Oh come on, there are plenty of reasons, it's a case of whether they affect you enough personally. Telemetry, closed-source kernel/base system, Microsoft's history of nasty practice in the computing industry, E&E, having to pay money vs. free as in beer, outside of the VS ecosystem a generally poor development experience.

Well, the new microsoft is actually one of the biggest open source contributors.

I'm a UNIX developer (mainly Go), and I use a surface pro 4 with win 10 for development. Bash on Ubuntu on Windows already runs great, and I have the ability to sketch diagrams whenever I want to. Additionally I have docker running flawlessly and a system that just works 99.9% of the time. (as opposed to Linux where I have to hack my way through most of the things)

What software do you use to sketch diagrams? Pre-Surface I was switching between Visio and yEd. Now that I have a Surface I am using OneNote but have a feeling I could be using something better.

OneNote windows 10 app version. Though I sometimes use Lucidchart.

For me that picture indicates all manner of problems. The main window does not follow the Windows user guidelines, which is bad enough in Windows 10 already. For decades double-clicking on the top left corner of a window means that you want to close it - it was explicitly mentioned in the 3.11 manual. With 7 (or was it Vista?) they removed the icon from Explorer for no obvious reason, but kept the functionality there - you could still doubleclick the invisible icon and it'd do what you expect.

With early Windows 10, the Settings app didn't even have a title bar so there was no clear demarcation from the window grey to the titlebar grey - how would I know that the grey bar at the top was the way I moved the window but the grey bit beneath the grey bit at the top DIDN'T move the window??

With current Windows 10, the Settings app finally has a title bar that has a colour like all other applications. But the paradigm we learned 20+ years ago (double click top left to close the window) and the ability to get the window menu HAS GONE. I can still press Ctrl-space and get the window menu but the ability to get the window menu from a Metro app or a metro-style app using the mouse has completely gone.

So now I have to learn another method of interacting with the basic building block of the system - windows. When each window behaves differently according to the "metro or not" measuring stick, this does not make for a great user experience. And this is me coming from using Windows since the 90s. How do you think new users and my mum is going to get on??

What's the point of having window guidelines if Microsoft themselves don't even follow them??

So although the screenshot is aesthetically pleasing, I remain very concerned about the direction usability is taking on the platform.

I don't know, when Apple decides to change things to go against the established norms they call it being courageous.

Somehow, I'm not bothered about ignoring learned paradigms from so many years ago. For example, my 12 year old daughter could care less how you learned windows management 24 years ago. She's learned to Windows as it is today.

Just picking up an odd expression you use - are you American by chance? I notice this expression in films and interviews and online and it's wrong: "I could care less".

This expression implies that you currently have a high level of care about a subject, and that you have a range or distance to travel until you reach rock-bottom/zero regarding your level of care for the item.

In fact, if you were to care 80% or 100% about an item, the expression would still be true: eg. "I could care less about my health" which would mean I care GREATLY about my health and therefore have range to drop my level of care from its current position.

The expression that everyone should use is "I couldn't care less", or "I could NOT care less".

This implies that you are at 0% of your care about an item, thereby having an inability to move below your current level of care. It is already at rock bottom. It cannot get any less. It cannot go any lower.

Subsequently, I am assuming that you meant that your daughter COULD NOT care less about how I learned window management. i.e., she wouldn't care in the slightest.

I had to ask because I am hearing this expression more and more and it's incredibly irritating because it is wrong.

I never hear any native speakers here in the UK saying it, but judging how manners of speech drift over here I imagine it is only a matter of time before I hear people saying it, much the same way I now hear the word "like" sprinkled into sentences needlessly. When I hear this expression over here I think I'll suffer an apoplexy and drop down dead.

EDIT: By the way, I don't think Apple's changes have been courageous. I find that they stuck their head in the sand for too long and finally did sensible things. For example, on Snow Leopard and prior, you COULD NOT resize the window from any corner but the bottom right. This was officially STUPID. Thankfully they realised how stupid this was and enabled the ability to resize a window from any edge. Only took them 30 years.

