When you have no real, defined product that solves specific problems to sell anymore, you sell garbage that pretends to be a real product. Microsoft is far from alone here. Almost every successful software product that doesn't know when to stop building and start maintaining suffers from this degradation later on in life.

Specifically the Surface Book does a really good job of making the windows "experience" work in a keyboardless scenario. I'm sure the same is true of the other convertable hardware that's been popping up lately.

I'll concede that this isn't the majority of users but I would argue it's not just a rewrapping of existing software.

It's very apparent to me, it puts itself back in tablet mode after every restart, it's a pain to get that slide out menu working with a mouse. I bet a lot of people unknowingly get stuck in it.

OSX/macOS promoted their point releases to be something between service packs and major version releases, keeping it at version "X" for marketing purposes. From what I can see, between Cheetah and Sierra the expected workflow of the system has changed strongly a few times.

I don't recall them saying that.

Imagine if it was 1955 and we thought it was a good idea to randomly go into every company every year or two and say "Alright, this inventory system, this time tracking system, this customer service system... All of it, right out. Progress is here folks, and you don't want to be change averse. Time for some new fresh paper."

It's ludicrous. One thing you learn very quickly in business is that companies have little or not stomach for doing things that do not make them money. Every minute or dollar you spend on them appears to be money down the toilet. So if Microsoft wants people to use Windows 10 they need to offer more than hand-wavey bullshit about features and progress and security, because all of that stinks to high heaven of a company trying to convince its customers to give it more money because it wants more money - not because it's offering anything of real value to the customer.

I find I care about the applications I use: my IDE, git client, console, and the various web apps I use. I don't so much care about my browser UI, as long as it gets out of the way and shows me what URL I'm on and renders the page.

Likewise, I don't care about the UI of the OS itself, as long as it does its job properly: lets me start and switch between apps, connects to wifi, manages the display power, and sleeps and wakes up.

When I'm looking at the computer screen, I'm looking at what I'm doing, not the UI chrome. Even now, I'm only paying attention to this comment text box and your original message.. Everything else -- all the other tabs I have open, the visible bits of the OS, the other window open on my next monitor -- all blends into the background and gets ignored.

For example, Target and Home Depot were hacked because they failed to upgrade their point-of-sale hardware from Windows XP embedded to Windows 7 embedded or later which was an upgrade recommended by Microsoft. Windows XP embedded had a security flaw later patched in later versions of Windows.

I've worked with people very used to working with enormously complex systems and even they say Walmart etc is on the higher end of that scale. We're talking weeks of people on site to get new software stood up.

This isn't to diminish your point about the need for upgrades, but it's nothing like a push button process.

Also, they should pay the vendors contracts for maintenance instead of trying to do the upgrades themselves. The vendors are generally more likely to do the testing necessary and have the skills for upgrading systems across from various customers.

At any rate, as you put it, eventually they still should do the upgrade.

If you want your POS to talk to your marketing automation system, that's another integration and maybe another vendor who Oracle may or may not wish to support etc.

There's no way for a bank to standardize on vendors as it's back office systems might have been designed in the 1980s. If it wants to add an iPhone app or mobile payments, it has to rely on another vendor almost automatically.

Making these stacks work generates huge revenues for people like CA, Automic, IBM. Process automation is big business. Big meaty huge Fortune 500 companies held together with the software equivalent of sticky tape.

Just to make what I'm saying more concrete: most people in my home town in Sicily think it's perfectly OK to bring their phones and laptops to some random guy owning a tech-assistance shop and tell him their Facebook/Email passwords straight away so he can reinstall stuff and save their login for them. Do you think they care about upgrading because of "improved security"? I'm not sure they even understand what a security issue is...

One can always hire experts with a proven track record to help with the install of the new OS.

Incidentally, many people may have trouble with upgrades to the new OS because 1. Running old hardware 2. Not running quality hardware -- e.g. for Windows laptops traditionally Thinkpads. 3. Do a fresh install. E.g. don't upgrade, but backup the data, clean the disk, do a fresh install.

I use Mac and did the fresh install of Sierra 10.12.1 and then upgrades for point version updates.

I also have been running Windows under Parallels and on Thinkpads prior to 2011 and not had problems with new versions of Windows.

http://www.dailytech.com/Appalling+Negligence+DecadeOld+Wind...

Between each significant revision of Apple's desktop OS, my mother would get frustrated at settings that were moved elsewhere/renamed/removed entirely, for example. OSX is no stranger to unnecessary changes (or at least that's what my mother thinks of them).

It used to be that cmd-h hid an application and moved it to the end of the application stack. If you wanted it back you could use cmd-shift-tab.

Some suit, in their wisdom, decided to change that so cmd-h now only hides the app.

It's a tiny change ...that's a stone in my shoe every single day. IMHO that change is was completely unnecessary and breaks my workflow.

You should try it. It's fun!

Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want. But let's say you didn't want to do that, because you got tired of having a system full of cruft due to all these funky pieces of software scattered about the system that the package manager had no clue about - oh my!

So - you want to install the software as a package under Arch. Oh - and just to make things more fun, the software is something proprietary and closed-source. There is more than a few bits of useful Linux software out there like this - much of it niche areas where a) probably no one else in the Arch community uses, and b) it's proprietary - so you can't distribute it anyhow.

