Windows 10 Gains 14% Desktop Market Share in 2016, Edge Continues to Struggle (petri.com)

From a report by long time Microsoft watcher Brad Sams on Petri.com: With 2016 now behind us, we can take a look at how far Windows 10 has come thanks to usage-share with statistics from Net Marketshare. At the end of December for 2016, Windows 10 is installed on roughly 24.5% of devices whereas, at the end of 2015, the OS was only installed on around 10% of machines. During the same period, Windows 7 declined from 55.68% to 48.34%, Windows 8.1 usage dropped from 10.3% to 6.9% and XP dropped slightly from 11% to about 9%. Also, released alongside Windows 10, is the company's new browser, Edge. While the market share of the desktop OS has grown steadily, Edge has not performed as well. At the end of 2015, Edge obtained a market share of 2.79% and at the end of 2016, it has climbed to 5.33%. But, Chrome, which had a market share of 32.33% at the end of 2015 now commands 56.43% of the market. During the same period, Internet Explorer dropped from 46.32% in 2015 to 20.84% in 2016.

Comments

So what?

[barrywalker]

It's still a turd of an operating system.

The only reason they can show higher adoption numbers is because they FORCED it on people.

Re:So what?

[Snotnose]

Yup. Win10 uptime is well under a week, figure 3-5 days before a reboot. Typically a reboot that happens while the laptop is closed and your snug in a rug sleeping.
Got the uptime up to 3-5 days by realizing I could restart Windows Explorer when it crashed, which it does 1-2 days in.
Win10 is the buggiest, most unreliable PoS I've run in decades.
Did I mention I "upgraded" from Win 8.1 to 10 because I was installing something, and Microsoft took that millisecond to put up the "Pssst. Hey bud, wanna upgrade?". I clicked yes but Microsoft changed what "yes" meant on me.
Games. Gotta quit playing games and put Microsoft into the categories of toilet paper I've wiped my ass with, then flushed and forgot.
Why the fuck to I have to put HTML formatting into posts here? I can't just hit CR twice, I have to enter between paragraphs. Really?

Re:So what?

[jezwel]

Yup. Win10 uptime is well under a week, figure 3-5 days before a reboot. Typically a reboot that happens while the laptop is closed and your snug in a rug sleeping. Got the uptime up to 3-5 days by realizing I could restart Windows Explorer when it crashed, which it does 1-2 days in. Win10 is the buggiest, most unreliable PoS I've run in decades.

My Win10 install is a clean install, and is restarted whenever needed for updates. Can't remember the last time I had to manually restart. Windows explorer doesn't crash.
I suspect your hardware isn't up to scratch.

Re:So what?

[caseih]

Linux user here. I have Win10 installed on a tablet and also on a full-time, always-running virtual machine. Seems pretty stable and solid to me. I don't like how settings are dumbed down, and I'm not a fan of constant communication with MS (I have everything turned off that I can). Overall I am much more impressed with Windows 10 than I thought I would be. It's pretty solid, if ugly (hate the flat, white look).

No idea what you are talking about with having to use html formatting. CR twice to start a new paragraph works for me. No formatting here.

Re:So what?

[gweihir]

That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

Personally, I will not move to Win 10 before I can block updates indefinitely and I can turn off spying ("telemetry") reliably. If that does not happen, then I will go to one gaming-only Win10 machine, no email, no browsing, no non-gaming uses at all, and a Win7 VM for Office with no network connection on a Linux basis. Everything else will be Linux, which I use for a lot of work already anyways.

Re:So what?

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Windows 10 uptime is as long as you can defer updates that need reboot.
And that is a Windows 10 install that has basically everything installed I can find on the internet which ends in .exe or .msi.
It might be just you doing something wrong, or a hardware issue.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last-gasp-of-2016 Treat: one *new* laptop.
Installed OS: Virus 10
On arrival @ home: UPGRADED! (to Linux Mint)

Virus 10 uptime - under 5 minutes.

Re:So what?

[ArmoredDragon]

That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

I think it's more likely that 15% was gained during the most egregious cases of Microsoft pushing it really hard on windows 7 users (i.e., clicking the red X doesn't cancel the upgrade, or outright removing the red X) and doing other dirty tricks that are quite mean to their customers, like upgrading without any prompt at all and then you can't cancel until 10 is already installed and running where it shows you an EULA, then after you refuse the EULA it downgrades back to 7. Each operation is quite dangerous for the typical PC user because when things go wrong, (and they do) they usually can't fix it, or even be able to google a fix. But, Microsoft doesn't see a problem with that, as it went on all throughout the first half of the year. After that was over, the quarterly gains Windows 10 saw were very tiny, usually 0.5% +/- 0.15%

It will probably take two years or so before 10 sees a 30% market share, it will likely be until 2020 that it sees 7s current market share.

Re:So what?

[JoeMerchant]

Internet Explorer quit starting up on my IT dept. maintained laptop - that will kill your usage statistics in a hurry, if the program stops functioning on mass maintained fleets of PCs. Chrome works just fine there, even though it is not supported and IE is.

Re:So what?

[JoeMerchant]

Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it - and I use them to do programming and browse the web extensively. My home Win10 machine with special touchscreen drivers that runs various 3D CAD packages in addition to heavier animation (kids education) web browsing seems to benefit from a reboot about once per 20 hours of work, if it's just sitting there doing basically nothing, it doesn't need to be rebooted, either. Now, if you have auto-launching crapware installed, you might need to reboot every couple of days, even if you "do nothing" with the machine.

Re:So what?

[Snotnose]

You seem to think I wanted this upgrade. The Win10 update "wanna update?" box came up when I was about to click on something completely different, then I was afraid to stop the upgrade for fear my laptop wouldn't boot again.

So no, it's not a clean install. It's also not a desired install.

Re:So what?

[mmell]

Um, speaking as a UNIX head for nearly three decades now (yes, I understand TIP consoles, UUCP and good old fashioned modem telephony) - what's wrong with Windows? It's not perfect, but frankly neither is Solaris, AIX or any Linux variant I'm familiar with. The associate UI is reasonably usable and readily understood by a great many users - not bad for a photocopier interface, eh?

Come to think of it - while there are many underlying design differences between MS-Windows and UNIX/X, at the end the presentation isn't all that different. This is a natural function of using the same I/O devices (same monitor, same mouse, same keyboard - you get the same paradigm). Reliability? I've had data loss result from SIGSEGV. I'll grant you that I've seen a lot less kernel crashes under 'NIX than under Windows - but then again, I've seen Windows do some pretty fun and useful things before we UNIX heads managed to keep up.

So if Windows is a turd of an OS, is Linux just a polished-up turd?

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

My windows 10 install is up for weeks at a time. It's even a clean install. It was a upgrade from 7 to 10 and its been rock solid. I imagine you are running on crappy hardware.

Oh and why the fuck do you have to put html code in here? It's because that is the way it is, deal with it.

Re:So what?

[lucm]

It might be just you doing something wrong

It takes courage to say that.

Re:So what?

[tepples]

My windows 10 install is up for weeks at a time.

So what do you do if you have processes that must live longer than "for[sic] weeks"? I remember participating in a forum discussion where someone mentioned having to keep information for incomplete orders in an open program on a PC connected to a UPS. The information provided by a customer couldn't be written to disk for legal reasons, as the orders were for something tightly regulated such as insurance. Nor could it be discarded for marketing reasons, as the customer expected to be able to pick up where he left off. Yet Windows 10's reboot every "for weeks" would discard everything.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you're going to do things that belong on a server you should run a server operating system rather than desktop? Like Windows Server or, better yet, Linux?

Re:So what?

[Serge_Tomiko]

I think that was a poor attempt at a troll.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is a fine operating system. It's functional, well-supported and easy enough to use that my parents can keep an MS Surface on standby for Skype use. It's also great for gaming and just about every game is available on Windows.

Mac OSX is also a fine operating system. It's functional, compatible with all Mac hardware and very teachable. I wouldn't give a Mac to my parents though since my Dad would probably toss the thing out of the window after enough run-ins with the one-button mouse. Mac is okay for gaming if you want to stick to some Steam titles.

Linux is a fine operating system. It's functional, easy to experiment on and is (or can easily be made) compatible with just about anything. No way would I give a Linux box to my parents though since my Dad would probably pour gasoline on it and sadistically set fire to it. Linux isn't brilliant for gaming but it can knock a few good titles out of the park.

The market is 99% users that don't speak computer, don't want to, and shouldn't be expected to. Windows is great for those people that want to get things done and want to treat the computer as a productivity tool. I'm a programmer and I also like my computers that way sometimes. Linux is great for those people that want to work with the computer and/or understand the computer. They're all just built for different people - there's nothing intrinsically bad about any of them.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well more to the point, replacement PCs and laptops use Intel/AMD's "super special" dynamic clocking tech which only Windows 10 supports.

Re:So what?

[dwywit]

Did you not take the opportunitty to roll back? You had 30 days to back up your files, locate software discs, roll it back, and then format and re-install if the rollback didn't work.

Re:So what?

[dwywit]

I don't have any Win 10 machines, real or virtual. Would someone please try this and let us all know if it works:

Go to Task Scheduler, and schedule this to run every 30 seconds:

shutdown /a

This command aborts a scheduled shutdown, and returns an error if there's no scheduled shutdown. You might need to give it elevated privileges.

Re:So what?

[Snotnose]

The risk of losing something doing all that was greater than the risk that Win10 would actually fucking work. So yeah, I thought about it. Had I known how flaky Win10 was gonna be I'd have probably done it. Shit happens.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The only reason they can show higher adoption numbers is because they FORCED it on people.

Given that around 250-300 million PCs are sold each year, most of them with Win10 installed, then one would expect that would account for 15% - 20% (400-450m) of all PCs active since Win10 release (1.5 years ago). That leaves maybe only 5% (100million) that were forced (or voluntary) upgrades.

Re:So what?

[dwywit]

OS400 for the win!

Or IBM i, or whatever they call it these days.

Re:So what?

[dbIII]

Skills? It's MS Windows, Fischer Price Central, of course he's got the skills. Do you really think you are something special because you can move a pointer and click when you see a picture? Just about everyone else can do that too, but the above poster has a good point that if you follow something other than the main tested path with MS Windows the chances of a fuckup are very high.

Re:So what?

[dbIII]

Set a few dozen people loose on machines with MS Win10 on them and you'll find that "pretty solid" is a rare description of the thing.
You have been not just lucky but also helped by the very conservative choice of hardware that is emulated by virtual machines.
The device drivers all work for you.
For other people on real hardware, sometimes not so well at the moment.

Re:So what?

[dbIII]

So what do you do if you have processes that must live longer than "for[sic] weeks"

MS Win7 or MS "server".

Re:So what?

[donaldm]

Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it

This is one of the many reasons why I don't run Windows 10 because when I get updates on my Linux machine I get to choose when I install them and if required when I reboot. Even if I choose to install updates they don't interfere with what I am currently doing. I also have had this freedom for years.

BTW. I do have Windows 10 installed in a virtual machine (legitimate license). I actually used the Windows 10 ISO which is a free download from Microsoft and is 4.2GB so I would recommend getting it for recovery purposes if you really want to run Windows 10. The installation is quite simple and quick although I would strongly recommend using the advanced setup rather than the quick install.

When I say use the advanced setup when installing from the Win 10 ISO you will see many settings that are by default turned on which would be the case with the quick install. Whether you choose to turn off those settings is up to you although I personally find they tick all the boxes for the definition of malware . Even if you do lock the machine down you still have to go into the registry (oh! yes everyone knows how to edit this) and even then you may not get everything. Third party software (if you trust them) can help but they still may not get everything.

Even after you think you have locked down Windows 10 if you use tools like Wireshark and/or Etherape and you will see that Windows 10 loves to chat with outside machines (Owned by? You guessed it Microsoft) which may not even be in the same country you live in.

What is interesting is the install of Windows 10 is over 5GB which is really bare bones (ie. no applications like Office .. etc) compared to my Fedora 25 desktop with over 2,200 packages (includes Multiple browsers, Office suites, Multimedia, CAD, Statistical and Scientific packages) and is only 7.2GB and all my packages get updates when available without me having to manually search for them. Even when I get updates most of the time a reboot is not needed although if I get a new kernel a reboot (when I decide) takes about 60 seconds and that includes logging in and starting my preferred applications (SSD's are great).

