I'm just curios, disregarding performance aspects, what is there to like about w10 over, say w7? Two things that have put me off upgrading to w10 is the inconsistency of the UI, and the fact the user has less control over the system in a variety of ways.

There are a lot of legitimately great features that have been added for power users and developers since Windows 7. To give a few examples of things I make use of literally every single day:

- Windows Subsystems for Linux. I don't think this needs any further introduction.

- Client Hyper-V. It's a type-1 hypervisor that just works out of the box with completely seamless GPU passthrough (only to the root OS, i.e. the Windows 10 instance with Hyper-V enabled, but it's enough for gaming and running neural nets). Docker for Windows depends on this.

- Storage Spaces. A storage pooling system that supports thin provisioning, mirrored and parity redundancy, tiered caching, bit rot detection and correction (when used with their new ReFS filesystem), and works seamlessly with removable drives (I use a cluster of 2 2.5" external 4TB drives in mirror mode because I travel a decent amount, and 2 2.5" external drives are so much more pleasant to travel with than any NAS on the market).

- Huge improvements to window management, including virtual desktops, arrangement by snapping to all 4 corners on every monitor on multi-monitor systems, a super intuitive UI that lets you choose a different window to snap to the other side with 1 additional click, along with keyboard shortcuts for everything.

- First class pen support. I have a convertible laptop with a Wacom pen, and some of the features in the ink workspace like sketchpad and screen sketch have become indispensable to my workflow, and so damn convenient to use.

Windows 10 really is an excellent OS in its own right. It's such a shame that they keep undermining all the progress they've made by pulling crap like this.

You forgot the great and updated CMD where you can finally select and copy properly ;)

and Environment Variables / PATH entries are now added as rows on a table, instead of appending to a super long string and trying to remember whether or not to put a slash and or a semi-colon at the end

The default terminals have improved significantly since Windows 7 for sure, but it still hasn't evolved into something that I genuinely enjoy using yet, at least compared to some of the other, much better terminals out there (missing tabs, splitting, extensibility, etc), so I'm hesitant to include that on my list.

You can make Powershell your default now, iirc. Also, have you tried the Win+X power user's menu?

I'm actually frustrated by it. I like the fact that I can finally CTR-C/CTR-V into the cmd line. But I spend my time interrupting scripts by just clicking on the cmd windows. It triggers the selection tool which blocks the script (this is mostly W10/WS2016 through RDP, I don't use windows 10 on laptops).

You know you can just untick the checkbox that's enabling this feature on the window properties.

Honestly, I prefer the old rectangular-selections because it's great for copying individual columns of output from `dir`, for example.

In many applications you can Alt+drag to select vertically.

W10 gets rid of w7's endless, sneaky "upgrade to w10" crap.

Can't tell if facetious

Yes.

As far as I can tell, 10 has no killer feature, but has incremental improvements in a few areas that will be more relevant to some than others. It has better built-in support for modern hardware: common examples are USB3, NVMe, high-dpi monitors and touchscreens. It has some improvements under the hood in terms of security. It has DirectX 12 for gamers.

Well, I happen to like Hyper-V in the box, it tends to work better than VirtualBox or VMWare for that matter (at least in my experience)... Windows 8 pro comes with it too, but Win10's UX is finally there, where I hated windows 8's and would always revert to Classic Shell.

I also disabled Cortana and most of the search features beyond basic indexing and likewise don't use sync... I don't like the occasional Edge browser ad above my Chrome icon in the taskbar though. I'd still rather W10 than Linux... I use Ubuntu on my HTPC, and really like Unity, but it's just not quite as good, and there's the pretty regular quirk after updates run that I spend hours hunting down a solution for a few times a year. I also happen to mostly like my macbook, but there's not a viable solution to replace my main desktop.

Try KDE. You can customize everything!

