Windows 10 updates?

[Manolo Sobrino]

The deal breaker for me is mandatory updates. I understand the benefits for many users, but there's simply no way I'm getting there. I want to have the last word on what's on my computer, because it's my tool, with mandatory updates it's Microsoft's. Now they're adding features, later they might remove them or even ban things that I can do now and there's no way to go back (Microsoft do botch updates from time to time and include drivers you may not really want). If I wanted a closed ecosystem I'd be using a Mac, thank you, but no thank you.

To add insult to injury, there's this new policy of switching to rolling releases by forcing Home version users to test the patches that Pro version users will have to apply four months later whether they like it or not. Have they lost their mind?

And then, there's the point that Katie raises. It's bonkers to go through a system upgrade in a production machine to get a beta OS on day one. They have rushed this release for strategic reasons, there's a big update coming in October (Threshold wave 2), and something like Windows 10.1 coming up next year (Redstone). You have one year to upgrade for free and very likely get a more stable version.

Sounds like overall the upgrade has been a success, that's a great accomplishment for the company, it wasn't easy at all. There's a lot of things that can go awry in such an upgrade (I've checked tomshardware forum because I couldn't believe it's been that smooth for everybody, and yes indeed, it broke some machines). Under the hood, Windows is a very, very complex beast prone to break in esoteric ways. For instance, try to fix a corrupt .NET setup. No, it can't always be done without wiping the whole thing.

My latest machine (Lenovo laptop with an awesome not U version i7 Haswell) came with Windows 8.1. I finally got it to work just like I want it. Removed the silly corner actions save for one, installed Classic Shell (why did I hesitate for so long?) and Classic Explorer (no more breadcrumbs, yippee!!). It boots to the desktop, has a great Start menu without metro stuff there and virtual desktops via mDesktop happen to work fine. I also changed font rendering, I hate the new one. I have disabled automatic updates and I can remove whatever I want. It has support until 2023, don't have to worry about what "supported lifetime of the device" means for Windows 10 (is it OEM support? is it 2 or 4 years?) and it is working beautifully. A free upgrade is not worth my time. There's no reason for me to switch to Windows 10 and a few for not to (besides mandatory updates, there's the deprecation of even more good old APIs I'm used to, want to change default programs?). I don't need Cortana, nor a browser (not really using Microsoft web browsers for a decade) without extensions that can't block ads, nor a huge Start Menu that really isn't, nor even more notifications and yet another UI change, this time with no contrast between active and background windows. The only cloud service I need is Dropbox, and that can be replaced as well.

After 20 years of Windows registry tweaking, my next desktop is going to be a Linux one with any Windows-only stuff virtualised. At least that would be my own choices system. Not sure about the distro right now, I don't have a clear picture about what's going on with systemd. I have a soft spot for Slackware -not so sure about it for the desktop- and I have to test Arch. Maybe I'll go back to Debian and Ubuntu or give another chance to FreeBSD. I've been moving to platform-agnostic software for a while getting ready for it. For the next laptop, I'll wait and see. I've always liked Apple's Air breed... On the other hand, Thinkpads are linux-friendly .

BTW, does anybody know if Voidtools' "everything" search engine works with W10? There's a 'without everything' and a 'with everything' way of dealing with your thousands of relevant files, the latter being the more productive by a huge factor.