Also in recent versions they have been making a big fuss about the ability to go full screen with applications. Windows have always been resizable, so the ability to get a window fullscreen and not see the menubar is not really a big feature. Nor is the ability to run two fullscreen apps side by side - surely we have been able to put windows side by side since the 1980s? Just because the menubar has gone does not make it a feature. This is not courageous, it is dumb.

They have also made regressions. For example, now when you want to use Mission Control you must move to the top of the screen to see the desktops. Hang on - just tried it again and now it works again. Hurray!

Their new filesystem is still significantly behind NTFS for features. Sad to believe we're all still hobbling along on HFS+ with byte swapping for big endian to little endian metadata every read/write of metadata.

I am not saying that Apple does things any better with software development, but the feel across the OS is generally consistent. This is not the case on Windows 10, eg. how do you find out which build version you are on? Press Windows key + Break to see system properties.... oh it's not in there. I suppose I need to run the Settings app > System > About to display a duplicate window. How do I join a domain? I could use the Settings app and it'll mention joining a school. I could also use the duplicate domain settings from Advanced System Properties and join there, but there's no mention of the word "school". Why do the two sets of windows look different? Why is there even two sets of windows? What the heck is going on?

So now I have Control Panel, the Settings app, Microsoft Management Console and its snap-ins. They all do the same thing. Are the teams not talking to each other at Microsoft? Is nobody at the helm?

For extra fun, look at shell32.dll and see how many icon styles are inside that thing. That's not even an architectural change - that's just pictures in a single DLL, owned and controlled 100% exclusively by Microsoft. All of the icons are from different eras. If they can't get even little pictures to be consistent and uniform, I do not hold much hope of uniform system behaviour.

So you can see the cobbled-together nature that Windows 10 exudes, despite a fantastic opportunity to make the entire system coherent again. And I say this as a C++ developer on Windows as my day job.

Yeah, I totally agree but it must be really hard to implement new guidlines for a monster (super large) company like MS.

They are moving slowly, but IMO to the right direction.

In fairness, while double clicking the upper left icon did work, it was non standard and redundant.

It's not whether Windows is aesthetically pleasing. It's that it's 2016 and some first-party windows apps still upscale fonts rendered at half resolution. It's that there are two control panels. That kind of messiness is endemic to the platform.

I don't agree with the notion of blaming the platform because some devs refuse to update to modern standards of the platform. That's on the devs.

First party, as in, provided by Microsoft.

I just ran Win10 for the first time yesterday to work on a security guideline and I was blown away by how janky the whole thing was. Using it is like crawling through 20 years of computer history; there's things from every phase of Windows since '95 in that UI, and I don't mean UI hints, but entire applications.

I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

Well, I think it is quite possible that the devs on the first-party team are not the same devs on the platform team. First-party or not, if the platform provides the tools and the devs refuse to use them, it is on the devs. Not the platform, the devs. Unless you can show me where the company demands its devs do so for no good reason.

>> I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

I'm sure there is, that's a mix of backwards compatibility and don't mess with stuff that works. Some people want it, some people don't; can't make everybody happy. Can I complain that OS X provides a terminal that looks like it dates back to the 70's?

No? Because that complaint doesn't make any sense? Especially since Terminal.app is far more modern than CMD.EXE?

> Especially since Terminal.app is far more modern than CMD.EXE?

To be fair, a lot of Terminal.app dates back to ancient Mac OS too. The menu bars, for example, are all still Carbon. There is still a full classic Mac OS main loop running alongside the Cocoa main loop in every macOS application. Apple's done a good job hiding it, but it's still there.

Anyway, cmd.exe is a bit of a special case. What you're really seeing is conhost.exe, which is kept the way it is because it's part of CSRSS, which occupies a similar place as PID 1 does, and Microsoft doesn't want to bring new UI into it for fear of increasing its dependencies [1].

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071231-00/?p=...

It does makes sense if I insist we only consider my own personal subjective opinion on the matter, which most complaints along these lines tend to be.

The 3.1 UI that still exists is silly stuff like file open dialogs that aren't "desktop aware" or whatever. There's no reason at all to retain such "compat" because it instead requires users to learn where all such magic folders live in the filesystem.

I'm with you there. Windows 10 looks like developers designed it. Not meant to come off negatively to developers but sometimes we just get lazy and use solid colors.

