptable.
Good riddance metro.
Theoretically, there’s no reason why it can’t work. However, just like going from phones to tablets, the UI shouldn’t be the exact same when going from tablet to desktop. There should be more happening on the screen, with controls and UI elements suited for the input method available. For example, maybe there’s a toolbar present with the mouse is connected …
I use OS X most of the time so I might be biased but I found Metro really interesting, I believe it didn’t caught up because two things.
Microsoft should had released a complete Metro-Friendly Control Panel and file browser. Metro configuration panel is useless most of the time and having to fall back to desktop Explorer breaks up UI consistency.
The second problem is that Windows biggest strength and drag is backward compatibility. Windows 10 should have been Windows 8 and it should had began to phase out or deprecate UI elements (like the menu bar or right click menu) to give time to developers to redesign their UI.
I beg to differ here on some points.
Metro is not uninteresting as an UI for phones and tablets but is just nonsense on real desktops/laptops
I agree as for the control panel^aEUR| The actual dual control panel is just nonsense but to have 2 different explorers makes sense. One that is more feature-rich and that is aimed to be used with a mouse and another one, much simple, which is built to be used with big fat fingers (like mine) on a phone or a tablet (BTW I agree that there is no decent ^aEURoeMetro^aEUR explorer actually). “Metro” is clearly not designed and, as far as I know, not even aimed to be a desktop UI.
As for the contextual menu (What you call right click menu). NO^aEUR| Just a big fat NO. This is the exact thing that makes, in my humble opinion, the windows UI superior to the OSX UI. You want to do something on something??? Right-click and you know what can be done. No crazy moves through the screen(s) to click the right button/menu entry, no lost time in trying to figure out which schizophrenic designer on drugs designed the menus of the app you^aEURTMre using. Each time I have to use OSX I become crazy in finding what is just under the right mouse button on Windows. I know that contextual menus somehow exist on OSX but they^aEURTMre far from the usability of those in Windows
I read the whole review and not once did I see the word “shiny”.
And you’re not even trying to figure out how to write a Windows 10 application. I keep trying to read the SDK, but there are three of them, jumbled together, and the one tutorial has mistakes in it. Half of the links take you to Windows 8 topics.
Are these people serious? What ever happened to “developers, developers, developers”?
I don’t think Microsoft has fully realised yet that they are no longer in a position to dictate what people have to use, like in the late 90’s.
Back then everyone had to use Windows, so it didn’t matter how crappy, slow and confusing it was. People grunted and paid to get it anyway. And after a while they got used to that OS’s should be crappy, slow and confusing by default.
Today there are plenty of options like MacOS, Android and a multitude of Linux distros. They havn’t destroyed Windows, but they have shown the end user how an operating system *can* look and function. Therefore, they have a bigger standard today, which showed in it’s full with the hate MS got for Windows 8.
Micosoft’s new CEO told the world that they where going to make an OS “people want to use”. So far, it feels more like they still go for the old “eat our crap and like it!”
And people are buying Windows less and less even businesses it seems. I’m going to quote the article I linked below:
“Chromebooks have overtaken sales of Windows notebooks.”
http://www.itworld.com/article/2970868/hardware/chromebooks-are-eat…
One thing I learned ages ago is that what I thought of as being the perfect user interface could be totally different from what someone else thought it should be. I could go on and on pontificating and explaining the perfect logic of my ideas and concepts, but it would have no effect on what anyone else thought.
I did pick up one piece of wisdom, useful when confronted with cold, harsh truths. Life is tough. Deal with it.
Edited 2015-08-28 01:21 UTC
The only “Metro” app I use in windows 10 is Photos, and this application actually crashes daily. While it’s only once a day, it’s still ridiculous.
I immediately stopped using the other one I could barely tolerate: Calendar.
I see peop..actually, I see nerds constantly banding on the hate-train on Windows 10 and I can’t shake this feeling that for most it’s partially because it’s still cool and trendy to hate on anything Microsoft.
I am liking Windows 10 so far, it’s faster than 7/8/8.1, but also uses a lot less disk-space — very useful when you don’t 500GB SSDs. I don’t use UWP-apps, I do agree with the sentiment that they’re rather awful and the whole concept is flawed, but for running regular desktop – stuff? Works just as well as the previous versions. The fact that the UWP-stuff sucks doesn’t mean the whole OS sucks or that it’s unuseable.
I am apparently going against the grain here, at least if one looks at the usual OSAlert-comments, but I don’t have any good reason to downgrade to any previous Windows – version nor do I have a need to be constantly writing negative comments everywhere about it.
The reason people are angry about Metro still sucking is that the ENTIRE PREMISE of Windows Phone, the new Xbox UI, and Windows >= 8 was that Metro was going to be the One True Unifying Graphical API across all Microsoft products except for games, where DirectX is still king. In the time that Metro has still sucked, we’ve seen GNOME 3, KDE 4, and KDE 5 all go from horrible to really good, Android and iOS have grown more desktop-like multitasking capabilities and better graphical performance via Vulkan and Metal respectively, and Haiku OS go from a kludgy, shaky Alpha 4 to a really good looking fully package managed Beta release (in a few months). There’s just no excuse for Metro sucking this hard with all the time and money Microsoft has been throwing at it.
Edited 2015-08-28 03:41 UTC
I was talking about Windows 10, not Metro. You know, the whole OS.
Aside from metro and a few moderate performance tweaks, the only things differentiating Win10 from Win7 are all the horrible privacy-invading data leeches, and most of those got backported to Win7.
No difference between 7 and 10 except for some moderate performance tweaks? You must be either trolling or you have only used Windows 7 the last few years. If you remove your focus from Metro to the Desktop you would have noticed lots of major and minor tweaks, conveniences and improvements. Some of these are for powerusers only, others just make life easier for everyone
* Notification Center
* Multiple Desktops
* Snapping in quadrants
* Much better multi-screen and high-dpi support
* Much better touch support
* HyperV
* TaskSwitcher (CTRL+TAB in addition to ALT+TAB)
* ISO-mounting
* Copy pasting in command-prompt (FINALLY ctrl+c, ctrl+v works)
* The ribbon in Explorer that allows you to “copy path”
* Have you even compared the Task Manager?
* Much improved file-management with Explorer
* Major improvements on behind the scene, enterprisey support for things like deployments (just do dism /? on win7 and win10)
* Winkey+X
* Much better support for lots of new technologies, from UEFI/GPT/Advanced-Format-HD, SSD, USB3 to 3D Printing
* Almost everything can now be changed, configured, installed, uninstalled, reset without requiring a reboot or even having to logout
* Much faster startups, reboots, standby, powermanagement
* and maybe most importantly, no 250 updates after an install (for now)
I could honestly continue this list with 50 more things that improve my way of working with Windows and that I would miss if I ever had to work on that ancient OS that is now 4 versions and 6 years old.
I completely agree that Metro is an unfullfilled promise. Not because there is anything wrong with it technically, but simply because app-developers didn’t develop apps for it. Why didn’t they? Because you develop apps for users and only a small percentage of users can run Store-Apps while everyone can run Desktop-Apps. What will fix Metro is not the next version but having hundreds of millions of potential users to attract dev-love. Currently devs have to choose between “local apps” that are very powerful but people keep using old versions and “web apps” that are much harder to develop but people will always use that 1 centralized version. Store apps nicely provide the best of both worlds but just haven’t caught enough attraction on any pc-platform
I also completely agree that Edge is an unfinished browser that needs a lot of fixing up. I think the rendering engine is extremely solid and they made a lot of good choices but for now it just doesn’t handle well. Luckily this thing is an app so it will continuously get improved (no “next version” that is going to fix everything, but “it gets better every month and maybe in October it is mostly usable, in January it can replace IE and next year it is awesome)
The ribbon in Explorer is a positive? Really?
