Last October at the Windows 10 event in New York City, Microsoft officially unveiled the Windows 10 Creators Update, codenamed “Redstone 2”. At the event, Microsoft stated that the update will be released in “early 2017” but we didn’t know when exactly the update will arrive.
Until now, anyway.
Per my sources, Microsoft will be releasing the Windows 10 Creators Update this April.
The more regular, smaller updates Windows gets now is such a huge step up from the monolithic releases of yore.
I like a lot of the direction Microsoft has been going with their stuff. Might even replace my MBA(2013) with Windows 10 convertible shortly.
I’ll be downvoted to hell for this but windows 10 feels a bit like arch linux nowadays. Stuff is new and shiny but it breaks often.
I’ll admit i’m boring as hell but i much prefer LTS releases and only security updates in between. I’m too old for this shit.
But then again, if MS would have released something polished in the first place maybe the wouldn’t have to “release now, fix later”.
Windows Modern is a complete mystery to me. They could’ve updated the looks of W7, implemented some new features and polished the shit out what already worked, replaced the kernel and whatnot. Would’ve been effing magic. Instead they decide to build the titanic. And patch it up as they go. As i said, i’m too old for this shit…
I haven’t noticed anything breaking from release to release myself, but everything that was janky in the first release (esp. the start menu) is still janky. Plus, they’re really shifty about changing how you neuter Windows 10 to turn off the crap you don’t want, so it’s slightly different from release to release, making it harder to Google this information.
Facebook does a similar thing, where they change up the privacy controls every so often to make it more difficult for people to find up to date information in regard to turning stuff off.
The news is full of stuff breaking at an alarming frequency.
Small anecdote: last time I went home my dad mentioned he was really annoyed because his laptop got upgraded to Windows 10 despite his clicking the close button of the upgrade dialogue (he was savvy enough to work this out, but then got by the sneaky changes they made to schedule the upgrade automatically).
Back again over Christmas, my dad mentioned that “the internet stopped working a couple of weeks ago”, and asked me to look at it. Half an hour later, I remembered reading about the update breaking DHCP. Two hours of futzing around setting a manual wireless IP, applying updates and multiple reboots later, I got it going again, though it still seemed somewhat intermittent. He would never have ever been able to go through that; it took me long enough as it was.
Point of the story: how many hundreds of thousands of computers around the world, right now, continue to be broken and unable to get working networking because of that one botched update, and the general lack of knowledge of what’s wrong let alone how to correct it. Given the forced updates, I’d imagine the number is not small. And this is just one problem out of many that got reported. Most people won’t follow this stuff in the tech news and will be helpless to fix it.
The attention to QA and testing at Microsoft appears to be less than one would like for something which so many people and businesses rely upon. After the unethical tactics they engaged in to force it upon us, the least they could do is provide something which is reliable, but it continue to be a half-baked mess.
Yeah, I know there have been things that broke (like webcams), but I *personally* haven’t ran into issues.
I was thinking along the same lines. The rolling, small updates is good for (some) techies, but it’s horrible for more typical end-users. For example, just this past week a lady approached me about rescuing data off an external drive as Windows 10 had stopped recognizing it after the latest round of updates.
The drive, it turned out, was 100% fine, but Windows no longer recognized the extrnal disk. Maybe a driver was dropped or something in the latest round of updates. Anyway, my Linux box could read the drive fine and I just copied the files to another external drive her computer did still recognize. I may end up with a perfectly working spare external drive because Windows no longer see it due to Microsoft’s new rolling update schedule.
It seems to me that the dev tools creators have too much leverage in the internal power hierarchy at Microsoft. And they only recognize “OOH, shiny!!!!”
Back when Windows Phone was still relevant, the damage was mostly contained to that platform. However, it seems that even the toolchain devs @ MS understand that that ship has sailed and they require more visibility.
Just yesterday, the “modern” start menu/taskbar hanged on me for whatever reason for half an hour or so. Every other program worked, alt-tabbing worked but that was it. Not the first time that has happened as well. But, hey, the “modern” is finished, lets chase another pie in the sky, for example, initiate a tug-of-war with Apple over the mindshare of artists!
I don’t understand how you think software dev works, but its not magic. Complex systems like operating systems have bugs and can’t magically be updated with kernels without bugs. That’s fantasy land. Windows 10 ( look at my comment history, I hate microsoft, so It pains me to say this) is really, really good quality. Now, I kinda understand there are some privacy issues, but for stability and performance as a desktop, its pretty good. As good as 7 ever was, but with some more useful features that I’d been dying to get. So I’m pretty sure Microsoft will take them away with Windows 11 or win 10, the evil release. But for now, its pretty pretty good.
I do understand that updating a kernel can be problematic. The kernel has been the least of my concerns with windows 10 however. In fact i freaking love the kernel.
