She called me in a panic from 6 timezones away, and I had to drop what I was doing and spend a good half a day walking her through the various transition and setup steps. Every 30 minutes she would plaintively ask me why she had to do this - she was perfectly happy with what she had and had no interest in anything new. Every time she asked and I had no good answer, vague thoughts that included the words "class" and "action" swam through my head.

Which in my opinion is exactly that. Social engineering to get them use to it (same action over and over), and dark pattern (doing something do so they would agree to something they didn't necessarily want to).

Very scummy in my opinion. I wish I could change but I am very much stuck on Windows (my only product uses windows voice recognition engine. . . .I don't have the knowledge to wrote my own).

Edit: typo

In the "future" (ie. web apps and android apps), there won't be any control about software upgrades anymore. Even, or perhaps especially when they're really more downgrades than upgrades.

Recently I sat in the waiting room of a general practitioner (in Germany), where all patients had to wait because their main computer was unusable. That computer started an upgrade to Windows 10 against their will and almost all patients had to wait.

I’m not sure how far Wine has come, or if dentist software for Linux already is a thing, but I’ve heard more and more people discuss these things recently.

Windows 10 might finally be the time for Linux on the Desktop.

If you read the actual dialog box, it reads fine. Really. It's not a trick. The big change is Windows 10 being classified as a "recommended" update. Turn off recommended updates (only take "critical" updates) if you don't want Microsoft changing functionality on your computer. It has been like that for a long time. This is a very extreme example of it though and MS knows that--that's why the box exists, I think--they don't "warn" you about other upcoming recommended updates. Yes, they could do more on that box to guide you towards cancelling the upgrade, but if they mean what they say that the update is "recommended," your dialogs should be guiding people towards getting it rather than away from it.

Again, the bigger thing to question here is the choice to make it "recommended," not the dialog box.

"Dell is not testing or developing Windows 10 drivers for this product. If you choose to upgrade, some features, applications, and connected devices may not work as expected."

The laptop is only three years old! If I were him I would have returned it for a refund, but he doesn't have the time to migrate to another laptop right now so we eventually gave up, downgraded to Windows 7 and now he has to operate his laptop defensively, with Microsoft and their relentless upgrade treadmill as his adversary.

His next laptop will be a Mac.

Had that setup for a while: Win7 as the host - had some proprietary sw there that wouldn't run in a VM - and Kubuntu with the usual office apps on a separate partition, where I could either physically boot into it, or run it as a VM. Since it didn't share any partition with Windows (data was shared via VBox Shared Folders), all was OK.

(Tried the other way around, but Windows - and the programs I was using - were really picky about HW changes and paravirtualization; didn't work so well.)

Add a Google Chrome and you have Netflix & the rest, Skype works out of the box on Mint, and it has an 'app store' - also known as package manager for a decade in linux terms -, so there really is nothing missing from Mint for generic scenarios.

( No, you really don't need full back-and-forth MS Office compatibility in generic life and Libreoffice is doing a good job on compatibility. You also don't need Photoshop for generic, everyday users; there is Digikam, Gimp and Inkscape and countless others for the non-professionals, all of them are more than enough for someone who's not making a living of this. )

Linux doesn't solve the dist upgrade situation any better than Windows here: there's still a lot of cheese that moves around between dist upgrades. Sure, if you stick to LTS dist upgrades you restrict the amount of change to roughly once every two years, and if you use a particularly conservative distribution like Mint you can count on, for now, a fairly decent track record of trying to stay in a "Perpetual 90s" of GUI choices.

But even with Mint there are lots of little differences between dist upgrades, and especially if you stray conservative and only do LTS dist upgrades then your relatives also don't benefit from the slow gradual updates and are forced into the changes more jarringly.

(And yes, Windows 7 to Windows 10 is an LTS dist upgrade.)

(And TBH, I think it does solve it better: went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 to 16.04, and still running well; the upgrades were polite, didn't interfere with normal system use except for one restart each for new kernel, and most importantly didn't break the system. Maybe I was exceptionally lucky, but I dare you to do this from Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10)

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-linux-mint-hack-...

But the PR team nails it, I agree, because despite everything microsoft does, people keep forgetting.

For the other divisions. Windows has become an absolute shit show. Every time I go on the Azure portal I get lost. My xbox one is blowing like a leaf blower. They stopped developing Office 15 years ago (ah no, they changed the color from blue to green) and my surface pro is reminding me of my Windows 98 BSOD days.

Ha not, their mouses are still pretty decent.

I used their IaaS which was a pain to setup and constantly rebooted but maybe that's just because of Windows which is pretty problematic to begin with...

To enterprise and devs the likes of Scott Hanselman do a brilliant job but they seem to be fighting against MS's bad tendencies.

Marketing is what they are, and always have been, best at. They still overwhelmingly dominate despite the worst efforts of the last 2 CEOs.

Reminds of the days when "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

I'm sure it's not the entire team, engineers usually aren't sociopathic assholes.

No, this is undoubtedly marketing or management. Maybe even top management. Maybe Nadella?