All it does is take up scarce vertical resolution.
I really do beg to differ here.
I have enough vertical resolution to enable the ribbon by default, but if you want to use those pixels for something else you can just CTRL+F1 to hide/show it whenever you would benefit from it. It is called choice and it is a good thing
I don’t use explorer often (Total Commander ftw) but having “Copy path” or “show/hide hidden items” or “System Properties” available with half the keystrokes/mouse-clicks it took in Windows 7 is a good thing
There is a little up arrow on the right.
Click it.
Problem solved.
ps. It actually uses less vertical real estate than the old explorer did when run this way. The only cost you incur is having to click the file menus first in order to see the ribbons when you need them…
ps.ps. This is pretty much universal across all recent MS desktop apps that use a ribbon bar, but of course the little arrow is never in the same place.
You Sir are extremely annoying… You wrote almost word for word what I was going to write.
I would even add some other little things I’ve noticed since I use it and that were real blessings for me.
– On the fly resizable CMD and PS prompts. FINALLY
– Remote execution of GPO’s (OK… Existed already with 8)
– Startup of application focused on the mouse position in multi-screen environment
– Huge improvement in centralized management for enterprises
The problem of Thom’s analysis is that it takes as fact that W10 must be judged by the sole usage of “Metro Apps” and we are light-years from that. I think that the major focus in W10 was again to create a real desktop OS without losing its ability to work on phones/tablets.
The big error MS made with W8 was to force a phone UI over a production desktop. This was an utterly bad move that has only been barely worked around with W8.1
With W10 you REALLY have an easy way to switch between a desktop UI and a phone/tablet UI. This makes perfectly sense when put in relation to Surface3 Pro tablets.
There ARE some choices that still are awful in the interface (The worst I think is old+new control panel). But all in all W10 in an excellent OS with amazing changes under the hood. I don’t think I’m too far from truth when I say that it’s a progression similar to 7 from XP.
Edit: Forgot to mention support for REALLY old hardware. I tested the upgrade on an old Fujitsu Laptop (Core duo / 2GB of RAM / 32Bit Win7). It worked like a charm… All hardware, including the fingerprint sensor, works perfectly and even faster than before
Edited 2015-08-28 10:58 UTC
Then tell me why is the Mail app still crap ? Because they are still forcing people to use a phone interface on a desktop machine.
I’m sure there are smart engineers at Microsoft doing lots of good stuff and incremental improvements where they are needed.
But my guess is, after Windows 8 UI fuck up they just fired all the UI people.
The problem isn’t the phone interface on a desktop OS. It’s the fact that for even the desktop interface has been ruined. Everything is afflicted with this hideous “flat” UI, on which is much harder to distinguish controls in a window and between windows.
With the exception of Windows 7, every version of Windows since 2000 has been getting uglier and uglier, but at least until Windows 7 you could switch to the functional and clean and visually appealing “classic” Windows theme. Now you can’t even do that any more.
Right now, the desktop UI is less configurable than Windows 2, and about as good-looking… and let’s recall that Windows 2 was limited to 16 colors.
I really feel that through the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft has UI right. They did a good job and make clean and consistent UI for their OS. The default XP theme was ugly, but you could turn it off. But now, there are no more standards and everything has this dumb, flat, bland, colorless look to it.
You used to be able to customize a lot of stuff, the fonts and colors and sizes of different Windows elements, now the best you can do is change the color.
I guess recreating the “classic” window theme of Windows 2000 is too hard to do now.
“Why didn’t they? Because you develop apps for users and only a small percentage of users can run Store-Apps while everyone can run Desktop-Apps.”
I disagree, the reason I, as a Windows developer with over 20 years experience, decided not to develop ModernUI/Universal Apps is twofold:
1. Sandboxing. This makes sense on a phone, but much less on a desktop. It makes it quite hard to access some O/S services and makes the wrong trade-offs in my opinion.
2. The Store. I may be going against the grain (in a different way), but I dislike the Store model. I blame Apple for introducing it, but the other big tech companies seem to have swallowed it whole.
To me its a freedom issue. I should be able to write whatever software I want, run whatever software I want, and distribute it how I want. I cannot even freaking distribute an “Universal” app unless I go through the freaking store. I don’t want Microsoft (or Apple or whomever) acting as the censor deciding what is OK for me to run or view on my computer. I hate the whole walled garden idea, and think Steve Jobs should be crucified for introducing it (if he wasn’t already dead).
[End Rant]
1. Sandboxing is difficult for developers, but good for users. After decades of security issues introduced by developers (like you and me) it is time that users get apps that don’t break when something outside that app changes and if security is compromised the system as a whole is still safe.
2. Store model. This cannot be the reason that developers don’t develop for Windows because it seems to attract plenty of developers for IOS and Android. And of course you can side-load (powerusers/developers) or bypass the Windows Store entirely (Enterprise)
You’ll be pleased to know that with windows 10 you have the option of allowing sideloading of universal apps in the control panel then…
Forget about the store, they can block normal apps too:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/407894,microsoft-can-disable-you…
If you want freedom, Windows, especially 10, is not where you can get it.
I think the point is: Thom only talked about the apps Microsoft developed for Metro/Modern/whatever.
And what sucks about those apps.
If Microsoft can’t even fulfill this promise on their own platform then how you can expect other developers to get it right ?
This shows there probably is a structural problem.
There are clearly two teams inside Microsoft that makes these apps. One is the “old Windows” team and one is the “Windows Phone” team. The Windows Phone team is actually building quite nice apps that are very usable because they have a couple of years experience with these technologies and understand the user feedback.
The “old Windows” team just started building apps without learning from the Windows Phone team, making lots of mistakes and “rediscovering the wheel”.
Now that there is “One Windows” the quality of apps should improve simply because of better “lessons learned” and experience. And mostly because a lot more people will be using them and will be commenting how awful they are. Things will get better, the question is “how soon and how much better”
Until then, just use your current desktop programs. They still work just fine
This site is called OSAlert. The entire point of this place is to discuss evolution in operating systems. Why shouldn’t Windows 10 be included in that discussion? Nobody is telling you to downgrade to anything.
But the question I have for most people using Windows 10:
why did you upgrade ?
Why? Well, I tried out the the Insider Preview and saw that 10 is faster, leaner and uses a lot less disk-space than e.g. Windows 8. I have only 128GB SSDs both on my desktop and laptop, so the disk-space savings do come in handy. Also, I’m a gamer and it provides DX12, which will be useful once the games start to support it. On another note, 10’s new Start – menu is again perfectly useable, so I don’t need to be running Start8 or similar anymore.
As the only UWP/Metro – app that I use is Netflix and everything else is regular desktop – apps I just didn’t have any reason not to upgrade, but I had several reasons (see above) to do so.
Ahh, you came from Windows 8… there are probably more reasons to upgrade than from Windows 7.
Everything aside from the Start-menu applies to Windows 7, too.
