Submitted by This article was not created to say that Linux is better (it’s definitely not). It was created to stop Microsoft fans roaring in regard to Windows 10 and how it’s better than Windows 7 in every regard – it’s actually worse in most regards aside from DirectX 12 (which is actually hidden from the user and it’s only exposed in games).
Some points are more reasonable than others, but they all have at least a decent grain of truth to them. Sometimes, I don’t want carefully crafted, PR-whispered, politically correct reviews that you can interpret either way.
Sometimes, you just want a sucker punch.
This may be more true than ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d85p7JZXNy8
Spam? For me?
You shouldn’t have.
Interestingly there aren’t really any of his complaints i care about. I used to be a heavy KDE user and loved spending hours tweaking every last little detail, but these days i just want to either get work done or have fun, neither includes tweaking the operating system.
Anyway, i actually agree that Windows 10 sucks, but for different reasons. First i am probably one of the few who prefer Windows 8.1 to Windows 7, it is prettier and faster and works the same as Windows 7 if you just ignore some of the visuals. I don´t care about any of the modern ui apps, except netflix because that was the only way i found to get surround sound output. I like the Windows 8.1 start menu, it works great for finding apps and files using the keyboard and again is doing this much faster than Windows 7 did it. Using the keyboard to start apps is probably faster than just reaching for the mouse. Yes yes, the start menu obstructs the entire display, but i only look at the search result part of it anyway so makes no difference to me if they displayed dancing unicorns on the parts not containing the results.
Now for me Windows 10 sucks because:
It is slow starting and stopping. Windows 8.1 for me was like 2 seconds from entering my password until itw as fully ready, now it is about 10 seconds. About same different for shutdown. Sometimes it is even slower. In general it just feels a bit slower over all, and it stutters once in a while. Not constantly, but for sure a few times per day.
Having a computer part time connected to a TV through HDMI got much worse. Windows 8.1 would automatically switch between single display mode and duplicated display mode when turning the TV on and off. Now i need to go into settings and change it manually. This matters because i have a 16/10 monitor so i get black bars when it didn´t figure out that i turned off the TV.
And last but worst, they ruined the start menu search. It used to search in all words in the app/file names, but now it only searches from the start, except for a few built in programs where they seem to cheat, for some reason Microsoft Edge does come up when searching for Edge, but for chrome i have to type “google ch” before i get it as first hit. Searching for chrome gives me nothing, same with apps.
If i could be bothered to reinstall i would go with Windows 8.1 for a while until Windows 10 got more mature, but i am sure it will be very popular again because it has a small start menu….
At least with Windows 10 i won’t receive 10+ questions about how to shutdown the computer like i did with Windows 8(.0), and on a slightly happier note i think Windows 10 is slightly prettier than Windows 8.1. But my work computer will stay on 8.1 for a while, downgrading to Visual Studio 2015 was enough fun for a while there.
Every time ms release’s a new windows we have claims of horror and doom:
Windows XP – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/22/the_truth_about_redmonds_wi…
Windows 7 –http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revea…
Windows 8.x – http://bogpaper.com/windows-8-1-spying-machine-8-1/
Edited 2015-08-13 14:27 UTC
Well, because there is always some shit involved in these releases.
Just because people eat it up doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Was everyone Ok with Vista then? :p
Vista is interesting in that that it was a great example of corporate greed: from what I can tell, the biggest amount of hatred towards Vista came from greedy manufacturers selling PCs with the badge “Supports Windows Vista” or “Windows Vista capable” instead of “Designed for Windows Vista” — the difference was that it supporting Vista simply meant that Vista can run on the machine, not that it’d actually run anywhere close to useable speeds, and thus manufacturers tried to sell machines with only 512MB RAM as Vista PCs. “Designed for Windows Vista” actually meant having sufficient specs to run it at reasonable speeds.
Of course, Vista itself was quite buggy until SP1, too, but the complete and total lack of disrespect towards customers from PC-manufacturers with their sleight of hand still disgusts me to this day.
The launch of Vista (2006), was extremely contentious, had everyone (including the tech pundits) up in arms over MS’s Windows Genuine Advantage(WGA)notifications. At issue was that Microsoft called home each time a Vista PC booted to report on the product’s activation status. That is presumably all that it did. Everyone went ballistic! Even the milder article’s authors noses were out of joint because activation verification needed only to be done once (if at all as most felt), not at each and every boot in perpetuity. It’s interesting, now that pretty much ALL companies want to invade people’s privacy, how much we’ve forgotten of what was once the majority attitude in such matters. A good rundown on this at this link from 2006(below).
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-disable-wga-notification/
Fast forward to 2015, and Windows 10, replete with wholesale, forced anal raping of the stupid and unknowing users as the default (opt out) privacy settings. Going hugely, spectacularly past anything that Vista was doing, and now anyone with any type of objection is accused of having a WARDROBE FULL OF TINFOIL HATS, one for every occasion. No, not everyone was OK with Vista, but their concerns pale to triviality by today’s so-called “new normal”.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10s-p…
And no!
1) That other companies do this kind of tracking now too is no excuse.
2) Win 10 is only a free upgrade to current 7 and 8 users.
