Once you do, it's rock solid, but it should be OOTB and it annoys me that it isn't. It leaves those not familiar with Windows with a bad first impression, and those tech savvy enough to install Linux just don't come back.
But an accurate impression. Windows main focus is Microsoft and partners product sales and ad delivery. No matter how much you remove after install, they're likely to override your very obvious wishes not to be bothered in a forced update.
And yes, I've seen first-hand the updates steamrollering your preferences and setting them to nice, MS-friendly 'please target me with marketing' options. I gave up Windows in 2008, was Mac full-time until 2015 and now I run Ubuntu exclusively, at home and work. Canonical aren't perfect, but they're a bit more open about their commercial expectations than MS will ever be.
The funny thing is that Microsoft know that the normal OOTB experience is bad, and created the "Signature" effort to offer people PCs with clean Windows installations. Then they seem to have forgotten that, and started putting their own passive-aggressive "value-adds" into Windows 10.
From 2012: https://www.itworld.com/article/2718342/consumerization/here...
With Windows 10, that is unfortunately not true anymore because MS is the provider of a lot of the crapware.
I was very happy with an Asus Zenbook I bought that had the PURE (+ sometimes a number) suffix on the model name. Those laptops come with a clean windows install + any needed drivers.
It only saves an hour or two for yourself, but I wish more (or really all) manufacturers supplied these models.
Very nice piece of kit, but even that came loaded with ads, and would search Bing and the app store every time you searched the start menu.
It's little things like this that make Windows so much worse. It takes ten minutes in Group Policy to turn it off, but the majority of users will never go near group policy, and will just assume that is just the way Windows works.
You're just scratching the surface on how user-hostile Windows can be. The ads, bing crap, and telemetry are simply horrific considering it's a paid product.
Windows Update is still a mess. It takes me less than a couple of minutes to pacman -Syu, while windows updates can take HOURS.
Some random windows service can still suddenly ramp up disk usage or cpu to 100%. There are two control panels. File Explorer is still terrible. The list goes on.
It isn't a matter of tech savvy, and pretending that it is is part of the problem with the Linux Desktop community, which is the worst part about using a Linux Desktop if you ask me.
The system has a whole lot of issues, many of them somehow even worse that dealing with Windows 10's bullshit, or else I'd have switched myself by now. Even Linus calls out the Linux Desktop for being pretty crap. Developing for it is a nightmare too, especially in regards to distribution.
I'm trying not to go on a rant here. Point is, there are plenty of reasons to not want to use a Linux Desktop aside from not being "tech savvy" enough.
Also, I disagree that it is getting better every year. Individual pieces may work better once they're properly configured, but on the whole the system is becoming more and more of a complicated kludge of intertwined, abstracted, obfuscated, and otherwise non-transparent mechanisms. I personally don't see much hope for it as long as that trend continues.
Pros:
- It's fantastically fast, I dislike going back to win 7
- Some of the utilities are nicer
Cons:
- Random scheduled tasks fire in the background at really annoying times. I installed a completely clean install of win 10 and some fail and then constantly re-run as they've not been marked as completed (e.g. .net 32-bit optimization service, some sort of memory optimization service). On my desktop I don't notice, but on my laptop if I leave it unattended the fan often starts going crazy. I've tried fixing the broken services but never really got to the bottom why. What's most annoying is the when you then try and disable or replace these services with dummy exes, windows update will "helpfully" "fix" them and re-enable them. There are also various scheduled tasks that automatically re-enable themselves on restart. It was also constantly trying to run one windows update that kept failing and it never told me, but would go through the whole rigmarole of doing incredibly expensive windows update trying to install this one driver.
- New start menu is bad, it's simply just not as usable as win 7, you end up always searching where win 7 seem to just be easier to quickly find things without typing anything
- Tiles are generally annoying
- New windows apps are annoyingly fancy and touch screen centric, for example there's no reason a calculator should be semi-transparent, it's actually really visually distracting
- Telem crap is incredibly user-hostile, invasive and almost impossible to get rid of
- Ctrl-alt-delete is partially broken and no longer works seamlessly. You have to do some crazy stuff like create a new desktop to get off a crashed program
- Explorer (file explorer) just seems to have become a real mess since XP and searching is agonisingly slow. Especially if you're doing it on a folder that contains bower or npm folders, in 2017 windows still struggles with long file paths
This had been going on for months too.
I think that's my biggest beef with Windows 10, you're not supposed to muck around with the scheduler running tasks when idle or the updates, but it's so brittle that when it fails it does really stupid things without telling you.
Remember when we used to say the same thing about Linux? Funny how times change.
Is writing proper docs so bad not even getting these fine people working for you for free makes it worth the effort?
Not that I necessarily disagree with their position on the matter, but you can't escape the consequences.
There is also a reason, why Apple won't ship hardware or drivers, that they don't have source for.
Really? Which version are you using? On a clean install of Win 10 Pro, I fell foul of several known issues. A failing update to Anniversary edition required reinstallation, and the Creator's update only made it through after initially crashing mid-update. The fast shutdown (which I wasn't aware of) caused me a problem with network connectivity on moving the machine which was hard to troubleshoot because it was unexpected. Then to top it all off once I got it running properly, the start-menu was still full of ads.
Maybe if I could get hold of the enterprise edition, with all the ads/telemetry disabled by default, it'd be a better experience, but my faith in the updates has truly gone and as a result we now just leave the Win10 install of the dual-boot alone.
I wouldn’t use any other version of Windows, Enterprise is the only usable version.
You shouldn’t have to do that, though, especially on Enterprise!
Edit: I cannot find a source, so take this with a grain of salt, however I do clearly remember reading it.
Couple of refs for anyone interested:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29544745#p2954...
Kind of a glaring security issue.