Well, it’s not just Metro which you need to try and ignore. Because it changes things which are in the way of getting stuff done.
Like in almost every Windows release it’s harder (needs more actions) to get to the configuration options in Windows 8 than Windows 7 (which was true for Windows 7 in comparison to Windows XP and which was true for Windows XP in comparison to Windows 2000).
I was talking about my usecase, not some other person; I mean, that’s what you asked for. I do not have any need to constantly go and fiddle with configuration options, plus Control Panel is right there, almost the same as it was before. Windows Update got moved out to another app, but that’s hardly a big issue for me.
I do not see anything getting in my way any more than it would have under 7 or 8. The only, real practical differences between 7 and 8 were the Start-screen and the charms bar, but Windows 10 removed both of those. Everything else I mentioned still applies to 7.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention in my original reply that the improved cmd.exe is quite handy in W10. It’s not really earth-shattering or anything, but improving copy-paste is something I am liking when I rarely need to use it.
Edited 2015-08-29 18:37 UTC
Really, You think it is harder to get to the configuration options?
Winkey+X (or rightclick on start) gives you a new menu with all the configuration options.
Do you want to go to the control panel? Winkey+X, P
Device Manager? Winkey+X, M
Computer Management? winkey+X, G
There are about a dozen in there!
Want to know what is slowing your machine down? Task Manager has been improved enormously.
Want to see what is making your machine start up slowly? There is a special tab for that in taskmanager.
I couldn’t think of anything that is better in 7 than in 8.1 or 10, except for “we have a lot of experience and knowledge about this and not about 8.1/10”
Again, it is _not_ free. Do not confuse it with free operating systems such as Linux. Windows is not free. Period.
It was offered only as a “no cost” upgrade to existing Windows 7 genuine users who actually bought Windows in the first place in a limited timeframe.
Everything anyone says is right or wrong depending how wide or narrow the context, in this context it is indeed free for the first year or whatever they decided to change. Come back next year and look at the willful adoption rate when you have to pay for it.
I have written software for years and I for one have no reason to even consider writing any kind of Metro App, the overly simplistic apps are more focused on the Forest Gumps of the world.
It’s not “free” except as a short-term promotional upgrade for some existing Windows customers.
For anyone building a new computer, the cost is $100 for Home and $140 for Pro. Those are the exact same prices as Windows 7.
For anyone buying an off-the-shelf computer the price is bundled with the computer. There is nothing to indicate that Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, or any of the other major OEMs are paying less for Windows 10 than for any previous Windows version.
75’000’000 actually… That’s not so bad.
I think that almost everyone who wanted W10 and is techie enough to build his own computer found somewhere valid licenses for Windows >= 7 and made the upgrade.
Those who buy a new computer from Dell (or whoever) mostly don’t give a sh… They just don’t understand which part of the price goes to MS.
Just because people don’t understand (or care) how much they’re paying doesn’t make something “free” by any definition of the word.
Hum… You have probably overseen that only the last sentence in my post was about people not understanding what they’re paying for. These people actually represent only marginally those who use Windows 10.
The ~75’000’000 other users are those who really received it for free. Future updates won’t be, but actually it is.
To be even more clear. What I contested in my first answer was the impression you gave that only a minority of actual Windows users would benefit of this upgrade. Sorry if I misunderstood you there.
Yes, the current Windows users eligible for the short-term promotion outnumber those that are not eligible. I never meant to imply otherwise.
Have a nice day.
As Windows 10 matures and ages, the people who bought for it bundled with a new computer/tablet/phone will eventually outnumber those who received it as a Windows 7/8 update.
It is free. When most normal people say an object is “free”, they mean free of cost. Objects are not people to be “free as in freedom” or “enslaved”.
When most people hear the word “free”, they don’t think of 4 random sentences some neckbeard with an axe to grind wrote.
#deal_with_it
It is Not “free of cost” either. Aside from this short-term promotional offer that’s available to some existing Windows users, Windows 10 pricing is the same as the last few Windows releases.
Anyone who buys a computer will be paying about $50, the discounted price Microsoft reportedly gives large OEMs. Anyone who snaps together their own machine or misses the promotional period will have to fork out $100-$140 for a full copy of Windows 10. That’s the EXACT same price as Windows 7.
It’s also not “free of cost” if a user exchanges something of value to receive it. Privacy, personal information, their old Windows installation…
He wasn’t talking about freedom.
He meant, you’ve already paid for Windows 7 or 8, the operating system isn’t free. Only the upgrade is free and only free if you upgrade in the first year.
Many people will argue these are just bugs, tiny problems that will go away over time. Windows 10 is new! It will work itself out!
And here’s whet I get agitated, because that’s utter hogwash. This is the perpetual Windows Phone hypecycle all over again – it’s always one more version, it’s always the next release that will fix everything, it’s always next month’s set of updates that finally make Metro not suck. Windows’ Metro has been in our hands for three years now, and Microsoft has been working on it for far longer than that. Why are we giving them a free pass every time they repackage this crap?
Yes, Yes, Yes!!
Agree wholeheartedly. How can I send you beer?
I hope your well considered words get a much wider distribution.
My main gripe is their goal to force the phone UI to the desktop. What % of phone users actually choose a Windows phone? <10%.
Their grand plan to rule the IT world now depends on people using the stupid Metro UI on the desktop and saying to themselves that ok, I’ll get a Windows phone because I know how to usr it…. {Doh!}
Some points from the text
1)Can you spot the URL input field?
This is because they want you to search for everything. Then they can harvest all that lovely data just like Google. This is why they have put all this emphasis on Search.
simple really.
BTW, I never use and form of search on the Windows systems I use for my day job.
2) Your description of the Mail app shows their totally borked thinking. I use a three screen setup for my job as a software developer. Can someone who isn’t a marketeer please explain how the single panel workflow can work efficiently here? {i’m listening to the ‘sounds of silence’}
It seems to me that MS is preparing us for the future.
No not the rent the OS on my desktop by the month/day/hour but the full blown return to the days of the Mainfram and 3270 terminals.
Instead of that we will have (very) thin clients and everything is in the cloud for the marketing people to sift through every keystroke. Different technology but essentially the same.
The increasing emphasis on ‘being always connected’ for social media fits right into this grand plan.
Stop the world I wanna get off.
Well , I will soon anyway when I retire and with every incarnation of Windows this date gets shifted ever closer. So I’m an old fart/dinosaur/fogey. What is wrong with that eh?
The explanation is that the mail app is not meant for people like you. For people like you they sell Office that includes Outlook that will fit your workflow much better.
The mail app is meant for people like my parents that check mail twice per day or less and receive about 10 mails of which they only respond to a few.
Of course the mail app scales up quite a bit and is probably at least as capable as Outlook Express used to be while being much more userfriendly. From the other side of the spectrum Outlook scales down quite a bit so you could also so it with just an IMAP-account instead of an Exchange Server
Different users require different programs. Not so long ago Microsoft got slammed for including a browser in the OS. Now they get slammed for not including a professional mail-client?
But… It is a metro App. Aren’t we supposed to be using only Metroised Apps because that brings a consistent user experience from phonues upwards?
Thom was talking about Metro Apps. Even my non It friends want the sort of thing that is there even in pretty basic mail clients but is not possible win a single panel app.
Like what? (serious question, because the regular people that use me as their IT-guy all think the mail-app is enough)?
