During the installation, Windows uses weasel words to present the user with privacy settings hiding the option to change them at all. Take a look:

https://jonathan.porta.codes/images/posts/2015/07/window-10-...

In "express settings":

* Send contact, calendar and input data to Microsoft

* Send typing and inking data to Microsoft

* Let apps use your Advertising ID for "experiences across apps" (I'm not making this shit up)

* Send microsoft and "trusted partners" location data

* Turn on SmartScreen (Admittedly I don't know exactly how it works but seeing as it's in those options I can take a horrifying guess on the implications)

* Send your browsing data to Microsoft to "make your overall experience better" (WTF wording)

* Autoconnect to shared networks

* Autoconnect to suggested open hotspots

Damn. And then, one that's not in there which you have to find for yourself, if you even know about it: P2P share windows updates with any windows computer on the internet.

Ho-ly-crap. I like W10 as an OS so far but this stuff is just insane.

BTW, the only reason I went with W10 was that W7 doesn't support GPT.

Sources:

http://www.howtogeek.com/224352/what%E2%80%99s-the-differenc...

http://www.howtogeek.com/224981/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-...

Edit: Yikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#SmartScr...

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PSA: For people with Windows 10 installed, I've found the following tool quite useful in shutting down the large amount of information collected.

http://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I'm not sure that concerns me since they're doing signature verification on the data before doing anything with it.

That still brings up the issue that Microsoft is leveraging my broadband connection, my power and my computer(s) that I pay for to issue updates to their customers without even asking. That's not ok.

Fuck them for even daring to do this. It's authoritarian arrogance, nothing more.

My ThinkPad T430 runs Windows 10 without any Lenovo crapware, and it's such a smooth experience. No more invisible windows randomly popping up in the taskbar, stealing my keyboard focus, no more dozens of TPCRAP.EXE in my autostart.

Nice coinage: "TPCRAP.EXE"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10303162

On a new ASUS X205ta ("Windows 8.1 with Bing") the audio drivers are broken, and which don't have Linux drivers yet. (at least, the websites I read from July suggest that.)

Especially the spying experience is an upgrade. Thanks to the excellent relationship between the NSA and Microsoft. Nice try, Nadella, to make us believe Microsoft has changed.

If anything what people want are less frequent releases with longer support periods. Or at least designate specific infrequent releases like Windows 7 for multi-decade long-term support -- if they would do that then they could reduce the support period for the non-LTS releases and end up supporting fewer versions at once.

I wish the big name software vendors would understand this, but the hype train has a lot of momentum right now and it seems like everyone is trying to jump on board.

The reality is that stability and reliability in your software bring huge benefits. Big changes can bring big benefits too, but usually any improvements are more modest. And the kicker is that even quite small changes can make something work worse from the user's personal, subjective point of view, and this is actively bad.

My standard policy on our Win7 machines at work has been security updates only for quite a while now. I don't see anything pushing us to install Win10 on any of those machines right now. In fact this whole farcical exercise has been a great demonstration of why we shouldn't: the more Microsoft try to abuse the update process in older versions of Windows, the clearer it becomes that a version of Windows where updates are mandatory shouldn't be trusted.