Neither Win7 nor Win10 crashes on me, but the whole "user experience" has been such an inconsistent mess after Win7, even though Win10 tried to undo the worst UX sins of Win8 it's still a far ways off from Win7.

It's as if the Windows team is trying to throw random shit to the wall to see what sticks instead of trying to do slow and steady improvements.

Apparently Win10 has some serious improvements over Win7 under the hood, but those technological improvements don't count much if the user facing parts are quickly deteriorating.

Win 7 doesn't handle high dpi properly, doesn't have secure boot, storage pools, usb 3 (IIRC), DX12, face unlock, etc. There is quite a lot of UX stuff that has changed since 7.

Most of those are what I described as under-the-hood-changes though.

I do understand where you're coming from, but I guess I see it differently - For e.g. High DPI directly impacts UX for me as I can run older applications at 150% without squinting at the tiny icons. Security is part of UX for me, etc.

Windows 7 has the old network stack, can be slower in some situations.

Lots of security improvements since Windows 7 with Windows Defender.

Didn’t MS also improve font rendering?

OS stability is not the thing that people are concerned about when criticising Windows 10. What has made me turn away from windows is the complete lack of trust I have that the OS will respect my privacy.

This.

I switched from 7 to 10 when it was offered. I stayed with 10 for about one year, and I liked it thanks to all the fixes and improvements and despite the occasional quirk.

But after one year, I realized my computer didn't feel like it was mine anymore. I jumped to linux and never went back.

I like reading these kinds of comments, but then I snap back to reality. It's easier to make Windows 10 behave than make Linux actually work properly beyond a browser and an editor.

How so? Not to start the old windows vs linux flamewar but if something in Windows doesn't work the way you want it you don't have many options. In Linux you can change absolutely everything... and people have been making it "actually work properly" for decades. This feels like just your personal experience about how some Linux distro didn't work out of the box the way you wanted.

Yeah it's a useless debate. If you're lucky to only need software that runs on Linux and you use desktop hardware, it likely works well. It certainly works great in a VM, unlike Windows.

> it's a useless debate

Not really. It's just too complicated of a "debate" (it's actually a non-debate) or discussion to dive into the differentiating factors that will assume different priorities for different people. Tradeoffs are everywhere and in everything and so is nuance.

Personally, I am growing tired of chasing Windows releases every few years so I will re-prioritize almost entirely around Linux's strengths.

this is just false.

It's sort of true.

For example, I have a 3700x / 5700XT computer. Windows 10 runs flawlessly without issues. Ubuntu, or any flavour of Ubuntu, runs like garbage. I have to fix screen tearing, slow boot, sleeping. Then from a clean install, open up firefox, and it crashes multiple times per day. It's not even close to stable.

Yet I run any flavour of Ubuntu on my Intel laptop and it's flawless.

Setup Manjaro on this same desktop, and it works flawlessly, yet on the same laptop if I use Wayland, it's completely broken.

Yet all the same hardware, never had an issue with Windows.

So my point is: Everyones experience is different. For some people they can set it up and fix it to be flawless, others just want to set it up and use it, not fiddle around.

Ubuntu started collecting telemetry in 2018, I don't see how it's invasive at all.

The difference between invasive and non-invasive telemetry is choice. If you give me the choice to turn it off, there's some sense of mutual trust: you trust me to leave it enabled if I have no reason not to and I trust you not to abuse the information collected. When there is no choice, as with Windows 10, I have to wonder why. What are you collecting that you won't allow me to turn it off at my discretion? What are you doing with that information that earning my trust is not an option?

Linux is not just Ubuntu, there are plenty of distributions to choose from.

It's asked one time, options are straight forward, and you can preview what gets sent to Ubuntu.

The approach is far more reasonable than what Windows does.

Ubuntu is not all of Linux

I guess that's the business norm. It's not really that Windows 7 is better than Windows 10, but that traditional business practices - of buying tools and using them and a respect for users - was better than modern business practices - of data and limited services and a confidence that the plan is always right. Everything has changed to foster that distrust, even completely non-computer services like journalism, taxis and food delivery.

If Microsoft would go back to pick up development from Windows 7, or Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, it would still be about abusing their customers.

I still don't get why Apple/Google are totally fine to collect telemetry but Microsoft is somehow supposed to not do that.

Well on Apple platforms it’s easy to turn off with a single checkbox, which they explicitly ask you about at setup.

iOS infamously collects your location data even when you opt out of Apple's iOS analytics; it's more of illusion of control than anything.

Source?

Probably referring to this story: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/the-iphone-11-pros-locat...

Interesting. Maybe GP comment knows something I don't, but from your article, this seems like much ado about nothing. From your article and the linked follow-up:

The issue:

"[Apple's] policy [is]: “You can also disable location-based system services by tapping on System Services and turning off each location-based system service.” But apparently there are some system services on this model...which request location data and cannot be disabled by users without completely turning off location services."

Apple's response:

“We do not see any actual security implications,” an Apple engineer wrote in a response to KrebsOnSecurity. “It is expected behavior that the Location Services icon appears in the status bar when Location Services is enabled. The icon appears for system services that do not have a switch in Settings”

"...“Ultra Wideband technology is an industry standard technology and is subject to international regulatory requirements that require it to be turned off in certain locations,” the statement continues. “iOS uses Location Services to help determine if iPhone is in these prohibited locations in order to disable Ultra Wideband and comply with regulations. The management of Ultrawide Band compliance and its use of location data is done entirely on the device and Apple is not collecting user location data.”"