3) The retail versions (paid for) of Win 10 will have these same intrusive defaults. So the “it’s free so they can track you as payment” is also BS.
4) Cortana/digital assistants don’t absolutely require they be designed to work only with central servers. With the power of even mobile phones and tablets now, they could easily be highly personalized client programs that poll/search for relevant data etc.. all residing in privacy on the device. Not umbilically tied to some nosy big brother company or government organization.
This is the key point for me.
I always wondered why people don’t criticize this more loudly. File system on Windows is such a mess, I simply gave up on it. On my work computer (win7) I create C:\1 folder and organize everything in there, C:\1\code, C:\1\download, C:\1\media, C:\1\programs (place where I try to install stand alone version of any program that I use) and so on…
When I absolutely must go to %USER% folder, TWO(!) Program Files folders, or Windows folder, I consider it an adventure with unpredictable results.
For me, usefulness of Windows (any version) would skyrocket with sane folder hierarchy. I can fix start menu in 5 minutes, I really don’t care about windows colors, I can even forgive that horrible update process, but when I can’t easily backup application data … that’s is when I give up and move on.
My children have never seen Windows, and it looks like their “cartoon-youtube-box” will continue be Linux Mint for foreseeable future.
File system hierarchy on all three major platforms suck. In theory, they are all sane. In practice, developers have no fucking clue, and we end up with the file system mess that is Linux, OS X, and Windows.
This will never be fixed.
On Linux you have your home folder (~) and fairly good separation of “user” and “system” data. Sure you sometime need to change config files outside of (~), but that can be scripted easily (I am programmer so I have an advantage there). Theoretically, you can have a separate /home, reinstall your system (say from Mint 17.1 to 17.2, like in my case), run a configuration script or two. And you are good to go. Everything is the same state, even application sessions are preserved.
On Windows, reinstall is so painful, many users (myself included) avoid it even at cost of having a barely functional machine.
What I am trying to say, no one is perfect, but Windows file system is just horror of a special kind. For me at least. Since not many complain about it, I might be a minority on this.
Every Linux distribution does its own thing. Nobody adheres to the laughable FHS. Linux’ file system hierarchy is just as big of a complete and utter mess as Windows’.
But sure, you got seperation between ~/home and and system. too bad everything else is a jumbled mess nobody understands. Sure, people can list how the Linux filesystem hierarchy is supposed to work, but everybody also knows that nobody – absolutely, utterly, nobody – adheres to it. It’s a fucking dreadful mess.
And let’s not even get started on OS X.
> Theoretically, you can have a separate /home, reinstall your system (say from Mint 17.1 to 17.2, like in my case), run a configuration script or two. And you are good to go. Everything is the same state, even application sessions are preserved.
This is absolutely true. Hell, I kept my /home the same while from Gentoo to Debian and it didn’t mess anything up. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not good.
I guess my initial post was vague. I talked about “file system”, but I really wanted to criticize just one part of it: user/system data separation.
So, yes Linux has craziness in its system directory structure, but that is typically not important to users. On Linux (as diverse as it can get) you do have a strong feeling of “used data” being separated from system files. Home folder is not just the place where your mp3’s get downloaded to, it is also place where configurations/session application data resides.
And that is what Microsoft folks just don’t get. Reinstalling Windows OS is not that much of work, say an hour (add some more time for updates), but then you have to reinstall and setup your applications, and THAT takes hours (depending on your software preferences). You re-download manually, click “Next” endlessly, and manually reconfigure each application.
There is no way to automate this.
And places where user/app data may reside? Absolutely anywhere, C:\, Program Files x2, %USER$, %APPDATA%, some system folder, registry. Even Microsoft applications don’t follow any rules.
Microsoft was, at least partially, aware of this because they introduced virtual folders with Vista. But that was like putting out fire with gasoline, even more abstraction and data hiding.
It has been like this last forever, and whatever they bring to fix things (APPDATA, virtual folders) only makes matter worse.
I never used OS X so I will take your word that they managed to f**k it up even more.
This is largely false. Yes, there are applications that put user data in the wrong place– But that’s not the fault of Microsoft or Windows, that’s the application authors being stupid.
The current Microsoft spec says to put user and app data in C:\User, either in the user’s home directory if it’s user specific, or in the C:\User\Public directory if it’s for all users.
I find it entertaining that “Program Files” and “Program Files(x86)” is “Bad”, but “/usr/lib” and “/usr/lib64” is perfectly OK (not to mention “/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu”– I’m looking at you, Debian).
There’s too much in C:\Users, but at least there’s an attempt to bring some coherence to where things are stored. It does get a bit chaotic when you’re looking at “AppData\Local”, “AppData\LocalLow” and “AppData\Roaming”, but at least it’s somewhat obvious what goes where.
Then there’s KDE with “.kde/share/config/” with 130 config files, 78 of which begin with the letter “k”.
And then you discover that the other half of akonadi’s configuration is in .config/akonadi. *sigh*
I’ve even seen the occasional Unix/Linux science application written to write to “/usr/local”, so the problem isn’t unique to Windows.