Re:So what?

[antdude]

Why game in W10? Just play in older Windows versions, Linux, Mac OS, etc.

Re:So what?

[nnull]

I've already made that move. The only problem is that for me and you, it's not a big deal, for others it is difficult to get used too.

Re:So what?

[stooo]

Use Linux.

Re: So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

7+ year certified linux user here. The answer to your question is long and complicated with a bunch of angsty linux users at the heart of it. They're upset it never really took off on the desktop world while the rest of the windows/apple/google dominated market continues to slap them in the face with closed source standards and privacy invasions. The very thing linux stands against. It's not their fault per se, the tech industry is consumer driven and 98% of consumers don't know what they're buying. Alot of the 2% post on slashdot, so what you see on slashdot is in fact a very rare and unique view, which is why I come here. I digress though, windows and the modern tech industry is everything hacker types dispise and windows is a well understood thing everyone can kick around. Where was the outrage when android di the same shit 6 years ago? There was none.

Re:So what?

[Anne Thwacks]

My 90 year old mum tossed her Windows laptop out the window and insisted on a Mac in the days of XP. My barely literate inlaws all use Linux Mint (or Android), claiming not to be able to use Windows when it was shown to them.

People are not all the same.

Re:So what?

[Tough Love]

Rebooted my Linux home server the other day, it was up for 475 days and went through multiple updates in that time. Only rebooted it to install a new kernel. This is typical, actually. Linux desktop machine uptimes are usually months, laptops are only rebooted if they run out of power.

Re:So what?

[thegarbz]

That is basically what the numbers say. The 15% increase means these are mostly replacement PCs and laptops, and people likely cannot get Windows 7 for them easily or transfer it form their old machine.

But that is standard practice and has nothing to do with the level of turdness of the OS. I don't know of anyone who upgraded an OS, except for a few people who found Vista so poor that they welcomed Windows 7 on to a pre-existing machine.

New OS comes with new PCs. New PC rates are slowing down so it stands to reason that figures are poor. The vast majority of people don't know Windows 10 is a turd and so are ambivalent about the "upgrade".

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

> You have been not just lucky but also helped by the very conservative choice of hardware that is emulated by virtual machines.

Actually if you install the VirtualBox additions so you get the screen at the proper resolutions you will be getting crashes all the time on the insider release after updates...
So I would at least say that Microsoft doesn't seem to test its code much on VMs...

Re:So what?

[TheDarkMaster]

For me the problem is with Windows 10, in particular the user interface of it. It is a PoS, completely inconsistent as if it had been handled by dozens of developers where each of these developers had a radically different idea.

Re: So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there is a lot of turdiness if you ever use it...
For example, I have a couple of Windows PCs used for CI tasks.
You used to be able to schedule tasks "at startup" and running as a particular user so that e.g. Jenkins comes up if some updates reboot your machine.
However after some recent updates, those now fail with "could not be started because the login service is not yet running". WTF, why does the task scheduler not wait until the system is actually WORKING before running tasks? And why does it not at least retry?
Sometimes a test process gets stuck, and then you can't even start a fresh build or clean the repository, because the binary is of course locked. So you have to make sure to reliably kill all processes. Sure, that is a good idea anyway, but I'd rather not have the whole CI process break just because one thing went wrong with a previous build!
Then there are the myriad of cases where NTFS simply trips over itself under prolonged very high I/O load, for example it can get in a state where you can move and rename files, but you cannot delete them until a reboot! And those are files that are NOT in use by any process.
Then for VisualStudio there is that magic PDB server process. If you are unlucky, you have a project that causes it to crash for some reason.
Once it crashes, all your other currently ongoing builds will fail, and if you are unlucky continue to fail. Because obviously the server crashing was something so totally unexpected that nobody bothered to implement handling for it.
And it goes on and on like this. The only thing as crappy as these things I've seen in Linux-land is NFS, and that usually only due to crappy implementations by incompetent storage vendors (hey, deleting 50000 files in one go will bring down the whole storage system and it won't answer any read requests until it deleted all those files - taking several hours - and the delete was done by a completely ordinary user with no special priviledges. I mean WTF how can major storage vendors get away with being so incompetent yet companies STILL buy from them?).

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

He reminds me of the kids now who think being able to plug together parts to "build" a modern day PC is some kind of special skill. They have no clue about soldering components or configuring memory addresses like we did back when people actually built computers.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

people really should consider piracy, specially for their personal computers

you buy a computer, with win10, you dont like it? download virtualbox, try an iso of windows 7, check if sound, network, and stuff like that works, if everything works, fucking install it and remove kebab, i mean remove windows 10

easy peasy

if something does not work because no drivers or something, then keep using win10

Re: So what?

[cyber-vandal]

It's easy enough to configure a Mac to use 2 buttons. Why this keeps coming up is baffling to me.

Re:So what?

[jez9999]

And all the "help" icons in the corner, instead of opening up a proper help application with info on the current page, simply open up Edge with a Bing search for "Windows 10 help". That made me LOL.

Re:So what?

[jez9999]

Windows is great for those people that want to get things done and want to treat the computer as a productivity tool.

Windows 10 has an ugly UI with smaller, less-colourful icons, spits ads in your face, keeps resetting your telemetry preferences (which can't even stop all telemetry), and forces you to reboot regularly. If that's good for productivity, what the hell is bad?

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. I installed Linux Mint on my mother's PC about a year ago and she hasn't had any problems with it. She is 72 years old and not technical at all. Primarily she uses the web browser (Pale Moon), office productivity (LibreOffice), image viewer/manager (XnView MP), digital painting (MyPaint) and music player (Clementine).

In fact Mint works better than Windows did on her computer. Windows was slow and would occasionally crash or have problems resuming from sleep. Mint has none of those issues.

Re:So what?

[allo]

And for something forced that hard, 14% is very little.

Re:So what?

[zifn4b]

It's still a turd of an operating system. The only reason they can show higher adoption numbers is because they FORCED it on people.

I'll probably get modded down for this because I respond the same way every time and get modded down because apparently some people don't like to deal with reality and problems at hand. While what you say is true, the reason why people don't adopt alternatives is because they can't run all their favorite software including games on *nix and OSX. Steam and Indie games are starting to go cross platform more than in the past but isn't enough. You also have NVIDIA/ATI drivers that are optimized best on Windows and the problem of open source developers not getting access to enough source code to create comparable drivers. When Ubuntu/Mint/CentOS and Apple solve these problems, Windows will ride off into the sunset. Until then, it's going to be around for some time to come.

Re:So what?

[Big Hairy Ian]

It's still a turd of an operating system.

What's worrying is they are still trying to polish it

Re:So what?

[JoeMerchant]

Again, all depends on what you run, the easy quip is that Linux doesn't run any "real" software like Autocad or Office, so that's why it never needs rebooting (yes Office is absolute crap and should be replaced with Libre + Google, but Autocad - not so much.)

My Ubuntu 14.04 instance that has zone minder installed, needs its periodic reboots - others, not so much.

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

MS Win7 or MS "server".

This exactly. Windows 10 is running on my personal desktop/gaming rig. It never "needs" to stay up weeks at a time, it just does. If I ever need something to stay up for more than weeks at a time, say months, I'm going to push it off on a machine just for that.

In fact that is what I do. I have server built, running on Centos, that I use for long term projects, like video encoding. Anyone that does video encoding for something like plex knows that quality encodes take hours. Toss in entire series like I do can take weeks. To do that I ether use handbrakecli and the linux batch queue or a windows 7 vm running as a guest in the centos server.

This VM and the centos box have been up for months at a time. The only reason they weren't up longer is I needed to install some updates to the centos part of the system.

But even those that centos box "needs" to be up months at a time, it doesn't 'have" to be. I just has been and can be.

Re:So what?

[a_mari_usque_ad_mare]

Undoing accidental mod

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

Any one that calls MS Windows a fischer price OS clearly has no clue what the hell they are talking about. Sure you install it, turn and it on and it just runs, which is what all OS should do out of the box. Once you get over the "fischer price" mentality and start digging in the OS you will find how power windows 10 and even 7 can be. There area number of hidden features that only power users can find and use.

But the fact is that windows has a simple side is the reason I run it at home on my desktop. I get off work, go home, sit down and play a game. It comes up and just works.

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

They have no clue about soldering components or configuring memory addresses like we did back when people actually built computers.

I for one do not miss those days. It would take 2 or 3 days to get a '286 or '386 up and running. Shotty hardware, incorrect clock and jumper settings. It all made me appreciate going home to my Amiga 3000 where it just fucking worked.

No special skills required to build a pc today. My entire i7 build last month took 3 hours from opening the first box to first boot. Still there is nothing quite like first boot. You flip the switch and wonder if its going to power up or just sit there. Then when it does wake up you can almost smell the new electrons flowing through the system. Of course there is the follow up for days or weeks waiting for that first crash to signal you have a marginal hardware issue.

Re:So what?

[gweihir]

Security patches and graphics drivers. Games and machines only running games get attacked too.

As to Linux, I hope in 2020 gaming on Linux will have started to work well due to Vulcan, but at this time it is just not really there yet. And I say that as a long-term Linux user and fan (since 1994).

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehh?? I just reboot it once a every 2 months or so and let it do its thing with the updates. I have written a tiny 'cron job' to run updates on a fixed schedule of my choosing. Took me all of 10 minutes (basically just a toggle of a GPO called 'Turn off Access to all Windows Update Features' ). Its pretty much the same on any OS. You can choose when you want the updates installed. Jesus.. Is this still a technical website? Or are you people really really dumb?

http://imgur.com/a/GBSEs

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad thing is that rather than Windows 10, people use the Windows 8.x which is worst piece of UI design since Microsoft Bob. Any sane corporate board would fire the CEO and top management immediately when their only option to get adoption of new product is to force it into paying customers machines. MS has now ruined their relationship with most of their customers.

Re:So what?

[erapert]

Why bother with the VMs and all the kooky stuff?
Why not just use Linux straight up?

I used to use VMs at work but then I just ditched it all and now I run Linux 100% for everything. And I'm one of only two people (besides a guy in IT who knows how but doesn't actually use it) in the building that uses Linux.

For games, Steam runs quite well on Ubuntu and with the binary Nvidia drivers so do all the games I buy through Steam.

Re:So what?

[nasch]

So what do you do if you have processes that must live longer than "for[sic] weeks"?

That wasn't an error; he didn't mean to type "four".

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I for one do not miss those days"
Neither do I but the experience of working during the evolution of the PC platform is something a lot of people today do not have. They have not worked through the lighting fast iterations of software and hardware. Since you mentioned working with the 286 I assume you also have seen the evolution of the Internet. The transition from BBS and Kermit into the modern day world wide communication network. The skills and experience gained during the explosion of the PC and the networks to connect them is invaluable.

Re: So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really had run Unix for three decades you wouldn't be asking that question.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The information provided by a customer couldn't be written to disk for legal reasons, as the orders were for something tightly regulated such as insurance. Nor could it be discarded for marketing reasons, as the customer expected to be able to pick up where he left off. Yet Windows 10's reboot every "for weeks" would discard everything.

That is a made up bullshit story.

In a highly regulated industry like what you're describing, the user will be running a managed windows install. An admin will always be in control of when a desktop OS updates and/or reboots. If they say they can't then they're either lying or incompetent, or perhaps both.

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

Oh yes I remember those days. The late night BBS sessions and finally the rise of the internet. I remember saving up and buying my first hayes compatible modem that wasn't quite hayes compatible. Leafing through difficult to understand manuals to figure out register settings and init strings.

One of the things I'm most proud of during that time was configuring my on UUCP node and map. I complete had no ideal what I was doing but it set it up and it worked the first time. Email was so fast then. It only took 3 days for email to travel from one cost to the other.

I can't help but roll my eyes when I hear some teen or 20 year old bitch about how slow their laptop is or how bad the graphics are on their xbox 360 are. Let them do a few weeks with a C-64 and then see.

Re:So what?

[dbIII]

With respect, consider where *nix, VMS and a pile of other things were before MS Windows NT ever existed. Sure, it's got fiddly annoying bits like fucking with that braindead registry idea that scales very badly, but in terms of capability it is very definitely a fischer price OS and there really is not a lot that needs to be understood about it to use almost everything it has got.