Nobody's excusing them in this thread. But for me, Windows 8 was actually the last straw. I hate this "all your data are belong to us" mentality, and that absolutely includes smartphones, tablets, and internet "things" [edit: as well as PCs].

When a company, that has been playing a dirty game for decades making a monopoly of their software while collecting billions++ in licenses, people tend to expect some standards; and rightfully so.

Apple doesn't monetize their user's data, for one.

Whomever said it was okay for Google? There is a reason ublock origin and temporary tabs are installed in my firefox.

Who said anything about Apple and Google? Who said it is about telemetry? Unless you mean any and all data is telemetry.

My privacy, and my time.

No, I don't want your ads. No, I don't want your nagging. I want you to shut up and leave me alone. You're a tool that I bought, not my mother. I don't need you to nag me or give me advice.

Related gripe: When it wants you to do something, it offers you two options, "Yes" and "Ask me later". Conspicuously missing: "No, and never ask me again". It won't let me say no, just later. Grr.

We more or less know what they collect. Trust MS more than facebook, Google, Twitter, tiktok. I mean your privacy is probably violated more just browsing the net, even with all your ad blockers and tracking disabled, than using Windows for any daily task.

I only use Windows for gaming these days but privacy is hardly an issue in Windows compared to anything else.

I'm using Win 10 LTSC, and that is clearly better than 7, even if I have to work really hard to disable a ton of stupid crap, as well as a lot of telemetry.

I think it says a lot about Microsoft that they constantly move around the 'search with Bing from the start menu' setting, and make it harder to find every time. They know we turn it off, and they don't want us to.

In addition to that, even with the setting disabled, I STILL see "web searches" when I search from the start menu. Not every time though, which makes it more frustrating.

Windows 10 has lost me weekends' worth of experiment data multiple times thanks to its insistence on installing updates on a whim. Windows 7 has never done that. I would call Windows 7 more stable.

2011 Windows 7 desktop install still running daily at home with no signs of slowing down. Runs everything I need, even games. Never gave me a single issue even after frankenstining with added NVMe and newer GPU.

Two year old Win 10 work PC install committed suicide after updating few months back. Blue screen on boot. Spent more time "troubleshooting" that issue than reinstalling win 10 after giving up.

Well, those are 2 different PCs, so it's hard to compare them. Anyway I'm sure we all can come up with opposite stories as well, so to continue with anecdotes: unlike back in the days, blue screens (well, the ones I encounter, like 1 a year across 50+ machines of all ages) now are most often caused by actual harware failures the OS (be it Winows or linux) cannot cope with. Pre Windows-7 every stupid driver manufacturer would cause it instead. At least that has been fixed now.

I've had great success with Vista too. The point is Windows 10 is no where near as stable as you have no control over the update process which may nuke your install. It's a step backwards and offers no technological advantages.

As much as I dislike Windows in general, the NT based Windows systems have been very stable for a very long time. I once saw a server running NT 4.0 with 6 years uptime.

I don't know about Vista, but in my experience both XP and 7 have been very stable as long the hardware was reliable and no messy device drivers were in use (which includes AV software).

That being said, Windows 10 did a few things I liked, too.

Vista was a good OS. It’s just when it came out there was a huge lack of drivers. So everyone got upset. When 7 came out with less DRM, all the drivers were available at this point. And vista was solid.

I remember reading that before SP1, performance was very unpredictable; I read one review where it performed okay on a mediocre machine but was abysmally slow on a high end machine.

SP1, allegedly, fixed a lot of those problems, but by that time Vista's reputation was beyond repair.

The driver situation might have been made worse by the transition to 64-bit. I remember a friend of mine tried XP 64bit back in the day, and the system crashed constantly because some driver had been written with the assumption that a long is exactly 32 bits wide or something like that.

As far as Windows goes, I really liked 7. The UI was reasonably pretty and useful, performance was not too bad, compared to earlier versions, security was much better (or so I'm told, not being an expert).

Your experience with 7 is extremely atypical.

Right? The only time someone has weekly crashes is bad drivers or bad hardware. I had multiple-months uptime on my Win7 machines and it only wasn't longer because I would reboot for whatever non-essential reason.

I've had many more crashes on Windows 10 than Windows 7. I would guess it's more about what you're doing with the computer.

The only thing that was outright good about 10 were the improvements in how the taskbar and window management works. Port that to 7 and call it a day, I say.

That might be true for you but as a developer that uses it daily there have been hundreds if not thousands of improvements to 10 that I would not want to give up.

Such as what, exactly? Most languages are platform agnostic: Java, .NET, Python, Ruby, JS, TypeScript. Windows offers nothing to developers of these languages that Unixes haven't been offering already for decades.

As a developer, I'd be happier than anything if my work just let me have a bare-metal Linux machine to do my work on.

I wasn't comparing it to Unix. I was just responding to the parent that Windows 10 had many improvements over 7 and I would not want to go back?

I also enjoy Windows as a development platform quite a bit. It has made me a LOT of money in the last two decades so I can't complain. I like Linux a lot too, no need to only like one or the other.