Slamming windows because of changing standards over the years for where/how user data gets stored, and ignoring the exact same problem in every other modern OS is a bit naive, if not outright hypocritical.
Except of course that a bunch of Microsoft apps violate this. In my User directory there is a Tracing directory with junk from Microsoft Skype. There is also a OneDrive directory (I don’t use that). There are also the lovely NTUSER.DAT files (8 of them!).
Then in my public pictures folder Nvidia (Microsoft WHQL certified!) dumped some 3D Vision Pack files. And Hyper-V decided on my behalf that I wanted to share virtual images.
The C:\Users directory itself is packed with silly user accounts created by Microsoft (.Net v2.0, .Net v4.0, MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS, etc).
Contrast that with my Macbook Pro where a “ls -la” reveals a bunch of .XX files and then the Library (“appdata”) folder. The users directory is even more clean with just a Shared folder and my home dir.
Now the point I am trying to make here is that if Microsoft really want me to treat my home directory as my home (as opposed to dumping things in C:\) then they have to make it so it feels clean and my natural location to put things. And we are talking about small things like not having Windows *itself* polute the directory and make things like a command prompt launch in C:\Windows\System32.
In short, they actually should enforce their own rules themselves if they want anyone else to follow them.
Oh and I completely agree with you that it would be nice if Unix people invented a standardized .appdata subfolder one day.
A long time Windows user (since Win3.11/DOS days) is criticizing one aspect of it. How is that hypocritical? By that standard, how many paragraphs of introductory Linux critique is needed before discussing a problem on Windows OS?
I’m curious, what apps do you use that store user data in Program Files? I can only think of Steam, but everything else I know of save their stuff in the correct place.
I don’t use Steam, but looking at my C: drive, I can see folders like “Intel” and “ORACLE” in there. Even tghose guys can’t stick to Windows recommendations. I have no idea who created those, and I don’t want to google it. I stick to my own C:\1 folder, and that one gets backup-ed regularly. App data (like configs and sessions) is backed up before reinstall. In case of drive failure (which has happened before) I loose all configs and sessions.
Back to your question.
One good example would be Notepad++. When people ask for help on forum, and I need some configuration file to see what got messed up, I typically write something like: look in installation folder (typical location Program files) on XP, and APPDATA on Vista and letter. Or look in app folder for a stand alone installation. But then you discover that people have no idea about APPDATA, so they need further instructions. Or that users used installer several times (doing manual updates) once setting it to use APPDATA other times not to use APPDATA. In this case, config file are spread across two locations.
Some user reported that they give to their user account full control over Program Files, and keep using Vista and newer the same way as XP (everything is in Program files, APPDATA is ignored).
As an engineer, I can find my way around this mess. Most of my tools and IDEs can export settings, and I know how they function internally, so I know what to backup). I just wish it wasn’t so time consuming. And frankly, as an engineer, I see a bad design here, an average Windows user simply cannot perform such complicated tasks.
So, you’re saying people are deliberately messing their installations and that’s somehow Microsoft’s fault? I don’t get the logic. I did specifically ask what applications do you use that store their user-data in Program Files as per your complaints, but you just moved the goalpost.
That is the kind of stuff I deal with during reinstall time (roughly once a year on my computer). I don’t have a list ready. So I gave you a first example that came to my mind.
When the time comes, I open Program files, and APPDATA and scan is there anything I’ll need after reinstall. I wish I didn’t have to do it. But when people bring me their laptops to reinstall Windows, this is the procedure I have to go though. Luckily, I rarely do that these days.
Yes, indeed. If an application under Linux wrote its user-data in some random location you wouldn’t be saying it’s a platform design – issue, you’d be saying it’s either the user’s or the developer’s fault, but then under Windows you flip that thing around and rather blame Microsoft for it.
Well, at least we know where you stand.
Please don’t put words into my mouth. I didn’t say that, and you cannot draw such conclusions from my posts.
When I am using Linux as a reference point to criticize Windows, I am not claiming that Linux is perfect, or trying to hide shortcomings of Linux. It is just a reference point in discussion.
It seems like no one here understand the separation between “Program Files” and “Program Files (x86)” and also system32 and SysWow64 in x64 Windows so let me defend Microsoft and give you a clue.
You see, Microsoft always cares a lot about compatibility. That’s actually their primary advantage in comparison to all other OSes.
Old Win32 (x86) applications, which know nothing about x64, oftentimes load necessary libraries or run necessary applications directly. By directly I mean that they are not reading appropriate environment variables or registry variables to establish the location of system folders, they just load whatever they want from C:\Program Files or C:\Windows\System32.
Of course, in case of the x64 platform, such a behavior will lead to a situation that these old applications will simply stop working.
So, Microsoft created a neat trick to deal with this situation. x86 applications, which run under Windows x64, have filesystem and registry virtualized for them automatically. Whatever such applications do, they never deal with the x64 environment behind their back.
birdie,
To be honest, the “trick” is a “hack”. If it were necessary for compatibility then I’d begrudgingly agree with you, but it wasn’t necessary. 32bit apps were working fine as is, and MS had full control of what to do with the new 64bit apps/libs. They could have put them in C:\FOO and it would have worked. They CHOSE to put 64bit DLLS in C:\Windows\System32 and this choice broke compatibility with the 32bit subsystem. The mess we see with with C:\Windows\SysWOW64 is the result of clumsy MS choices, and not an inherent result of incompatibilities. Some people argue that they had no choice, but on further reflection, well yes they did.
