The recent pop-up ads, automatically downloading of Windows 10 by Microsoft and bricking devices by Microsoft's friends seems like a good indication of the tipping point for many people. Stallman was right, then?
About 10 years ago I made the jump from Windows to GNU+Linux. It was quite annoying because at the time I was still heavily invested in web design and such, so not having photoshop was quite a loss. Nowadays I am so glad to have an OS that works for me and not artificially limits me to what it thinks I should do. As extreme as Stallman was, I came to appreciate him more and more for what he has done to protect users' freedom and privacy.
It's not just Microsoft making a mess out of Windows. Third-party vendors are conspiring to ruin the PC platform. As often comes up in these discussions, I only use my PC for gaming. I've upgraded to 10, and downgraded back to 7 again, twice, just to make sure it really was that bad. (I downgraded both of my boys' PC's as well, just recently, because of strange problems they were always having.)
Last time I updated my nVidia video drivers, I found I had to create an account with nVidia to get into the configuration options of the driver on my machine. So, let me get this straight: I need to create an account... and log in... just to set the graphics options... on my own computer? Screw that! I downgraded to a driver that was over a year old, just to get away from all of nVidia's "improvements," like this "ShadowPlay" which was causing performance problems on my machine.
The driver for my execrable Razer Chroma keyboard was like this as well, but the build quality of that thing was so bad, I threw it out, and uninstalled the driver.
Microsoft has shifted into a whole new gear with Windows 10, and made it clear, despite user feedback, that they intend to stay the course, and continue the data collection, and advertising, and everything else that gets discussed on HN. I think this has sent a clear signal to the aftermarket vendors that they're free to do the same things, and we'll see more and more of it.
It looks like there are about 3 years of patches left for Windows 7. After that, there's Linux, Mac, Playstation, iDevices, and, now, the Switch for gaming. (Sadly, my boys already have an Xbox and an Xbox One.) There are plenty of other options to waste my time. I won't be upgrading to 10, and, thus, after 25 years building serious gaming rigs, I'm done buying any more PC kit. I just can't take all the hassle involved any more.
> Last time I updated my nVidia video drivers, I found I had to create an account with nVidia to get into the configuration options of the driver on my machine.
I see a lot of people with this confusion between the NVIDIA Control Panel and GeForce Experience.
You do not need to create an account of any kind to use the NVIDIA Driver Control Panel. You never did and hopefully you never will.
GeForce Experience on the other hand you do need an account now, but it's also completely unnecessary (and buggy) software. You don't need it at all unless for some reason you want Shadowplay (recording) or can't be bothered to set game graphics settings yourself and want GFE to 'optimise' the experience for you.
GFE is garbage. I have a GTX10x0 (I forget exactly which one but one of the faster ones) and it insists that the 'optimum' settings for games are wayyyyyyy lower than what I use.
Like medium settings or something. I switch it to ultra and 4k and they work AOK.
Now nVidia installs some tracking phone home shit, regardless of using advanced setting during setup and removing all unwanted "features". I had to remove to EXE files that were running, I found out about them with a Firewall and ProcessExplorer.
Yes. Even removing it with Autoruns brought it back, so I tracked down all nVidia EXE and services and removed the files physically and just kept the graphics driver, the HD audio and the physics driver. Now I have to do that everytime I update the driver, which I do of course when I want and by manually downloading from nvidia.com.
Though I hope AMD gets more competitive, and I would really like to go with them next time.
>>Microsoft has shifted into a whole new gear with Windows 10, and made it clear, despite user feedback, that they intend to stay the course, and continue the data collection, and advertising, and everything else that gets discussed on HN
Well if you would just Subscribe to o356, put all your documents in OneDrive, and buy every app in the windows store they would not have to show you ads ;) /s
Microsoft's willingness to actively disrupt its users (whether it's through forced updates or artifical limitations) is indeed a tipping point for me. I always chose Windows for its convenience, and the fact that I could use it on my own terms. Clearly, this is no longer the case.
As for Stallman, there's a fine line between a madman and a genius. Reality has shown us that he definitely is not a madman.
Some people could see his point by thinking about it. To them he was a genius. Others thought he was a madman because his point was too hypothetical for them, but now that it's becoming a reality they can see he was a genius all along.
You may say that it's because they couldn't see the future, but RMS experienced it back in the 1970's at MIT. Things have not actually changed, they've just started to influence a wider swath of the population.
Ah, yes, how absolutely shocking that Microsoft should choose not to support a processor that didn't even exist at the time that version of Windows was released. Why, everyone knows, especially on HN, that updating and retesting software costs nothing at all and so that's why we all eagerly go back and retrofit all versions of software we've ever released, no matter how old, to support the latest hardware just as soon as it's released. This outrageous behavior is right up there with Ford not retrofitting anti-lock brakes on the Model T and VHS VCRs not providing a HDMI output. /s
(I'm sorry for the early morning jocularity but I just can't take this topic seriously.)
Upvoted because it's true: Microsoft has no obligation to support old software, any more than it has an obligation to respect its users. I mean, it would be nice if they did, but clearly they aren't in it to do good for the world.
But this stuff is built of a platform that allows standardized parts to work without a lot of extra support. This has always been the users' expectation, one that Microsoft has managed well -- you can use new hardware on your existing Windows, but driver support might be minimal.
This new tactic is a complete change of pace. We are seeing businesspeople make technical decisions.... hurl
For the Photoshop part, check out Krita (https://krita.org/en/). Although it isn't exactly like Photoshop, a non-power user wouldn't notice the difference between the two. And Krita is really the only program I've come across on Linux that actually has a really nice UI.
I still can't move over to Linux fully, even though I want to, it's just not there for me yet. Gaming being the biggest issue, but also general user experience is mediocre at best, even on a vanilla Ubuntu installation. Kubuntu is definitely better thanks to KDE, but still problematic. I still haven't tested out Elementary OS, but most my problems stems from driver issues (especially WiFi, printers and trackpads), which I believe would be the same since it's a kernel issue.
Depending on what you are using it for, I generally would not recommend Krita as a photoshop replacement.