I don't want to customize everything, I want nice defaults, where advanced features are tucked away... I also don't want to spend another 2 hours a few times a year fixing whatever problem the latest round of updates have caused. much more rare in windows in my own experience, I know two people who have had bad aftermath from updates, but one turned out to be bad ram that caused the issue.

All the same, I would much rather have macOS with a start/taskbar a little closer to windows... the instance previews are nice, and it's a bit easier to work across multiple monitors... Most of my time is spent in VS Code and a couple browsers, so as long as I have bash (comes with git in windows), I'm pretty much good in any OS...

I truly think these things are overblown. This article references "sync" providers, but having sync disabled I've never seen the ads they show. I also disabled Cortana and most of the new W10 stuff but never looked back after switching.

Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.

W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it.

Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor.

I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal.

There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.

Of the three things you can find to praise Windows 10 for, two are power user features that Microsoft has long provided through power toys and sysinternals utilities. The last one sounds like Microsoft rediscovered Fitt's Law. I'm not prepared to give them any kudos for fixing such a glaringly obvious and simple flaw.

But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.

There is only one switch on a win10 machine that needs tweeking by the privacy-conscious user. If you really care about privacy you really need a non-proprietary OS.

The Windows 10 Settings app has a Privacy section. On its General tab, there are 6 options. There are also 15 more pages of options for different categories.

Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?

And the problem is not just to cover everything (I set up a script for that). But also to actively maintain the list for all the new intrusions on every "security" update. This is an absolute waste of my time by Microsoft.

The switch to Linux, I presume...

The off switch.

I'm planning a hardware upgrade for my home PC. Making a beast of a machine. Intending to have Host OS Ubuntu ang guest Win10 with passthrough for the M2 drive and GFX. Games with near-native performance and privacy on the host platform. Best of both worlds.

go for it! I was very upset with the direction MS took with Windows 10 and have now been running Windows in a VM with graphics passthrough since 2015, with no problems

the only real problem I had with setup was sound: emulated sound had buffering issues, as did USB

I would suggest buying a cheap soundcard, giving it to the VM and running a cable between its output and line-in on your host (which hopefully has hardware support, so the sound doesn't have to be touched by the CPU by the host system)

I'm salivating at the idea of being able to snapshot Windows before doing something quirky and then just being able to revert to a known good setup.

And btw. I wouldn't go for cheap for this build. I'm aiming for power and experience. Buying a 4K monitor and maybe VR headgear too.

yeah

be careful though, the hardware selection relies on trial and error quite a bit, devices have to support things like MSI interrupts, the board has to have proper ACS support, bios support has to be there, and so on

even picking things like graphics cards is a problem, some AMD cards support hot-plugging properly, others of the same generation don't

(and just because it's on the datasheet doesn't mean it works in practice :/)

I will be researching each component carefully and picking only items that have a proven trackrecord for this setup.

I was on the same boat. Made the switch, and this weekend I'm sadly going back. Ubuntu's UI is just a mangled mess full of bugs. I lost so much fighting against stupid UI choices that I realized I was wasting way more time than if I just stayed on -heck- win7

I don't know just how many people did Unity successfully prevent from switching to Linux!

With regards to usability and customizability, IMHO Unity seems to get worse with each release, so eg. now it no longer supports screenlets, and even the "Unity Tweak tool" no longer seems to work for several useful "tweaks".

But, I just don't get why do people assume it's either "plain" Unity or back to Windows. Have you ever tried Kubuntu? Or MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce flavours? I personally find KDE Plasma 5 the best DE ever, period - that is, once you invest those few minutes customizing it / fixing its few oddities here and there. Why don't you try it out?

In your opinion, what are the pain points of KDE?

For me, my biggest beef with Unity was a death from a thousand papercuts. EG: i wanted to open a file in a program and had to navigate to the location, and couldn't just copy the folder path as I did on Windows. Or when I wanted to Alt-Tab between two windows of the same program, I couldn't do it with Alt-Tab. To remove it, the forums told me to launch a program which then for some reason didn't open when I double clicked on it. And then I realized that Sublime Text was not longer called Sublime Text but Ubuntu somehow renamed it to the last file opened as admin, which was aparently a well known bug with Unity.

