I've got a Lenovo Y50 running Win10. With a HiDPI display, it is pretty much unusable. While OS elements scale rather well, most of the software doesn't, even using the "DPI fix." [1] There are also ads on lock screen. [2] The "terminal", PowerShell, is slow to launch, path completions are crawling.

The subsystem for linux is great, and certainly a move in the right direction. There's ConEmu with Bash, which is also usable. Admittedly, if it weren't for aforementioned DPI issues, which have been around for far too long, I'd probably use Windows as my primary OS.

Also have to mention that VS Code is a fantastic editor with an MIT license. So definitely there are strides in a good direction. Compared to e.g. Facebook's "open source" offerings, while great products, yet containing a `PATENT` file in every repo

[1] http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/

[2] http://www.howtogeek.com/243263/how-to-disable-ads-on-your-w...

You understand that you approved these ads when you set up windows initially, and that they can be removed with the flick of a switch in the lock screen settings?

It wasn't clear there might be ads there.

Glad you're digging Bash & WSL :D

May I ask which Win10 build you're running. If you're on Win10 AU (build 14393.x), you're not yet seeing the huge raft of changes that we've been releasing weekly to those on the Windows Insider program.

Key among the improvements that will be released broadly when Windows 10 Creator Updated ships (ETA spring 2017) include: * MANY improvements to Bash/WSL enabling MANY more dev tools, platforms, an tech to work even more smoothly, plus fixes for networking features inc. ifconfig & ping, traceroute (incoming). Also adds ability to invoke Windows exe's from Bash and vice-versa. * Lots of DPI fixes including many fixes to correctly scale desktop apps and pop-up dialogs (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/12/07/annou...)

HTH.

They're not targeted ads, so they're not using a data profile on you to power them or anything like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they know how many screens displayed them, but there's not a lot of interaction tracking you can really do with a static lockscreen. So it doesn't have the sort of privacy implications of normal advertising either.

So, while you may not like their choice of wallpaper because it is related to a product they are releasing, it's not really much more egregious than the fact that it downloads daily wallpapers on the lockscreen to begin with: It's all stuff selected specifically by Microsoft. And as others have pointed out, it's really easy to shut off.

I would still consider this to be an ad.

We can both agree, I'm sure, that your OS tracking you is a clear problem, and I'm not unable to be convinced on this one here, but I'm going to need to see a line of reasoning on how it harms you.

Would it be using my computer as a marketing tool to promote a product? Yes. A more obvious example might have been if it said something like "Drink Coke".

It's a banner ad, but now bundled automatically into your machine. Even if banner ads didn't track you, I'd still block them. There's a reason marketers pay for them.

Powershell often seems to hang on startup when it's actually already up and running. You're left looking at an empty terminal, waiting for a prompt. If that happens, you can try pressing enter, at which point you'll most likely get your prompt, er, promptly.

But pretty much everything I listed above is Microsoft willfully doing things at the expense of the user for their own sake. I could list loads of other things that I'd prefer they did another way but I wanted to highlight things that weren't just subjective preferences.

(It will update itself whether you want to or not and reboot by itself unless you're on Enterprise, etc.)

There is something particularly sinister about your OS gathering your data. You can switch out any other software for an alternative but changing OS is a whole other ball game (and one only the technically minded would go through).

Back when Ubuntu brought in their Amazon spyware partnership I jumped ship for Linux Mint. Even turning this stuff off doesn't provide any peace of mind, the system for gathering your data is still in place and why should the user trust that turning the anti-feature off will be honored or that the switch won't be reset during an update.

I absolutely hate the constant force update/reboot from Win10 and the huge amount background / network activities/connections.

After most of the win10 background networks connections are blocked and force update/reboot is disabled with Windows firewall, the system are usable now.

I tried and found the new Linux subsystem not useful at all. Real Linux inside virtualbox worked much better for my own use.

Searching the net with firefox/google is much faster than Cortana. I found and installed the 8 year old discontinued "Google Desktop Search" Windows App and it can search files in my location system with 100 times better results and so much faster than latest Cortana/SearchUI.