Here is my mini replacement list:
Use Case | windows | Linux
digital art | Corel Paint | Krita
image editing | photoshop | GIMP
simple image editing | paint.net | pinta
vector image editing | illustrator | inkscape
photo editing | lightroom | darktable
I'm not a power user, but I want my tablet to work (DisplayLink on Linux is dodgy, though I did eventually get it to work--not Krita's fault but Linux in general remains a mess with hardware at times) and I want to be able to combine filter effects and behaviors with painting--and Krita has trouble with that. It is a good-not-great program (I even gave them money for it!) but it's not a Photoshop alternative unless the subset you need is pretty restricted.
(The mess that is Krita/GIMP interop makes it a non-starter, IMO.)
Buy a PS4, use Wine in Linux or keep Windows 7 around. There is no single game that doesn't run on Win7, except FH3 with its WinStore shit - anyway it seems so arcady to me I wouldn't want to touch it.
One does not simply tell a PC gamer to buy a console... There's a reason I'm playing games on PC and has invested a lot of money into a fat gaming rig.
I am a PC gamer as well. But Microsoft agenda with Win8/10 is so off-putting I will stay on Win7. Plus I opened myself to other consoles (Nintendo, Sony). I know it feels so wrong to play a shooter on condole with a gamepad, and I wish they would just support a mouse.
> automatically downloading of Windows 10 by Microsoft and bricking devices
Downvote for falsely claiming PCs can be bricked[1], even more so by simply using Window-update, which at worst might require a reinstall if the install is botched.
[1] The definition of a brick is that something is now completely non-functional, beyond repair and thus "as useful as a brick". Something which can be recovered is by definition never a brick.
I didn't say it bricked the PC -- but they literally did brick shit that gets plugged in to the PC. It's a binary blob that comes with windows update and it breaks your hardware, intentionally.
It is a brick, because (1) It was working before, it doesn't work now, (2) The hardware is fucked, you plug into another computer, it still won't work (3) You can't expect anyone except for the experts to be able to fix it.
Sure, off the top of my head Nvidia drivers contain a binary blob you don't get to see. Does it brick fake hardware? No but this is a very special case.
Is it out of the realm of possibility that a vendor could ship a kernel module with a proprietary binary that could damage your hardware? Absolutely.
Why would people accept these proprietary closed blobs over the open alternative drivers? Because the open drivers suck. Can you fix that? Not in the near term.
So how is this not a problem for Linux? It's a problem there too.
If you use Nvidia, then the open driver sucks. It is like GIMP sucks, and that's a very real problem. But the open drivers don't brick my hardware, GIMP doesn't go and send my shit to the cloud without me knowing it, and won't refuse to let me edit whatever I want (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation).
This is a trade-off I am willing to make - that is all, nd I have mentioned it from the beginning.
You are technically correct, but it's not the best kind of correct despite the meme. For any average user, it's a brick, which is what matters : they can't use it, lost all data, don't understand why, and will have to use SAV to have a working computer again.
You are splitting hairs. My dad's PC was as useful as a brick to him after it downloaded Windows 7 and then wouldn't boot. If you think 'reinstall' is an acceptable or realistic solution for average users, you are badly mistaken.
You act as if this is something unique to Microsoft.
Ubuntu distro upgrades were so bad (don't know if they still are) that you were better off reformatting and reinstalling. If the upgrade didn't flat out brick the device, it was almost certain to screw up drivers and setting beyond repair of even more power users.
Apple had it's fair share of El Capitan and Sierra upgrade brickings and those require you to take your Mac to a Store.
The only difference is that Windows is 90% of the market so problems from them generate way more noise than any other OS.
I do ubuntu dist-upgrade since 2009. I have done 2 full reinstall. Once to try linux-mint. And another one a little latter when I bought a new ssd drive (switched to ubuntu gnome).
The main upgrade issue was with systemd in 16.04: it found a dependency loop between net access and my nas drive and decided to cancel net access.
I ran Ubuntu on a netbook and a laptop from ~2007-2012. Wireless support was beyond awful and distro upgrades would break it beyond repair. There were also numerous bugs with Audio and their transition in desktop environments failed horribly.
Linuxmint based on Ubuntu has been my go to since 2013. Everything I want just works.
I use debian on my servers with the occasional rhel/centos for those folks who want or need that.
Windows never touches bare metal around me anymore. That has been the cause of so much pain and lost time ... Virtualize it, put specific snapshots on the vm, and I've got a working Windows in a window.
2012 was a very different time. Stuff sucked so much back then, especially wireless. It doesn't help, also, that most people don't buy hardware for Linux but expect it to run on a random machine that they spared. Buy good hardware (Thinkpads, Chromebooks), do research, never worry about stuff not working.
If we're talking anecdotes, then I should mention that I've had very little problem with many Ubuntu installs and Mac installs. Certainly no 'brickings'.
But you're missing the point. My Dad did not ask to install Windows 10 (n.b. I put the wrong version in my first post), Microsoft did that for him. Other OS upgrades may not be perfect, but at least they give users the choice.
Well there are PC bricks, just not software bricks. I'd argue pouring coffee on your motherboard can brick it pretty easily. I think once the term became more widespread on mobile people used it for everything.
There was also that arch Linux debacle, where users with a certain motherboard mounted the uefi partition with write permission. Some motherboards were bricked that way.
Not exactly bricking, but a habit that Windows 10 developed is to force install drivers, even if they don't work.
I.e. it will install something, it won't work, do a rollback. Then, a day or two later, it will do it again, with the same package that didn't work last time. And again. And again.
Of course, meanwhile, your computer is unusable while it does the install/rollback dance and as a bonus, it does unnecessary wear and tear to your SSD.
My friend returned his Surface Pro 4 a few days after he got it when a mandatory Windows update bricked it, as in it turned off instead of restarting, and wouldn't turn back on.
I had a similar problem with a Surface, but some persistent going through the reboot options (of which there are about six, in increasing order of nuke-it-from-orbit-it's-the-only-way-to-be-sure) fixed it eventually.
There were no reboot options. The damn thing wouldn't turn on. My friend now has an XPS13 (which he had for just over a year before an issue with the fan prompted him to return it to the retailer for repair; amusingly the retailer screwed that up and offered him a new one as a replacement).
