Data From Windows 10 Feedback Tool Exposes Problem Areas

jones_supa writes: Two weeks in, and already a million people have tried out Windows 10 Technical Preview, reports Microsoft, along with a nice stack of other stats and feedback. Only 36% of installations are occurring inside a virtual machine. 68% of Windows 10 Technical Preview users are launching more than seven apps per day, with somewhere around 25% of testers using Windows 10 as their daily driver (26 app launches or more per day). With the help of Windows 10's built-in feedback tool, thousands of testers have made it very clear that Microsoft's new OS still has lots of irksome bugs and misses many much-needed features. ExtremeTech has posted an interesting list of the most popular gripes received, them mostly being various GUI endurances. What has your experience been with the Technical Preview?

Comments

As it is designed to do

[jamesl]

Data From Windows 10 Feedback Tool Exposes Problem Areas.

It is now headline news when a software release works as designed.

Re:As it is designed to do

[pushing-robot]

Sheesh, can't you even read the summary? This isn't just a software release working as designed. This is a Microsoft software release working as designed!

Re:As it is designed to do

[qubezz]

It works as designed, however it works against the interest of the user. A perfect example is the unmovable and unremovable search button next to the start button that opens Bing search. Just like on Windows phones with a physical search button made useless because it cannot be configured to do anything but open Bing, this is just another operating system iteration that does what Microsoft wants, users be damned.

The best reply and what every user actually wants: "be Windows 7 after I disable all the bloat and UI garbage, libraries, and homegroup cruft you put on that OS".

Re:As it is designed to do

[hairyfeet]

Oh horseshit, you are just a power user and Windows has NEVER EVER been set up for power users OOTB. Remember the damned search dog in XP? Clippy? MSFT has been trying to make things simpler and friendly since the days of MSBob and ya know what? regular Joes LOVE that shit!

I've had the Win 10 TP running on my netbook at the shop since its release so folks coming in can play with it and folks LIKE it, they LIKE having their little chat or headlines in the little start menu out of the way but easy to check, they LIKE being able to search for anything from that one little search box (which just FYI was started waaay back with XP and the Bing desktop program which did the same thing) and they LIKE how its simpler to use yet is familiar enough they don't feel lost. As for the rest of us? You can spend a whole 5 minutes in regedit and make a single reg file that will switch off everything that you as a power user don't like.

Re:As it is designed to do

[epyT-R]

Sure it has, well it used to be. They've been dumbing it down since, removing features from explorer, and win 8 was an experiment to see if they could get pc users to abandon the open desktop market and stick to closed-store fullscreen apps on their pcs. It failed. There are plenty of power users who still use windows, and they are the ones who produce the content that is consumed by mobile devices. It's bad news to fuck with that workflow flexibility.

Just because the tech mediocre out populate the tech knowledgeable doesn't mean everything should be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Those knowledgeable people are the ones producing the software (and designing the hardware) your idiot customers will consume on the devices you sell them.

No, the backlash started with vista, where a lot of the options were slowly removed from the code, or made inaccessible without system-breaking hacks. With each new release they removed a ton of efficiency and replaced it with huge, gaudy colored widgets/fonts, and tons of wasted space between them. The control panel introduced with vista is a great example of the beginning push, replacing simple easy to remember names with long convoluted phrases and lots of extra clicking. There was no reason to break the interface like this other than to force people into using the new search-for-everything paradigm. This is the source of the backlash, which hit a new high with the idiocy that is windows 8.

IIRC msbob was a market failure too.

Re:As it is designed to do

[hairyfeet]

The last "power user" version of Windows was Win2K, sorry. WinXP had the search doggy,starting with WinME they had the "wow we think you are tarded!" wizards, Windows hasn't been for the power users OOTB since business and consumer merged. Does that mean power users couldn't tweak it to get what they want? Of course not but again the topic was what you get OOTB and OOTB has been trying to dumb down since the days of MSBob, that is just how it is and why we have regedit.

I installed it

[heezer7]

In a VM. Said hey, it has a new huge start menu. Saw nothing else exciting and haven't booted it since.

Re:Windows 7

[Billly Gates]

You mean no virtual desktops, a rumored tabs in explorer, kernel level sandboxing that all browsers can use, much improved power consumption, directx 12 with low cpu overhead, and USB 3 support are not reasons to upgrade?

There seems to be a consensus that all change is for the sake of change and eye candy and XP is GOD.

This is a must for a gamer or laptop users.

Re:Windows 7

[drinkypoo]

2002 called, and Linux wants to wish Microsoft their best.

Well, except for USB3 support. That seems to work fine in Win7.

Re:Windows 7

[ADRA]

Quite literally, I'd be happy with Windows 2000 (plus a few common add-on programs) as long as their kernel/driver model were updated and games actually worked with it anymore. I held out with 2000 until like 2008 and by then I had to hack many game DLL's to ignore the XP only extensions and it was just too much hassle to stick with it. Today, Windows 7 works well enough, and with Classic Shell, everything but some annoying explorer aspects work about the same as 2000 did. No gloss, no FX, just productive bliss.

Early adopters skew results

[brunes69]

The type of people who would have the know-how to, and be willing to, download and install beta copies of windows are not typical windows users, and this is reflected in the types of requests.