What does Arch require you to do in this situation? Well - last time I looked anyhow - and that was a couple of years ago, so maybe something has changed... It seemed to me to create an install package for a piece of software, the process (according to the docs) was to install the software "manually" and keep track of where everything goes. Then, once you have done that (and the software is running fine), you are supposed to create your package manifesto (or whatever it was called) that tells the system how to install it, then take all the parts and bundle them up (as a compressed file of some sort) with that manifesto. Oh - and then manually "uninstall" your software you installed, then use your new package to re-install your now-packaged proprietary software.

That's basically the process I read about for any kind of software package for Arch; it was a very heavy manual process. While other package management schemes do require some manual effort, none of them that I recall seemed to require as much effort as Arch's did. This wouldn't normally be an issue with most open-source software, because once you made that package, it could be distributed and used by the community. But for a proprietary software package, only you could use it - so it was a ton of extra work for little gain in the end.

Don't get me wrong - I liked Arch, and their community support and forums, wiki, etc - is pretty top-notch (I like to use that part of the ecosystem myself for help and hint purposes when I need it). I honestly think it is a great distro, but it does have some drawbacks to it (and they probably don't have good solutions, either).

This might be technically correct (not completely sure), but hugely misleading. Packages are defined by PKGBUILD scripts. When you run `makepkg` to create a package, it creates a directory called $pkgdir. In your PKGBUILD, you just delegate to whatever installer came with the source code & tell it to install into $pkgdir. e.g. `make install --prefix=$pkgdir`. makepkg takes all the files in $pkgdir and tars them and bam - there's your package.

If you look in most PKGBUILDs, they contain some metadata (where to get the sources, etc), and then it's more or less:

    build() {  
        cd "$srcdir" && make  
    }  
    package() {  
        cd "$srcdir" && make install --prefix="$pkgdir"  
    }

And if you're dealing with a non-source package that doesn't have an installer and isn't self-contained, then installing/packaging it is difficult on any OS - not just Arch!

For reference, here's a PKGBUILD for a non-source, proprietary application. It's pretty much as above, but includes some fancy .desktop files & such, too. https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=disco...

It's manifest, by the way.

> Now, of course, you could just go old-school and "manual install" whatever you want.

Yep, stop right there, do that.

This is why I switched back to Debian. Updating is stress-free and there's no downside to doing it as often as you like.

Not really.

Arch was a PITA. FreeBSD has a smoother install (not a compliment to Arch).

It's all about audience. OpenBSD's installer is a thing of beauty for technical people. I can see where it would be daunting and texty to someone who's never touched a command line, but that isn't the audience.

At this point, I feel forcing technical users through a plodding GUI install wizard is as cruel as making grandma install OpenBSD with a complicated RAID configuration and volume encryption.

Followed the instructions, hit a few snags, and resolved them by reading the wiki.

There's also the factor of familiarity to consider. People buying new machines will learn the new system, and overtime as they learn how to use it, they will prefer it to older system versions. However, this is another long-term factor, and as such Windows 10 seems doomed to only slowly gain adoption.

Note:

Considering the reputation Windows 10 got for itself at launch, this is less surprising. For non-technical users, the upgrade to Win10 has probably been pointless or frustrating: new concepts, new default applications and system UIs these users have learn to perform their ordinary tasks. What's more, for many users, upgrading their system to Win10 left them with an unusable machine. Win10's launch was a mess.

Then, almost 8 years after WinXP's launch, MS released Win7. There's a lot of improvements between the 2, but I wonder what were the major factors that made users upgrade to Win7. I only remember a few pain points in XP that were relieved in Win7: file/app search, connecting to the internet, system updates, and window management.

64-bit memory space support (crucial, considering enormous browser bloat after the FF 3.5 era)

TRIM support for SSDs (I switched to 7 when consumer SSDs started to become affordable)

DX11+ for gaming (DX10 was a wash in Vista, but by the time I switched to 7, there were some games that actually did look noticeably better with DX11)

Half-Open connection fix for torrenting.

But I'm a power user, so reasons for regular users may vary.

But in reality, we're rapidly approaching the point where we absolutely need to be able to sandbox apps and segregate them from the platform like with UWP.

While the basic functionality of the OS you need may not change much, the constantly moving target of security definitely will, and both 8 and 10 introduced significant improvements in security.

Windows 10 will get a majority of the Windows market. In fact, in some areas -- the USA and the UK, for example -- Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 late last year, on StatCounter's numbers.

And since they gave away a free upgrade for the life of the device, at a considerable cost in terms of servers and bandwidth, it wasn't profiteering either.

Pro tip: when a for-profit company does something that appears to be uncharacteristically altruistic...

...Aw, heck, you know what? Never mind. Enjoy the garden.

As for your "garden", anybody can build their own Windows PC and sell it, without restriction. Anybody can write Windows software, and sell it. Anybody can use a Windows PC and software for any purpose they choose.

If you want to attack people for restrictions, you can find far more of them in other parts of the tech world.

If you have hardware that only runs in XP you don't care.

I have more than a few Windows 7 installations that are nothing but hosts for virtual machines that run XP.

Windows 10 has moved heavily into mobile, touch-screen operations, use of sandboxed apps from online stores, AI assistants, cloud integration, biometric security etc etc.

Maybe in place upgrades are fine now, but I haven't trusted anything but a fresh install for as long as Windows has existed.

Given that the upgrade was free just as in the case of a linux upgrade the good enough point should consider these factors as well.

I've never had the experience you describe; which app(s) are you talking about which need to be bought repeatedly with no new functionality?