Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming Another year, another round of Windows 10 updates – most likely 1803 in March, and 1809 in September or thereabouts. The company calls this "Windows as a service", the idea being that users get a constant flow of improvements. The advantage for Microsoft is that it can begin to escape its legacy prison, where keeping …
Sounds political - give me Regressive Web Apps any day!
Maybe there's an opportunity for someone to offer a Windows Cleaning Service which intercepts Windows Update and gives you customised patches to disable all the tracking / bloat / apps you don't want? Now that would be a service worth paying for!
'Hardly avoid it' is right! We need to see more lawsuits / legal cases:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/12/microsoft_hp_italy_windows/
Overall OEM's need to wake the fuck up and offer users more choice!
My gaming pc has linux mint, windows 7 and windows 10. I can honestly say windows 10 is the most unreliable PITA of the lot by a mile. I have wasted so much time fixing things that should never have broken I have now given up on it.
Why microsoft do I need to add my pc games to an xbox app in some vain hope they might run as smoothly as they used to before the creators fall update ? If I wanted an xbox why would I be using a pc to game ? Now I can't install any nvidia graphics driver updates properly since your 'upgrade'. Great - thanks for that new feature. Cortana, edge, windows store - utterly useless to me. GUI is as ugly as ever. Why don't we get a choice of GUI's like Linux ? Oh no of course not - microsoft knows best. Except they don't.
For work I use linux. Windows 10 is far too unreliable to do anything useful with. Its a mess frankly. Too many BSOD's, updates take too long, too much going on in the background, too much data slurp.
It seems to me that Microsoft over the years has got a little confused as to what it was supposed to be supplying.
For most an OS should do the basics and provide an opportunity or platform for Application vendors to provide the experience.
Back in the days of Windows 95 and subsequant versions that experience was subsumed in to Windows until Windows 7. With windows 10 lots of work was don to uncouple teh basic OS from all teh peripheral detritus which is why the early copies booted almost instantly with the help of BIOS tweaks and SSD, unfortunately it came with a penalty of increased snooping and a need to sell services and become a hub and more and more has been added to the OS in the name of features and selling stuff.
I have no camera, microphone or mobile phone connection and yet i still have to have Camera, Recorder and Messenger installed, why?
OS as a service should be just that, an OS, a platform for others to build on, unfortunately no one (not even Linux distros) seem to offer that, MS could but choose to, but the everyone needs money to survive and its current business model precludes it.
What price a basic OS that is stable, free of snooping, light weight and secure by default and the only consequence of a badly written app is that it crashes its own little world?
"Latest Features" meaning bloated things I didn't want and can not uninstall? Apps that occupy system resources, and cost money to fully activate? It only took a millisecond to make that connection.
I understand it's inevitable, but can we stop pretending that it's for our benefit please? The mealy-mouthed pretense is making me ill.
I keep my windows machines offline to avoid malware AND M$ updates. I need them for CAD and sim work and to be stable all of the time. The last thing I want is to have an update break an expensive piece of software that I am not ready to or can't afford to level up. I'm not a great software writer either, so custom bits that I have written could have problems too.
There just hasn't been a super compelling reason to update any OS in a long time. So many things get changed just for change's sake which leads to slowing down work when maximizing human output is what computers are supposed to help with. The additional OS overhead also slows down perfectly good hardware that could have ages left to run but ends up having to be trashed before the magic smoke is all used up.
There are elements of both, but lacklustre adoption for key features including Cortana, the Microsoft Store and the Edge browser raises the question of whether Microsoft's main areas of focus in Windows resonate with its customers.
Cortana - do we really want to be forced to send embedded local search queries to the US, to be processed using a poor search engine (search engines are generally measured against Google) and for it to omit, half of the time, the bloody local resource that we were searching for? No. Happy for Cortana to be an option, not happy that it's shite, transfers data to untrusted regimes (US), intrusive and non-removable.
Microsoft Store. Generally nothing to see there other than poor quality versions of desktop applications. The fact that the PoS is designed in such an appalling way that uninstalling something where there is an update for it queued will reinstall the software just makes it even worse. However not worse than all the shovelware junk that is foisted on every user on every system, the removal of which is directly hamstrung by the uninstall/update-reinstall issue.
Edge Browser. Seriously, it's hopeless. It's foisted on W10 users however is only vaguely fit for personal use, it's not controllable in any way to the level required and that IE is. However MS have set it as the default, put in hard-coded nags about switching away (search for "Internet" and rather than IE showing first, Edge is - attempt to change default browser from Edge to anything else and you get an "are you sure" prompt with a tiny "do it anyway" option). The fact that it feels slow, unwieldly and has take the minimal user interface style to the point of barely being usable doesn't help matters either.
However most of the updates to W10 revolve around these dead areas and then add a load of junk focussing on things that frankly 99.99% of users have zero interest in - 3D browsing and 3D objects... While there have been some small, nice improvements within W10, many of these are fixes to issues that were introduced in W8, rather than actual improvements to W10 :(
I have a new machine on Windows 10... it needs plenty of taming, including installing 'StartIsBack'.
Microsoft has abandoned/betrayed its desktop heritage... look no further than the schizophrenic Control Panel vs Personalize/Settings UI. With Build 1703, even the classic taskbar clock is no more. The good old calculator is replaced by some 'Modern' monstrosity, I had to install the old Calc.exe from Sergey Tkachenko (downloaded from Winaero.com).
It was a bad decision to merge a desktop OS and a touch/mobile OS (otherwise Apple would have done it long ago). Instead of letting Windows 10 be a mea culpa for Windows 8, they doubled down on the idiocy, and used it as a platform for the then newly appointed Microsoft CEO SatNad to data mine everyone.
The Great Deception ... way back when .. was to convince customers that the OS was a cool, aerodynamic rocketship of a product ...
When in fact it was then, and is now, there just to run programs, safely, securely, without fuss.
A thoughtful computer user should not have to give a phlying phart about his OS. It exists only to execute code and do basic housekeeping.
In point of fact, a really *good * OS is, or soon becomes, invisible.
MS appears to be heading in the opposite direction, trying to sell its ever-more-obese spying technology with bells you don't need and whistles you don't want, long after you'd settled on Win7 and thought "Ok, that'll do the job".
Yup, Windows 7 is fine but then so is Windows 10. Windows 10 can be configured to run much more minimally than the default out-of-the-box configuration.
Most telemetry can be shut off by tweaking a single service, the Store "apps" can most all be deleted, Cortana shut off with a single regedit, and privacy can be turned on via the Privacy panel in Settings.
Moreover, just like with Windows 7, there are plenty of guides out there for shutting off any services you don't want running.
As far as safety goes, any versatile computer that connects to networks such as the Internet will need updating, that's just a fact of modern life.
Windows won't ever quite be 'invisible' on the desktop/laptop as it is a GUI OS, but even then, there are many programs you can run in kiosk mode. Even the Command Prompt can be run in kiosk mode.
So sure, the marketing dept. at Microsoft wants their bit, but you can easily tweak out what the marketers contributed.
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