Could someone please design a not horrible OS?

[escrow4]

The first thing I wanted to murder was all of the crap that gets bundled in. Some of it was Dell, and I get that, but plenty of it is baked into windows. The start menu begins as just a giant billboard for other services. The action center chirps irritatingly all the damn time. Cortana is a great idea that is implemented terribly and forces using Edge, which still sucks (and even if it didn't suck, let me use the browser I want).

Mostly Windows 10 feels like it is trying desperately to be 1) Cool, 2) Mobile, even though it's a goddamn desktop OS, and 3) everything to everyone.

- Start Menu, can be fiddled with and suggestions disabled
- Cortana, can be shut up and disabled
- Edge eh, use Chrome
- Action Centre can be disabled (turn system icons on/off under the control panel -> system -> notifications and actions)
- Notifications can mostly be adjusted and shut up

Don't see any issues there.

 

[Mushkins]

The first thing I wanted to murder was all of the crap that gets bundled in. Some of it was Dell, and I get that, but plenty of it is baked into windows. The start menu begins as just a giant billboard for other services. The action center chirps irritatingly all the damn time. Cortana is a great idea that is implemented terribly and forces using Edge, which still sucks (and even if it didn't suck, let me use the browser I want).

Mostly Windows 10 feels like it is trying desperately to be 1) Cool, 2) Mobile, even though it's a goddamn desktop OS, and 3) everything to everyone.

So wait. Instead of taking two seconds to remove a handful of live tiles you aren't interested in from the Start Bar and your *own personal* notification preferences in the action center, you'd rather throw the whole OS in the garbage? This is my start bar, and it took me less time to set it up that way than it did to write this post.

Is this a troll thread?

 

[RampantAndroid]

My start menu is a bit more full than yours, but it's because I have things like Inkscape, Sublime, Visual Studio and so on in there. My desktop is devoid of icons beyond the garbage bin. Action center doesn't do anything - no notifications for me. I regularly have the PC booted for a month or more and no crashes...

And onedrive is a godsend for me. If I need something synced on multiple devices, onedrive. Stuff like my inkscape work, or website code. If I want my music everywhere, onedrive - heck, Groove music will play my library of music off onedrive - no need to sync it. If I want to back stuff up, onedrive...

 

[JimmiG]

Well it would be better if the OS came with most features, tiles, app suggestions etc. disabled, and then you could enable the things you actually use.
It's like buying a house and finding it full of someone else's furnishings, paintings etc...

 

[sweenish]

Well it would be better if the OS came with most features, tiles, app suggestions etc. disabled, and then you could enable the things you actually use.
It's like buying a house and finding it full of someone else's furnishings, paintings etc...

People pay interior designers to do exactly this.

 

[nerp]

Well it would be better if the OS came with most features, tiles, app suggestions etc. disabled, and then you could enable the things you actually use.
It's like buying a house and finding it full of someone else's furnishings, paintings etc...

You are the minority. Most people don't want to and never touch that stuff. Have you ever worked on someone's aincent machine? You might see a MSN and AOL icon on the desktop if it's a 10-year-old dell. Never deleted.

 

[Ketchup]

You are the minority. Most people don't want to and never touch that stuff. Have you ever worked on someone's aincent machine? You might see a MSN and AOL icon on the desktop if it's a 10-year-old dell. Never deleted.

When I was first trying out Windows 10, I felt like JimmiG. But the more I installed, the more I felt like nerp. You don't put all of these features on an OS and disable them right out the door. Same thing for having a Microsoft account as the main option when you install. But leave the "turn off" option for geeks like us to turn it off. And that is exactly what MS did. That's not enough to stop people from crying about MS spying and data mining, but hey, they tried.

 

[PingSpike]

Largest beef by far with Windows 10 is forced updates. I have no idea what that OS is going to transform into next year even if I worked around all the things I don't like in it. But with the way things are I suspect I won't like the changes at all. Windows 8.1 is actually better because at least I have a recourse from having the carpet pulled out from under me.