There area number of hidden features that only power users can find and use

That's the flaw of poor documentation and not a virtue.
Just be happy it's good enough to run an arcade game or glass typewriter - for simple workloads with a single user it gets the job done but there's no point making claims about it that it was never designed to do.

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

With all due respect, I have been at this a very very long time. I've forgotten more about unix, vms, and windows than most people will ever know. When windows started out it was clearly a inferior OS compared to the listed systems.

But a lot has changed since then. Windows 7 and 10 are just as capable of doing anything a Linux workstation can do. Windows server is just as capable of doing things that a unix/Linux server can do. An in a few cases, better. An both windows workstation and server are just as stable as any Linux install on quality hardware.

This doesn't mean that all OS's do all things equally. Its foolish to run apache on a windows system. You can, doesn't mean you should. Its also just as foolish to clam that Linux desktops are more powerful than Windows desktop when its clear that they are not.

Re:So what?

[dbIII]

Windows 7 and 10 are just as capable of doing anything a Linux workstation can do

You most definitely have forgotten a vast amount about unix if you are under such a delusion.

I don't just run linux clusters for licencing reasons, I run them because there is far too much overhead in MS operating systems to make them viable for anything other than the narrow range of tasks MS are selling them for.
Also - have you noticed how there are so many SAN or similar boxes around instead of trusting MS Windows with the actual disks? It's shit at the task compared with freebsd, solaris and even linux.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a non-argument since Windows 7 and 8 are still supported until 2020 and 2023 respectively and receive regular updates and the GPU makers still make drivers for those OSes.

Nice try though, M$ shill.

Re:So what?

[Lord Apathy]

I really hate it when I'm treating someone like a professional and they go and prove they are far from it by making a debate personal. Very well if you wish to go down that road. Please put your glasses and comprehension cap on before you respond in the future.

Please note what I said and not what you read. I said that window 7 and 10 can do anything a Linux workstation can do. WORKSTATION. Clustering is a server function, not a workstation. And yes, windows server can cluster just as good as a Linux server can. Before you open your yap again, please learn to separate workstation roles from server roles.

As for your comment on SAN you clearly have no ideal what sans are for. The reason that sans are so prevalent is because its easier and better to manage all your disk assets from a central location than many different locations. This holds true for any OS be it, windows, Linux, or bsd.

Of course Edge is struggling...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Edge is struggling, its not yet got a good plugin system, and by extension no decent ad blocker yet. The browser itself is pretty nice, IMHO, but until it's got things like ad blocking, tracker blocking or disconnect, it's always going to be slower and use more power than the others simply because it's doing more work.

Re:Of course Edge is struggling...

[damnbunni]

Edge has extensions now, one of which is adblocking. Well, maybe more than one. But I didn't see a need to install more than one.

I use Vivaldi on my desktop, but I use Edge on my Windows tablet, because it comes closest to having a good touch UI of all the browsers.

Chrome and Firefox removed their touch UIs. Irksome.

Re:Of course Edge is struggling...

[Gadget_Guy]

Of course Edge is struggling, its not yet got a good plugin system, and by extension no decent ad blocker yet.

Actually, it does have extensions, albeit just a tiny selection (although it does include Adblock Plus). That said, even going to a page without ads I still find Edge to be an appallingly slow browser. I just can't stand to use it. It is slow to load, slow to open even simply web pages, and it lacks basic features that every single desktop browser has like F11 to enter full screen mode. (Didn't that start on Internet Explorer?)

If I ever have to open something in a browser that isn't one of the other three that I have loaded, I always choose Internet Explorer rather than Edge. I'll give them credit for trying to shake off the problems that IE had, but I consider Edge to be version 0.1 and not yet ready for real use.

Re: Of course Edge is struggling...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried the AdBlock extension? Works a treat. What about inking, sharing, and reader mode? Have you given them a spin? See, Microsoft's mistake is it assumes users are creative, intelligent. Thus, five percent.

Re: Of course Edge is struggling...

[MightyMartian]

Ah I see, so it isn't the shitty substandard browsers that Microsoft distributes with their newest OS, somehow it's users' faults.

Re:Of course Edge is struggling...

[SeriousTube]

Edge has a grand total of 21 extensions in the windows store last I checked a few weeks ago.

Re:Of course Edge is struggling...

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW, You nailed it. I completely agree. I tried Edge on my Surface tablet, but it was SOOOO slow. It could not quickly open a webpage at all. Internet Explorer dances circles around Edge in webpage loading times.

I have two identical 128GB Surface Pro tablets. A side-by-side comparison of Edge on unit#1 versus IE11 on unit#2 is not even a comparison - I have yet to find a single webpage that loads faster on Edge... IE beats Edge every time...

I'm not saying IE is perfect... I have many high-memory usage problems with IE if I leave a browsing tab open for a long time, but it is a small price to pay for the faster loading times, and the familiar GUI of IE...

Would help if Edge actually worked

[snickers]

I've just moved to Windows 10 for work and and Edge just doesn't run on my machine. It opens and then closes straight away. Googling the problem has shown it appears to be affecting a reasonable number of users. I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

Re:Would help if Edge actually worked

[SeaFox]

I can't be bothered to spend more than an hour trying to fix it.

Neither can Microsoft, since they let their QA department go. /rimshot

Re:Would help if Edge actually worked

[thegarbz]

more than an hour

Wow you would spend up to an hour trying to make a Microsoft Webbrowser work? What mental institution did you break out from? Can't you just download the Chrome installer on another machine and transfer it via USB stick?

Re:Would help if Edge actually worked

[AmiMoJo]

The outsourced QA. That's what the telemetry is for - why run it in their office and pay people to shake the bugs out, when they can run it on your computer and will you find all the bugs for free?

Re:Would help if Edge actually worked

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a different person than the GP, but I tried to get Edge to work on my machine for about an hour as well. For me, I was bored and it was an intellectual puzzle for me to figure out. After awhile of Googling and checking different ideas and reinstalling Edge, I stopped as it lost its appeal as a puzzle.

So... after a year of ...

[QuietLagoon]

giving away Windows free of monetary cost, and using what seemed to be malware-like tactics to trick Microsoft customers into installing Windows 10 even if they did not want to, Window 10 has less than a 25% marketshare?

.
Surely this cannot be seen as a success, even by the rose-coloured glasses that Microsoft PR usually looks through.

It is a colossal failure.

Re:So... after a year of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

even if they did not want to

I have several machines in our company I did not want to upgrade to 10, so I just didn't do it, who are these fuckwits who not only didnt want to install something THEY installed, but were too fucking stupid to revert it, even though it tells you in like 2 dozen places how to do so, while the upgrade was being pushed

seriously

Re:So... after a year of ...

[QuietLagoon]

...seriously...

Seriously... when Microsoft has to change the fundamental operations of Windows UI controls, going against the published guidelines of how those controls should work, the users are not "too fucking stupid" when they expect Windows controls to operate as they always have operated.

From the linked article:

...Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened....

Re:So... after a year of ...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Look at the market share trends for the first half of 2016 when it was still a free upgrade for many users, and then for the second half when it wasn't.

Re:So... after a year of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

only after your retard ass already initiated the upgrade

Re:So... after a year of ...

[QuietLagoon]

I am sure Microsoft loves your erudite retort. It certainly helps the image of Windows 10.

Re:So... after a year of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You may have a problem aka pebcak...

Re:So... after a year of ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go fuck yourself you shill cunt.

Re: So... after a year of ...

[cyber-vandal]

Since Windows is heavily used in corporations that control their updates and are usually quite conservative about updating the whole OS it's not that surprising.

Chrome works

[rsilvergun]

he who lives by the Enterprise Management tool dies by the Enterprise Management tool. More and more I have to put users on Chrome because the numbskulls who manage their domain profiles have cranked IE's security settings so high nothing works. And there are so many esoteric settings buried in the registry good luck finding the one causing your JavaScript to go haywire. But they let 'em install Chrome. So I get to have this conversation a lot:

Me: Does it work in Chrome?
Them: Yes.
Me: Wanna spend 8-16 hours of your life figuring out which of the 800+ settings it could be that's breaking IE?
Them: No.
Me: Use Chrome.

Re:Chrome works

[amiga3D]

It's all relative. If you don't have anything critical on your computer then why lock it down? I have a cdrom based os I use for banking. I boot from it, do my business and shutdown and reboot the computer to my playtime system. I'm not going to build a fucking fortress unless I have a reason to.

Re:Chrome works

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Indeed.
The high use of Chrome was triggered by issues with Firefox (which I think have been well managed by now).
But Chrome is a security and privacy threat. It is a corporate produt. It is vendor lock-in. It eats all memory. It looks like a turd. It is userunfriendly.
I have the strong feeling people now mostly use it because it is a trend amongst teens and preteens: "muh friendz have it da cool bro so i gannah have need it too".

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the puerile "if you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to hide" argument.

The entire contents of my drives are critical, to me. I don't give a shit if you or anyone else thinks it's not important because you are insignificant. It's my stuff and I value my privacy. Nobody should be poking around in there unless I give explicit consent each and every time.

On top of that, there is the bandwidth and power usage that _I_ pay for.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome works .... only to the people who don't value privacy and security.

We're talking about windows 10 users, so... yeah pretty much.

Re:Chrome works

[MightyMartian]

If you valued privacy, you wouldn't be using Windows 10 at all.

Re:Chrome works

[mmell]

If he valued privacy, he wouldn't be using the internet at all.

FTFY

Re:Chrome works

[freeze128]

You're in trouble when someone actually DOES want to spend that time, and you still can't figure out the problem.

Re:Chrome works

[lucm]

So you don't give a shit what people think because they're insignificant. Well guess what, nobody cares about your stuff either. You could print it out and leave it at the reception desk of Microsoft or Google and at best they would say a polite thank you before dumping it in the recycle bin.

The only value you have for those corporations is as a contributor to their metrics so they can fine-tune their ad campaigns, and it has to occur within the parameters of their system. You personally are meaningless to them and so are your precious files.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't give a shit what people think because they're insignificant.

When it comes to MY data I am the only person who matters and the only person who can say who can access it and how it will be used.

Well guess what, nobody cares about your stuff either.

Then why do they constantly try to collect it? Didn't think very much on that, huh genius?

Sorry, but you are a fucking moron and a waste of life. Go die in a fire.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know how to maintain your privacy while using the internet, then you shouldn't be anywhere near a computer.

Re:Chrome works

[lucm]

Sorry, but you are a fucking moron and a waste of life. Go die in a fire.

Go die in a fire? What are you, a petulant teenage girl?

What I'm trying to explain to you is that individually you are of no concern to any of those corporations, all they want is some stats so they can tune their ad campaigns. Just from the way you express yourself it's obvious that you have no secret worth harvesting anyways so pipe down with the lame privacy defender impression, nobody is trying to look at your bad Hunger Games fan fiction.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah the new AOL idiot. Only complete idiots use a web browser by a fucking ad broker which spies on your privacy and which lobbies in Washington to erode your privacy even further. Yeah what a brilliant idea to empower -that-.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so easy to trigger you little kids.

If they didn't want my data then they wouldn't try to collect it, full stop. Your excuses are meaningless and you are a tool with a vested interest. Go die in a fire.

Re:Chrome works

[jez9999]

The high use of Chrome was triggered by issues with Firefox (which I think have been well managed by now).

Oh, did they back out Australis finally?

Re:Chrome works

[allo]

Just use chromium. Or is this solution too easy?

Re:Chrome works

[Stan92057]

why feed the troll? i mean really....

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, it's a waste of time since lucm will never admit he's a moron who is saying exactly what he claims he isn't saying.

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an enterprise version of chrome you can manage with group policy. They give you a real msi package and it doesn't install in the user's profile (You know the default method of installing chrome from google's chrome webpage installs in to %localappdata%? Fun stuff in multi-user environments)

Lots of great settings to tweak, particularly if you're deploying chrome in a kiosk or classroom environment. (Turn off logging in to chrome, form autofill, force a default homepage, disable extension installing, etc)

Though once you start playing with those settings you quickly find that thinks break and bug out in a rather IE-like manner. Worse, Chrome's frequent updates cause new bugs to appear overnight.. Or more commonly for old bugs to regress.

Point is browsers are a pain in the ass and Chrome's apparent consistency mostly from the default chrome install having few options to tweak. Microsoft gives administrators lots of options, and lots of opportunities for bugs. Chrome in the same situation isn't very different.