I had a dual boot since years, but I really switched to ubuntu only in 2009 (thanks to vista64 not supporting my scanner and printer). It is the main home computer that is also used by my wife. In order to make the switch as smooth as possible, we were already using openoffice and chrome on windows years before. On ubuntu, I have checked that photoshop was working correctly with wine. Sometimes, after an update, I had to configure the desktop to not highjack the alt key. This is the single issue I had with photoshop on linux (I am using an old release of photoshop).
I still did not achieve to migrate to gimp (steep learning curve).
This seems like they have enormous pressure from on high to make sure Windows 7 doesn't become another XP that they have to support for 15 years By Any Means Necessary.
If circumstances were different, I might even be applauding them for taking strong corrective actions against another XP doomsday scenario, or for moving to rolling release, both of which seem like great plans.
The reason I'm not is that Windows 10 feels unfinished and buggy to me. I gave it more than a chance, I used it as my primary OS for a year and change - but even after all that time, I still felt like I was fighting the OS far too frequently, and when my laptop had to go out for service, I threw Windows 7 on the older backup laptop.
So while I advise people who ask me to use Windows 10 if they can tolerate it, I can't say that I'm supportive of their efforts to forcibly move everyone onto their latest platform.
(I'm extremely familiar with running Linux, before anyone jumps in to recommend it - the Windows installs are for running Windows-native software that doesn't run well under Linux and for doing things like lots of RDPing that are extremely cumbersome inside Linux. All machines in this story dual-boot.)
Everyone makes this point, no one elaborates it. How is it buggy and unfinished? I'm using it on 5 different devices with vastly different hardware profiles (1 modern gaming rig, 1 old gaming rig, 1 low end laptop, 1 convertible laptop, and 1 SFF PC) and they're all rock solid.
I also use Windows 7 on my work laptop daily and moving back and forth between the two OSes daily always makes me appreciate Windows 10. Minor enhancements like window snapping are very nice, fixes to many/large file copies are wonderful, and the ability to actually detect and utilize modern networking equipment is fantastic.
I can't think of a single thing that I prefer on Windows 7.
Windows 10 feels unfinished because a bunch of the UI seems to be in transition between older interfaces and newer ones, sometimes lossily - and I'm not talking about third-party components, I'm talking about things like configuring networking in Windows 10, or not being able to find a way to convince the new UI widget to tell you the capacity of batteries any more. (There were probably more examples, those were just the two that sprung to mind.)
It feels buggy because if I left File Explorer windows open, eventually all of explorer would stop responding until I killed it and restarted it. If I used a machine for a couple of days without restart, DWM would lock up and suddenly I'd get to try to remember the commands to kill dwm.exe and type them flawlessly without being able to see what I'm doing, or restart the machine. Sleep and hibernate, both of which work reliably under 7 on my laptop, have about a 50/50 shot of waking up or coming up to a black screen - which, itself, has a 50/50 chance of either being a login prompt which is just not displaying and if I enter my password and press enter, it will bring up the suspended environment, or just a permanently frozen unresponsive black screen. Oh, and Start Menu searching being completely broken - attempting to type, say, Firefox would prompt me to search the web for Firefox as the top result, or I could open All Programs and there's Mozilla Firefox.
I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten. But that's a concise list of what I recall.
(A quick addendum - my Windows 10 was patched up to date as of December 2016, which is when I sent my machine off for repair and started using 7 again, so this isn't just some artifact of the Windows 10 Preview or early builds.)
That's true but another way to look at it is that it's in a constant state of improvement. There's 30 years of legacy that they're taking the time to refactor correctly rather than just skin or eliminate entirely.
> I'm talking about things like configuring networking in Windows 10
That is one of the very rough areas right now. They have the basic functionality in there but then shifted focus to other areas. Actually getting to the legacy control panel App to make changes to things like DHCP and DNS settings is ass backwards at the moment.
> not being able to find a way to convince the new UI widget to tell you the capacity of batteries any more.
That sounds like a hardware specific issue. If I hover over my battery indicator I get both a percentage and time estimate. If I click on the indicator I get the same information and the option to change power mode.
> It feels buggy because if I left File Explorer windows open, eventually all of explorer would stop responding until I killed it and restarted it. If I used a machine for a couple of days without restart, DWM would lock up and suddenly I'd get to try to remember the commands to kill dwm.exe and type them flawlessly without being able to see what I'm doing, or restart the machine.
Your explorer issue sounds like it could either be a hardware issue with a storage device or a problem with network discovery. Since DWM uses GPU compositing now, I'm going to say that you might have a hardware issue. I have 3 PCs running 24/7 that I either sit at or RDP into daily and I've never experienced anything like what you're describing.
> Sleep and hibernate, both of which work reliably under 7 on my laptop, have about a 50/50 shot of waking up or coming up to a black screen - which, itself, has a 50/50 chance of either being a login prompt which is just not displaying and if I enter my password and press enter, it will bring up the suspended environment, or just a permanently frozen unresponsive black screen.
I ran into this on my laptop when I upgraded it from Win8.1 to Win10 and left the vendor's Power Management AND Bluetooth drivers installed. After removing all vendor supplied drivers and allowing Windows Update to install new ones, it has behaved perfectly.
> Oh, and Start Menu searching being completely broken - attempting to type, say, Firefox would prompt me to search the web for Firefox as the top result, or I could open All Programs and there's Mozilla Firefox.
That sounds an awful lot like Windows 7. For starters there's no "All Programs" in Windows 10. I tried with Cortona on and off and could not reproduce that result. Every time I typed "Firefox" into the search bar or just with the Start Menu opened, the Best Match was the "Mozilla Firefox" shortcut. Now Windows 8.x/2012.x had a slow search feature and a nasty habit of just searching the web if you hit enter after typing your query but all of that is gone in Windows 10.
I understand how this would work in theory, but it seems more like they're trying to burn customer goodwill by breaking or removing old tools in favor of migrating everyone to {Modern UI,a walled garden}.
> That sounds like a hardware specific issue. If I hover over my battery indicator I get both a percentage and time estimate. If I click on the indicator I get the same information and the option to change power mode.
Not particularly - when I said capacity, I meant {design,current maximum, current remaining} capacity in mAh, which I couldn't convince it to tell me. (Admittedly, I did not go looking for the specific WMI calls that probably have this information, because I don't expect to have to resort to WMI to find out my battery's capacity.)