Is anything stopping them from installing a better mail-app from the store or just like they would in older versions of Windows?
and there you have it ‘Store Account’
No , Nien, non , Niet and 200+ other languages, I say No to this just like I have said no to Google.
Ok, I do have an apple Id but I have never (and never will) buy anything from the apple App Store or iTunes Or any other online store of this type.
If you do it become only too easy to link your purchases together and provide all those pesky ‘targetted ads’. I hate all forms of advertising but I’m a grumpy old fart(in IT since 1975) so my POV does not count.
But as I have said before, I see all this as just a stepping stone to get all home users ‘connected all the time’ with everything running in the Azure Cloud.
sort of a modern day Mainframe + 3270 terminals. your home devices will be very very thin clients. You pay MS by the hour/week/month for everything you do. Wanna run a CMD window? that will be $0.20 per minute. etc etc etc
Than just use your Store account the way you use your Apple ID. You don’t have to use it to buy anything, no credit card is needed. But if you ever setup a computer all you have to do is sign in with that account and you get your settings, apps, documents, etc all like you had it before without hunting down software or restoring from (not made) backups or running (paper) scripts to restore your settings.
And all of that is OPTIONAL. You can configure what you want to sync or choose to use Windows 10 without a store account at all. Nobody is making you pay for anything, you actually get a ridiculous amount of free stuff if you want to
They don’t need to break the UI to do that; they could just send every URL you type back to themselves and mine that data directly.
I assume their idea is that you’d share the data between your phone and desktop because you are using the same apps.
But as I mentioned above they are busy even loosing the business desktop:
“Chromebooks have overtaken sales of Windows notebooks.”
http://www.itworld.com/article/2970868/hardware/chromebooks-are-eat…
Typo fix: wrong link
Edited 2015-08-29 16:40 UTC
Lennie, you have posted a few links to the “Chromebook sales have overtaken Windows”. That article has created a lot of fuzz on the internet because it isn’t until halfway that they mention that this is only in a very tiny segment of the entire market.
A realistic view of the market shows you that the expected number of Chromebooks to be sold this year is about 7.5 million, of which only 2 million will be sold outside of education.
Now please compare that to the roughly 50 million ipads, 250 million pc’s. 1 billion smartphones etc.
I didn’t find that information you mentioned.
I was surprised of the numbers too.
Here is a similar article from 2014: http://www.omgchrome.com/chromebook-business-sales-rocket-2014/
Note the “..all commercial channel notebook sales (an estimated 1.4 million)”
Now to indicate how useless these numbers are compared to the “real” market: Guess who was selling the most and what that marketshare would be…Did you make a guess…was it something like this: “In just one year, Samsung^aEURTMs share of B2B sales in the US has tumbled by 40%. It drops from a commanding 88% in 2013 to a slimmer majority of 48% this year. ”
In the 2014 article that I linked there is a nice “Caveat Implorium Noticia”
In the 2015 articles that you, and all other clickbaity headline “journalists” stubmled upon there was hardly any mention of how irrealistic these numbers are. You, me, everyone immediate “was surprised” when we read those numbers…and we were right not to read anything into them
I moved into Windows 10, do Windows development professionally and am quite happy with Windows 10 thus far.
I hope you enjoy life out there in the Wilderness
As I see it most places are holding off on deploying this and preferring to wait and see how things pan out.
I too use Windows and develop software for it (Server side). If I have to replace my W7 desktop (that runs Server VM’s) then I’ll go to Server 2012 on the desktop.
A good few individuals here (me included) won’t be treading the W10 path this side of hell freezing over.
So, I really hope that you have a ‘Plan B’ in case its adoption stalls.
Edited 2015-08-28 16:37 UTC
I think you’re wrong here…
There are two main types of Windows Users:
– Casual home user
– Corporate users
Casual home users are upgrading at high speed (75000000 is not ridiculous in one month) and they will most probably continue to upgrade.
Corporate users are sensible to 3 things. Deployment/Management costs, Support and application compatibility
Deployment and management costs are drastically reduced with W10.
Support… Mainstream support cycle has ended. We’re now in the extended support cycle and this IS a problem in many cases
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?al…
Application compatibility. I have actually seen very few problems. Companies are holding off on deploying W10 as a simple precaution… Once the 3~6 month “safety period” is past, there is a very good chance that adoption will be very good.
You should better get used to W10 in your every day’s life. I don’t think a plan B will be needed
Edit : Typo
Edited 2015-08-28 17:59 UTC
Well, my compmany is not going to even consider W10 before 2017 at the earliest. Why? Some of our business critical apps don’t work very well on W10.
If that is not being deferred I don’t know what is.
Of the 75 Million users, how many are like me, did the upgrade and then reolled back to the previous version of the OS.
Hey,they can tick 1 on the upgrade list even though it was only a short time.
Thankfully, I will be retired before we get W10 foisted upon is. I know that W7 is the last desktop OS from MS that I will ever use. I know that I am not alone in that situation.
W10 could be the straw that breaks the MS back. It is not as if there are no longer alternatives to Windows.
IMHO the likes of Canonical and Apple will be watching this disaster playing out very closely. Again, IMHO they can only win from this debacle.
What did they change in Windows 10 that breaks business apps ? Assuming the business app is a Win32 app.
Win32 development seems pretty much halted.
Or is it a .net-app ? I guess Windows 10 does come with a new .net-runtime ?
Even businesses are not buying as much Windows machines any more:
“Chromebooks have overtaken sales of Windows notebooks.”
http://www.itworld.com/article/2970868/hardware/chromebooks-are-eat…
Hey if you are developing for Windows, maybe, just maybe, you do need a Plan B.
I never seen a Chromebook being used in any of the European countries I routinely travel to.
I knew Chromebooks were doing well in education, but the numbers surprised me too.
Most of the time Chromebooks are also cheaper than Windows laptops, I’m certain that has something to do with it.
Funny thing is, Microsoft is helping people move to Chromebooks with things like Office 365.
Edit: added last 2 paragraphs
Edited 2015-08-29 19:42 UTC
The problem with the metro concept is the idea that I Want to use the same apps on my phone and Xbox. I have the whole circle, and i do like them individually, but, they serve different purposes. The only cross device app I have and use is plex. As a media server it’s well suited to single window full screen use. Not much else is..
Well, I still haven’t installed the upgrade to Windows 10 and I cannot comment on the quality of Metro apps (I admit that – given the bugs you described – they could have been shipped in a better state. Let’s hope they keep listening and update that stuff very soon).
However, regarding the consistency problems you mention, I disagree for two reasons:
– due to Windows heritage (and very bad API choices made in the past) they are still trying to keep compatibility with a billion old programs written using prehistoric APIs. Having the appearance of – say – every app contextual menu being exactly the same is no easy feat, otherwise they would have done it perfectly at this point. How many other OSes do you know that keep compatibility in such a regard? I’d say zero.
– still, the situation is still orders of magnitude better than how it’s been in the past. Do you really want to get me started on the multitude of inconsistent appearances that apps had during the Win32 era? (not to mention the kitsch-ness of WinCustomize themes, or the PlaySkool looks of WinXP). There was a time when any Windows user with a minimum attention to design would have badly envied Mac users – now it’s no more, and with Metro (or whatever you call it) MS has finally shown care for a single design language… Or at least, it’s trying hard to.
Why would anyone use nothing but Metro applications? Windows 10 is getting good reviews because it is a good OS. Metro applications are a tiny and optional part of that. Should OSX be judged by only using Store-Apps?
