Ditto - 9-year-old MBP with SSD replacing disk about 3 years ago. Still going very strong.
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I enjoy Arch on my desktop (because I take some strange masochistic pleasure in keeping that system working and configuring everything manually) but even there, I have enough headaches (my network card’s drivers aren’t in the kernel yet so I need to build them from source, but the AUR package is broken so I have to patch it by hand and rebuild every time the kernel updates…)
For laptops, where I want wireless networking to work and power management to be optimized for battery life, and don’t want to find myself with an unbootable system hundreds of miles from home, I really can’t be bothered to do all that stuff myself. Apple knows how to optimize a system for power management and reliability better than I ever will.
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There’s still one huge difference between buying a windows pc and a mac. With a windows pc, Microsoft is so sure you’re trying to rip them off, anything that requires an OS reinstall is a major hassle. Meanwhile, Apple has made enough money off you via the hardware so PITA copy protection is nonexistant.
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In many of the most important aspects though Win10 is just polished dogshit, i mean it’s clearly not even remotely close to being the best version of Windows (that still remains 7) because it fundamentally plays to Microsoft’s tune and not the user’s. I’m gonna quote Ascaris over on askwoody here because they cover a whole raft of issues that users have been battling with for years now…
I would have Microsoft copy the rest of Ubuntu’s release schedule and have every fourth release be a long-term support branch (for all versions, Home through enterprise) that gets five years of security and bug fixes.
I would restore full control over updates, as in every previous version of Windows. No deferrals, active hours, or any other silliness required, and certainly no need to use aftermarket programs to block Windows Updates. Do them when the hardware owner gives the ok, if the PC is so configured, and leave it at that. No “Update and shut down” or “Update and restart” choices that don’t include a non-update version or any of that nonsense.
I would reinstate professional testers and stop trying to use your own consumers against their will for that purpose. This is a paid product, so treat it as such .
There should be a single master OFF switch for all telemetry (not counting Microsoft Updates, CRL update requests, malware definition update requests, and that kind of thing; these things have their own settings and are not properly ‘telemetry’) that stays off once set. If people want to enable it to help MS out, that’s fine… I do opt-in for some telemetry on some programs by trusted developers, but the key word there is ‘ opt .’
Also in the “treat it like the paid product it is” vein, I would have Microsoft commit to never having any ads in any product that costs money, whether they be paid app downloads that the users did not request, messages about OneDrive specials in the Windows Explorer “sync provider” field, “Get Office” app preinstalled, or any other such thing. If they want to have a free, ad-supported, telemetry forced on version for free, meaning no activation at all and available freely to OEMs without cost or paperwork, that’s fine, and they could include an upgrade to the paid version as an option, and that paid version should be ad and monetization free.
I would have all “apps” uninstallable, including MS Store, Edge, Xbox, and all the rest. Not “disabled,” in the way that IE supposedly could be in XP following the settlement with the US government (the thing still popped up as much as it ever had before when I “disabled” it), but legitimately removed . The apps could be brought back with the “add or remove Windows features” dialog– keep a section for “Apps” in there and have each app represented with a checkbox, which would cause Windows to redownload the app from MS and install it. It’s a lot more likely that someone will be able to get the app back by doing that than if they do as I would and use the nucler option (forcefully removing it with aftermarket programs and/or Powershell scripts, which are pretty much irreversible).
Because the MS Store would not guaranteed to be there, there should not be any important things (like nVidia control panel) that MS would attempt to have distributed only through their Store. If you want to have the store, fine, but don’t ever make it mandatory to get anything. People often liken the Store to Linux repos, but no program is ever ONLY found in any distro’s repo. It’s not the existence of the thing that I object to, but the way that it is forced on people. MS did this in 8 also, where the 8.1 upgrade was from the Store, not Windows Update. That should stop.
I would have the user interface of Windows 10 reflect the device in question. If it is a desktop or laptop PC with no touchscreen, it should have a pure mouse and keyboard UI that is the equal of the UIs found in Windows 7 or XP. If it has both a discrete pointing device and a touchscreen, it should ask the user what he wants. My suggestion would be that 2 in 1 devices use the mouse UI when docked and the touch UI when in tablet mode, but they should both be distinct and optimized for the platform rather than the half and half UI that has been there since Windows 8.
The “settings” app is inferior to the old Control Panel on mouse-based PCs, and its only reason to exist at all is to be a touch-friendly but less useful (as is the norm with touch friendliness) substitute. There’s no reason to accept the compromises and limitations of the touch interface when one is not using a touch interface.
I would have the first-run setup program (do they still call it OOBE?) of Windows 10 default to an offline, non-MS account, without the increasingly difficult hurdles to find it. My guess is the actual plan is to remove the option to have a local user account, and I’d definitely do a 180 on that one.
In short, I would have Windows 10 developed with what I consider the Golden Rule of operating systems, and that’s that an OS is meant to serve the interests of the owner of the hardware, as defined by himself, and no one else. No trying to sometimes serve Microsoft and sometimes the hardware owner. It has to be 100% hardware owner and 0% everyone else, Microsoft included. Most of these problems would self-resolve if MS stopped trying to have other people’s PCs serve their own interests with Windows 10.
