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Latest Windows 10 Preview Build Brings Slew of Enhancements
Deathspawner writes: Following its huge Windows 10 event last Wednesday, Microsoft released a brand-new preview build to the public, versioned 9926. We were told that it'd give us Cortana, Microsoft's AI assistant, as well as a revamped Start menu and updated notifications pane. But as it turns out, that's not even close to summing up all that's new with this build. In fact, 9926 is easily the most substantial update rolled out so far in the beta program, with some UI elements and integral Windows features seeing their first overhaul in multiple generations.
This update went through this morning with my morning coffee and broke my boot. I'm assuming it'll be as easy as booting a live disk, chrooting in, and running grub-install again but it's still a pain I haven't gone through in a fair while.
The problem is the previous build was visually different while being MORE functional, this build is less functional if you have 19+ years of Windows experience. The previous build had the Windows 7 Start Menu with the addition of a live tiles dock area to the right, it added new useful functionality to the familiar and functional paradigm, the new build is basically a shrunk version of the Start Screen with all the crap that entails and which the majority of users have derided as being less functional on desktops (still the VAST, VAST majority of Windows machines). We had actually started plans for a Windows 10 rollout to our enterprise based on earlier tech preview builds, but those are now on hold and will be cancelled if they don't reverse the insanity. We can just keep using Windows 7 for the next 5 years.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Cortana is probably a new and better Clippy. But besides that, the rest seems like polishing the brass on the Titanic.
New folder icons? I remember visiting gnome-look.org for the first time ten years ago and being blown away: page after page of themes, icon sets, etc.
Start menu tweaked again? Why is this so hard? And it still looks awkward to me. Program names are inside squares, instead of just being text items in a list. Or small squares at least, like the launcher in Chrome OS.
I've used Mac since 1984, Windows since 95, and Linux since '05. I've either not minded or actually liked all of the iterations of program launching in Mac and Linux. But I have never, never, like the Windows Start menu.
Let's start with the word Start, which is where you go to Shut Down. Makes sense. And while it was a little more straightforward than today's shenanigans, it wasn't exactly pleasant to dig through. Plus, I was always stymied by why Windows took several seconds sometimes to me just trying to open the submenu --- not launch a program, just open a folder within the Start menu to see what's in there. It's like Windows was going to the bathroom, and I had to wait for it to finish even to answer a simple question.
And then there was the My everything fiasco, where Documents became My Documents, Computer became My Computer, and so on.
There is the trash can that they still won't default to the bottom right, because if you ever resize the screen, it messes up the position, since Windows calculates everything as the number of pixels from the top left, apparently. So they put the trash can in the top left. This never looked right to me. A trashy-looking thing like a trash can should be in a minor part of the screen (bottom right) even if they call it a Recycle Bin. The Macintosh somehow figured out how to do this 30 years ago.