You make some valid points, although heavily biased by your obsession with UI-consistency but this only affects a tiny part of the entire OS that people are reviewing.
Here is a related article: http://www.windowscentral.com/14-reasons-not-to-upgrade-windows-10
1. Upgrade problems
2. It’s not a finished product
3. The user interface still a work in progress
4. The automatic update dilemma
5. Two places to configure your settings
6. No more Windows Media Center or DVD playback
7. Problems with built-in Windows apps
8. Cortana is limited to some regions
9. Shutdown and reboot take a long time
10. Devices with limited storage are still limited
11. OneDrive selective sync problem
12. Microsoft Edge isn’t ready to replace your default web browser (yet)
13. Continuum is not enough
14. Privacy concerns
Thoms points are basically 3 and 7 (and a bit of 12).
Some points (8, 10, 12 and 13) are silly because they are not better in previous versions of the OS.
Several other points (1,4,6,9) only affect some users and are not wide-spread issues.
The points that I personally would like to see fixed are 11 (promised to be fixed before the end of the year actually) and 14.
The privacy issue is something that has been mentioned excessively in the media, and rightly so. Some defaults are not user friendly and Microsoft needs to fix that. I only need to tweak a few settings myself so this isn’t a showstopper for me.
Is Windows 10 perfect? No, not by a long shot.
Is Windows 10 the best OS on the market? It is for me and I think it is for most people.
Go back and re-read the article, because you clearly didn’t get the main point. My point isn’t 3 and 7.
My point is even in the damn headline.
Edited 2015-08-28 11:07 UTC
Okay, I read your article again. This time I focused more on your headline and your statement “Here’s the cold and harsh truth as I see it: despite all the promises, Metro applications are still complete and utter garbage. Let me explain why.”
Now a proper headline for that would have been “Metro: it’s always the next version”, but instead you wrote “Windows” and then talked about Windows reviews in your opening paragraph.
Now if you wanted to write a detailed article about how Metro isn’t improving you could have talked about developers targeting common platforms (which is not Metro) or the 4 bridges (Web/Android/IOS/Win32) that Microsoft is building and releasing in the next 6 months. That would have actually nicely fitted with your “It is always the next version” statement.
Nobody (except sales andd marketing departments
) is claiming that Metro is a well developed eco-system. The whole reason behind Windows 10 being free is actually to create enough traction to finally start creating this eco-system.
And for the record, I didn’t say your POINT (argument/statement/conclusion) was 3 and 7, I said your POINTS (examples/discussion points) were 3 and 7 and 12 which they clearly are.
You are also claiming that the desktop part has hardly improved since Windows 7 which is nonsense (see another post of me in this thread: http://www.osnews.com/thread?616816)
The next version will always claim to be better than the current version. No current version is perfect. Some technologies will die a (sometimes well-deserved) certain death, but Metro is not a bad technology or idea in its core. If developers, including those at Microsoft, are finally going to embrace it remains to be seen but the tech doesn’t seem to be the limitation.
Enjoy using this new OS with your older programs for now and hopefully add some Metro apps in the future when they are ready. I think that we can agree that this is the way to make working with Windows 10 productive and sane.
Stop confusing the OS and the included tech with the apps that are running on top of it, that is not what we expect from OSAlert
There is no confusion. Microsoft themselves marketed heavily that Universal Apps (that’s Metro, you know) was the main new feature of Windows 10. Your apps will run everywhere – on your phone, tablet, desktop, xbox and that headset device. It is how the future of the OS is meant to look and function.
The apps actually being part of this vision are all more or less a train wreck on Windows 10 launch day. Heck, they couldn’t even finish their new control panel! If Microsoft themselves can’t get their Metro apps working properly, why should any 3rd party developer pay any attention to it?
If you think that Metro is about rewriting the UI of an application while keeping the inside the same you would be wrong. That would be like saying iOS applications are OSX Applications with a rewritten UI or Android Apps are Linux Applications with a rewritten UI.
I don’t know if it is possible to write “mega-applications” like PhotoShop in a Universal App. So far I haven’t found anything like that and I don’t know of any developer that is trying to do that. Store-Apps seem to be all about “Make a nice looking, easy to use program that solves 80% of the problems of 80% of the users”. And just like on most new platforms there is a lot of UI-experimentation going on. It takes time for good UI ideas to surface and become common and for bad ideas to disappear (20 years later the web still looks inconsistent)
I completely agree that Metro is an unfullfilled promise. Not because there is anything wrong with it technically, but simply because app-developers didn’t develop apps for it. Why didn’t they? Because you develop apps for users and only a small percentage of users can run Store-Apps while everyone can run Desktop-Apps. What will fix Metro is not the next version but having hundreds of millions of potential users to attract dev-love.
Because Microsoft doesn’t get the development tools much before others anymore. They might be a couple of months ahead, but you and I basically have the same tools at our disposal as the developers at Microsoft. And the new control panel looks finished to me. In the 8.1 era I hardly used it because control panel was clearly the place to go. In Windows 10 I was surprised to see myself using the new “System Settings” instead of Control Panel. Control Panel is still there, just like IE11 is still there for people that really need it…I just haven’t really needed it.
Edited 2015-08-28 13:57 UTC
“…if it is possible to write “mega-applications” like PhotoShop in a Universal App…”
All the new Office Apps are universal apps.
None of those Office Apps are mega-apps. They are quite reduced functionally compared to the “normal” Office programs. Just compare the OneNote app (free) to the OneNote program (also free). The OneNote app is the best app that I have personally seen but it doesn’t come near to a mega-app like Photoshop.
Like I wrote: I don’t know if it is technically possible to write a mega-app, but nobody seems to try anyway
WinDiv doesn’t get early access to what they write themselves? If that is really true, they should probably make some changes.
In any case I really think they should get their act together and port all their old dialogs. I recall Thom complaining years ago about that same control panel/system settings having the exact same problem on his Surface tablet.
I think everyone agrees that Windows 10 was a rush job. I don’t think July 29 should have been the targetdate. There are clearly lots of polishpoints left, however everything important seems to be in place so they decided to “release early, release often”.
I do think they are going to add more and more polish and I was surprised by the sudden jumps in quality in the last month. Clearly everyone was working overtime and they had been holding out on some builds that they had internally. However I don’t think Microsoft is very good at polishing UI elements so I wouldn’t hold my breath for getting things supersleek. The current iconset already pleasantly surprised me, but I had set the bar quite low.
And I do believe “Windev” gets some tech earlier, but not much anymore. With public previews and many early releases and continuous delivery there is simply no reason for Microsoft to keep things private anymore
Well, Edge’s URL bar is actually not that problematic: after all the search bar acts exactly the same as URL bar in every aspect.
Mail app is a complete disaster. They managed to do everything just as wrong as they could: threads are traversed from new to old, messages can’t be just plain text, URLs in plain text messages can’t be easily selected (and are not parsed, which may be OK), answer is put above quotation by default, etc. For the sake of consistency it should also mangle IMAP and automatically subscribe to spam.
What troubles me much more is Microsoft’s handling of input:
^aEURc Keyboard layouts are not configurable: I can’t add or remove additional symbols. On Windows 7, Sailfish and all XKB-based systems I could make my own layout and share it between languages I need, but on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 I am out of luck. Despite many user requests Microsoft refuses to update KLC to make it produce proper layouts for Windows 8, 8.1 and 10. In the end I am forced to using two latin and two cyrillic layouts instead of two altogether.