Windows is beautiful compared to the Mac OS where the software all looks like it was inspired by a 1970's era stereo unit.

The ugly UI isn't even the worst part about the Mac OS though. The worst part is that it just doesn't even come close to offering the same sort of freedom that you get on Windows where Microsoft leaves hooks in to let developers actually do what they want.

Most of the problems with the Mac OS are by design too. I think it's hilarious that Apple folks think it's a really good idea to hide the label on most buttons. I guess you have to "just know what it is" before clicking it or hover over it and hope for a tooltip to popup tell you what the thing will do. Real efficient.

There's really no wonder in my mind why most people don't use Apple anything.

I have to agree despite your downvotes. From 8.1 onwards, mobile and desktop, Windows has been the most beautiful OS. Using my iPhone 7 feels like stepping back in time in terms of the visuals.

I dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on my desktop, and I only switch to Windows when I need to use an application that is Windows only. I find it to be a more pleasant and user friendly desktop experience. Switching back to Windows honestly feels like stepping into the past.

i dunno...part of why i use Linux or MacOS is the knowledge that under the hood they're well designed. With Windows, no matter how good it looks, I feel like it's an ugly system, not to mention insecure.

How so? It's definitely an unfamiliar system, for me, and there might or might not be vulnerabilities in the current implementation, but I have no reason to believe that the windows NT model is intrinsically less secure than the unix model.

err modern windows has many good security measures and in many cases Microsoft are ahead of the curve in adopting new security techniques.

For me "insecure windows" is an old trope and not particuarly accurate any more.

The most insecure part of the operating system is the user itself. You can only do so much to stop people from doing dumb things.

The security infrastructure behind the Windows desktop is a decade ahead of the Linux desktop. Yes, kernels are okay in both cases, but e.g. Xorg is a security disaster.

That's why we have Wayland, (and yes you can use it today, just install Fedora 25 or Arch with GNOME).

Reading books like "Windows Internals" would reveal to you the actual way how things are designed.

I just want to randomly poke in the discussion to say that out of the three big OS, MacOS user interface is the most vomit-inducing. I know this feeling isn't shared by most.

Now that windows has nice workspaces and an already usable UNIX environnement (Windows Subsystem still has things to iron out, but it's very nice for a beta), my personal ranking became:

Linux > Windows > MacOS

I see nothing that MacOS offers that Windows doesn't, whereas Windows has potential for much better hardware specs, games, bigger user base.

The only thing left for Apple is their 16:10 screen and their per-monitor scaling.

Same ranking for me here. At home I use Linux and would never go back to the alternatives but at workI had to use Mac and Windows. If Mac did not have a good terminal (iterm2 is what I used) then it would be no competition at all.

I do miss a good terminal in windows but assume the Linux subsystem will fill that hole

It's not the best terminal, but give hyper a shot. It seems to work fairly well plus it's cross platform so you can take all your configs. Downside is it's an electron app.

I'll have to check that out, thank you!

How can it be ugly if it looks good?

No package management on Windows? Even if they somehow managed to do an app-store, that wouldn't be tailored for developers.

Windows already has an app store (although it's pretty terrible). It's had non-networked package management for decades (through .msi files that end up as line items in Control Panel). Nowadays there seems to be a move to nuget and chocolatey.

It kind of does now: https://chocolatey.org/

I use apt-get.

If you are dependent on the linux ecosystem, it seems counter-productive to awkwardly force your workflow on another one.

It's not awkward at all. I use cmder that is using Linux subsystem beneath it.

For example:

- apt-get install php

- php -S localhost:8081

- Launch Chrome on Windows, go to localhost:8081 (it works)

There is zero awkwardness or extra configuration there. Only problem is that some things do not work properly yet (because still beta). For example `go get github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3` will not work because of some ?gcc? compilation issue. But it's getting fixed on next release.

Wall of texts in this lovely page [0] are set of good reasons to consider before switching to Microsoft. If nothing, EEE [1] is.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Oh, good old EEE. So that's why they open sourced and redesigned .NET Core and C#? To extinguish it?

Come on.

Yes, this is the "Embrace" Phase.

So what will they be extinguishing?

.NET, obviously! :'D

>EEE

end this FUD