Then I read that the next version of Unity is a rewrite from scratch, with usually means many new fun bugs, and just said 'forget it'.

Now, is any of these DE simple to use and with well-thought defaults? I can try out a few ones (after all I will do a clean wipe of my desktop) but sadly don't have the time to test more than a few DEs.

I think KDE, MATE, Xfce and Cinnamon have all (mostly) sane defaults, and are simple enough to use, so it's mostly a matter of personal preference. I'd choose KDE though - I have used Xfce for years before, and it always felt somewhat limited.

Have you made a decision on the card yet? I really wanted to do this on my primary desktop and ended up using a secondary machine which I stream non-Linux games via Steam. But I hate running that second machine all the time.

It will depend on cash-on-hand at the end of next month and the available GFX at my local stores.

How do you achieve GFX and m2 passthrough on Ubuntu? VirtualBox?

There are a bunch of tutorials out there if you simply google it. I intend to use KVM.

I found this guide which seems fairly complete: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

> I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.

Pro does show adds (like app suggestions in the start menu or add on the lock screen). Enterprise is the one that doesn't (if you configure it properly).

You can turn app suggestions and ads on the lock screen off in Pro.

(It's worth noting that you can configure pro in the same way. There's a gpedit property) and a regedit property in home to achieve the same thing

>two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge

You have windows 8 to thank for that, they figure this out designing their "hot corners" feature. There's a 5px angle at each corner to catch the mouse. This idea is users learn to hit the top and slide across to get the corner, rather than try to nail the corner perfectly all the time.

near the bottom: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2012/05/21/enhancing-win...

You can go into settings>system>display to configure the alignment of the two desktops. It looks like they might both share the bottom edge rather than the top edge

Faster booting to a truly usable desktop rather than 1 minute to get a non-functional screen then another minute for enough of the OS to be brought up to do anything.

Page compression for low memory PC's is nice to have too.

Boot time is a non-issue if your boot partition is on an SSD, which is the case for most serious users today.

I actually measured the difference. My Windows 7 used to boot in ~20-22 seconds. With Windows 10 it went down to ~15-17 seconds. Sure, Windows 7 was a bit slower. However, it also didn't have forced reboots like Windows 10 does, which in my eyes more than makes up for it.

Clearly 5 sec on the occasional normal boot is meaningless.

Unexpected reboots with awful long "installing updates" screen is an issue however.

Performance is the big one. Win 10 - when it's good - feels like a super-polished Win 8. They fixed the "metro" app stuff to not be awful. It does a good job of getting out my way and letting me run what I want to run. It's when it intentionally gets into my way that I get cranky.

> I get a little closer to jumping to a Linux desktop for good

I wonder how bad Windows has to get before Linux on the desktop takes off? It's kind of depressing that as good as most Linux distributions / window managers are, they aren't compelling enough.

As someone who has managed to stay off windows for everything but gamedev (playing games on linux, only devving on windows because I find magical ways to crash the linux UE4 editor), I really think Vulkan is what will do it. Once we have Vulkan, it will be easier to get performance out of games and the underlying DE/WM, and it should simplify dev since we shoulnd't have to worry nearly as much about direct3d vs opengl.

I have been dissapointed at Epic and Valve for not investing a bit more resources into the linux ecosystem, but I think they are just playing a longer game. While a freedom geek like myself will force myself to get used to the sometimes more difficult ecosystem, the genpop needs an excuse to chase the medium... I think gaming is it, and vulkan is the thing that should help linux gaming.

Ryzen and it's low cost will also lower new pc barrier to entry, which should help, boosted along with lots of people wanting to dip into VR and therefore upgrading. More and more reasons for sections to move.

If the CIA/NSA leaks keep up and MS keeps alienting users like they have since Vista/8/10, gnu/linux userbase will continue to rise.