> Your explorer issue sounds like it could either be a hardware issue with a storage device or a problem with network discovery.
I had another bug with network {share,host} discovery which resulted in explorer crashing and me disabling that particular feature, but no, that wasn't my only issue with explorer.
If it's a hardware issue with the storage device, I'd be rather impressed, as said SSD runs other OSes perfectly fine, and SFC comes back without any complaints.
I can certainly believe it's something about my platform or usage, but after trying a clean reinstall of 10 without OEM drivers to confirm it wasn't some OEM-provided driver causing this fun and games, it stops being something I want to spend all my time debugging.
> Sleep and hibernate
Tried with the OEM-drivers install and without, no visible difference, much to my chagrin.
> Start Menu
Sorry, I meant All Apps.
I just tried it with Firefox, and after letting it sit for ~15 seconds offering a random json file with Firefox in the name as the best match, it did come up with Mozilla Firefox, and then immediately came back with every other thing I thought to try.
I don't know whether this has changed in the interim, or I'm just associating the initial delay with never trusting it, or something entirely distinct. (I don't think I'm conflating it with Windows 7, though, as I don't think I've ever seen it do that on one of my machines.)
I started to respond to this but then I realized you're just twisting things to fit your world view. Microsoft isn't removing for breaking their UI to trick people into their walled garden. Yes they'd like the Store to be a success but making advanced networking features difficult to surface by migrating from GDI to Modern UI elements isn't part of that master plan.
You're sighting what you see as shortcomings in their battery status indicator as a regress when what you're asking for has never been a feature in Windows.
I don't deny that you've had some issues with Windows but it sounds like a lot of your objects are based on personal beliefs than actual problems.
I'm not sure how inconsistent UI equates to buggy but I see this argument a lot and it's mostly unfounded. Those inconsistent UI screenshots are always different versions of the OS or different themes. I made my own comparison 2 months ago to show that it's not that bad.
The other annoying thing is that this is portrayed as a Microsoft thing. Linux Desktop UIs are horribly inconsistent but it's somehow ok. People just about lose their minds when Apple updates the UI of iTunes or Safari out of band with the rest of the OS.
Microsoft hasn't done much to bring GDI UI elements up to Modern UI specs and that's the main pain point. The consistency variations between UI elements in Modern UI apps comes down to individual Apps doing different things. That happens on all OSes with vendors like Adobe all the time.
That example is either out-dated or was not made with good care. On my system there are three types of menus and within each group they are consistent: http://i.imgur.com/ig4gvgc.png
- the ones Edge renders
- the ones the taskbar renders
- the ones rendered for pure window chrome
Also, some details between the groups differ, but they're still rendered with the same code and UX. What differs is only the styling, colors, padding, margins.
MS could start by fixing the start menu bug that does not allow you to start all of the installed software from there.
There are many more things. The reason nobody is giving examples is because those are small things, that we circumvent in seconds and move on (to face the next bug). Most people don't even remember what the problem is. I only remember about the start menu bug because it's so kafkanian.
Wat? "programs not showing up in start menu windows 10" is a perfectly good Google search. It will lead you to a ton of MS reps denying there's anything wrong with Windows.
Funny that I couldn't reach the actual bug report anymore with that search. There are places where MS claims they increased the limit on the number of items on the start menu from 512 to 2048, but the problem was with 100 when I saw it.
It looks similar, but if it's the same thing, it's a regression. I've only noticed the bug on my work computer this year.
It's hard to say exactly what it is, because as you can see, MS publicly denies any problem (despite a lot of people reporting it) and technical information is really hard to find.
All that I know is that I still can't access all the programs on the computer by the start menu. (Not a big issue, the menu is so messy that I prefer to navigate the program files in explorer anyway.)
I'm still not entirely clear on the issue but I suspect it might be older Applications that do not adhere to Microsoft guidelines for registering Applications in the Start Menu. Once upon a time you could just dump shortcuts into a specific location and you'd have Start Menu shortcuts. While that worked up through Windows 8ish, Microsoft guidelines have said not to do that since XP. In Windows 10 they removed support for that location.
Since XP they've also been telling developers to register their uninstall executable with the "Programs and Features" Control Panel Program. However even new apps (i.e. Node.JS) still drop Uninstall Shortcuts in the Start Menu.
Since Windows 8 they have recommended that developer keep configuration out of the Control Panel but Adobe, Intel, Synaptics, Lenovo, and countless others still register Control Panel programs. Microsoft has been gradually migrating old Control Panel Programs to the Modern Settings App. Once they're done they will no doubt remove the Control Panel and all of these Vendors will have broken software.
The problem is that Software vendors ignore Microsoft guidelines and now Microsoft is trying to fix the issues with Windows that have accumulated over the last 30 years and these failures to follow guidelines are starting to become apparent.
It's pretty clear to me that they started upgrading the "Control Panel" menus and never finished the job. At a surface level, you get new-style flat, simplified dialog boxes. To change more advanced settings, you jump into the old-style dialogs.
Absolutely that's what they're doing. The old Control Panel is very byzantine and cannot be completely done away with primarily because it's a modular system that vendors hook into when they add proprietary configurations for their hardware or software (e.g. Synaptics, Lenovo, Intel, Adobe). For backwards compatibility purposes they cannot just scrap it.
The aspects of the Control Panel that they do control have portions that date all the way back to Windows 3.1 and it's no small feat for them to refactor them into Modern UI apps. Instead of halting all OS progress until that herculean effort can be completed, they've chosen to gradually migrate or deprecate Control Panel features. This has been an on going project since Windows 8 and they've made a lot of progress. Many of the ancient UI elements like the "Windows Color and Appearance" panel are gone in Windows 10.
Personally I'd rather have it happen this way than the Apple approach (i.e. removing the UI and forcing you to edit plist files).
For me 10 feels more buggy because of many small details that create an always-shifting, async-updating, never-where-I-put-it experience. Compared to that, even crashes in XP felt more... robust? Some examples:
When copying files, copy progress dialog is sometimes opened hidden behind all other windows
The ui formerly known as start menu populates search results incrementally, so Win+program name+enter can open different thing based on timing
Randomly self-reboots at night, breaking long uploads or batches.
Force-installs drivers (NVIDIA, synaptics, ...) that crash on current setup or lose features. Even during the work.