Re:Chrome works

[amiga3D]

You stupid dickhead. I don't give a shit about your kiddie porn collection, that's between you and the FBI. If you've got something to hide you better lock it down like Fort Knox. I'm paranoid about things that matter. You don't matter to me.

Re:Chrome works

[david_thornley]

I may have missed something, but is there decent evidence that (a) Chrome spies on something and reports to Google, and (b) Edge and IE and Firefox and Opera don't spy and report to their mothership? Is there any reason for someone already using Windows 10 to worry about this?

Re:Chrome works

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an insect and nobody gives a shit about you.

Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

As in "standing on the edge", "the edge of the knife", "edge your way across". Interesting choice.

Funny quote:
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." -Hunter S. Thompson

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just an incredibly stupid and embarrassingly dated name to use. Microsoft is always about 10 years late on everything and when they try to be "hip", they just expose what huge dorks and losers they are.

Remember that Windows 7 launch "party"? That was almost as cringeworthy as Apple's "The Martinettis Bring Home a Computer".

Re:Edge

[Z80a]

It does sound like the kind of browser that a sonic OC artist would use.

Re:Edge

[Gadget_Guy]

It's just an incredibly stupid and embarrassingly dated name to use. Microsoft is always about 10 years late on everything and when they try to be "hip", they just expose what huge dorks and losers they are.

So what name for a browser do you think they would be allowed to use? Of all the dumb and annoying things that Microsoft has done, choosing the name Edge is not one of them. I think that this is a case of wanting to find fault in absolutely everything that Microsoft does whether they deserve it or not.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think "Edge" is a cool name, then I have bad news for you: you're an out of touch dork too.

Even Internet Explorer was a better name. At least it was somewhat descriptive and more professional sounding.

Re:Edge

[amiga3D]

We have a fucking music artist called "The Weekend" and another called "Lady Gaga." Edge seems to be in time since fucking stupid is up to date.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well I listen to real musicians, not that prefab crap.

"Edge" as a name sounds like something people thought was cool in the 80s. Sort of like "rad" or "fresh". So what will be next for Microsoft? Renaming Windows to "Extreme OS" and making it go to 11?

Re:Edge

[Vlijmen Fileer]

Pretty names for applications are silly anyhow, and have always been.

Just give them as name /what they actually are/. "Browser", or perhaps "MS browser".
At the very least, build up your application list or start menu or whatever with logical names like, perhaps allowing to append meaningless pretty names: "MS browser (Edge)".

I have so many applications installed, many of which I use only seldom, that I sometimes need to actually start them, or Ixquick them to find out /what they are/. :/
It would also greatly help new, or inexperienced, or old computer users.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

The other day I was ripping a disc and fre:ac wrote it out with a filename that was too long for NTFS to handle (many classical pieces have long names). Windows would not let me rename, move or delete the file. I even tried with multiple file managers, thinking maybe it was just Explorer, but that still didn't work. Luckily I was able to subst the directory the file was in to an unused drive letter which just barely made it short enough to rename.

That 255 character limitation on combined path and filename in Windows is fucking ridiculous and embarrassing.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Group Policy Editor (Press Windows Key and type gpedit.msc and hit Enter.
Navigate to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Filesystem
Click "Enable Win32 long paths" option and enable it.

Re:Edge

[Gadget_Guy]

Assuming that you are the same AC that posted before, you are the only one who thinks that a name has to be cool or hip. I certainly never said that Edge was a cool name.

Edge is just a name. Just like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Safari, K-Meleon, Mosaic, Lynx, Epiphany, SeaMonkey, Konqueror and all the fifty million other browsers out there. Netscape Navigator is probably the only one (other than Internet Explorer) that tries to describe what it does in the name. But that's another old name that is no longer in use, so if you think that a name needs to be descriptive then it appears that it is you who is out-of-touch. It has been decades since people thought that those sorts of names were "cool".

Re:Edge

[epyT-R]

"The Edge: The beer, beer-drinkers drink when they're not drunk."

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft was trying for hip, gritty and edgy, but "Edge" is just cheesy and anachronistic. It sounds ridiculous.

BTW, nice strawman, but I never said a thing in support of or against other browser names. I only said that Internet Explorer is a better name than Edge. I never said that browsers had to have descriptive names. Maybe you should learn how to read before posting again.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I'll try that.

But that brings up a question. Why wouldn't that functionality be enabled by default? What's the catch?

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevermind. I just tried your suggestion and it doesn't work. I still get the 255 character cumulative path+filename restriction.

This is in Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 10 only, and only for win32 apps that support it.

Re:Edge

[tepples]

Using longer paths may cause buffer overflows in programs not written to expect longer paths.

Re:Edge

[SeriousTube]

Microsoft likes to name things that are impossible to search for because they are common words.

Re:Edge

[Gadget_Guy]

Microsoft was trying for hip, gritty and edgy, but "Edge" is just cheesy and anachronistic.

You have also never proven that Microsoft was actually attempting to be hip, gritty and edgy. You just keep asserting the claim over and over again. So what does Edge mean? Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore said during his Build 2015 keynote:

The name refers to the idea of being on the edge of consuming and creating. It refers to the developer notion of being closer to the modern capabilities of the web.

So there you go. That wanted to move away from IE's reputation of not supporting modern standards so they chose a name to suggest being more cutting edge. You have decided that they meant for this to be part of some fashion trend, but that is all in your head. "Edge" doesn't mean edgy in a trendy sense, but cutting edge in a software development sense.

BTW, nice strawman, but I never said a thing in support of or against other browser names. I only said that Internet Explorer is a better name than Edge

If you think that I was accusing you of saying anything about the other browser names then you have reading comprehension problems. I said that the name Edge is no better or worse than all those other names. None of them are descriptive or professional like you want Microsoft's browser name to be. Nobody is ever going to say that Edge doesn't sound professional enough so that they will use Firefox instead.

You never did answer my question about what name they should use instead of Edge. They have tried to distance themselves from the Internet Explorer product, so they can't just reuse that name.

I never said that browsers had to have descriptive names. Maybe you should learn how to read before posting again.

Really? Let's see what you said before:

Even Internet Explorer was a better name. At least it was somewhat descriptive and more professional sounding.

Maybe you should just stop lying and fixating on what is a perfectly unremarkable name for a browser.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore said during his Build 2015 keynote

Yeah? Ever seen what Joe Belfiore looks like? He's a middle aged man who still thinks he's a teenager in the 90s. He looks ridiculous and is a PERFECT analogy for the dated name and image Microsoft has chosen for their browser.

So there you go. That wanted to move away from IE's reputation of not supporting modern standards so they chose a name to suggest being more cutting edge.

HAHAHAHA! "Cutting edge"? Really? And you don't think that sounds incredibly stupid and cheesy?

I said that the name Edge is no better or worse than all those other names. None of them are descriptive or professional like you want Microsoft's browser name to be.

Then why bring them up? They weren't the topic of discussion, nor was their descriptiveness. I also never said anything about wanting Microsoft to use a more descriptive name for their browser, just that Edge is a ridiculous name and that Internet Explorer was a better name because it at least has something going for it. Again, learn how to read.

Really? Let's see what you said before

I'm waiting....where did I say that? You really ARE illiterate, aren't you?

Maybe you should just stop lying and fixating on what is a perfectly unremarkable name for a browser.

Take your own advice, liar. The sad part is you probably don't even realise you're doing it because you are such a habitual liar and only hear/read what you want. The rest you fabricate because you're just that "rad".

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's basically worthless. Aside from not using Windows 10, I don't use 32-bit applications any more.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that something that the OS should be handling gracefully?

Re:Edge

[garethjrowlands]

Parent said Win32, not 32 bit. Win32 is another name for the Windows API and doesn't imply any specific bitness any more.

In my (unasked) opinion, Windows 10 is better than Windows 8.1. Most things are!

Re:Edge

[Gadget_Guy]

Ever seen what Joe Belfiore looks like? He's a middle aged man who still thinks he's a teenager in the 90s.

How utterly irrelevant! Once again you are just looking for excuses to hate.

HAHAHAHA! "Cutting edge"? Really? And you don't think that sounds incredibly stupid and cheesy?

No, I don't. Obviously you do, but then you are an idiot.

I said that the name Edge is no better or worse than all those other names. None of them are descriptive or professional like you want Microsoft's browser name to be.

Then why bring them up? They weren't the topic of discussion, nor was their descriptiveness.

I don't know how many different ways I can explain this for you. Your entire complaint is about the name of the browser, and yet you refuse to acknowledge that it is no different than any of its competition. You said that it was a "dated name to use", which means you are comparing the name to the names being used today. If the other browser names are off-topic to this discussion, then exactly how can the name Edge be outdated?

Really? Let's see what you said before

I'm waiting....where did I say that?

Oh my god! I linked to the post and then copied the text to quote from it. I see you managed to forget to include either of those parts in what you quoted. Trying to be deceptive, hey?

You said that one of the reasons that the name Internet Explorer was better was better was that it was "somewhat descriptive". That's right; you were the first one to use the word "descriptive". Why are you trying so hard to distance yourself from that?

I guess it is because you are a lying troll. It's such a shame. One of my New Year's resolutions was not to engage with trolls, and I fell at the first hurdle. So I will stop now, as there is no point in continuing with someone who either just simply repeats themselves and thinks that is an argument, or lies about what they have said even though anyone can look back up the thread. I am sure that you will do one more post to repeat your original statement again as if it is a fact and think that is a "win". I'll give you that. Congratulations, even though you will have convinced nobody and will deep down know that you are just a lying zealot. Good luck with all your future trolling.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. Win32 refers specifically to 32-bit Windows applications. Win64 is the API used for 64-bit applications.

In my opinion Windows 8.1 is superior to Windows 10 because it doesn't contain spyware, doesn't serve ads, allows me full control over updates and can be made more usable and more customisable than Windows 10 by simply installing Classic Shell.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

How utterly irrelevant! Once again you are just looking for excuses to hate.

It's completely relevant. He's the Windows 10 mouthpiece that you cited even.

Also, when you use "hate/hater" as your argument, you've already lost.

No, I don't. Obviously you do, but then you are an idiot.

It's because you're stuck in the past and still think embarrassingly outdated phrases like "cutting edge" are still impressive and current. You're such an out of touch dork that I bet just thinking about "edge" sends shivers of pride and a sense of badassery through your body.

I don't know how many different ways I can explain this for you. Your entire complaint is about the name of the browser, and yet you refuse to acknowledge that it is no different than any of its competition. You said that it was a "dated name to use", which means you are comparing the name to the names being used today. If the other browser names are off-topic to this discussion, then exactly how can the name Edge be outdated?

Irrelevant. I was talking about Microsoft Edge. Stop trying to shift the focus.

Oh my god! I linked to the post and then copied the text to quote from it. I see you managed to forget to include either of those parts in what you quoted. Trying to be deceptive, hey?

You linked to something, but it certainly wasn't what you claimed it was. Try being honest for once.

You said that one of the reasons that the name Internet Explorer was better was better was that it was "somewhat descriptive". That's right; you were the first one to use the word "descriptive". Why are you trying so hard to distance yourself from that?

I said "Even Internet Explorer was a better name. At least it was somewhat descriptive and more professional sounding." Note the emphasis and learn something about the English language. "At least" is hardly all-in support or endorsement.

Seriously, if you have this much trouble with comprehension, you might want to get out of your basement more often.

I guess it is because you are a lying troll. It's such a shame. One of my New Year's resolutions was not to engage with trolls, and I fell at the first hurdle. So I will stop now, as there is no point in continuing with someone who either just simply repeats themselves and thinks that is an argument, or lies about what they have said even though anyone can look back up the thread. I am sure that you will do one more post to repeat your original statement again as if it is a fact and think that is a "win". I'll give you that. Congratulations, even though you will have convinced nobody and will deep down know that you are just a lying zealot. Good luck with all your future trolling.

Let's see... Troll/hater accusation? Check. "Not gunna respond no more"? Check. Pigheaded denial after demonstrably proven wrong? Check.

Sure, I'll accept that as tacit concession and an admission that you are an illiterate, backward moron. Been nice owning you.

Re:Edge

[tepples]

If a legacy program expects strcpy() into a MAX_PATH-byte local variable to work, I don't see what can be made "graceful" about it.