What would really make it though... is a killer AAA game or program that's on linux only. No port for windows, no bad windows gamers, you don't get to play, sorta thing.

As for distros, I just want to make a quick plug for (xfce) Manjaro... normally I distrohop very frequently, but I haven't had such an easy linux experience ever. Really worth trying at least in a VM.

I respectfully disagree. I don't think there's some feature that is enough to dislodge Windows. I think it's going to take something like iOS on the desktop.

By that, I'm not really talking about the touch-based UI (although that's part of it). I'm thinking about the app model. The model used by Windows is too complex (and Linux is even more so).

There are a lot of things Apple got right with iOS, but I'm especially fond of the security measures. Apps are sandboxed, they hide filesystem details, inter-app communication is mediated by the OS, and updating happens mostly transparently. The tight integration between iOS and the hardware for security reasons is also something that should be copied but will be difficult to do.

As a software developer, I couldn't use something like that to do my work, but most of the non-developers in my life could. Microsoft's current approach where they half-ass everything isn't going to work (IMHO). They are in no real danger though, because nothing else is challenging them today.

Potential challengers are around though. Apple is pretty close with the iPad Pro. Valve's Steam box is also on that path.

It would have to be literally unusable.

Quality is not the thing keeping most people away from Linux. It's not even software availability (although that is still relevant). It's PR and forced Windows distribution.

If there are all those problems then... why do you like Windows 10?

It's fast, does what I want almost all the time with no extra guesswork, and runs all the software I need to run without having to monkey around with WINE.

I love Linux, I love Linux desktops, but they cut into my productivity because I spend time fighting <esoteric edge case> rather than getting my work done. Windows (mostly) just gets out of my way. It's cases like this - when it gets in my way - that make me reconsider it.

I'm about to have to switch from 7 to 10 at work. I haven't used 10 before. What's going to piss me off most?

(You'd think there would be an answer to this somewhere, but I haven't found one that is more than a puff piece.)

Cortana, the tighter integrations of microsoft bullshit you don't want. Having to search a dozen times for how to disable/turn off things.

Probably the settings app which is there to replace the control panel of old. It's very dumbed down, and frequently has to launch cpls itself to allow you to do more complex things.

FYI you can still get the control panel, just hit windows key and type "control panel". (Note, it appears for me after just CON, so you probably won't have to type the whole word, depending on what you have installed)

Or just hit 'WIN+x', then 'p' to bring up the Control Panel.

WIN+x, e for Explorer

WIN+x, c for CMD (but configurable to launch Powershell instead)

WIN+x, r to bring up the Run dialog.

And so on...

Learn to love WIN+X+Key... until Microsoft takes it away or otherwise nerfs it.

seeing as how its a new (and advertised) power feature to windows 8, why would they nerf it?

Control panel and some of it's applets are available also by right-clicking the start menu. Since w8.1/2012r2, even.

They removed that in the newest beta build. Now it has a menu option to the new settings app. Pretty stupid. They haven't even finished transferring everything yet.

I get most pissed off at the crapware that keeps getting re-installed. I don't want Microsoft's weather, news, money, music, contacts, calendar, etc... You can uninstall most of them by right clicking and choosing install but others require a PowerShell script.

My advice - do it all by script and keep the script because you are going to need it again when Microsoft decides to re-install all of it.

As a power user, pay for Windows 10 pro. It's not free like regular windows 10, but "look ma, no ads!"

But what about Telemetry?

Still there. Actually, even Enterprise edition has it, although labelled 'Security'. There is no off.

My Windows 10 Pro VMs always had some Candy Crush bullshit in the start menu and happily displayed celebrity news every time I had to open Edge (mostly to download Firefox).

Right, candy crush and edge are still there, but it's not like the ads in explorer.

Windows 10 Pro was free if you upgraded from a Pro edition.

Come on over, the water is warm.

I've been over several times, the water is great, but the sharks lurking about make the experience a little frictionful sometimes.