These complaints are somewhat valid and also not exclusively Windows things. I've experienced similar issues on every other major platform.
> When copying files, copy progress dialog is sometimes opened hidden behind all other windows
I've not personally experienced this. If you initiate a Copy and then change focus, the dialog will not steal focus. Perhaps that's what you're experiencing? I despise when apps steal focus (i.e. Outlook 2015/Skype 2015 splash screens) and so I appreciate this aspect of it.
> The ui formerly known as start menu populates search results incrementally, so Win+program name+enter can open different thing based on timing
That happens to me constantly on Windows 7, this isn't something new. As of right now, if I type "windows update" in the Win7 Start Menu and hit enter it launches "Lenovo Update" on my laptop. If I wait then I get an Apps list of Lenovo Update, Java Update, Intel Update; then gradually documents, downloads, One Drive searches, and then at the last moment "Windows Update" appends itself to the bottom of the Apps list.
> Randomly self-reboots at night, breaking long uploads or batches.
There's nothing random about this. When an update is installed that requires a reboot then Windows notifies you that it scheduled a reboot outside of the Active Hours you defined. That notification sits in the tray until you manually dismiss it. You have the option to click on it and open the "Restart Options" menu which allows you to put off the reboot for up to 7 days.
If the update is installed while you're not present and you never return before the reboot is scheduled to occur then I'm going to assume it reboots. I would like to say that it holds off the reboot for up to 7 days for you to return to the PC but I don't believe that to be true.
> Force-installs drivers (NVIDIA, synaptics, ...) that crash on current setup or lose features. Even during the work.
Windows will install baseline drivers for hardware that doesn't have a proper driver installed. These drivers do not necessarily have the full functionality of drivers you download directly from the vendor, however they are provided by the vendor. If you've installed a driver directly from the Vendor, Windows will not supersede that install with the Windows Update Version but will instead list the version in Windows Update as available to install.
> Randomly resets file associations.
Windows Media Player on Windows 7 is the only time that I have experienced this issue. I don't use any of Microsoft's preferred Apps (e.g. Edge, Mail, Groove, etc), I have different defaults associated, and I have never had this happen. I have had an issue where x86 and x64 versions of Firefox were both installed and, when I uninstalled the x86 version, Windows notified me that it changed associations back to Edge since the x86 install was set as the default browser. The notification was not temporary, it sat in the notification tray until I manually dismissed it. That behavior is perfectly reasonable to me.
> Resets some settings to default on upgrade.
This is true of lots of software, I've had it happen with Chrome, Firefox, and iTunes with in the last 6 months. It doesn't always happen with Windows and it doesn't always happen in other software, but it happens. I cannot recall this happening to me in Windows 10 other than during a major update to a product. Specifically when they made significant improvements to Cortona and wanted you to give it another look, in that case it reset to the setting from disabled to "setup and configuration" mode but it didn't enable Cortona.
It's really funny, I like windows 10 a lot, for me it's the best Linux distribution, but there are a few of these little things...
To reply to some of your points to clean up possible misunderstandings:
> If you initiate a Copy and then change focus, the dialog will not steal focus. Perhaps that's what you're experiencing?
No, I drag or Ctrl-C/V file between two explorer windows and a new window icon appears on a taskbar with progress indication (by a backgound color fill), but the progress window is not visible until I click on that icon or Alt-tab to it. There are some complains and workarounds about this on the web.
> That notification sits in the tray until you manually dismiss it.
That is the cause of the problem for me. The notice is mostly invisible (no dialogs), until 7 days later "You have 15 minutes to pack up your things"...
> If you've installed a driver directly from the Vendor, Windows will not supersede that install with the Windows Update Version
It absolutely does. I manually install 341.81, everything works. Then, some weeks later bam, black screen, driver crashed. And a notification that driver was updated. Same way touchpad driver keeps updating after I manually reinstall it.
> > Randomly resets file associations.
See search results for "An App Default was Reset"
Since the amount of side-effects from the combinations of installed 3rd party software (antiviruses, ugh) is so huge, I'm constantly amazed they keep everything working and backwards compatible as much as they do. But some of this new stuff, eh.
> I drag or Ctrl-C/V file between two explorer windows and a new window icon appears on a taskbar with progress indication
That's unusual. I just tried copying large swaths of files with varying combinations of Explorer snapped, unsnapped, overlapping, not overlapping, etc. In ever case the Copy window appears h/v Centered over the origin Explorer window.
Do you have anything that has custom Shell integration installed that might be causing some weird interaction? I tried this on a pretty bog standard install. I'll try to reproduce it later on a more customized system.
> The notice is mostly invisible (no dialogs)
Yeah, that seems like an area of user experience they could improve. Do you lock your PC? All my PCs require password unlock and when I unlock them notifications like "Updates were installed that require reboot" or "Windows Defender finished scanning your PC" always pop out from the Action Center briefly. That's been my que* to go inspect it.
> I manually install 341.81... some weeks later... a notification that driver was updated.
I'm curious what could be causing that. I have some old Logitech Webcam drivers installed because they removed some features in the Windows Update version of the Driver and it's never updated.
> See search results for "An App Default was Reset"
This seems to be a result of 3rd party applications changing file associations using mechanisms outside of the Windows Guidelines. This is a big problem for Microsoft with regards to the Start Menu Icons, Uninstall Utilities, Control Panel Programs, and apparently file associations. They have recommended specific ways of interacting with the OS since XP that have been routinely ignored. Now in Windows 10 they're making changes that break these unsupported mechanisms and are catching flak for it.
If you can get it[1], install the Windows 10 LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) installation[2]. It has all the kernel-level improvements that make Windows 10 better than 7, without all of the bullshit that was sprinkled on top of the consumer versions of Windows 10.
[1] Currently seems to be restricted to enterprise licensing agreements or MSDN subscribers. Or other places...
I'm in the same boat - downgraded to 7 from 10 twice now, because 10 continues to be one of the most buggy MS systems I have used so far, with overall lack of polish in pretty much every corner, with UI taking top prize for how illogical it is(Metro design everywhere, yay!) - if you can't tell how something works by looking at it for 5 seconds, it's bad design. 7 is still the most stable, bug-free and clearly designed OS at the moment, with MacOS close second(although it's slipping away steadily with every iteration).