Re:Edge

[darnkitten]

I just figured they wanted a common "E-word" so they could use a variation on their "Big Blue E" trademark.

"Excel(lent)" was already taken, and "Edge" likely tested better than the logical alternatives "Error," "Eruption," "Evil," "Exit" or "Brand ECCHS" (with all due apologies to MAD).

Re:Edge

[amiga3D]

If you're not listening to the prefab you're out of date too. Congratulations, it means you're not part of the herd.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly they should have named it browsr.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it means I'm ahead of anyone who does listen to the prefab. Prefab != new or progressive.

Re:Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows should detect that it's a legacy program and return a properly formatted string. If it can't do that, then it's a really poorly made OS.

Re:Edge

[tepples]

As far as I'm aware, there exists no "properly formatted string" shorter than MAX_PATH bytes that correctly represents the absolute path of a file whose path components plus separators total MAX_PATH bytes. Or should Windows be automatically allocating and deallocating drive letter aliases whenever the user attempts to access an affected file using a legacy program?

Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

When I launch a browser I want to start using it immediately, not after it has pestered me about some bullshiat I care nothing about. It is insanely frustrating to have Edge ignore the fact that I am typing a URL and have it take me off to some recommended shiat page telling me how much better Edge is than its competition. Quit trying to sell me on your walled garden web experience and stay out of my way, you imbeciles. Your UI includes a Stop button for a reason. The fact that it doesn't work when you are cramming your shit in my face only serves to piss me off.

Re:Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like a fucktard error, you can change the default page to blank

and btw firefox and gaggle try the same shit all the time, cept firefox occasionally begs for money after a UI update

Re:Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you M$ shills don't even *try* to sound credible any more.

Re:Edge is a POS

[amiga3D]

It sounds like the fucktard is the person that designed the UI. Since you yelped did he hit you with that rock?

Re:Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

you can change

No.

You change.

Re:Edge is a POS

[Anonymous Coward]

that dog älähts to which calick calahts

Browser market share - who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Microsoft care how many people use Edge or IE?

Re:Browser market share - who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they want to use it to break the standards?

cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

praising ubuntu and all its back door bullshit shovling all your searches direct to amazon

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

praising ubuntu and all its back door bullshit shovling all your searches direct to amazon

Since 16.04 LTS, switched off by default. Please try and keep up.

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

why? OSS hasnt lol

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that you used multiple pieces of open source software to be able to post that drivel.

If you don't like OSS, then stop using the internet because it's run with OSS.

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

>implying that everyone uses Ubuntu

Also, Linux has a ton of flaws. See comment. But Chromium on Linux is actually pretty well-designed (see comment), so I think we can say it's better than Edge.

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[tepples]

back door bullshit shovling all your searches direct to amazon

I solved that in December 2011: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Then five years later when it came time for a clean reinstall for various reasons, I went with Xubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

yes OSS runs the internet, just like mac's are superior for graphics and sound

thanks for that outdated retort, have anything else that is maybe from this last couple of decades

the real world doesn't work on PHP and MYSQL, just a bunch of junky ass troll sites

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[tepples]

the real world doesn't work on PHP and MYSQL, just a bunch of junky ass troll sites

Is Wikipedia such a "junky ass troll site"?

Re:cue the linux fucktards

[Anonymous Coward]

Just shut the fuck up, noob. You know less than nothing about computers and the internet.

Hint: Everything from your router, to your ISP to the sites that you visit use OSS. Microsoft even uses OSS because it better than what they make.

I want to believe

[grasshoppa]

I want to believe MS has competent design managers working for them. Maybe they are being micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, but I want to believe that after 20 years of trying to make a decent web browser they'd achieve success...or lacking that, they'd fail because some idiot manager keeps fucking them up.

Because damn...I'm embarrassed FOR them. How do you not put out at least a baseline capable browser by this point? Multi-billion dollar company who's spent 20+ years in the market, and they still fuck it up.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

22 years ago, the Start menu was introduced.
The people responsible for that change are long gone.

Re:I want to believe

[Frosty Piss]

Maybe they are being micromanaged to the point of irrelevance, but I want to believe that after 20 years of trying to make a decent web browser they'd achieve success...or lacking that, they'd fail because some idiot manager keeps fucking them up.

Apply that same thought pattern to the crap that is the latest version of Firefox...

Re:I want to believe

[amiga3D]

Firefox is still usable. I don't care for a lot of the changes but I still find myself having to shift back from Chrome occasionally. I looked at Edge on a Win10 setup and I figure I'd have to install Chrome and Firefox if I had Win10.

Re:I want to believe

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to believe MS has competent design managers working for them..

Yah, that would be nice, but I'm doubting it. Win 10 needs the following:

1) Weekly ISO releases. I hate your update process. It takes forever. I've been working on updating this little little netbook now for what 24 hours off and on. I first did a complete reset of the OS from inside windows and then babied it through updates, and it is still updating 24 hours later. I have better things to do. Just give me something I can flash into a USB drive and let it do a clean install. Oh look it just complained it failed at getting some updates. I have 100Mbps charter Internet. I could have installed linux and updated it twenty times by now. You also need these weekly iso releases with everything for systems that remain off-line. Windows can either get its updates from it, or you can do a clean reinstall, whichever is less painful.

2) The option to protect your privacy in the setup. Give me something I can select in a few seconds that raises privacy settings to max and turns off telemetry.

3) The option to configure the system as lean, such as for gaming, or well anything pseudo real time. Seriously, I don't want your stupid personal assistant, or a bunch of this stuff. Again, make it a simple setup option, maybe buried under advanced setup or something.

4) Better yet, on the microsoft web site, let me choose how I want windows configured, including perhaps configuring optional profiles for different machines, and then the server can send me an ISO that matches. In short, stop wasting my time. Microsoft should be leaps and bounds ahead of Linux right now with the money they can invest, but Linux Mint/Ubuntu/etc are much less painful. Hell I think I could have installed and built gentoo from source in this much time.

Re:I want to believe

[AmiMoJo]

Edge is a great example of how not to develop software. You can see very clearly what has happened.

Under the hood it's actually quite good, does well with standards compliance, is reasonably secure and fast. On top of that the UX people built something that ranges from mediocre to annoying, with the most touted features being little more than gimmicks. Then management really screwed it up, ticking boxes like "had sync capability" without bothering to check if it's actually useful to most people, and demanding some changes directed by marketing like the forced adverts for the shit you are already using.

My Xmas present to my parents - Win10 gone

[dbIII]

My Xmas present to my parents - remove that piece of shit MS Windows 10 off their laptop and restore MS Windows 7 on it.

The utterly braindead MS Windows 10 installer decided to run itself on an i3 machine with 2GB of memory. That made the machine totally unusable despite Firefox and Skype being the only programs used.

Changing it to MS Win7 gave it a usable interface that doesn't change or put ads in your face. Putting in 8GB of memory did the rest.

Re:My Xmas present to my parents - Win10 gone

[amiga3D]

I find Windows 7 works great with 4 gigs of ram. At least it does in Virtualbox. :)

Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't use Windows 10.

I'll stick with Debian, thank you.

IE and Edge combined

[Anonymous Coward]

A better statistic would be to combine IE and Edge usage.

In 12 months you see it drop from over 50% to 26%.

Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of what we think about Edge and Windows 10, we do have to acknowledge that at least Edge's market share is growing.

Like the article states:

At the end of 2015, Edge obtained a market share of 2.79% and at the end of 2016, it has climbed to 5.33%.

So although it may not be doing well compared to Chrome in absolute terms, at least its share of the market did increase during 2015, and then it increased again during 2016.

Compared to a browser like Firefox, which has been losing market share for quite some time now, Edge is doing very well.

Users are adopting Edge. Users are fleeing from Firefox. If Edge is considered to be "struggling", even though it's growing and taking more of the market, then Firefox must be in a much, much worse state.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Anonymous Coward]

But is Edge optional, or the default choice? If it is the default choice, how sure are you that people who use Edge have chosen to use Edge? And how sure are you that they just didn't take what was on the system because they don't know how to install another browser or simply don't care to install another browser?

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[unixisc]

Great question. Edge, as well as IE 11, is installed by default. It's another thing whether people actually use it or not. When I use my Windows laptop, I use variably either Chrome or Pale Moon. I only use Edge to log into Microsoft services

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Scutter]

I only use Edge to log into Microsoft services

You're lucky. Half the Microsoft services I log into won't render properly on Edge. They may have been fixed recently, but I've already moved on to browsers that work.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[justthinkit]

And when someone wakes up to find Windows 10 installed over their Windows 7/8/8.1 setup, doesn't that mean that their previous Firefox/Chrome default has now been changed...against their will? So most of this market share "gain" is really an attack, disruption or theft.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Anonymous Coward]

User motivation is irrelevant. It doesn't matter why users are using Edge. All that matters is that they are using it, and more of them are using it each year. At the same time we're seeing fewer and fewer users use Firefox, so its market share is dropping.

What makes the Firefox situation even worse is that in addition to Windows it also runs on platforms like Linux, the BSDs, macOS, and Android. Edge, on the other hand, is limited to Windows. Despite being an option for far more users than Edge is, we're seeing widespread rejection (both in the sense of non-users not starting to use it, and existing users who stop using it) of Firefox across multiple platforms.

Re: Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microshit Corp services are being developed by stupid indian chimps. Why would you subject yourself and your personal data to a third world shithole?

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[MCROnline]

I think people have to take other browsers apart from Edge into account too. Take Chrome, which hasn't been mentioned at all in the summary, that browser is plugged again and again on Google services to the point you feel obligated to install it. I do usually have multiple browsers installed anyway in case of a problem which would affect my browser. I personally have gone back to Firefox as I just prefer it over other options, my PC is fast enough to render at a speed that I don't notice the difference between browsers. Edge only comes up if I start an 'app' from the start menu and it is quickly discarded back where it came from once the job is done.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[zifn4b]

And when someone wakes up to find Windows 10 installed over their Windows 7/8/8.1 setup, doesn't that mean that their previous Firefox/Chrome default has now been changed...against their will? So most of this market share "gain" is really an attack, disruption or theft.

This is hyperbole. First of all, you can't upgrade to Windows 10 silently that I'm aware of. Second of all, no one can force money to come out of your wallet, pay for software and install it thereby accepting the terms and conditions of the End-user License agreement. So no, it's definitely not theft. Your idea is analogous to purchasing a firearm, shooting off your own foot and claiming the gun manufacturer is at fault.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Trax3001BBS]

But is Edge optional, or the default choice? If it is the default choice, how sure are you that people who use Edge have chosen to use Edge? And how sure are you that they just didn't take what was on the system because they don't know how to install another browser or simply don't care to install another browser?

It's passed as such but one is unable to change it's operation.

If I wish to view a PDF edge pops up and it's not a program meant for PDF many expected options are missing. So I'd select FoxIt (which came pre-installed) over and over again, yet Edge continues to open a selected PDF, open with: all tried - it has to be done manually.

Re:Compared to Firefox, Edge is doing great.

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using Edge to watch Silverlight content. For some reason on my Microsoft Surface 3 with Windows 10, I can rarely watch Amazon Prime movies and shows with Chrome. If I try, I constantly experience short pauses that become super annoying. I finally did some Google searching and found some forums that claimed that Silverlight worked better in Edge. I tried it a few days ago, and so far it solves the problem.

I would really like to roll back to Windows 8.1 since Windows 10 has made everything feel a little less stable and is also constantly rebooting and updating, but so far I haven't found the time or energy to do the roll back.

I wonder if Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging Silverlight on Chrome or if anyone else has experienced these problems?

What percentage?

[techno-vampire]

What I'd like to know is what percentage of the machines running Windows 10 were stealth upgrades, and how many of those weren't reverted because the users either didn't know that they could go back to their old system or were afraid to try.

Re:What percentage?

[QuietLagoon]

That's a great question. This whole Windows 10 disaster is a supernova black-eye for Microsoft. It will be a long, long time before Microsoft will have earned back the major trust they lost. And mea culpa blog entries buried in the holiday season are not the way for Microsoft to earn back the lost trust.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I realised something a few months ago that I think a lot of people haven't picked up on yet:

Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more.