I do think I know why it happened though. To get 64bit windows working quickly, MS rebuilt all of windows as is, and kept the 32bit paths unchanged in the process. Now 64bit windows was working and distributed throughout microsoft and it’s partners. However 32bit needed to be added, and unfortunately the “new” 32bit environment was not backwards compatible with the pre-existing 64bit. Instead of fixing 64bit windows, which was already making it’s rounds, MS engineers decided to make new directories for 32bit and apply OS level remapping for 32bit components.
I don’t think anyone can write off the criticism as a superficial fanboy attack, it’s clumsy alright. With better planning and decision making it would have been avoided.
Edited 2015-08-14 13:58 UTC
Uhhh you CAN automate the process, you just can’t do it using first party tools. look up Cameyo or Installrite, both will take a snapshot of what your Windows install looks like before and what it looks like after and backs those changes up into one easy to re-use package.
As for reinstalling windows? Plenty of places show how to automate the install and I always set customers (as well as family and myself) with a D: partition which has docs, pics, and programs. This is also handy for those with SSDs as it saves space.
Lately it seems like Microsoft isn’t even trying anymore. For instance I am seeing more and more ‘guid’ temporary directories and crap like $Windows.~WS in C:\. The kind of stuff you’d expect from some lousy 3rd party driver vendor (like C:\NVIDIA).
There are well-defined places such stuff should go. Windows stuff to C:\Windows, application specific data to %APPDATA%\ProductName and so on. How can you expect other companies to behave nicely when Microsoft and their OEM partners keep such a low standard themselves?
come on the Thom. Tell us what your perfect files system hierarchy is. I’m sure that we’d like to know since everything we currently use is a pile of dog poo.
There was an interesting initiative, but it never caught on: http://gobolinux.org/?page=at_a_glance
I totally agree that this sucks for all major platforms. But users don’t care anymore because they use apps that get virtualized and sandboxed so whenever they do a reinstall/repair/reset of their OS all of their apps come back totally magically and life is awesome again.
This is one of the things I’ve always complained about with Windows, no standard file system hierarchy. Even within the ‘Program Files’ mentality, they now have Program Files and Program Files (x86), which sure, Linux has the same thing with lib vs lib64, but you still at least know they are libraries there, they are not all ‘program files’ under Windows, you have all sorts of crap put in there.
Then there is the non-standard way that things get installed there. Do they do <company name>\<program name> or just <program name>?
Perfect example of how messed up it is, if you find some tweak to a config file for a game, most times you’d have to look in the installed directory, dig for the config file, and edit. Now you have to scour around in %USER% as well, because half the games will install it there…
Horrible.
App-specific, system-wide config data should go in the program dir (Or, more specifically, %PROGRAMDATA%)
User specific config data goes in the user’s %APPDATA%.
If these conventions aren’t adhered to, it is hardly the fault of Windows.
Edited 2015-08-13 18:08 UTC
Drumhellar,
Is this just hypothetical? Gimp on my system in fact keeps it’s gtk libraries under %PROGRAMFILES%\GIMP 2\lib\gtk-2.0. So the problem doesn’t arise regardless of whether you install a 32bit or 64bit version.
Never the less, if you had a specific reason to install multiple versions, it should be possible by simply installing them in different root directories, for example:
%PROGRAMFILES%\GIMP_32
%PROGRAMFILES%\GIMP_64
I’m not aware of any apps that store shared libraries under %PROGRAMFILES%, but even if that exists it still wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the paths aren’t hardcoded in the apps (they shouldn’t be anyways, that’s bad practice).
So I agree with leech, I don’t see the benefit. I’m not really sure what the justification was in creating this mess without a better reason. I honestly can’t think of one.
Maybe it was for the convenience windows devs at the time when they were regularly testing both 32 & 64 bit programs at the same time? But now it just seems to be unnecessary complexity.
Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, and many GNU utilities, all do this, just to name a few.
Drumhellar,
You must be referring to Program Files\Common Files? Well that whole branch seems to be a bit of a garbage pit, I’ll give you that
However it would still make far more sense to make a new branch for that by itself than to split up the Program Files hierarchy. MS could have introduced new 64bit apps without breaking the hierarchy, but now that they’ve done this it’s much harder to fix.
You can move the ‘special’ folders like Downloads and Documents wherever you want; I always set up a data partition and move those folders there. That way, if I have to blow away the C drive for some reason, it’s no big deal.
I wish it were that simple. Documents ad Downloads are trivial, but where did PyCharm save its configuration, or Notepad++. Install dir? APP DATA? Which subdir of app data? Maybe $USER dir (like say git .config)? Maybe a custom .dir in %USER%. Maybe in Program files (which one). Is there anything in Windows folder? What about that black box called a registry?
No one really knows, the best thing is to backup EVERYTHING to external drive and keep it there for few months in case you discover something is missing.