I am using windows 10 from the release date and I had a lot of problems in beginning but seems that all of them disappeared with updates, I don't have them anymore.
Yesterday I received a Gigabyte Brix i5 and wanted to run Windows 7. The process was painful.
The Brix has no USB 2.0 ports and no legacy USB in the bios - So keyboard and mouse were non functional. Presumably the ISO was built pre-USB 3.0 era. So I had to customize a untouched image with USB 3 drivers. Drivers had to be downloaded from Gigabytes website. All to learn that MS update doesn't work with Kaby Lake. Great.
Windows 10 setup was quick & easy.
Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS. It updates when it wants and I have no way of turning it off. It is connected to numerous IPs I have no control over except to painfully block in hosts. Onedrive has no official uninstall option, Windows updates can no longer be postponed with 1607 and burns 15-20 mins productivity when restarting. There are a handful of services I don't need or want that I cannot disable (Wifi password sharing anybody?). It is the exact reason why I wanted to run Windows 7 in the first place.
To me it feels like another forceful tactic to push me to use Windows 10 for which I have no desire. Win 7 is supported till 2020 so don't choose for me but that doesn't matter.
And Windows 7 is as old as Ubuntu 9.04. It's about as obsolete as it gets. It's time to let it go, man.
Problem is, there's still no reasonable alternative if you need to run Windows software. Windows 7 is the last stand of Windows that doesn't actively hate and work against the user, so there are some very real reasons to stick with it.
Hopefully when Windows 7 "extended support" runs out, ReactOS will be able to run Photoshop and Cubase so there is an escape route for those of us who still need to run legacy Windows applications. More likely it'll be Windows 7 with GPU passthrough in a sandboxed VM with no Internet connection forever.
>Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS.
I suspect MS still want to run Windows on consumer devices like tablets and phone, which really have to be as automated and simplified from the user's perspective as possible. Because they don't have a commercially viable standalone mobile OS, they're still trying to push W10 there to extend their desktop success into mobile success.
This leads directly to the sort of worst-of-both-worlds scenario Apple fans are so worried about, in which MacOS becomes as locked down and unconfigurable as iOS. Except that possible dystopian future is the here and now in Microsoft Land. But the flexibility of Windows has always been it great strength. I worry that they are giving up that advantage, but will never be able to reap the rewards they hope that might lead to.
I'm sure you've already seen it, but using https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/ helps alleviate some of these issues. I completely agree with you though, the whole thing feels dirty.
Just finished installing this OS. I generally enjoy MS products but this has changed my opinion. The OS isn't really any faster than 7 and the amount of road blocks I have encountered to change things to how I want them is remarkable.
I have found two great resources if anyone is in the same position as me. For Uninstalling the store bloat and disabling geo-location services and other anti-privacy I used:
Disabled too many things to list and I'll set this up to run on restart and restrict the file write perms for security. I've used pretty much the defaults but most importantly
> Running 10 feels like I've lost control over my own OS. It updates when it wants and I have no way of turning it off.
That one part is only partly correct. Windows 10 already contains the APIs required to have completely fine-grained control when to download updates, when to install updates, and even which ones to install now and which ones to leave on the list.
The difference is that with earlier OSes MS did make this choice easily accessible to every user of Windows regardless of their level of expertise. This resulted in massive security issues that hurt the internet at large.
Windows 10 still contains all the controls, but it has stopped providing easy and obvious GUIs for it and instead expects you to use administrator-level interfaces to talk to those systems if you desire so, thus effectively gating them behind a learning process.
Once again, there is no technical reason, it's purely political to force people off an OS they're comfortable with in favour of increasing Win10 adoption statistics. Although at my company we're rolling out Win10 at a reasonable rate, we still run Win7 on many machines (I myself do because I have no need for Win10's 'features'), and if we have older software that won't run on Win10, we could be prevented from upgrading our workstations in future.
What bothers me most about the rampant, furious force behind the Win10 rollout is that Microsoft are pushing it hard not just on end users, but on businesses, traditionally and still Microsoft's largest market. Businesses who've bought into the Microsoft platform and buy large quantities of licenses. The idea of taking away the power and control they have over their platforms is not going to sit well with CTOs all around the world; even Enterprise editions of Win10 have 'features' that you'd think would be consumer-only.
Microsoft are backing themselves into a corner. Something's going to break eventually.
> This error occurs because new processor generations require the latest Windows version for support.
Can someone explain this better? It feels like the direction of 'support' has been inverted. I thought all these new CPU's were supersets of the instruction set of previous gen i386/amd64 processors?
IMHO, it feels like just another hamfisted way to get the adoption of Windows 10 to increase. The whole point of Windows used to be that it would run on nearly every system, with most overhead being reactivating the license, now you'll actually find yourself re-installing an OS that refuses to work on a newer processor.
They're closing the gates to their pseudo-walled garden. Windows 7/8 don't have permanent revenue streams, WIndows 10 does (or will).
For all the song and dance of Windows 10 being superior, Linux seems to not care at all about what processor it runs on.
Linux seems to not care at all about what processor it runs on
That's not true, there definitely are unsupported (Intel/x64) CPUs for Linux. It even prints a lovely warning on boot to not file any bug reports because you're using an unsupported CPU.
But, what Linux does (often) do is make it possible to get a kernel patch or upgrade to add the missing support.
Outside of an all-volunteer ecosystem, like Linux or the BSDs, supporting and validating software on a particular processor family costs time, money, and ties up engineering resources, you know.
It's not just Windows that has this issue. I recently had issues trying to add new Intel servers to an existing cluster. The new servers had a CPU that was too new to be supported by the older (CentOS 6 based) Linux OS that the cluster was running. Now, this particular problem was fixed in the kernel and pushed in the next point release by Red Hat. Unfortunately for us, it never made it to the upstream cluster OS vendor, and we weren't able to patch the supported kernel, so we were stuck for those machines.
Intel's Skylake processors caused kernel panics on earlier Linux versions, but that never affected Windows, and Microsoft still supports Skylake on 7/8.
And Kaby Lake is just a rebranded Skylake with higher clocks, with no hardware differences. So this is just Microsoft fucking over users.
You do not buy a perpetual support license with those OSes.