^aEURc Layouts for physical and virtual keyboards are strongly coupled. I have a US English keyboard for my tablet, but normally I use Yugoslav layout, so I’d rather have US only for physical keyboard and Yugoslav for virtual. I can’t. All Unix-like systems (including Android) allow that.
^aEURc Input prediction is tied to orthography test. In some contexts I can’t use only one of them. As a consequence, if I choose to enable them, Windows would silently replace what I typed with something it thought I wanted to type, with no easy way to change text back. Provided that offline prediction sucks for some of languages I use, the result is often horrible.
This is a trainwreck, particularly provided that even Sailfish developers with their limited resourced could get it right.
P.S.: There are other things done wrong in Windows 10. But in the end my overall experience with Windows 10 tablet is still better then with iPads I had my hands on, as well as with Android tablets. Being able to run desktop programs is a big deal, and Universal apps are not half that bad with keyboard and mouse as are most iOS and Android apps…
Edited 2015-08-28 11:28 UTC
I could be wrong but a large part of that code/knowledge was probably already created by Nokia in the years before it was called Sailfish.
The culmination of Nokia efforts – N900 – was released on 11 November 2009, soon after Microsoft started to work on Windows 8 and 3 years before it was released to manufecturing. Obviously, Microsoft had enough time to get familiar with all of Nokia’s results, particularly provided that Maemo was opensource, and at least some people from Microsoft had direct access to all Nokia’s mobile assets well before Windows 10 release date.
Clearly the Microsoft OS team didn’t want the Nokia people to get involved.
I meant, I think this wasn’t just Jolla that did the work on this.
That doesn’t matter. Microsoft has more resources then Nokia and Jolla had on the whole project, and mail-enabled Microsoft-based devices with both onscreen and hardware keyboards appeared well before Nokia’s first attempt at sensor screen, so obviously Microsoft had enough time to get things right. That’s not lack of experience and expertise that made Windows 10 what it is. Microsoft development practices and decision making did that. Tunnel vision and lack of testing turned good idea into loosy implementation, which looks like a beta version to me.
P.S.: I actually sent feedback on all of those issues during development preview stage for both 8 and 10. I’ve seen other people whinning about those issues exactly the way I do. Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t care.
Edited 2015-08-30 00:13 UTC
Maybe you should stop choosing Microsoft
To me one of the biggest issues is the complete UI flatness MS has embraced for the whole OS even in desktop mode. Not sure if there are any studies on the subject but, for me at least, this affects usability notably.
I updated to Windows 10 knowing full well I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Modern apps. In fact it is possible to remove the modern apps and get something very much like Win 7 in return. Unfortunately one Modern app is required for functionality – Settings. You can still access some of the old Control Panel functions through a few desktop apps that still remain embedded, but the old Control Panel itself is long gone. Not really a deal-breaker but I really do not understand why some legacy parts were left behind while others were stripped out.
Change is inevitable but as humans we still fight it every step of the way, clinging to some familiar element so that we don’t feel completely out of touch.
It’s still there in all its glory. Just search for “Control Panel”.
And that’s part of the problem with Windows 10. Two control panels, and the old one has to be searched for. There are niche, hobby OSes in perpetual alpha stage that are more consistent.
I really want to like Windows 10, and in many areas I do like it, but it’s all the little things (not to mention the same privacy issues that make me hate Windows 8/8.1) that add up to an unpolished, early release mess. Windows is no longer stable for daily use as far as I’m concerned. And that’s a shame, because during the beta period I was really excited to see the final product. Now I have a feeling we won’t ever really see that, just little fixes here and there.
Actually, it is there in MOST of its glory. Some items actually got removed, like Windows Update which is now only configurable from the Modern System Settings. As far as I can tell this is the first time that something got removed from Control Panel.
(small tip: Winkey+X, p starts the control panel)
Since Windows 8, through 8.1 and several inbetween and after updates until Windows 10 now the System Settings have been expanding. I have no idea why it took Microsoft this long to make a decent “settings editor” but the only thing I have used from Control Panel so far is the “mail (32 bit)” to fix an Exchange configuration problem for Outlook.
I used the Windows 8 and 8.1 Mail app to get my Hotmail. It was easy to use and always worked. Windows 10 mail app can’t even get my email from Microsoft’s servers. I’m using Outlook on Android to check my Hotmail. It’s astounding just how bad the Windows 10 built in mail app is. MS has not said when it will be fixed either. For customers that ask if they should install the free upgrade I recommend that they ask again in January as it’s usable, but unpolished at this time.
That’s it.
And be locked to a limited set of proprietary hardware? No thanks!
With notebooks, tablets and phones it already is like that. Unless you plan on upgrading every less than 5 years, then the hardware doesn’t matter much. We are not in the 90’s.
I respect Thom and this website is one of the few I sometimes check for nice links (not articles, as obvious).
However, I think he’s getting too biased about many things, especially Windows but not only that. I know that complaining makes you look more professional than appreciating and that Windows10 is everyone’s favourite target for complaining but hey, come on, we cannot start from scratch everytime.
So let’s summarize:
– Windows 7 was good but all blogs (and journalists and analysts, which is essentially the same thing because nowadays journalists and analysts are basically bloggers with a bigger picture) complained that Windows 7 was not ready for the touch era because PC is dead, desktop is dead, iPads will conquer the world and Microsoft is late.
– Microsoft designs a new (in my opinion beautiful but that’s just my opinion) interface for touch-enabled devices and releases Windows 8 with touch in mind. because, hey, all bloggers state that iPad is going to kill PCs and desktop is not useful anymore.
– surprise ! Everyone discovers what we knew well in advance: you cannot simply do ALL the things that you do on a desktop with your touch-enabled device. Meanwhile PC is not dead, iPad sales are fading like iPods ones were before them and all those tablets are basically toys for fun or work machines doing very limited tasks. But when you really need to be productive, you need a desktop. Everyone screaming : we want our desktops back !
Microsoft then releases Windows 10. It brings desktop back for desktop devices while it is touch-enabled for touch devices. There’s a lot more into Windows10, especially under-the-hood, but there cannot be much more on the surface because Windows 7 was already a great desktop machine.
So, for whatever reasons, Thom wants to review Metro applications only. Why? Hell, I don’t know because everyone wanted their desktops back just to do more than you can do with touch-only apps.
So my question to Thom is: what mobile app did you saw that it is doing more (and better) than a desktop app ? I’ve yet to see any.
So why complaining that Metro/Universal app are limited when compared to desktop app ? It’s not that Microsoft didn’t invent a new paradigm, it’s that Universal app are mean to work on different devices and they need to adapt to the lowest common denominator.
Oh and Thom, it’s obvious that Microsoft want you to use Bing for searches and that’s why it hid the URL bar and focused on search bar… but everyone is doing the same. Can you blame them ?
Is Windows 10 meant to use Univeral app only ? For God’s sake, no! Windows 10 is aimed to bring all desktop apps back to the surface again since the touch-only revolution failed. So reviewing Metro apps only is like reviewing tyres only in a Ferrari review.