Loreia,
I really miss this facet of win3.1. While it didn’t have a great organization either (especially the win/system ini files), the backup and restoration of apps was fairly trivial, not just in theory, but also in practice.
There are still some tidy little apps that can install/run from a single folder (hurray), but since win3.1 they’ve become less and less common.
Now a days I don’t bother backing up applications at all because, short of imaging the entire disk, they don’t restore correctly. This sucks since anytime I need to reinstall windows to start clean, I can’t just reinstall the OS, but now I have to reinstall all the apps as well.
I used to try and restore individual apps, but that became so tedious with so many fragile dependencies between windows/system32/registry/user app data/program files/blah bla bla and even DRM designed to stop the apps from working that I just accept the fact that everything will need to be reinstalled.
Few years back I’ve spent few weeks writing custom Python scripts that would emulate mouse clicking, and would reinstall and setup applications by automatically running setup.exe files. I had it running successfully for few applications. But I gave up as soon as I realized that each installation (and app setup) was entirely unique. There was hardly a line of code I could reuse.
After that I realized I must install manually, but hunting session/configurations files across Windows file system is a frustrating exercise.
And reinstall time is dangerously near ….
Point taken. But for me, I’m only re-installing once every couple of years, most apps I use aren’t that hard to set back up. For the ones that are, most of them (like Firefox) either have a way to move settings to a different folder, export to a file, or sync in the cloud. Still not as accommodating as something like /home, but it doesn’t really bother me.
In my case, roughly after a year of use, my Windows system is “ready for re-install” (like noticeably slower and less reliable (a crash every now and then)).
And I really hate it when reinstall time approaches. Backup (copy everything, export every setting that can be exported), recheck like 17 times, reinstall system, than each application, then manually reset options, it just sucks.
You mentioned Firefox, that is the one I like, just copy session folder in APPDATA, and all of extensions and tabs are back. I wish everything was that easy!
Or you could use a Microsoft tool that’s actually designed to back up your user profile and restore it.
Such a tool actually has shipped with Windows for many versions now, and comes in two flavors… backup/restore and Easy Transfer.
Here’s a trick that many of my friends who work(ed) at Microsoft recommend:
Create an empty partition. Format it. Put all your non-program files there. Then those files are safe and easy to find. And if you need to reinstall Windows, you don’t lose anything except your installed apps.
Personally, I find Windows 10 little different from Windows 8. It works, it runs Windows programs, that’s it. I also happily use Mac, Linux, and, lately, Chromebooks.
My beef with Windows 10 is that the programming documentation is either missing or out of date. Program Windows 10 in C++, C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, or …. I don’t mind the choices, but they only give a little bit of coverage to each, definitely not enough. I guess I miss Win32 and C programming. 🙁
Linux definitely is better and ready for the desktop
Edited 2015-08-13 15:57 UTC
Article should have mentioned this too.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/windows-10-wifi-sense,news-21409.html
MS has no business holding the keys in any form. But regardless of that the system can only be as strong as it’s weakest link. So it may be easier to get the keys by socially engineering a family member to “friend” them or chat on skype instead of hacking into microsoft to get them.
Sure, I get that home networks aren’t fort-knox so to speak, but tying network security keys to social networks is stupid and ripe for abuse.
I agree with the dangers of this. I’m sure that everyone who reads OS news knows to do a custom install and say “NO!” to every option.
But the vast majority of the world isn’t technical and won’t understand why sharing their WiFi passwords with their Facebook friends might not be a good idea. What WERE they thinking?
What were they thinking?
IMHO, the target use for windows is the tecnically illiterate.
Their TV advets show it doing all sorts of ‘cool’ stuff. That will sell it to a good proprtion of the population.
We (the typical OSNews reader) don’t count statistically in their sales figures.
A friend of mine wanted to upgrade her desktop. I took my test W10 laptop to her and set it up on her network with another Laptop running Wireshark.
Once I’d shown her what was being sent to 20+ MS domains she soon realised that her current W7 installation wass not going to be updated.
Even with all the privacy settings set to OFF it still phones home. Have the NSA bought a controlling interest in MS without anyone knowing?
This is so wrong.
Having those Wifi-Sense options on by default is strange and possibly insecure, BUT
it still will not do any Wifi sharing unless you allow it to.
Yes, this might sound strange but if you enable Wifi-Sense during the installation, connect to your Wifi and have connected friends on social networks with Windows 10 they don’t get access to your Wifi just yet. Windows will pop up a message whenever you connect to a Wifi and ask you if you want to share that one particular Wifi with your friends.
The fact that nobody reports on this means that everyone sees this feature during installation, cries, but never actually uses it to see what it does.
The same for sharing internet updates back to the internet. It is a bad default, but it does make sure that it doesn’t do that on a metered connection.
All other options haven’t changed since Windows 8/8.1 and I leave most of them on because they actually benefit me. Advertising ID: Off. Wifi Sense: Off. Share updates outside of my own netwerk: Off
The problem is that if you give your Wifi password to a friend, for example, because they’ve called in for some tea or whatever, they’re now a primary user of your network, and then it’s up to them not to allow the sharing, not you. As was said before, most average users will just click yes when faced with a dialog box they don’t really understand rather than reading it, and suddenly, all of *their* friends, many of whom I don’t even know, have access to my network.