 

[Ketchup]

Largest beef by far with Windows 10 is forced updates. I have no idea what that OS is going to transform into next year even if I worked around all the things I don't like in it. But with the way things are I suspect I won't like the changes at all. Windows 8.1 is actually better because at least I have a recourse from having the carpet pulled out from under me.

Hmm, OK. 99.9% of home users have updates set to automatic and don't have a problem. Heck, I have my updates set to automatic, and never had a problem. What exactly are you expecting to lose with not having an option that an incredibly small portion of people actually do anything with?

 

[sweenish]

Everybody likes to think that their build is some super sensitive snowflake.

I know a lot of people are just bringing their work home as far as vetting updates goes.

Others are just stupid, where "updating on my schedule" means never updating. I can never tell which is which.

 

[nerp]

I find that the people who get furious about things like automatic updates often 'tweak' their systems and only end up hobbling performance; install questionable utilities that do outrageous things like install self-signing certificates that open a huge attack vector on the entire computer and insist on strange ass-backwards ways of doing simple things out of stubbornness instead of facts.

 

[morkus64]

Hmm, OK. 99.9% of home users have updates set to automatic and don't have a problem. Heck, I have my updates set to automatic, and never had a problem. What exactly are you expecting to lose with not having an option that an incredibly small portion of people actually do anything with?

99.9% means that 1 out of every 1000 have a problem. According to Microsoft, 300,000,000 devices run Windows 10. That means 300,000 systems have problems.

THIS is the problem with most OSes. They are designed for the 99.9% (or, more realistically, the 99%). I'm not saying Windows doesn't have a place - most people have garbage computers running a garbage OS, and that's fine for people who aren't pushing anything. But for those of us - the majority of Anandtech, I'd wager - who aren't happy with the status quo, it would be nice if someone made a compatible OS that didn't suck.

 

[Ketchup]

99.9% means that 1 out of every 1000 have a problem. According to Microsoft, 300,000,000 devices run Windows 10. That means 300,000 systems have problems....

No it does not, but nice play on words. 99.9% don't touch the default settings of automatic updates (and it's probably a higher percentage than that). Is that clear enough for you?

 

[PingSpike]

Hmm, OK. 99.9% of home users have updates set to automatic and don't have a problem. Heck, I have my updates set to automatic, and never had a problem. What exactly are you expecting to lose with not having an option that an incredibly small portion of people actually do anything with?

The ability to uninstall or not install updates that break things, remove things or change things that were working before or that I was using before.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Largest beef by far with Windows 10 is forced updates. I have no idea what that OS is going to transform into next year even if I worked around all the things I don't like in it. But with the way things are I suspect I won't like the changes at all. Windows 8.1 is actually better because at least I have a recourse from having the carpet pulled out from under me.

Well, I mean...that's just W10 right? It's a moving target. If you want to be sure that it'll be the same, there's an LTSB version on MSDN. Otherwise, a lot of the updates are cumulative. So I mean...why bother trying to skip them? If you skip this one, the next one will get you anyway.

The ability to uninstall or not install updates that break things, remove things or change things that were working before or that I was using before.

You can still uninstall updates. It's in the old control panel (fastest way to the old CPL is Win+X.)

 

[William Gaatjes]

So wait. Instead of taking two seconds to remove a handful of live tiles you aren't interested in from the Start Bar and your *own personal* notification preferences in the action center, you'd rather throw the whole OS in the garbage? This is my start bar, and it took me less time to set it up that way than it did to write this post.

Is this a troll thread?

I agree with him in to the extent that the GUI is fugly. No borders and use buttons mixed with text that are also buttons. Plain fugly.

But there are at least solutions for that.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Hmm, OK. 99.9% of home users have updates set to automatic and don't have a problem. Heck, I have my updates set to automatic, and never had a problem. What exactly are you expecting to lose with not having an option that an incredibly small portion of people actually do anything with?

It is nice to have that option. I had problems with windows updates that caused problems. It would have been nice if there was still an option for the geeks...

 

[William Gaatjes]

This is interesting :

http://winaero.com/blog/get-windows-7-theme-for-windows-10/

Make windows 10 look a bit more like windows 7. It seems microsoft did their best to make windows 10 refuse themes microsoft does not want but there are ways. Until of course a forced update kills that option.