That doesn’t mean that Windows 10 is perfect. It is not and somehow it could have been even better. But bashing for bashing doesn’t help at all. Let’s say that Windows10 is still the best way to use your PC/Tablet when you need to do something more complicated that accessing Facebook or doing a selfie. If bloggers (pardon, journalists) were serious about their job, they would first demand from Apple or Google that their systems were at least on par with Windows for features and applications and then start complaining.
Blah… but it’s ok.
You talk about iPads or Windows desktop or laptop/notebooks, but sales seems to be going somewhere else, even for the business users:
“Chromebooks have overtaken sales of Windows notebooks.”
http://www.itworld.com/article/2970868/hardware/chromebooks-are-eat…
I completely agree that Metro/Modern/Universal apps are total crap and should never have been put on the desktop.
That being said, I still find Windows 10 better that 8.1 or 7. The only thing you have to do is never use any of the universal apps.
Would it be better to have a single consistent UI throughout the system? Definitely. Is this enough to make me go back to Win7 and its more confusing UI in some areas (like copying and replacing files).
The only good part of Windows 10 is the “Windows Server” part. The rest of the consumer junk is junk. Pretty soon we’ll all be running modded Windows Server editions, just to get away from the crapjunk
Windows Server 2012 R2 had the same UI as Windows 8.1
So does the new windows server have a different UI than the desktop version ?
Server 2016 Preview 3 is exactly as you’d expect. Windows 10 with junk removed. Like Enterprise LTSB, I guess…
Windows 10 is a bloody mess. It is essentially MS TRYING to appease users angry with Windows 8…but still falls woefully short. They tried to appease people with a “Start Button” in 8.1…but that button just put you back on the horrid, “Metro” infested “Start Screen”!
So, now they give you a pop up menu…which is now infested with “Metro”. Great?
The inconsistency with the UI, and the scattered controls spread over “Settings” and “Control Panel” are still there…so are plenty of other inconsistencies. In short, this looks like something that was designed by committee! No unifying “vision” to tie it all together…it’s just a hopeless mess!
Worse, MS is forcing updates on users that BRICK their PCs, and violating everyone’s privacy and acting like it’s no big deal. The OS is “free” not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because the users are now the PRODUCT and not the CUSTOMER! Your personal data is now just fodder to be sold off to 3rd parties.
For these reasons and many others, I have completely left Microsoft behind. I have a Win8 laptop (which is collecting dust and hasn’t even been powered on in over 3 months!), but other than that, I have ZERO Microsoft products (hardware OR software) that I use…and I couldn’t be happier!
So long, MS…it was a nice ride…I bought your stuff since DOS 1.1 and Windows 1.0 Runtime…but I have decided to move on. It’s not me…it’s YOU! Bye now!
Quick question for anyone familiar with the Windows 10 install/registration process:
If someone running Windows 7 goes for the ‘free’ update and then after a three months isn’t happy and wants to go back… Can they reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows 7 from scratch using their original disc? Or is their old Win 7 registration key now void, in which case they have to purchase Windows 7 again at full price?
As far as I know you can re-use your old license key and reinstall Windows with it (There is a limit to the number of times you can do it but this limit is quite high)
The worst that could happen is that the automatic registration process fails and that you have to call a MS registration center (Number is shown in the registration window if required) for them to “unlock” your key.
I had allready to do it in other contexts and it always took less than 3 minutes.
As always… This is just my own experience. Do it at your own risk
P.S: If you take some hours to get used to the new interface and to discover all the possible tweeks that you can make, there is only a very little chance that you want to go back to 7
If is not just the UI that we don’t like. We don’t like the spying and the forced update policy. This is just wrong, so wrong.
When the lawyers have finished with MS they may change their mind but somehow I doubt it.
All it needs is enough users to have their system borked by a forced update for the class action suits to start flying in the direction of Redmond. No amount of wriggling will get them out of this.
Then there is the EU. I would think that there are some laws over here that will put a stop to this including the Computer Misuse Act (UK). EULA’s don’t have any legal standing here because they are only agreed to post sale.
At the moment, there are more than enough reasons to avoid this until these things get settled.
Good. Don’t like it don’t use it. It’s your right.
The automatic update problem does only exist outside of the enterprise. Corporate “enterprise” Windows 10 does not require automatic updates.
And if there is an European ruling there will be a Win10E (just an example) for Europe without the automatic update process. It’s not the first time MS has to do it and it’s certainly not a big deal.
BTW… I’ve heard for YEARS people complaining on OSN that there is no mandatory update mechanism in Windows and that, contrary to (put the name of your favorite OS) you have old and unpatched versions still running. This is now resolved and what now? The traditional anti-MS bashing.
You also use “we” in a bit too generalist way… Your opinion is yours. I’m part of WE as well as many others and certainly don’t share it.
I don’t like spying either… But as long as you have a phone, a social media account (even linkedin) or whatever fidelity card, you already sold your privacy.
If people learned to configure decently the settings of their OS (including W10), their “privacy” would be sensibly as well preserved as it is under W7 now.
Edit : Typo
Edited 2015-08-28 20:02 UTC
He is not alone, and your tone is arrogant in the extreme.
The privacy issues are NOT minor, nor are the users bothered by this small in number. This is a SERIOUS concern, and Microsoft has stepped FAR over the line…in SEVERAL areas, with regards to how they are treating their users and their data!
Just because YOU are a sheep does not give you some kind of moral high ground to call others out for being concerned about these issues!
Oh, and configuring the settings, as you suggest, DOES NOT, I repeat, DOES NOT solve the problem! Even if you turn everything off, Windows 10 still continues to send data to MS servers!
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-tol…
Edited 2015-08-28 21:59 UTC
I never said W10 would send no data. I said that once well configured it would be decent.
What I wrote in my first post remains perfectly valid. Don’t like it don’t use it. It’s your right.
Now if you want to continue your ranting feel free… But without me. Enjoy
I have a (smart)phone and a Twitter account, that’s it.
The phone I need for work, I’m not happy about it because my location gets recorded every 5 minutes in a database. But only the phone company and the government should have access to that data. And there are laws which prevent them from using this information in any other way.
And my smartphone does not run: iOS or Android or Windows so not lots of stuff gets uploaded to wherever.
On Twitter I only do what I want to be public. Because most of what you do on Twitter is already public.
I’ve actually changed routes on how I go to work to avoid CCTV cameras.
And I don’t travel by airplane.
Nobody else has access to my data and I’m trying to keep it that way.
And if I can find a good mixing system I can trust I’ll be using crypto currencies instead of my bank account some day soon too.
Edited 2015-08-29 18:05 UTC
All I can say regarding Windows and consistency – if you’re expecting consistency in Windows 10 after two decades of Microsoft not giving a crap about consistency then you need to lower your expectations if you decide that Windows is the operating system for you.
This is one of the reasons I moved from the Windows world and I find it funny how for years Windows advocates would bemoan *NIX and the ‘lack of consistency’ yet those very Windows advocates ignored the mess that was before them. What makes the situation worse in the case of Windows is that the operating system is supposedly maintained by paid programmers which should mean the sort of labour required to address those more boring aspects of the operating system but alas you’ve got crap with win16 era common controls and dialogues still in use today or the half assed attempt to move forward but not actually complete the job hence Control panel still hangs around like a bad smell.
Honestly, I was expecting that Microsoft would deliver somethings a lot better than what we see but I kind of wonder whether Microsoft is in the process of just giving up – hand the market to Android/iOS then on the desktop/laptop ChromeOS (with Android runtime on top) and OS X then focus energy on catering for the corporate sector and providing middleware. I come to that conclusion because is the only rational explanation I can think of for Microsoft putting out such a half assed half baked release – that it must have been deliberate rather than some sort of accident.