Of course there are ways to prevent this like tagging keyphrases onto the end of the SSID, setting up two wireless networks with one open as a guess connection, or changing my password every time I have a visitor, but I shouldn’t have to do any of that when the system that’s there otherwise works just fine.
You said it perfectly: If you give your Wifi password to a friend they’re now a primary user of your network, and then it’s up to them not to allow the sharing. It is like giving the keys to your house to a friend and hoping/trusting he doesn’t make a copy
So before Win10 that means you couldn’t prevent them from passing on this Wifi password and now you still can’t. So the solutions are the same as in the past as well:
1) You stop caring and assume that they won’t do anything bad
2) You take some action, like requiring a MAC-address, giving them a one-time password, etc.
Most people will choose convenience and as long as that is a conscientious decision that is fine by me.
From the article:
The first is a complaint about too much user freedom (or, too much clicking to do things, in the form of UAC prompts); the other is a complaint against it.
you can’t have it both ways.
The rest are UI issues, which, as a long-time Linux user, I couldn’t care less about these days. I spend my time looking at software I use, not looking at the OS. I don’t care that the task menu has six different appearances for the right-click menu. As long as the right-click menu is a right-click menu, I’m happy.
Now, universal apps without a right-click bugs me.
Drumhellar,
Do you have evidence of this? Grub autodetects windows loaders, and grub can easily be installed on linux partitions only, I haven’t seen it nuke windows this way. I’m not saying it’s not true, but having never seen this behavior myself I’m curious as to what you are referring to?
I’m referring to personal experience.
None those them add Windows to the menu anymore, and they don’t have a GUI to do it (exception being OpenSUSE and YaST), so you have to edit the GRUB2 configs on your own.
Of course, each is slightly different. I think Fedora and CentOS (and, Redhat) utilize the autodetect features of GRUB2, requiring one set of edits, while Ubuntu uses its own scripts to autodetect, creating a static GRUB2 config file that it uses, so making permanent changes requires a different set of edits that wouldn’t apply to Fedora/Redhat/CentOS.
FreeBSD, on the otherhand, is awesome. You just use F1-F4 to boot the partition you want to boot, and it remembers the last selection you made (Timing out after 5 seconds)
And it knows the labels – NTFS partitions are labeled as Windows, the FreeBSD system is labeled as FreBSD, and presumably Linux partitions are labeled as Linux.
Granted, it is limited to booting primary partitions (Not sure how GPT partitions are handled on UEFI systems, though)
Edited 2015-08-13 19:26 UTC
My personal experience, most recently with Fedora 23 and Ubuntu 1510 (obviously both development versions, but this behavior is nothing new), is that I get a menu entry to chainload Windows when grub.cfg sets itself up. However Ubuntu thinks it’ll chainload a Vista loader, one Fedora install thinks it’ll be chainloading a Win7 loader, and the other Fedora install thinks it’ll chainload a Win8 loader.
My personal experience with Lubuntu and Linux Mint is that both look for *any* other operating system, including Windows and other installations of Linux, and if any are found, put a boot entry in the Grub menu for them. Only when installing to a blank drive have I found that they don’t set up a boot menu by default.
As a happy multi-boot person, I can say that I’ve seen this happen a few times with various Linuxes. Not consistently.
Rule #1: Install Windows first.
Rule #2: Know that it installs a hidden partition.
Rule #3: There might be a second hidden backup partition.
Rule #4: That leaves one partition possible.
You only get 4 primary, so make a secondary.
Then divide that up however you want.
Rule #5: For multiple versions of Windows, install oldest first.
Rule #6: Leave room for a swap partition for Linux.
Some of these rules might be out of date but I’m very conservative (when it comes to hardware) and I’ve been doing this a long time. The 4 primary partitions may have changed in the last few years.
PS: I often install the oldest Windows first and then divide up my partitions using the Windows Drive tool. But I’ve found that GParted works perfectly and I’ve never had a failure with it.
PPS: I forgot to answer the original question. If Linux loses your Windows partition, grub is your BFF.
UEFI can use GPT partition layouts, which supports up to 128 partitions.
Just install one of the three distros mentioned. You’ll see it. Sometimes one can actually get the evidence for oneself, amazing as that concept may be.
darknexus,
In fact, MS takes active steps to prevent dual booting from working correctly.
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/494185-Dualboot-with-Win8…
Edited 2015-08-14 03:59 UTC
Again with this crap?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?615066
I’ve done triple-boot setups on hardware so weird the BIOS would sometimes change random bytes on the MBR (IBM I’m looking at you) and yet I’ve never seen the osprober script from GRUB2 fail to detect a NTFS partition OR the windows bootloader on the EFI ESP. It’s actually with detecting GNU/Linux installations that I have problems with. And this is the script that ALL distributions run.
And even if you can find a setup where it breaks, I would say there’s a significant difference between intentionally crippling your boot, and unintentionally failing to detect a bootable Windows partition when intentionally enumerating other operating systems to keep them bootable.