Configurable wallpapers for virtual desktops? A better multi-boot menu? Give me a break. What percentage of Windows users do you suppose even know what a virtual desktop is? I am pretty sure if I asked my wife or mother their eyes would glaze over.

It's kind of embarrassing almost to see these types of things in the Top 10 issues, while I am sure there are many more worse problems that the average users will run into often. Is the VPN setup and wireless configuration in Windows 10 as horribly crippled as it was in Windows 8 for example?

Make it less ugly

[BLToday]

* Windows 10 looks fine in pictures, but using it gives me a headache. I can't find a theme that's acceptable. UI is too colorful and the tile background colors still don't make sense.

* Why can't I move applications between virtual desktops? You had it in PowerToys for Windows 95.

Re:Make it less ugly

[BLToday]

"ModernUI is all about flat, there's no more 3D, so colors help you to identify different controls and areas on the screen."

That's the major problem. The colors don't make an sense so you can't use it to navigate. You what you end up with is reading white text on randomly selected color backgrounds.

Re:Make it less ugly

[ProzacPatient]

As an artist the flat Metro look drives me crazy; the desktop looks really dull and often times all these flat colors the screen clash and there really isn't anything seperating and balancing them so I can never find a color for the window borders I feel comfortable with. The Aero theme was the pinnacle of the Windows UI in my opinion but I was even comfortable with just the classic Windows 9x/NT 4.x/2000 theme because at least there wasn't this clashing of flat colors without any seperation.

One nitpick I've had about Windows 10 is that for some reason desktop apps still have the weird squished 2:1 rectangle Min/Max/Close buttons in the windows but in the ModernUI apps they're perfectly square and look like they fit the theme. Why can't all apps have the square buttons?

26 App Launches

[Sez Zero]

That constitutes a "daily driver" machine? (BTW, I appreciate the car analogy.) But I only launch one or two apps each day; most of the time I'm resuming already running apps. Do they have to reboot each day as part of this tool?

Re:#1 and #2 Complaints missing...

[armanox]

The ModernUI is optional now, and disabled by default. Metro Apps run in a window.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Windows 7

[cbhacking]

USB3 support is not present in Win7. Third-party drivers are required to get it working at all, and you can't use it for low-level stuff (mind you, it's not like kernel debugging and such require a fast connection).

The reduced memory consumption of Win8 and later (partially due to ongoing optimization, but mostly due to page combining) is definitely a worthwhile upgrade, unless your machine is so ludicrously over-specced for its workloads that you never experience enough RAM pressure to matter (and remember, it starts mattering as soon as you begin having cache misses because there isn't enough "free" RAM).

Win8 also has far better multi-monitor support than Win7. That doesn't matter on my home system, right now - I'm currently using a single massive display - but it's something I wish I had at work. I'm not sure how good it is in Win10, but I very much doubt it's worse than Win8, which means it's better than Win7.

Also, your implication that Linux (even today, much less twelve years ago) has low-CPU-overhead support for cutting-edge graphics (I'll even substitute OpenGL for DirectX for you) is a joke. Even using the proprietary drivers, Linux still has some distance to go. In fairness, they're working on it - moving away from X11 and its designed-for-networked-thin-terminals architecture will save some CPU overhead, for example - but it'll be a while before the alternative display systems are standard.

Re:Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no! Not 3rd party drivers! OH THE HORROR! 3RD PARTY DRIVERS!

From your motherboard mfg... yeah. that's so unacceptable...

usb3.0 works flawless for me on win7 with a biostar board.

Kill the writer of TFA

[BringsApples]

Who the hell puts a list of top 10 things in the wrong order?

Too many issues to count

[darkain]

There are far too many issues to count.

Half of the "menus" (are they even menus, or panels, or what?) for networking are flat out blank. Click on the ethernet connection to find out IPv4/IPv6 addresses and link speed? NOPE! Just a blank panel!

Opened up "Games" app, which launches what looks to be something similar to the XBox dashboard. Any games in there? NOPE! None! It just lists what I played on the XBox and what my achievements were on there. Any games on Windows 10? Comes with NONE apparently! Go to the store, download some free games. Are they then listed in the "Games" app? STILL NOPE!

And speaking of those downloaded games. None of them would remain stable for more than 60 seconds. These are basic games like Minesweeper, Mahjong, ya'know, the things that came with Windows 7? Also, their load times were in the 2-5 minute area. Yeah, that's right. It takes about 2-5 minutes to even get the games up and running once launching, then about 60 seconds of play before they crash out. Funny enough, while Minesweeper was "loading", I opened up Chrome and visited http://www.michaelv.org/ and played a game of Minesweeper through there while still waiting on the local native application to work.

Better customization of the start menu is absolutely needed. The menu is literally backwards. Windows 7 has a left/right split panel for the start menu, just like Windows 10 does. The problem? In Windows 7, the left half is the customization area for custom applications, with the right half being for static items (like control panel, computer, documents, etc). In Windows 10, this is reversed, with the static items being on the left, and the fully customization items being on the right.

Speaking of the customization items. You get the choice of normal desktop apps of either having a 1x1 or a 2x2 grid icon, nothing else. The 1x1 is simply an icon (no text), and the 2x2 is too large. Why not a 1x2 where it has the icon on the left and text on the right?

And this was just the beginning. The more I use it, the more the problems just seem absolutely endless.