VSCode is very good.

Visual Studio 2015 is just huge complex monster. Took hours to download and install. I tried download a few popular opensource packages (Python, winscp, ... etc) and used VS2015 community edition to build - all failed to build for one reason or another.

Really? How often? I have "active hours" set and I rarely get more than one reboot per month. Same with network connections, and what they're doing. Some recorded facts would be more interesting than your impressions...

MS really needs to get their shit together especially on the laptops.

Our laptops are not having problems but they are in regular use...

  [dozzie@alojzy dozzie]$ uptime
   02:29:42 up 53 days, 11:03,  2 users,  load average: 0.11, 0.19, 0.18

  [dozzie@wolfram dozzie]$ uptime 
   02:29:49 up 9 days, 14:20,  1 user,  load average: 0.25, 0.24, 0.26

I block all those apps now with Windows firewall except firefox, chrome and Windows defender.

Also you can check out the default windows firewall config and see how many out going connections are allowed AND CONNECTED by default.

I always configure my system network security by default disable ALL and only selected app/ports are allow connect to internet.

Win10 firewall is completely opposite - its default configure for outgoing are "Allow ALL".

1) Most of the windows laptops doesn't age very well. By the 3rd year the computer starts feeling like its become quite old. I needed hardware upgrades every year to keep my computer running. One of my friends suggested me to try Apple. I am running a Mac pro which is almost 5 years old but still runs everything and I am confident that I can use it for 2 more years. I can't say that for Windows laptops, partly the reason is the hardware is manufactured by Dell/Lenovo or some other vendor. I hope Microsoft surface books provide some longetivity.

2) My internet experience with Microsoft pushed me to move out of Linux. There are so many viruses/malwares out there trying to corrupt your system. You cannot live without an anti-virus and even then chances are that you will end up corrupting your system and has to do re-install windows or format your hard disk. I am done with that shit now..I don't remember doing any OS re-install or formatting in last 7 years. As a developer I can focus on writing code and browing internet.

Just before writing this comment, I had to work in a client's remote windows machine and it was still a terrible experience. Windows still doesn't have a decent way to tail the logs!!!

One more thing If I am running a server, Can someone tell microsoft :

1) why I need a GUI running on it? 2) The user home folder has "Music" & "Movies" folders. What is the purpose of those folders in Windows Server OS?

I agree that Microsoft is becoming more open as a company and embracing new technologies. But I really think they should drop Windows completely and build a new OS from scratch(Just like they dropped IE & started edge browser) rather than doing patch works and improving it. It has some serious underlying architecture issues.

I'm finding this hard to understand. Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 all seem to be about the same, spec-wise, and it doesn't sound like you were upgrading anyway. I don't understand in what sense you would need to upgrade your hardware, which, in any case, is the same hardware used in Macs - Intel processors and so forth.

> You cannot live without an anti-virus and even then chances are that you will end up corrupting your system and has to do re-install windows or format your hard disk.

For many, many years now, Microsoft has provided Microsoft Security Essentials, AKA Windows Defender, which is all that most people need.

I have a laptop from 2006 and a desktop from 2009, both of which are my (a developer) primary/sole work and recreation machines. I have never had to reinstall Windows or format my hard disk.[1] In my experience these were things you had to do in the Windows 95/98/2000 era, but not since, barring some catastrophe like a trashed filesystem caused by a failing harddrive.

[1] Though in the interests of full disclosure, I did elect to replace the laptop harddrive with a solid state drive, and at that time I did install a new version of Windows rather than bother with transferring data from the old drive. As to why I did this, well, in 2016, an Intel Core 2 Duo is pretty slow but the easiest thing to upgrade is the harddrive.

    cat -Wait foo.log

While it's not bad, they blew the terminal completely!! Why couldn't they at least use something like cygwin's terminal?

You can't delete text properly.

Note: MS employee, doesn't work in Windows division.

A fellow Windows user (with a decent experience on Linux as well). Is there a way to use Cortana from PowerShell/cmdline?

https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/12/13/cortana-sk...