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.
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.)