There seem to be two or possibly three serious problems with the way Microsoft have taken Windows and those are patch reliability, feature updates and telemetry. Susan Bradley has been doing her own business and consumer surveys covering all this and it seems like Microsoft have a ways to go yet before they get back to… well, where they used to be with patches which didn’t break more things than they fixed.
https://www.askwoody.com/newsletter/free-edition-patching-survey-consumer-2020/
An interesting aside is why a large number of people are sticking with the venerable OS for the time being.
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I’ve never found a pc trackpad that is anywhere as good as the Mac ones. Higher end systems get close but the sub $1000 range they seem to universally be garbage. As this is a primary way to interface with the computer it’s a pretty big deal breaker.
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That is good to know - can you share more details? We’re using the corporate version in my place of business - which may have kept that particular ‘feature’ from being included.
This is especially true of laptops. Build quality is extremely important in a machine that gets tossed in a backpack, especially if you want it to last 5+ years, and the unibody aluminum Macs are top notch (keyboards notwithstanding, but the new models seem to be on the right track there.)
A caveat tho - I now keep my 2012 mac mini as a way to run my 32-bit Mac programs if I need them, since Apple has now “upgraded” to only run 64-bit programs. That’s pretty frustrating.
There was exactly one model year of macs with 32-bit Intel processors. Everything since 2007 has been 64 bit. An IA-32-only Mac app is nearly as out of date as a PowerPC-only one. There’s really no good excuse for any app which was updated after 2006 to not support 64 bit Intel.
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Agree. Much of this, I think, drives what I mean when I say I “notice” the W10 UI more often than MacOS; it’s distracting when the operating system seems to have been designed for a different use-case than mine.
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I recently wanted to update the firmware of my desktop’s logic board (OK, fine, update the “BIOS” of its “motherboard” if you must) and found that the instructions to do this were only provided in the form of a Word document. I downloaded it, thinking it would be no problem at all since I was on Windows 10 and Word is a Microsoft product, right? After all, I can open a Word doc in quicklook or Preview on my Mac out of the box (or even edit it with Pages, which is free), and that’s not even a Microsoft system!
But nope. Out of the box, Windows 10 can’t view a Word doc. As far as I can tell you have to pay for an Office license, or else use a third party viewer app. There used to be a free first-party read-only version of Word, but it’s now unsupported and doesn’t even get security updates. What a joke!
(And no, I have no clue why MSI provided that info as a word doc instead of plaintext or just putting the darn instructions on the webpage instead of making me download something. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve been sent important info in proprietary Microsoft Office formats. It’s absurd.)
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Yeah, i would say they have designed Win10 for Microsoft’s use case and not the user’s. The future i think many people are also worrying about is this ‘Windows as a service’ that now plagues their flagship Office products. It defeats me that when all the other major tech companies are being hauled in front of senators to face questions over monopolistic practices that Microsoft escapes their notice, despite recently purchasing ZeniMax and all its subsidiaries.
It was a while ago, so I don’t remember the exact details.
This thread on their forum sounds right. Conduit it what I remember
I get prompted once a day to resolve a auth issue with my iCloud account, a service I have never used. I have tried several times to kill it, and failed. I am a professional software developer.
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I noticed this as well. I have reported it to the moderators for investigation as it appears to be something funky going on with the WP 
Discourse integration.
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I couldn’t agree more. In general, Apple usually nails it with laptop input devices. Great keyboards and trackpads (ignoring the debacle that was the previous gen MacBook Pro’s butterfly keycaps, of course). PC laptops are often very hit or miss for keyboards and trackpads.
I’ve found that Surface laptops from Microsoft have absolutely wonderful keyboards. Not quite as good as Apple’s laptop keyboards, but still pretty good. Good key travel, good responsiveness, good feel. Most other PC laptop keyboards are “meh” at best, or nearly unusable at worst (I’m looking at you, Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards).
When it comes to trackpads, PC laptops are all fairly terrible. I fully blame Synaptics and its monopoly in this hardware space since nearly every laptop uses the same damn hardware and pile of garbage drivers for its touchpads. I have a Surface Book Pro and its trackpad manages to be pretty good most of the time at least (again, not quite as good as Apple’s trackpads but the best I’ve used on a Windows device).
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Unless you rely on lots of scripts, hacks and tools to customize your machine to your needs. Then you‘d have to replicate all that between two different systems, which is not always trivial.
That’s true. I didn’t get into all the registry crap and UI tweaks I do to make Windows preferable to how I work. But it’s way better than the Win Vista/XP days, when I had to wipe the drive and fresh install everything every 30 days.
@frauenfelder May you transition be a smooth one. For Windows’ File Explorer blues try Everything by https://www.voidtools.com/
When I need to search the content of pdf or doc files, File Explorer works remarkable well especially when sorted by relevance. If you are searching for a file name Everything performs a super fast search.
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The browser and cloud are the operating system, everything else is mostly window dressing.
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You could look into virtualisation and run all the operating systems at once on the same hardware. Then you can use the OS that is best for the task at hand.
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Whic you can do at the moment on Mac and is super useful, but won’t be possible on future Macs since they’re switching away from the Intel CPUs that makes that possible.