The cost of those operating systems was for a given list of compatible hardware. Windows 7 support ended, Windows 8 support ended, and Windows 8.1 is no longer sold, but still supported (so security patches still arrive).
Like it or not, I understand MS, as backporting and re-valdating anything is a huge cost. Been there, done that, although for embedded systems.
1) this is almost certainly a partially arbitrary limitation, since Kaby Lake is architecturally identical to Skylake, yet one is supposedly supported and the other not, and
2) AMD Ryzen hardware has already been sold with the explicit promise by the vendor that it will have Windows 7 support; Microsoft is now breaking that promise.
Also, you may be misinformed regarding how Microsoft's support lifecycles work. MAINSTREAM support has ended for Windows 7 -- which means no new features -- but it still receives security patches until 2020. So does Windows 8 and 8.1. In fact, even Windows Vista still receives security patches until April 11th.
It seems like what's happening here is that they pushed out a patch that maliciously UN-supports certain hardware. I was running Windows 7 on Kaby Lake fine yesterday and receiving security updates, and now they're telling me I can't. Why? All the chipset drivers are third party and have nothing to do with Windows Update.
> You do not buy a perpetual support license with those OSes.
Well, when it come to Windows 10, I would say that yes, we are effectively paying for a perpetual support license. If Microsoft is comfortable throwing ads at me as a part of normal OS operation (and they are, and keep putting them in new locations I have to disable individually), I'm comfortable saying that I'm paying them perpetually.
Most people are paying them money for a version of windows that works with the hardware they are buying. You won't be able to find an OEM selling win 7 on a ryzen box, for example.
If you buy a separate license, you should be aware of compatibility as well.
and still they contain bugs sometimes, which need software workarounds. If interested in the topic you can surely find several examples in the Linux source codes as well.
Contemporary commodity CPU's have all sorts of features that important customers want [1]. You probably are not an important customer if you don't own multiple large data centers of the sort located next to hydro-electric dams and who causes price drops on used high end Xeons when you upgrade the data center hardware.
The CPU inside a CPU is vulnerable and it changes with every tic and toc. Windows 7 is pushing 8 years old and was designed around older and almost certainly early generation Management Engine designs (and perhaps a few down the road iterations of it). But it wasn't designed with data from the field about attacks and exploits. Windows 8 is largely a reskinning of Windows 7 and probably has similar vulnerabilities in regard to accessing the CPU in the CPU if such vulnerabilities exist.
Windows 10 has a somewhat different architecture and almost certainly has been designed considering ME and AMD's spin on it from the ground up and reflects all those years of experience from field deployments and the CPU vendors current roadmaps. Importantly, Windows 10 is designed with the idea that future experience will require changing the code.
Anyway, my suspicion is that the internal security model of at least some contemporary chips are considered to have probable or actual vulnerabilities exposed by Windows 7/8 and the business decision is that the most effective way of mitigating those vulnerabilities is simply to not support the consumer use case of buying new hardware and then running old versions of Windows on it.
The business case I am imagining runs along the lines of how much damage would Microsoft suffer if there was a problem versus how much damage it suffers from pissing off a handful of edge case users (considering that the majority of the noise will come from people who don't use Windows).
ME relies on security by obscurity (and hence the motivation of some for open source code). Of course that's not proof.
But I wouldn't rely on a Skylake ME's integrity for a public IP'd computer if it was running Windows 98 because it can be pwnd in ways that a Pentium Pro can not: replacing the disk drive won't get ownership back.
> I thought all these new CPU's were supersets of the instruction set of previous gen i386/amd64 processors?
Yes and no. People seem to forget that CPUs are not magical and can have bugs. On top of that, each processor family and processor stepping[0] have their own distinct bugs. (An example list can be found at [1], starting on page 8.) Well known incidents include the Pentium FDIV bug[0] and the more recent TSX bug[1] but there are a whole host of lesser ones that never reach the public consciousness because the OS works around them, e.g [2]. Needless to say, creating these workarounds takes time and effort and re-testing and that translates to money. And anything that costs money, well, ...
I wonder if you can get a refund from Microsoft if you purchased windows 7/8 retail. Doesn't the system requirements usually just spell out "such and such CPU or better"? Suddenly the requirements have changed post-purchase to "such and such CPU or worse"?
Also I wonder if this backfires on Intel. Why even bother providing 16bit and 32bit cpu modes if the CPUs aren't backwards compatible.
But is the CPU not compatible? I was under the impression Microsoft artificially creates an incompatibility in a shameless move to push users to an ad based OS. I wasn't aware that any cpu instruction had been removed that would prevent Win7 from running normally.
Only because Microsoft wrote a line of code that says if CPU is this model than do not run.
There is a big irony in Microsoft writing that sort of code given the efforts they have to go through to make applications with similar code (if OS version > 7 then do not run) run anyway by lying to the application about the windows version.
But apparently the CPU and chipset work well enough to run enough of the operating system that windows update can display a GUI error message with error code "Code 80240037", which is what the OP link to.
Who would design a chipset that is backwards compatible enough to boot windows and all its services in GUI mode, but not backwards compatible enough to run windows update?
If you run an old Linux or bsd kernel on these chips, do you get to login to X only to find a kernel error when you run apt-get update?
But the drivers aren't part of the OS nor are they written by microsoft. I don't see why Microsoft would block the OS running on a particular generation of CPU.
See also: UEFI, >4GB of RAM, booting GPT disks, booting from PCI-E devices (or heck, even USB or CD, though that's been supported for a while now, but boot floppies used to be the norm), AHCI (old SATA stuff would emulate IDE). This is nothing new.
This seems counterintuitive, even if Windows 7/8 are on life-support now. Surely letting people just install the updates 'as is' is better than restricting them.
That said – this is not so different from Apple, which puts computers into "end of life" every few years, so you can't get any updates.
Probably not. If you're affected by this, most likely you know what you're doing and are by conscious choice running Windows 7 on a new computer -- and if you're willing to jump through all the hoops that entails just to avoid Windows 10, you're probably also going to accept being without security patches if the alternative is forced upgrade to Windows 10.
So they're opening the door for all kinds of nasty security problems. Bad move, I gotta say.
