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Data From Windows 10 Feedback Tool Exposes Problem Areas

Posted by Soulskill on from the self-awareness-kernel-keeps-uninstalling-morality-drivers dept.

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?

11 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. As it is designed to do by jamesl · · Score: 5, Funny

    Data From Windows 10 Feedback Tool Exposes Problem Areas.

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

    1. Re:As it is designed to do by pushing-robot · · Score: 4, Funny

      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!

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    2. Re:As it is designed to do by qubezz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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".

    3. Re:As it is designed to do by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. I installed it by heezer7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  3. Re:Windows 7 by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  4. Early adopters skew results by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  5. Make it less ugly by BLToday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    * 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.

  6. Re:#1 and #2 Complaints missing... by armanox · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  7. Re:Windows 7 by cbhacking · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  8. Too many issues to count by darkain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.