I’m not going to write a long and detailed post about what exactly it is that bugs me about W10 because frankly it’s a lot of things. And we’re different people and apparently you think windows 10 is as good as windows 7 ever was. Well, if that’s how you feel then congratulations because i was perfectly happy with windows 7 and was looking forward with great anticipation on how much better “the next windows” would be. Because from my POV, you couldn’t possibly fuck this up. Turns out you can.
Yeah, I think thats safe to say, if you want to use a windows OS that is no longer getting security updates. And one of the first complaints about an operating system is the default mail client. I’d say we are very very different people.
About windows 10 mail, i felt that’s just really representative of the whole “modern” situation. Also, i like to complain
And i’m not planning on using W7 after it’s EOL. So unless something magical happens, i’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The nice thing about 10 vs 8 is you can completely ignore the old metro/modern apps. I don’t see them, or interact with them.
The *changes* might be smaller than previous full new versions (or even service packs), but the downloads are still full-size. Also irritating is that if a machine hasn’t been used for a few months, the old version is brought up to date first, before the new version is applied. (And that is once the Update system starts working properly – when doing this a couple of weeks ago I had to deselect the “Give me updates for other Microsoft products when I update Windows” option before updates would work at all, then reselect it after Windows was all done.)
Let me know when Windows doesn’t try to babysit me and pay attention to everything I do. I don’t need/want Cortana. I don’t need/want advertising sent my way (especially for an OS you have to pay for). There’s nothing Microsoft needs to know about how I use my hardware. And I’ll seek updates if/when I want them. None of this forced update & forced reboots nonsense.
Like you, I am unwilling to install this crap and use it as a main OS.
However, I recently installed the Enterprise edition in a VirtualBox VM to have a play around with. Classic Shell gets shut of the awful Start Menu and replaces it with one more akin to Windows 7, getting rid of those godawful advertising squares.
Cortana the advertising/spying whore, can be turned off, but will remain in the background. You have to delve into group policy or regedit to get shut entirely. Installing Spybot Anti-Beacon is the easiest way to get rid of it, it will neutralize all telemetry/spyware/advertising, and in my case disabled Cortana without having to regedit or delve into group policy.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet discovered a way to shut off forced updates, I’m continuing to experiment with that. I’m also looking for a way to revert the explorer windows to something more like Windows 7 as I find them bloody awful too.
As it is, there is no way I would install this crap on a hard drive, not until I can get it as I want it, NOT Microsoft!
Did you forget to update it to 1607? You might find your group policy settings don’t get rid of Cortana anymore. Worse, at least for corporate environments, is that the policies to disable the Windows Store are now deliberately ignored by Microsoft.
I have no idea if group policy still has the option to disable Cortana or not, I haven’t looked. Like I said, anti-beacon got rid of it before I looked at group policy or editing the registry.
It’s all moot though really as there’s no way I would run this as a main OS, I just stuck it in a VM to play about with. That’s likely where it will stay too.
Maybe I’m just not paying enough attention but I wonder why more companies aren’t giving Microsoft a big middle finger for some of the crap they’re pulling. You would think the type of control Microsoft has stripped away, and the type of crap they’re forcing on all of `your` users would be a big huge red stop sign for Windows 10. If I were using Windows in a corporate environment there’s no way in hell I would tolerate all the logging/spying/probing/etc, …sorry I mean “telemetry” they’re doing. Nor would I go for spamming advertising to my workers. If Microsoft wants to do that, they should pay corporations for lost productivity from their employees being distracted by crap/ads.
So now I get to have my RSAT tools deleted again (by design, mind you) and spend two hours reinstalling them because the stupid MSU package thinks they’re still installed. It’s starting to be desktop Linux in Windows land. I hate this crap. Luckily I only have to deal with it work, as I’m still all Apple at home and, as long as Microsoft keeps pulling this rolling release crap, I’m staying that way.
Just use Windows 10 N LTSB — it’s the only good version of Windows 10. Why? Here is why:
* No Cortana
* No Edge
* No MS Store
* No advertisements
* No Metro or bundled Metro apps
* No Windows Media Player or it’s components
* No alpha-grade buggy updates (only security updates are provided)
* Ability to configure updating behavior (auto-install, ask for install, ask for download…)
* Ability to control automatic restarts after updating
* Ability to control spying (to some degree, at least)
Basically, it’s like using good old Windows 7, just updated and more optimized.
Edited 2017-01-04 11:34 UTC
As i understand it, MS doesn’t really want people to run the LTSB flavor. It’s an Enterprise edition. Enterprise is only available to an organization with a volume licensing agreement, or through a new $7 per month subscription program.
There is no way in hell i’m paying MS $7 a month, for something that should be default IMHO. They should be paying me $7 a month for beta-testing their crap instead.
But thanks for the heads up.
You are correct. But since I have MSDN subscription access to N LTSB (among many other products), I enjoy using it very much 🙂
And, of course, you can always find cracks/activators for it if you don’t have MSDN or corporate subscription…