Not to mention half of the reason this entire mess still exists is because Windows refuses to cooperate with anything. EFI comes with a builtin bootloader? Well, you can’t use it, because Windows likes to set itself as the only entry. And on MS hardware (Surface, I own one) the EFI bootloader UI is obviously not even present.
Just correcting some ‘misinformation’. I know you need to hammer your pro-microsoft agenda around, but please find another area. In booting, Microsoft is pretty much still the same evil monopolist it was in the 90s.
Edited 2015-08-14 00:20 UTC
How about this bit from Ars Technica. Scroogled much?
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-t…
Edited 2015-08-13 18:42 UTC
That’s not completely true. Microsoft is trying to solve these problems with Metro. There are Windows Runtime Components and Store Applications, and Windows Store is supposed to be able to update them.
The problem with Metro is that it is very poor at the moment. Windows has its power because of lots of mutually compatible software and compilers: I can write in Delphi, I can write in Ada, I can get old IBM SOM, then get Foundation and AppKit implementation from Apple Application Support (distributed with iTunes) and make bridges from Objective-C to SOM, then I can install old OpenDoc and use its ComponentGlue technology to make SOM classes available to OLE2, write some VBScript.
Metro is like second additional OS, but it’s dead land compared to normal OSes. I can’t write in Delphi, I can’t write in Ada. We only have crap C++, crap C#, crap JavaScript. There is only crap, and no freedom. It makes Metro worse than Linux. These applications also work strange. If I have normal Skype and normal Mail.ru agent running, I’m confident that I won’t miss anything. With Metro, you are never sure if application is really running or not. Even now, on Windows 10, where these applications are no longer forced to fullscreen, if I click Mail.ru agent, I sometimes see it reloading, and it means I expected Mail.ru agent to be running, but instead I have missed some replicas because it was only illusion.
Microsoft has Project Centennial to port Classic applications as they call it, to Metro. If they do it right, then maybe we’ll get packaging/update mechanism.
Some issues look like being related to Microsoft’s rush to make Metro accessible for everybody. Win7 does not have it and Win8 can only run it in fullscreen. Add lack of non-crap options for development, and you’ll see that application developers don’t want to target Metro. IMO Microsoft tries hard to convince developers using Metro, and providing free upgrade to half-baken Windows 10 makes Metro available for virtually everyone, so developers can be more brave to chose this target. There is so much rush that we’ve got 2 control panels and UI inconsistences. Author completely ignored Microsoft’s intention to turn all applications into Metro ones (There are experimental toolkits to port iOS and Android apps to Metro, not only Centennial) and makes incorrect statements.
One of the things that’s hacked me off for many years is the fact that the window manager allows the focus to be taken from me – the user – to do some ‘background’ task and doesn’t return it. Many times I’ve been looking at the keyboard to type (don’t say it
) and look up to see the last 30 or so words that I’ve typed have disappeared into /dev/null (or the Windows equivalent) for no obvious reason.
I would guess this hasn’t been addressed in Win 10?
hate that too,
Mac’s used to hold the focus and just have the window that needed attention flashing. Now they have gone the Windows route, so you can be typing away and then all of a sudden half the text has gone because a popup window has appeared very slowly stealing focus.
That’s something I have complained about quite a few times myself, and it’s no better in Windows 10. I have no idea why Microsoft hasn’t paid any attention to this, but it shouldn’t be that difficult to determine if a user is actively typing something — on a virtual or a physical keyboard — and then prevent other apps from stealing focus.
Articles which have as their headline “Why Something Sucks”– usually suck.
This one’s no different. It’s not even really an article, it’s just a list of pet peeves in bullet point format.
It’s like an angry powerpoint presentation without transitions.
The more posts I read where people are whining about the Windows filesystem, the more I keep thinking of how much of a total joke it is in Linux. It amounts to nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black. It’s kind of funny that my personal solution to the idiocy is exactly the same whether I’m using Windows or Linux – make my own dir and stick everything in there. Easy to maintain, easy to backup, easy to migrate.
And I also can’t help but to think if Microsoft forced the filesystem, these same people would be throwing a fit about it. I swear some people just aren’t happy if they aren’t rambling & complaining about Microsoft and/or Windows.
ilovebeer,
Interesting Trivia: Apparently “rests me to say” is a Dutch expression, rests me to say. (Am I doing it right, Thom?)
http://www.osnews.com/thread?515893
I recall testing Gobo Linux a few years back. I loved the file layout but it had some major problems, no sound for example.
They’ve had a major update since then, to GoboLinux 15, but it doesn’t seem like a project that’s making much progress. Even the online user forum has disappeared.
Bobthearch,
I know…It’s sad because I think they’ve done a great job with FS layout, which I’m sure a lot of people would prefer regardless of their OS background. But in the end it isn’t enough to make the distro successful. It’s so niche that even those of us who love it can’t justify supporting it.
Way back in my own distro I tried similar ideas, but I was fighting the grain the whole time, anything I needed to add to the OS required patches. Ultimately I gave up, even though I thought it was better, because I lacked the resources to maintain it. It reverted to a more standard legacy linux layout, although I did make use of symlinks to replace some of the branches.