“Why are we giving them a free pass every time they repackage this crap?”
Because Microsoft’s customers are not end users at all. Microsoft’s true customers are the managers in each company’s IT organizations who purchase, install, and support their software. Neither Microsoft nor those managers give a rat’s ass about the end user experience. Windows, Office, Edge are utilities just like electricity and water, and companies are well-conditioned to keep buying whatever crap Microsoft releases.
As far as students and home users go…Most of them will either use whatever they’re issued at work or school, even if they’re shown something better.
I am also pretty (maybe “very”) frustrated with the state of Windows 10 – especially the dichotomy of the different design codes — but particularly the lack of fit & finish / polish.
My primary bugbear is the new-world “Settings” vs the old-world “Control Panels” — the massive duplication of function aside – it’s the LACK of duplication of some functions between one control scheme and the other – and vice versa that grates the most
Of course they won’t – but if I were a very brave Microsoft – I would do the following:
a) Clean and tidy up the mess and inconsistencies as much as possible within this Windows 10 release cycle
b) Create TWO versions asap on a quick-as-you-can (but good-as-you-can) follow-up release [analagous to how Win7 “fixed” a lot of what infuriarated with Vista ; these two being:
c) Windows 11 “classic” – a furtherance of the Windows 7 design but incorporating absolutely as much as possible of the Windows 8 and Windows 10 technical “improvements” and underpinning — with NO Metro capability – but with some Touch advancements (e.g. something clever like creating a hazy on-screen fingerprint tracking you finger + having the mouse pointed always follow this fingerprint on the leading side (and left and right click with single-finger clicks or double-finger clicks using the other hand) – or something similar)
d) And an almost Metro-only: Windows 12 “future” – release with (metro) MS Office apps built-in – including BOTH a simpler Mail client AND Outlook — but strongly overhauled for better visual contrast and faster function. (allow – fallback to Windows “desktop”/”win32 apps” only within a windowed VM – max 3 such desktop apps simultaneous.
basically – they need a constructive and amicable divorce – don’t laugh! – such things happen occasionally..
I for one have upgraded to Windows 10 to Windows 8.1, which was itself an upgrade from Windows 7. The upgrade took place the night of Friday to Saturday one week ago. And in less than one hour of usage, I had decided to revert to a clean install of Windows 8.1, which turned out to make my laptop faster than ever. Therefore, exactly one week ago, I was writing a report on Dell’s forum about upgrading my laptop: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/1964949…
I’ve read all comments and although Thom is right, others like avgalen are also right, they just look at different things.
Windows 10 is probably a good OS; I’ve read lots of forum posts and comments (including here) by people who feel like they have a flying machine, how things are richer or simpler, etc.
I didn’t like Windows 10 because (aside from multiple driver problems, probably due to Dell’s poor support) it was much slower. And also, the UI elements and workflow I was offered were directly inspired from tablets and phones and I had no other choice than to adopt them even though they don’t suit my workflow, work habits or use cases. Quick (trivial, indeed) examples in my “report” linked to above. And some tasks got more complex.
I don’t mind the “Plane mode” or “Do not disturb” in the notification center even though I don’t see how useful these can be on a computer. It’s just one more evidence that the traditional desktop PC is dead in the eyes of those who contributed to making it what it was (yes, past tense :-)) Desktop use cases have been forgotten about.
Anyway, to me, Windows 10 felt like a dictator saying “this is what it’s going to be, period”. And no, it’s not a perfect 10.
Was getting rid of that charms bar. I could install classic shell to get rid of the start screen, couldn’t get rid of the charms bar though.
Glad the “charms” bar is gone. Using a Windows 8 computer last week, I had unwanted menu bars on the right and bottom randomly opening. The cursor seemed to get ‘stuck’ in the bars, there was no [X] to close the bar, and the bars covered up portions of my work.
Maybe it was all perfectly logical and perhaps some people like the feature, but I found it to be utter sh*t.
…here:
http://enneesseci.blogspot.it/2015/08/windows-10-cosa-ne-penso.html
so I use win10 only after this treatment:
http://enneesseci.blogspot.it/2015/08/windows-10-come-lo-imposto.ht…
only use the translate widget in the upper right corner.
That was a lot to write about basically two apps that you didn’t like. Edge and Mail.
I agree with you about Mail. It is not even as good as the Windows 8.1 Mail and I have no idea why it was changed or what they were thinking as they did it.
Edge is not nearly so bad as you seem to have made it out to be. Probably because when I run it, I am running my Surface Pro in Tablet mode, which only has full screen or split apps just like 8.1. So I never need to touch it to bring it full screen. And when I have the keyboard attached I just Alt-Tab.
Other good applications that use the Metro/Modern look are Facebook, Netflix, and Kindle. I really like those apps. They’re well done.
What I don’t get is when microsoft decided that windows didn’t need decorators anymore. Buttons with no border, nothing to suggest that it is clickable, or even exists. menus that are the same color as the app with no separation and just bleed into obscurity. Window borders with no edge to see…
It just confuses me gives me a headache and my eyes wander around furiously looking for something to focus on.
UI’s where developed over time to be intuitive and logical. When did it become fashionable to make it really hard and confusing?
It’s fashionable to occasionally remove fundamental GUI designs from your GUI design. If you always have borders and recognizable button positions then you’re not cutting the edge sufficiently for new york fashion week
“Tiles” are confusing eyesores. Different colors, different shapes, different sizes… Some of the tile colors were ghastly and obnoxious, while many of the white monochrome icon images barely portrayed what a particular app might do.
And on the Windows 8, the tiles didn’t even fit on one screen so it was necessary to scroll across several fields of tiles to access them all. I can understand the need for that behavior on a 2″ Android Player screen, but on a 17″ laptop? Utter sh*t.
I was hoping to see NO TILES anywhere, ever, in Windows 10.
Edited 2015-08-30 15:29 UTC
Here’s a hypothetical-technical question regarding multiple operating system installs, the sort of thing that used to be discussed regularly in the OSAlert forums but that rarely comes up in the news stories nowadays:
Is it possible to install Windows 7 twice on the same computer but different hard drives or different partitions using the same registration code? The activation servers would recognize it as the correct computer for that Windows copy, no?
Then upgrade only one of the Windows 7 installs to Windows 10?
The result would be a dual-boot system with 7 and 10.
in windows 8.1 we could get back to the glorious nt days turning off themes with classictheme.exe and installing classicshell .
Somebody should write useful articles about these tips and tricks especially when classictheme gets updated for windows 10 or even about the handle mod to enable classic theme .
That Windows 10 is not giving all users choice like xp/2000 did does not necessarily mean that there are no mods that can add these good features back.
Helping users used to be so easy from the command line using a secondary network login without logging out the actual user. Could simply remote in, use switch user in the command line to a local admin, make a few clicks, and voila all done. Same with regedit. Then policy editor and content management kludges screwed it all up. Hardly had to leave the CLI prior to XP. And now we bitch about yet another control panel kludge…
I wouldn’t solely judge an OS on it’s looks and a browser that comes with it.Although i use linux most of the times, i quite like windows 10.Under the bonnet for example there’s DrectX12.I wouldn’t mind at all using windows 10 regularly.
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