i hate w10.

I actually use both. 7 at home and 10 at work. I don't mind the operation and daily use of 10, but the constant updates are killing me. It seems that every week, the updates keep breaking things that I need to use every day, and I'm experiencing a significant loss of productivity because of it. That's the reason for my griping.

Though I dual boot at home, I rarely boot into 10, though I have moved my games and things over with Steam. They seem to run better under 10, which I like. Overall, it's a decent operating system. It's just that right now, I don't feel that it's mature enough for business use or mission critical situations. Especially in an engineering environment where some specialized, or in-house created software needs to work.

After having built and used everything from DOS 3.3 (remember the 33M partition size limitations, yes that's 33 Meg), and SuSE 7.0 (Air), Win10 really strikes you as just BLAND. Crystal window decorations on KDE3 were the pinnacle of transparent glass eye-candy, but Aeroglass was close behind. I know that eye-candy doesn't make a desktop, but for enthusiasts, the "Next Clean Look" was always something to look forward to. All of the windows, from XP forward, have offered a clean interface with many native or 3rd party customizations that could make the desktops look stunning, and Windows 7 was probably the high-water mark for a good looking windows desktop (as KDE 3.5.10 with Compiz-Fusion compositing desktop manager was for Linux, Gnome2 wasn't bad either, or Fluxbox, E16, FVWM, WM2 and the remaining myriad of desktops to choose from on that side of the house)

Which brings us to Win10. While capable, if you use windows occasionally, the chatty nature of the OS can leave you twiddling your fingers while it opens and closes and writes megabytes of logs, chats repeatedly with every computer on the network and goes about its normal checks of updating everything under the sun (which is a good thing in today's climate until someone figures out how to send malicious payloads masquerading as updates... over which the user has no control but to accept)

But this is about the looks. Win10 is fine if your the type that doesn't mind every application looking like a generic vanilla web-page -- but yuk. (just compare it calculator to previous releases is about as good an example as any) Don't get me wrong, I don't want form over function, but when we have had stunning form for over a decade in desktop look, Win10 is somewhat of a let down and feels like a big step backwards in user-interface design. Between the office and home I probably have a dozen Win7 installs, a couple of Win10 installs (this laptop has Win10 on its SSD drive, and a second platter running OpenSuSE Leap/KDE3, with Win7 virtualized in Virtualbox). Win10 just cannot compare to the polished and finished look of the others. It works fine, WSL is a nice touch, its build in ssh server is nice, but alas, it just looks boring.

Win10 just cannot match the "enjoyment" or "pleasing to the eye" factor of any of them. I understand from a UI design standpoint why all desktops are moving to a web-page/css type UI interface. When you have to scale from a phone to a 27" monitor, you will inherently lose the layout optimizations for a larger display in exchange for UI that can be compiled to run on a wide range of devices.

Adding to the "I just don't like the way it looks" category, are all the buttons that are no longer buttons, all of the input-dialogs and combo-boxes that are not really dedicated and styled UI elements anymore, just simply markup abstractions in a larger interface scheme. Things are lost along the way. You no longer have the ability to customize titlebar height, border width in a native control-panel dialog (you can still control them with registry hacks) I see the Win10 interface is more a matter of what has been lost in, or as the result of, this race to web-ize the desktop. True desktop "themes" and configurable decorations are simply a casualty of this "progress". We have seen the progression on the Linux side of the house with the simple elegance of Qt3 and GTK+2 replaced with the web-ized Qt Frameworks adn GTK+3 giving the same "yuk" as the Win7->Win10 look.

Hopefully, after they have finished the functional transition to a web-ized desktop API, they can focus on bringing back some of the "pleasing to the eye" aspects of the desktop that have been lost along the way -- on both sides of the house.

A user interface should be as minimalistic as possible as it is there to interface between the user and a the applications they wish to use to perform tasks. You also have to realise that the enthusiast market for Windows is miniscule not sure exactly how small but probably less that 1%, so should not be the main driving force in system design.

Linux is different with most of the myriad distros only appealing to enthusiasts and where it does perform a real task it is as headless servers with a basic text display.

Yes, the vast majority of our forum users are enthusiasts with a sprinkling of current and former professionals, so we can expect a bias towards customisation and tweaking but the huge majority of windows users are using it as a work tool or as a new form of Phone/TV/Radio/Music centre/ Newspaper/Etc .

The first group are in an environment is rightly locked down to allow them to concentrate on work and lets remember that apart from a small period at the start and end of work periods the work computer will, or should, just show the application used.

In the home environment it's a bit of a shock to find how many users, when asked what operating system they use will reply with windows, (no windows version, just windows), or they will say I don't know or, even more humorous or scary, Google (meaning that's their Browser, not Google OS). Ok there are a few misguided souls that will answer with Apple or IOS or Android

This is the ecosystem that Microsoft has to design for and although enthusiasts may be those spending time inputting issues and suggestions to the Insider Program microsoft has to design for the market majorities, not the minority.

The perfect OS is probably one that is totally invisible to today's majority of end users, they only see a phone screen most of the time, and they need the other screens that they occasionally interact with to be familiar. The days of the computer interface being designed by geeks for geeks is long gone, its now a case of the lowest common denominator being the major factor in design, Less is more - this applies to the OS, The screen size, and probably the traditional computer

drankinatty said:

But this is about the looks. Win10 is fine if your the type that doesn't mind every application looking like a generic vanilla web-page -- but yuk. (just compare it calculator to previous releases is about as good an example as any) Don't get me wrong, I don't want form over function, but when we have had stunning form for over a decade in desktop look, Win10 is somewhat of a let down and feels like a big step backwards in user-interface design.

How strange that you use old calculator like the one in Windows 7 as an example. So this Windows 7 Calculator is "eye candy" to you:



... and this, Windows 10 Calculator is "generic vanilla - yuk":


(Screenshot shows native Windows 10 Calculator in build 16199.)

I have to say I totally disagree!

Kari

It's correct that the enthusiast market has dwindled in the last 10 years or so.
Today's big market is, buy it poke it and hope something happens.

Appearance wise I like it simple. I like the ability to changes sizes of things like fonts so I can read them easier, ect.

I keep my desktop black with a few icons. When I'm on my computer I'm doing something not staring at the pretty picture on the desktop.

I like to control my system as much as I can. Windows 7 gives me that ability to a large degree.
I do not like auto anything if I can stay away from them. I still update all my programs manually.

The thing about the enthusiast market that is different; we spend money.
That doesn't really do Microsoft much good because they don't sell what we are buying when it comes to hardware.
Some store bought computers cost less that one of my motherboards or cpu, ect.
All that hardware means nothing without a quality operating system to make it all work together.
For what a operating system does it should cost more. Windows 7 Pro is the cheapest thing on my computer and it's well worth what I paid for it. I'm waiting for the day I can say the same thing for W-10. Then W-10 will get a new home on it's own Intel M.2.

When I do some reading on the Ten Forum their still seem to be a problems with all the updates and upgrades. When you do get one their is a good chance it will mess up many things, including installed programs and settings. Then it takes a few more days to fix that mess. Just in time for another update.

To me W-10 is still beta. I will buy it when Microsoft gets it fixed and keeps it fixed.

Jack

Melchior said:

AS THEY SAY IF IT AIN'T BROKE don't fix it!

I thought the old adage was " if it ain't broke, poke it until it is broke, then try and fix it, then tell the wife it broke itself and buy a new and better one"