I have a really simple question: Why is anyone running Windows 10?
Resetting default apps and other (supposedly) user-controlled system settings every time the system updates is bad enough. Microsoft says it’s a bug, but from Microsoft’s point of view it looks a heck of a lot like a feature.
The home and personal editions are clearly being primed to become advertising platforms. Ad blockers will not help because it will be OS itself serving ads, not the browser you chose (or the one MS chose for for you, see above on defaults).
And it’s not just the home editions. I ran the SpyBot Anti-Beacon on a Windows 10 Enterprise build, and was shocked to see about 80% of the Telemetry* settings still sending data back to the mother-ship.
Even so, if there were legitimate needs to run Windows 10 because neither Windows 7 nor a decent desktop Linux distro were equal to some critical task, we’d have a benefit to balance off all these risks. But for the life of me I cannot think of, nor has anyone I have asked been able to elaborate, a single application or ability that users need and that Windows 10 uniquely fulfills. (And if you respond, “Edge Browser”, you are not being serious, please sit down and be quiet while the grownups talk.)
Windows 7 is on extended support until 2020. So what is the hurry to get off it? Please tell me in the comments: what is driving the rush to Windows 10? Is it just, “Ooh – shiny!”?
* – “Telemetry” is my solid pick for Euphemism of the Year: it means, “Spyware”.
anton
“While grownups talk…” indeed!
If the grownups were serious about avoiding the “Ohh! Shiny!” aspect of all this they would not just be avoiding Windows/10. You can add Windows/7. Windows/XP and Windows-3.1 to that list as well.
It’s not jsut all the features and personalization and games that come along with MS-Windows, its the CPU consumption. We’ve seen a long sequence of more powerful machine and graphics power consumed by iterative versions of Windows and graphical e-mail and pictures of cats on the Internet, and decoration of Facebook pages that take progressively longer to load.
No, really, strip out the bling and go for efficiency; run MS-DOS 3 and Word perfect 4.2. You’ll get more work done that way. Just ask Stephen King.
David Frier
Hm, do you eschew any GUI desktop environment on your Linux boxes?
There do exist applications for Windows that are not easily replicated on Linux or DOS. But what I am not finding, realistically, is applications that require Windows 10 but fail on Windows 7.