Sure, they'll take the money and make a few billion on those, but his vision really is almost completely detached from Microsoft's historical desktop strongholds. That's why, despite plenty of us being skeptical about how well they'd do with Windows 10 following on from Windows 8 and Office not really doing much different to ten years ago, they're actually still returning pretty strong financials and the share price and investor sentiment are staying up accordingly.

Whether the new cloud-dwelling emperor really has any clothes is a different question, which only time will answer.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Question. I wonder how many new computers with Win 10 pre-installed get reverted to Win 7 or something better? And how many people who had Win 10 forced upon them have reverted to their old OS or switched to Linux, BSD, or whatever non-M$ OS?

I personally reverted my brother's computer and his wife's parents computer to Win 7 after forced installs. They all hated Windows 10! I don't know exactly how Windows 10 got on their computers, but I call it a forced install when you are asked to agree to the End User License Agreement after the install is finished instead before the install files are downloaded! Sending the files to the persons computer without their knowledge or consent is just wrong, and should be a federal crime!

Re:What percentage?

[QuietLagoon]

...Nadella's Microsoft isn't really about Windows and Office any more....

I would agree. With a caveat.

It's not about Windows anymore. But Office may still be in the picture.

Office is the stranglehold that Microsoft has on its corporate victims. The future of Microsoft is Azure, but Microsoft needs to keep Office around to force its customers to stay with Azure instead of another cloud provider.

If Microsoft can lure customers to Azure without the lock-in of Office, then maybe a Windows-less Microsoft has a reason to be profitable in the future.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole Windows 10 disaster is a supernova black-eye for Microsoft. It will be a long, long time before Microsoft will have earned back the major trust they lost.

We've been telling people for decades that Microsoft cannot be trusted, based on too many instances of malfeasance to count, and you're only just coming to the realization that they're untrustworthy? It's nice to have another member in the choir and all, but if you honestly think that it will take a long time for them to "earn back trust", you don't fully understand how short most people's memory span is.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

An acquaintance got a new laptop. Tried to install Win7. Didn't work because no drivers for the newer hardware. Remember that bit about MS not supporting newer hardware except with Win10? Apparently despite saying that they backed off for a while they actually went ahead and did it.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Office is the stranglehold that Microsoft has on its corporate victims"
Corporate victims? How about corporations or individuals wanting the type of functionality Office offers? Maybe you think they should all switch to the far less capable and far less supported OpenOffice stack? A stack that is nothing more than less featured clones of the MS Office applications. And the online Google office replacements are a possible alternative but only if you want to have all your data stored on someone else's servers.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm calling bullshit. PC hardware is backward compatible. It would work with Windows 7.

Re:What percentage?

[Raenex]

We've been telling people for decades that Microsoft cannot be trusted

They took it to a whole 'nother level with Windows 10 fuckery. Honestly, while Microsoft has always been ruthless against competitors, they generally used to treat their customers with at least some modicum of respect.

Things started going downhill as the computing landscape opened up to more aggressive tactics driven by software that treated their users as the product.

Re:What percentage?

[swb]

I hear so much talk about the future of Microsoft being Azure, it also kind of seems like the future of electricity generation being fusion. The march continues to the goal line but he goal line keeps moving, leaving you closer but no nearer.

VM workloads are still fantastically expensive on Azure and nobody seems really interested in database as a service functionality due to the immense lock-in. Network bandwidth from most buildings is just too expensive to get the throughput necessary to offsite significant data unless all but the display part of its lifecycle is in the same cloud.

And while raw CPU has kind of stagnated, vendors keep pushing increasingly dense computing solutions with flash storage on the precipice of eliminating spinning disk completely for capacities around 100 TB. 2U of rack space with tens of TB of flash storage, a couple of TB of RAM and still more CPU than anyone can actually use.

I just see too many companies figuring the bill for Azure VMs plus lock-in at the services level plus the comms charges and just not seeing why they shouldn't stick with ridiculous performance advantages locally and bypass the uncertainty of cloud.

Re:What percentage?

[LVSlushdat]

OR tried the rollback, and had it shit the bed, leaving their system inoperable.. The ONLY people still using Windows are those who have no choice (at work/programs that won't work on Mac/Linux) OR just *think* Windows is the only choice for an operating system on a PC.. A lot of us who have used MS products for many many years (20 years for me, using/supporting it), are fed up with Microsoft and, at least in my case, when I retired in 2010, I deleted the dualboot Win7 partition on my home systems and haven't looked back. Watching the antics of MS, doing *all* of the tricks malware writers do to get their malware on to systems, and how they abuse those people who still use their products, amuses me no end...

Re: What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a new windows 8 box that it has proven impossible to load win 7 on. I tried everything I could think of for days. It now runs linux mint.

Re: What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you say impossible to load Windows 7 on, what do you mean? The install media won't boot? It refuses to install? It installs but refuses to boot? I bet that you could totally run Windows 7 on that PC and that the problem lies elsewhere, such as not having the boot order setup correctly or trying to install the 32-bit version on UEFI instead of legacy BIOS.

Re:What percentage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are in a company with at least 3-5 staff people who can manage your in-house data center 24x7, you should not be housing publicly available servers on-site. Or any servers where you need high uptime lots of bandwidth and a response within 90 minutes.

Fewer then that, and you can still have your own dedicated servers running VMs, but you'll have to put them in a managed data center (with tech staff that can swap out failed components). And you'll have to buy a VM offering like VMware which can help you load balance across your servers, so factor in that cost as well. And you need good connectivity at your on-site data center (not always possible). Plus the costs of setting up and managing the whole thing (that requires anywhere from 5-30 hours per week, plus setup time).

The bill for Azure / AWS starts to pale in comparison of the on-site costs pretty quickly when you start factoring in power / generators / UPSs / redundant WAN links / staffing requirements. You can do it yourself, but you'll spend a lot more (been there, done that, burned out from being on call 24x7).

Re: What percentage?

[buchanmilne]

"And you'll have to buy a VM offering like VMware which can help you load balance across your servers, so factor in that cost as well."

What, Hyper-V can't do this yet?

Well, then just run ovirt (on say CentOS or maybe even Ubuntu or Debian), the open-source version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, which has about the same functionality as vSphere Enterprise (but not quite vSphere Enterprise Plus).

Downgrading to Windows 7

[guacamole]

Downgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing I have done to my desktop.

Windows 10, even a year after its original release, had signs of being a beta product at best. One problem I have been struggling with was the machine's CPU eventually constantly at 30-40% use with no obvious causes. I have tried all of the half-baked canned answers from Microsoft, including disabling/enabling/changing AV, disabling Microsoft services, and even wiping out and reinstalling the OS.

The next issue is with the updater. This damned thing simply eventually stops working. It shows there are pending updates, starts the downloads, but then sits at 0%. I have tried every canned answer provided on the Microsoft forums, including resetting the update components and wiping and reinstalling the OS.

And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[phantomfive]

And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.

Your computer is just practicing radical freedom.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[staalmannen]

One of my major issues with Windows is the constant reboots for updates and a very slow shut down / start up when updates are being applied. It has happened several times for my colleagues (on Win7) that their presentations were interrupted by a forced update that could not be cancelled. Why can't updates in Windows be as smooth and easy as in Linux? Stuff can be updated in the background, not extra configurations / applications of updates during start up or shut down. Disclaimer: I manage my own work computer running Linux (Arch). A bit more of an administrative burden to make sure that stuff works with the work infrastructure but worth it.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[dbIII]

Why can't updates in Windows be as smooth and easy as in Linux?

Because it's not designed that way. It's a feature that was not considered important.
Maybe MS Win11 or whatever number they choose next will have better ways to deal with file locking and library versioning to bring it up to date with what *nix and VMS had before WinNT ever existed, but for now it doesn't have that.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this, they make an OS worth a fuck, and you stop getting on the nuts of your betters? It's good you're such a little bitch stuck in a bent over position, but this is of no concern to us.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a wild guess: they're still using an O(2^n) algorithm for applying updates.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Waccoon]

Haha... there's always some asshole that can't resist blaming the user. If the task manager can't tell you which process is using all that CPU time, I'm pretty sure that's a deficiency in the design of the OS. What do you do when the Windows Modules Installer (ie, TrustedInstaller) is using all that CPU time? Blame Realtek, apparently.

Next you'll insist that if WindowsUpdate uses up 100% time on one of your cores for 30+ hours, that's user error as well! That, despite this being a VERY well known problem for many years and the only solution is to manually hunt for and install the "right" KB update to update the Windows catalog file. Which KB update? Who knows? It changes every few weeks or so, so go to the MS forums and ask everyone else what magic patch to install.

One of my biggest problems with Windows10 is that its behavior, particularly with regards to background maintenance, is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes it'll idle for a day without using any CPU time at all, and then it thrashes the CPU and storage drive like crazy for the next 10 hours. Despite Microsoft's claim that Win10 only performs background maintenance when your machine is at idle, my experience has proven that's total bullshit. The OS does what it wants, and being a black box by design, go ahead and tell me what the machine is doing with that 10 hours of CPU time.

Then there's the lovely fact that configuration settings can just change for arbitrary reasons. If you defer updates too many times, the OS will lock out the config setting that lets you defer updates. Yes, it will literally just grey the UI out so you can't change it anymore. With so many hidden gotchas going on in the background trying to protect you from yourself (or prevent you from having any control over your PC), I'd image this makes Win10 practically untestable. How do you diagnose a system that just changes its own configuration willy-nilly? No wonder it's buggy as fuck and settings just reset to the defaults after certain updates (but only for some people and not others). The only way to diagnose a problem is to reinstall and cross your fingers.

MS built an OS where you don't know what's going on. Clearly, that's why you know it's always user error, and not bad design, that's the problem.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[thegarbz]

I'm so conflicted about your post. On the one side you look like a shill, (someone on Slashdot wants Windows Update to work? Nice try!), but on the other side you're not promoting the product.

I'm so confused.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

m night shymalamadingdong twist right there:

its the stuck windows update that you have the one that keeps pushing your cpu

source: my windows 7 update its broken and it does exactly that, so i disabled the service entirely

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run in to this case on a lot of laptops. 9 times out of 10 it's a bug in the Realtek SDcard reader driver.

Yeah, the driver that windows installs from the windowsupdate repository and is supposedly "certified" - Don't bother going to the website either. Latest version does the same thing.

Disable the thing in the device manager and you laptop becomes useful again.

It's a pain in the ass to pin down because you need to run special tools to see what drivers are misbehaving because windows groups them all under "System" or "Services" Thank fuck for Mark Russinovich - Best hire Microsoft has ever made. Process explorer lets you drill down and see what's going on.

Anyway, I'll still take the windows 10 way. Users are clueless. Bring on those managed, forced updates. Security is more important than usability. If microsoft fucks it up people will move on to something else. Windows isn't necessary for the continuation of computing as we know it.

We're not users though. So there's no excuse. Learn the environment you're administering and use the right tools. Or switch to linux. What you don't get to do is complain. Such is the burden of knowledge

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Blaming the user is often warranted. There are a lot of stupid motherfuckers in the world that wouldn't know a potato chip from a microchip. Since you defended this idiot, you're either a stupid motherfucker yourself, or you're a Anti-Microsoft troll and thus will defend anyone that shits on Microsoft.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Protip: Just because you personally have not experienced an issue, does not mean it does not exist.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem like a nice person

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[WolfgangVL]

Windows box in the shop ran my large format 3d printer.

3 day long print, dead 2.5 days into it because MS knows best when to update, running tasks be damned.

To hell with windows. Its run on a Raspi now. This means my time must be invested training users. This is a business cost. Thanks MS.

Re:Downgrading to Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

It is impossible to troll something evil.

Edge

[hackwrench]

Edge needs to fix its bookmark toolbar. You can't arrange your bookmarks by dragging and dropping them. And the limitations on bookmark text because they still are NTFS file system files needs to die. NTFS filesystem character limitations need to die.

Windows share in 2015 was 11.7 %

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

and had declined for 4 years. Everything points towards continued decline for Windows sales for 2016. So 2016 will probably be fifth year with declining sales for Windows.

As for Windows - they stopped selling Windows 7 and 8 in 2016 so well of course Windows 10 will continue to increase. Customer can't get anything else in the future.

Android had 54% in 2015. So looks like mobile is the way to go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Windows share in 2015 was 11.7 %

[tepples]

As for Windows - they stopped selling Windows 7 and 8 in 2016 so well of course Windows 10 will continue to increase. Customer can't get anything else in the future.