No, there you're pointing out the actual difference between Apple and Microsoft. I don't even remember the last time I directly paid for a Mac OS (10.6?). Nowadays it all comes down through the Mac App Store, a usb key, or a rescue partition. Periodically Apple discontinues which hardware sets it supports. You can still boot that same hardware on whatever the latest, most patched OS that will run on it - from Apple. They sell hardware. Intel does the exact same thing with their processors. Microsoft does the same with its products - which are software based.
Per Microsoft, Windows XP is EOL. It doesn't matter what hardware you want to run it on - Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft. Are they attempting to push people to newer versions of Windows? Absolutely. They're essentially defining their product.
This seems different on the outside but I'm not sure it is. I think they've said something about Skylake/above functions differently enough to require significant changes to Windows 7.
Rolling release is sure the right way to go as you can't support all versions ever released forever, but the problem is, that MS doesn't provide viable alternative anymore after Windows 7. I paid for Windows 7 as the OS I own, so why should I accept some adware/spyware ridden bullshit known as Windows 10 instead?
But it has DX12 which is what your games crave. Also, Linux subsystem is neat and you can get powershell (great for disabling all the spyware they include which doesn't have any GUI controls).
I think the problem is while they certainly made it better in many ways, they also made it worse in arguably more important ways (disrespecting the user).
What is insane? Windows 7 is 8 years old. Windows 8 is 5 years old. Microsoft is still providing security fixes for what are essentially now legacy platforms.
There has to be a cost in supporting these new processors. Windows runs on almost anything and the cost of testing updates across various platforms has got to be huge.
I also think it is a great way to reduce fragmentation. Windows 7 is supported till 2020. However you do not want to just cut people off. If you can reduce / stop new instalations before then it will greatly reduce the number of unsupported machines when Microsoft cut the cord.
> The article is about how they are explicitly not letting people download those security fixes.
Well... to be fair this will only affect those doing new builds, not current builds already running supported cpus.
If you're installing a new Kaby lake CPU on an OS that's outright saying it doesn't support it then it's at your own risk.
Not to support Microsoft's decision, but I'd say your analogy is backwards. It's more like you can't upgrade your bathroom unless you redo all the pipes (which is somewhat feasible). Your example would say in order to get windows 10, you would have to upgrade your hardware first (which isn't the case).
Everytime a slightly critical news about Microsoft is on HN, it gets off HN frontpage rather quickly. Be it by flagging, be it by spamming with "Microsoft isn't that bad", "Windows 7 is already 8 years old" comments to change the comment to voting ratio. --- a very negative thing about HN ranking algorithms, why hide stories with more comments than votes?
First Microsoft forbid AMD to announce Win7 support. They had to remove the Win7 phrase from their press releases of the announcements. Now that AMD provides chipset that work for Win7-10, Microsoft does another evil thing. How long have we endure this crazy CEO? Why has the whole desktop world has to suffer and no country investigates in this not okay business practices? Why haven't they split Microsoft in two companies back in late 1990s? Microsoft older products were great, but they turned evil around 2012 and kissed the QA department good-bye.
Did they support running Windows 7 on these machines before? If so, denying people the support they paid for is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
With Windows 10, you have no option to avoid updates. With older versions, you might not be able to get them, even if there is nothing CPU or hardware specific about the issue.
Microsoft: turning software updates into a weapon.
The main thing that annoys me about this is that i've been having major problems with Windows 10. I previously ran server 2012 as my daily driver, which was fine for everything i needed to do on Windows (run visual studio, play overwatch, basically).
I've installed Windows 10 LTSB (which is the true enterprise version of Windows 10, with all of the apps etc. removed [telemetry still remains and has to be manually disabled]), as i refuse to install home/pro/enterprise after having it randomly reinstall/re-enable all "apps" and other telemetry settings i explicitly disabled after updating. 10 LTSB has been great in other areas. With the Ryzen, mobo, ram, video card I now have, I have had constant crashes/freezes. People have said that updates fix this, but i'm yet to see it. This is a common issue with Windows 10, not the processor/setup. (ie. see https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5yf9ed/brand_new_ryzen...)
I took a step back, and went to Server 2016 datacenter with a GUI (or whatever the hell they're calling it these days). Despite the fact that this SERVER still has baked in telemetry and forced restarts (i mean, seriously?) It was rock solid, no crashes, no restarts, no freezes. I was unable, however, to install the latest video card drivers for the AMD RX480, as only Windows 10 was supported. Marrying the drivers up in device manager directly to whatever inf files were available in the extracted AMD folder didn't work, and although everything was fine, running a game just sucked massively (like 10fps).
Basically, it seems i'm getting the worst of both, and am completely falling into the "you HAVE to use windows 10" trap. I'd switch to Ubuntu in a heartbeat (and might still have to) but would end up doing pass-through which A. might still have the same set of issues, and B. kind of defeats the point for my usecase (Visual Studio, Overwatch). It's such a shame as the C# guys are making HUGE strides in the right direction, and then the rest of MS just seems so scummy these days.
I realize this doesn't contribute much, but this whole situation is pissing me off. It might sound petty, but MS effectively attacking people and their choices at home is going to lead me as an influencer in a professional environment to advise steering away from MS products as much as possible. I honestly think this is their plan. Drive those away from the MS server ecosystem (other than SQL server, which would be a huge cash-cow) and then discontinue the server products. The home-market, and information market, is so valuable (see Google) and "easy" in comparison - ie. how hard is it to bake in heavy telemetry when compared to almost anything related to ongoing server features/support> (idk, take data deduplication as an example....something else that they've removed from Windows 10 which is another pain in my ass). I think we're just going to see a switch in MS becoming a "Google desktop", and a cloud services provider for Linux, with MS products. This seems to fit with C# going open source/being on Linux, and SQL server running on Linux.
If I were given to cynicism I would suspect it as being an attempt to favour Intel and wrong-foot AMD. It must be the fastest a processor has been rendered obsolete in the history of hardware.
About 10 years ago I made the jump from Windows to GNU+Linux. It was quite annoying because at the time I was still heavily invested in web design and such, so not having photoshop was quite a loss. Nowadays I am so glad to have an OS that works for me and not artificially limits me to what it thinks I should do. As extreme as Stallman was, I came to appreciate him more and more for what he has done to protect users' freedom and privacy.