Edited 2015-08-14 16:19 UTC
So really, the only way we would ever see all these more or less global changes to the OS is if some ideology really takes off to get everyone to suddenly drop legacy.
I like the ideas behind logical file structure, rootless, isolated package installs, atomic rollback versioning, etc. but they are all or nothing ideals. Unless some ideology gets all of the features into the same OS, none will probably take hold.
I’m pretty sure Appdata is different in every version of Windows. If developers follow Microsoft’s naming convention by only creating folders via the defined location strings, like %appdata%, all is well. The problem is developers are a rare breed of antisocial, counter-intuitive nitwits. You all know who you are.
I preferred PROFILES rather than USERS for, well, profiles. (HOME is better yet.) And I preferred C:\PROGRAMS over %APPDATA%. (~/BIN being better yet.) And I preferred %USERDATA% sub folders over the triple-headed APPDATA strategies. The list goes on ad nauseum. But I get it. Developers have NIMBY syndrome.
I’ve lost count of the number of PC’s I’ve resuced because of huge amounts of crap in the %APPDATA% tree.
Because the root directory is hidden normal users don’t know what goes in in there.
If my memory serves me right, the last time I cleaned one out I retrieved more than 400Gb of space.
VMware is a major space eater (along with MS)
Total abject failure of OS design if you ask me.
I completely forgot about that. AppData is hidden by default, so most users don’t even know about it. Now, THAT might be the weirdest aspect of it. User data hidden from user.
Dot-files and -directories are also hidden by default, how’s that any different?
For me it is different, simply because they are placed in /home. Since /home is visible, and user knows about it, user can easily back it up and doesn’t need to understand much about /home content.
On the other hand, if you are not aware of existence or function of APPDATA, you are likely to miss it during the backup process.
Someone mentioned a tool that can do this. But if you need a specialized application to replace simple “cp -r /home .”, that is a bad design for me.
I still see hypocrisy, you are applying different logic to Windows than to Linux just for the sakes of it. You know about the dot-files in ~/, so you know to back them up, but somehow the same logic doesn’t apply to APPDATA?
~/ is visible, just as your User-folder is visible under Windows, so the exact same procedure applies: you back up your user-folder and POOF, the settings are also backed up.
In principle yes, in practice it works so-so. The best option is to use specialized tools for this.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear about it, this was not so much about me. Even though I keep using words like “I”, “me”, “my system” and so on. English is not my primary language, so I lack necessary “finesse”.
I am primarily concerned about average users who come to help (say on Notepad++ forum where I have spent countless hours helping people), and I see genuine confusion as to where stuff is.
My system will get twisted to my liking no matter what, I just see a genuine opportunity to improve Windows experience
That, right there. ~/ is not the same as APPDATA. Dot-files and dot-dirs are the equivalent of APPDATA. ~/ is the user’s home dir and the dot-files and dot-dirs reside under there, just as APPDATA resides under the user’s home dir under Windows. If you back up the user’s home dir you back up their APPDATA, too, just as you do with the Linux-equivalents.
Now I see your point.
You are right, comparing ~ and APPDATA is somewhat of comparing apples and oranges. I stand corrected here.
It’s why ~/home is superior by design. Windows NT 4 wasn’t so bad, because between c:\program files and c:\profiles, you basically had everything backed up. God forbid you had mobile profiles turned on in which case you had some abstract bdc with an old profile copy being loaded local because the pdc was timing out.
We had easy to follow local and network designs, then Microsoft threw a wrench into everything with each new f****ing improvement. It was easier to tell end users to look on G:\ for group files and H:\ for private folders. But they keep persistent with kludges under Windows.
Although few machines had floppy drives we still wasted A:\ and B:\ addressing. WTH they couldn’t have made boot drives A:\ by default is one of the worst decisions. But when all the add-on CDROMs, iomega floppies, thumb drives, etc. suddenly grew out to G:\ we had a problem. And now we have a new kludge mounting folder shares into the addressing kludge to make it even more screwed up. All because nobody could made solid design decisions.
APPDATA, idiotic LIBRARY defaults, and C:\Program Files(X64) are simply more of the same.
Edited 2015-08-14 15:34 UTC
Two things I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere:
1. The network data counter resets on a restart, but not on a cold boot. I usually remember now to do an immediate restart when I fire up the computer, but I sometimes forget – mildly irritating when you’re trying to keep track of data usage.
I’m a little surprised nobody else has mentioned this – perhaps somebody here could test, to see whether it’s just my machine?
2. Upon upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10, the installation dates of Office 2010 and all the updates to it were bumped to the date I did the upgrade. The patches this week have repeated this for most of the Office updates. This too is a little irritating – combined with the automatic updates, it’s now more difficult to keep track of *new* updates to Office. (It would be rather more annoying if I still had multiple Office installations I wanted to update manually.)
As for some other stuff:
I think the visuals are mixed but a net loss – I can live with it.
I think most non-expert users should hold off a little while until collections of privacy tips are widely known.
Compatibility – it breaks existing versions of Sandboxie (and the beta versions Invincea are pushing out the door have massive latency issues).