GNU/Linux is still available for desktop PCs, as is macOS for PCs made by Apple.

Android had 54% in 2015. So looks like mobile is the way to go.

Say I want to retire a luddite PC and use apps to app apps. How practical is it to use AIDE or another tool on an Android tablet for developing Android apps?

X-UA-Compatible: IE=edge

[tepples]

I was under the impression that the name "Edge" came from <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> used to disable legacy document mode in Internet Explorer.

Electrolysis makes Firefox responsive again

[tepples]

The high use of Chrome was triggered by issues with Firefox (which I think have been well managed by now).

I consider Firefox's issues managed as of Firefox 51, which brings the first round of Electrolysis to most users so that scrolling and tab switching aren't quite as affected by inefficient ad serving scripts.

(Unlike Firefox 50, which uses a whitelist of e10s-compatible extensions, Firefox 51 uses a blacklist of incompatible extensions. The "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" extension that ships with the Xubuntu operating system is on neither list. So to get e10s, I have to join the beta channel by enabling the firefox-next PPA.)

Re:Electrolysis makes Firefox responsive again

[Anonymous Coward]

FF works fine - though note that its market share is now about the same as Edge's. However, somewhere between 50 and 52 they broke NoScript; it now completely blocks most web sites without the ability to back off, even if disabled but still installed. So it's uninstalled and I'm getting by (poorly) with Privacy Badge and uBlock Origin. Need NoScript back.

Re:Electrolysis makes Firefox responsive again

[Fly Swatter]

Try uMatrix as an alternative to noscript. Same author as uBlock. Note that it may be a little overwhelming at first.

No Group Policy Editor on Windows Home

[tepples]

Open Group Policy Editor (Press Windows Key and type gpedit.msc and hit Enter.

Last time I tried gpedit.msc on a home edition of Windows, I got an error message to the effect "not found". So it appears users who want to access files with long names would have to either pay to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro or pirate the Group Policy Editor snap-in. What am I missing?

Re:No Group Policy Editor on Windows Home

[Anonymous Coward]

Or find out what registry hacks are needed to do the same thing. Most of the time, what group policies really do behind the scenes is set something in the registry, which can be done directly in Home if you find out what to mess with. Non-trivial process in many cases to find that out, of course. I don't pretend to know off the top of my head what in the registry enables long filenames, but sufficiently advanced searching would probably work.

The rush for DirectX 12?

[AHuxley]

Now that people have their OS with games and hardware for DirectX 12 support?
As for browsers, support for blocking all ads and related malware is a trending feature.

Re:The rush for DirectX 12?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia still doesn't have a card with full DX12, and Vulkan is waiting in the wings.

Let's see

[OneHundredAndTen]

The strong arm and bully people, and they have yet to reach a 25% penetration, less than 6% with their browser, which is the default that the illiterate masses won't be able, or won't care, to change. Well done, Microsoft; living up to expectations. Consider yourself, once again, middle fingered.

Try 25%

[Billly Gates]

Funny Netmarketshare is showing something different for me. Not that I like WIndows 10 as the best OS ever, but just saying

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Billly Gates]

Linux, on the other hand, was a buggy piece of crap... You get used to having all the bugs there and I don't know if it's just my perception, but it seems a lot of open source projects don't have nearly enough people squashing bugs. Everyone seems to want to add more features instead of fixing the bugs. I spent some time on a mac and thought I was in heaven, but my wallet wasn't. Windows 10, however... first OS they've done right in a long time.

Which is why I use FreeBSD for server oriented stuff. Many geeks on slashdot attacked Gartner several years back for attacking Linux as not ready for the server. Must be sponsored from Microsoft etc. ... but if you look closely at the criteria they asked CIO's what they wanted more. THat was big iron features and world class reliability. Solaris and HP-UX both beat Linux handily before 2005 and FreeBSD still does too with network loads and reliability.

But we can't talk about that here.

I'm not touching MS products with a 10ft pole

[Anonymous Coward]

The time of Microsoft is gone for good. At least for me. I use Macs at work, Linux at home and PlayStation for gaming. The right system/device for the right task.

- OSX is a really nice piece of software when you get used to it.
- I am yet to find a thing that can't be done on Linux. Sure, some tasks are non-trivial but everything is possible if you have the knowledge.
- PlayStation because I've already completed all the old PC games I desired since childhood and I just want to have fun out-of-the-box now.

Speaking about Edge and IE, I am a back end Django developer for a big international company. Having made extensive research of the market and discussed the case with pretty much every dev at the company, we stopped giving a crap about Edge and IE mid 2016. Firstly, because of the low market share. Secondly, because to us Edge and IE are both like a POS at the end of a stick and the ordeal you have to go through to make things work is simply not worth the candle.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

Not even with servers... it's a low bar to beat linux on the desktop. Mint seems to be the only one that hasn't gone to hell in a handbasket. Try to do something that is so simple the rest of the OS world takes for granted...like a decent program for playing your music. You have amarok, banshee....all these programs with tons of features no one would ever need.... and they have problems doing something simple like oh...playing your mp3s and keeping the playlists on your phone synced... Yes, in linux you have choice! You have to download 5 different programs that are supposed to do the same thing to try and find one that is actually usable for what you want to do. Some choice...

Then, Netflix or other services. The linux crowd likes to blame that all on DRM. Sure, they have DRM. But, guess what? DRM is here to stay. They're not going to remove it because 1% of users want to use an OS that can't handle it. So, linux becomes the choice of things you have to give up in order to run linux...

I could go on and on. I switched to Linux in the Windows 98 days. It had promise then.....and the other OSs left it behind while it floundered.

An old joke . . .

[mmell]

Letting programmers name a software product makes as much sense as letting marketers write it.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't talk about that here because it's a bunch of bull crap.

Our enterprise is migrating from Solaris to Linux faster than any other deployment.

Turd of an OS ..

[tuxgeek]

When it comes to turd OS adoption announcements they really don't mean much either.
You could say for example that the number of people that couldn't take it anymore and slit their wrists is up 14% this year over last.
Or perhaps the number of people that jumped in front of the train after Windows 10 self installs and then crashes your HDD and deletes all digital memories of their poor deceased mother is on the rise.

Give me Corporate Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

From a business perspective give me the following and I will upgrade:

1. Make it look and feel like Windows 7; I do not wan't to have to explain to hundreds or thousands of computer illiterate people why things have changed and where everything has gone, I just want them to continue to be able to do their jobs using the bespoke applications we run. The move to the ribbon interface in Office was a nightmare, I don't want to do that again.

2. Give me all the group policy controls and customisation that I currently have in Windows 7.

3. Give me the ability to disable all the telemetry; we are a UK based highly regulated financial services company, we have to be able to prove that none of our data leaves our company network and Win10 is oh so leaky. Yes I know about Win 10 enterprise but (a) I'm not prepared to pay a tax to only reduce telemetry and (b) I want telemetry completely disabled, I can already do this in Windows 7 using policies and scripts.

I have already been asked by the higher ups whether Linux or Mac is an option, I said not just yet and don't worry about it as Windows 7 is still viable until 2020, after all, we are still running machines with Windows XP on them and we have had zero issues.

Give us a corporate Windows with all those things Microsoft and we'll talk, until then we are sticking with Win7.

But Firefox increased is market share

[afc_wimbledon]

From the figures linked to by the original article, FF went from 11.68% in Jan 2015 to 12.22% in Dec. Hardly users "fleeing" - not what it was, but still comfortably twice anything but IE or Chrome.

It is a server OS but now nerfed

[dbIII]

Maybe if you're going to do things that belong on a server you should run a server operating system rather than desktop? Like Windows Server or, better yet, Linux?

Win2k and Windows XP were Microsoft's answer to that, giving people a server operating system based on NT instead of a relative toy like Win98/ME. MS Windows 10 has gone back to the approach of a toy that just happens to be built on what used to be a server operating system.

Re:It is a server OS but now nerfed

[WhiteKnight07]

Maybe if you're going to do things that belong on a server you should run a server operating system rather than desktop? Like Windows Server or, better yet, Linux?

Win2k and Windows XP were Microsoft's answer to that, giving people a server operating system based on NT instead of a relative toy like Win98/ME. MS Windows 10 has gone back to the approach of a toy that just happens to be built on what used to be a server operating system.

No. Microsoft's answer to that was Server 2000 and Server 2003. Win2k and XP were built on NT4 Workstation, an OS intended for client machines, not NT4 Server, which became the aforementioned Server OS's. Windows client OS's were never intended to be used for server like tasks. Use the correct tool for the job and install a server OS if you are doing server things, be it Windows or *nix.

Re: It is a server OS but now nerfed

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiot, NT4 server and NT4 workstation were proven to be identical code except for the extra software components that came with server like IIS.

Re:It is a server OS but now nerfed

[dbIII]

I do think you are very incorrect and are going by marketing labels and not actual capability. In nearly every single case the differences between the MS server OS and the general purpose OS from Win2k on has been items enabled with a licence and some server management tools.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you must be a fucking idiot if you need someone else to make choices for you. I appreciate having the freedom of choice in my software. It keeps things from being stagnant and allows me to find the software that is the best fit for my needs.

As for Linux, there is Linux Mint, elementary OS, KDE neon, Solus, Manjaro, Zorin...many desktop OSes that are great, easy to install and easy to use. The only "issue" I can fathom that you might have is again, you're not independent enough to make decisions for yourself.

I bet you only watch movies that critics tell you to watch, right?

Windows 10 users

[simpz]

Whenever I here of W10 market share improvements, especially with people who rave about it. I just think, go ahead sheeple and get pwned by Microsoft, so long as *I* keep being able to use alternatives.. don't care if they get 95% market share with it.

Win 10 just OK for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Edge is the worst POS browser Microsoft has done yet. Get's worse instead of better, freezes or stops responding a lot even on a fresh install. What's even worse is the complex task of how to reset it which is much worse than IE was. I cannot believe Microsoft thought Edge was ever going to be a good browser? As for Windows 10 it's better than Windows 8 by far and worse than Windows 7 in many ways. It's still mess of a split personality between tablet, smartphone, and desktop OS that simply degrades itself to fit into all those platforms.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

Your enterprise is migrating from Solaris to a pre-2005 version of Linux?

It's easy to call bull crap when you can't even read.

edge stinks

[smithcl8]

I haven't understood the push for Edge, even with the previews I've been on for a couple years. It's far behind Chrome or Firefox in terms of features and it stinks to even try to use. I'm not patient enough to wait for their Agile-built app to go through enough sprints to become good. It's seems to me like when you are dropping your new app into an already fairly crowded space, the minimal marketable product must at least provide a damn-near level set of features to what is there.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

If my "choice" is between competing broken products, then what choice do I have? So, the real choice becomes whether to continue choosing broken products or to choose to use something stable that does what I need it to. I made that choice.

You have a cookie cutter knee jerk response to criticism. You also don't have the nads to own up to your own comments, anonymous coward. If you examined the situation objectively, you'd realize a few things:

1. Linux Mint, Manjaro, Zorin, etc. are not different desktop OSs. They are different distributions of the same OS, Linux. Linux is not a desktop OS, but distributions can be geared towards the desktop.

2. All of these distributions share the same buggy software pool. So, no matter which distribution you "choose", your choices in software are limited to the same programs, with the same failings, that you have in every other distro. Sure,some patches are almost always included, but I have yet to find any that concentrate on the type of bug fixes to that software pool that would be needed in order to achieve the quality to make them usable to the vast majority.

3. As far as watching movies, I do so on Netflix and Amazon Prime....something that a google search tells me you're just now getting the ability to do again on linux...because they're finally caving in and working with the DRM. No more having to try workarounds (which incidentally didn't work for me last time I tried...right before Windows 10 came out). So, you only had to wait a few years to watch movies... or you switched to an OS that COULD watch movies.

But it's always something with Linux....some things you have to give up in order to use Linux. Instead of having an OS that fulfills your needs, you tailor your expectations by what Linux can do. Yes, you can choose to do less than everyone else... choose to have more bugs.. or you can choose an OS that actually fulfills YOUR needs.

Dumb fucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Current uptime? Six months.

Learn how to run an operating system, you tool.

Why the fuck to I have to put HTML formatting into posts here?

You can't even fucking Slashdot, yet you're trying to pretend you have the balls to manage an operating system? Really?

Re: Dumb fucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't even fucking Slashdot, yet you're trying to pretend you have the balls to manage an operating system? Really?"

As if managing windows requires balls. Get a real OS and learn something.

Windows 10 ads for Edge

[MobyDisk]

I have a Windows 10 box. Every couple of days it displays an advertisement claiming Edge is some percentage faster or more secure than Firefox. I wonder what other programs it does this too? If I run OpenOffice will it display an ad for Microsoft Office? If I run bash will it advertise powershell?

Re:Windows 10 ads for Edge

[n0w0rries]

Try running windows 10 in a country with slow internet. If you have broadband, you really have no idea how bad the telemetry/update/spyware is until it consumes all of your very little bandwidth, and makes your PC slow as crap because it's trying to hammer some server with a bunch of data through a small straw.

After running several scripts to kill all the telemetry and crap, it was still hammering my internet, with a huge transmit to microsoft servers. Disabling a few more services resolved it.

Now I use my Linux notebook a lot more, for general use, and my Win10 is used for specific things only that I can't do on Linux.

Linux user? So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, we can't tell if you're lying or not. Secondly, it doesn't materially affect your claims at all. Running linux doesn't make windows run less stably, though MS would like to do so and blame Linux...

It's more that Win only lets you fisher price

[Anonymous Coward]

In the interests of "ease of use", everything you could use if you were informed and competent is hidden and unavailable, usually done by the OS itself. So it's not that Windows is fisher price, but that all it lets you do is fisher price work. That, by the way, is the problem I have with systemd: it hides so much to be "easy to use" that if it doesn't work or you know what you're doing, you're fucked, because the option to manually override the "artificial intelligence" of systemd is totally unavailable. Unless you hack your own version of the code to help you out. Similarly, the server version of Windows may give you the tools. But either workaround of the designer deciding for you what you're allowed to do requires you to go into full professional mode if fisher price isn't working for you.

You are presuming a reason for their actions

[Anonymous Coward]

But since they are mental states that you have no access to, this assumption is merely your assertion based on YOUR thoughts. We can't say WHY you want to think that Linux users are whining about it not being the year of the Linux desktop,but we CAN see that this is what you project onto Linux users if they DARE to not like Windows' UI. That you cannot think of a good reason (even if you disagree with it, as with, say liking or not boiled cabbage) indicates that you want to be RIGHT and those disagreeing with you WRONG,and will not consider that there may be valid reasons for their actions.

What we CAN get from this is that your entire screed there is highly bigoted and unreliable, therefore even as anecdote it fails.

"that I'm aware of"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet the number of people who didnt know they were upgraded to Win10 until after it ran for the first time indicates that your awareness is at least unreliable.

The complaint isn't that money was stolen,but marketshare, so "wallet" is irrelevant in rebuttal of THAT claim.

Your idea is like trying to "defend" your bullying by saying that since nobody else saw who hit who first, you aren't the bully.

Re:"that I'm aware of"

[zifn4b]

Yet the number of people who didnt know they were upgraded to Win10 until after it ran for the first time indicates that your awareness is at least unreliable.

Where is the evidence for your claim? My experience with my Windows 7 -> Windows 10 upgrade was such that there was a nagware screen from the system tray that afforded me the option to upgrade or not upgrade. It was a limited time offer. I decided on my own accord that (while I disagree with this in principle) that because of my gaming preferences I wanted to have the latest and greatest DirectX stack. I realize Microsoft has a habit of making you upgrade in order to gain access to the latest DirectX stack to take advantage of the features of the latest 3D graphics hardware but for free? Why not? I found there was some work involved in customizing Windows 10 to fit my security and privacy preferences but I was able to do most of that in about an hour. I did have to do some registry hacks for things that were not exposed via the UI including disabling Windows Telemetry but I was able to do what I wanted to do with Windows 10 after I customized it to suit my personal preferences.

Also before you start complaining about that experience you should know as many Slashdot readers do when you use a *nix distro (and I've used several) you have to go through the same customization to make the distro suit your personal preferences. In fact, there are significantly more customization options in *nix than Windows.

I never encountered anything that suggested to me that if I did not upgrade to Windows 10 that the upgrade would be pushed to me. I also never encountered anything that modified my Chrome and Firefox settings so until I see some hard evidence it appears to be hyperbole based on my own hands on experience.

I mean you can disagree with the way Microsoft operates and there have been a plethora of articles full of valid criticism on those throughout the years but I have not seen one single shred of evidence for this claim and I have multiple laptops and PC's running various versions of Windows including 7, 8 and 10.

Re: "that I'm aware of"

[buchanmilne]

"Where is the evidence for your claim? My experience with my Windows 7 -> Windows 10 upgrade was such that there was a nagware screen from the system tray that afforded me the option to upgrade or not upgrade."

Really, you didn't see all the stories about complaints from users whose Windows 7 devices can't run Windows 10 adequately and got upgraded without ever actively opting in, or in some cases without any notification except being greeted with a Windows 10 login screen, or worse.

Here is an example article of how that dialog you saw changed when Microsoft wasn't satisfied with the slow adoption of Windows 10:

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

That was the first links from googling obvious search terms ...

Re: "that I'm aware of"

[zifn4b]

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

This is not a "silent upgrade". You can claim the pop up verbiage was changed in a shady way such that some uneducated users might not realize they had to click the X to avoid signalling to Microsoft that they wanted to install later and I would agree with that statement. That's not a "silent upgrade". "silent upgrade" means installed in the background with no warning whatsoever without the user's consent. The user in that article gave consent unknowingly. That's a completely different issue. My comment that "silent upgrade" is hyperbole still stands. This also explains why I never had a problem because I'm aware of these tactics and read carefully. If you've been reading this site long enough you already know not to blindly trust Microsoft.

You have to make the correct claim, otherwise you're accusing another party of something it really didn't do. It doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong, but you have to accuse them of what they actually did.

NVIDIA uses the same drivers on Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

So THAT claim is a load of bollocks.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

If my "choice" is between competing broken products, then what choice do I have? So, the real choice becomes whether to continue choosing broken products or to choose to use something stable that does what I need it to. I made that choice.

What broken products? You claim things are broken, but you don't back up those claims. I use plenty of OSS software under Linux and rarely have problems, so what specifically is broken in which pieces of software?

You have a cookie cutter knee jerk response to criticism. You also don't have the nads to own up to your own comments, anonymous coward. If you examined the situation objectively, you'd realize a few things:

And you do, "Tannhaus"? (I'm sure that's your true and legal name, right?)

1. Linux Mint, Manjaro, Zorin, etc. are not different desktop OSs. They are different distributions of the same OS, Linux. Linux is not a desktop OS, but distributions can be geared towards the desktop.

The difference between distribution and OS is semantics which you only bring up because your argument is so weak. In addition, not all Linux OSes use the same base, so they are "proper" OSes in their own right...unless you think Android and macOS are mere distributions.

2. All of these distributions share the same buggy software pool. So, no matter which distribution you "choose", your choices in software are limited to the same programs, with the same failings, that you have in every other distro. Sure,some patches are almost always included, but I have yet to find any that concentrate on the type of bug fixes to that software pool that would be needed in order to achieve the quality to make them usable to the vast majority.

What bugs? You keep saying that but you don't list anything specific. It's as if you're pulling shit from your ass. And of course Windows is totally not buggy and insecure, lol.

3. As far as watching movies, I do so on Netflix and Amazon Prime....something that a google search tells me you're just now getting the ability to do again on linux...because they're finally caving in and working with the DRM. No more having to try workarounds (which incidentally didn't work for me last time I tried...right before Windows 10 came out). So, you only had to wait a few years to watch movies... or you switched to an OS that COULD watch movies.

So you watch what Netflix and Amazon tell you to watch. Personally I buy the movies I choose on media that I will own forever. I'm not big on subscriptions and rentals, especially on inferior quality internet video streams.

But it's always something with Linux....some things you have to give up in order to use Linux. Instead of having an OS that fulfills your needs, you tailor your expectations by what Linux can do. Yes, you can choose to do less than everyone else... choose to have more bugs.. or you can choose an OS that actually fulfills YOUR needs.

My Linux boxes can do more than I need. I guess if you're fifteen years old and need to play thousands of video games, then Windows might be appealing, but I am a grown man with responsibility, family and friends. I simply don't have the time or need to play that many games. What I can currently run in Linux is far more than I will ever be willing or able to get through in a lifetime.

What I do need is a stable, secure PC to do work on. My Linux boxes fulfil that need perfectly while Windows fails.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

What broken products? You claim things are broken, but you don't back up those claims. I use plenty of OSS software under Linux and rarely have problems, so what specifically is broken in which pieces of software?

I get it... I must list each and every bug in some exhaustive reply and, if I don't take the time, they don't exist. Cute.

I gave an example...managing the music on my phone via Playlist and both Amarok and banshee having problems doing so. That was just one instance right off the top of my head. I'm sure everyone here that has used Linux can add a ton more...including you if you were being honest.

And you do, "Tannhaus"? (I'm sure that's your true and legal name, right?)

That's the thing...it's not. It's my online identity and you're still too chicken to pin your comments to your Slashdot identity

The difference between distribution and OS is semantics which you only bring up because your argument is so weak. In addition, not all Linux OSes use the same base, so they are "proper" OSes in their own right...unless you think Android and macOS are mere distributions.

Good lord.... no it isn't. They all use the same kernel. The "core" is the same and they build on top of it: just like you don't have Samsung Android, Nokia Android, etc. It's all the Android OS.

So you watch what Netflix and Amazon tell you to watch. Personally I buy the movies I choose on media that I will own forever. I'm not big on subscriptions and rentals, especially on inferior quality internet video streams.

So you buy what the MPAA and stores tell you to buy... see how nonsensical that is? You have the thought patterns of a religious fundamentalist. No one is free and making their own choices unless they're making the choices you make. Otherwise, they're misguided and misled.

My Linux boxes can do more than I need. I guess if you're fifteen years old and need to play thousands of video games, then Windows might be appealing, but I am a grown man with responsibility, family and friends. I simply don't have the time or need to play that many games. What I can currently run in Linux is far more than I will ever be willing or able to get through in a lifetime.

What I do need is a stable, secure PC to do work on. My Linux boxes fulfil that need perfectly while Windows fails.

Hahaha. Oh, that is rich. Try to discredit me because I'm not making the same choices you are. I get it... "free as in beer" and the whole spiel. Use the buggy crap, but convince the people it isn't buggy crap hodge podge together. It's a movement! It's for a greater purpose! Nevermind the fact that's been linux's spiel since way back when it was a decent alternative to Windows 98. It no longer is. It's fallen sorely behind, not enough people fixing bugs and most of the software has stagnated. To do many things, you have to resort to software that isn't even being actively developed anymore. Oh, but not you, true believer...never you.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

Oh and I'll just leave this hear to show that I was using linux as far back as 1998 as I claim:

Here's the proof

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

Or maybe the software I developed a couple of years back when I used Linux mint

I hate that Edge hides settings

[Anonymous Coward]

My father-in-law got a PC with Edge a few years back and quickly ran into some malware that reset the Edge home page to some kind of FBI warning type ransomeware. I could not find anywhere how to reset the home page.
That should have been one of the easiest fixes in the world, but instead I had to hack around it with a new icon that would launch Google's search page instead.

Wait, how do I load Edge on my Linux box?

[WillAffleckUW]

Nope, still won't work.

Whatever, grandpa.

The salt is real

[Ayanami_R]

I swear, MS can simply do no right by some people. People are still chomping at the bit for them to fail. I will never understand it. Don't like their stuff, fine, don't use it. But the amounts of disinformation, made up "facts" etc. around this OS is more than usual funny. Adoption keeps growing, after the free period and people are besides themselves every time it's reported...

Re:The salt is real

[david_thornley]

Don't like their stuff, fine, don't use it.

If you don't use MS Windows, there's a whole lot of software you aren't going to be able to use. MS isn't issuing any more W7 licenses, and there's a finite amount left. Most individual people who have W7 have an EOM license, which may not be transferred to another computer, so they lose it when they replace their system. Lots of people pretty much have to run W10.

Re:The salt is real

[guacamole]

Some people? Please.

Most people don't want them to fail. Most people want to take back the control over their desktop OS. The problems with Windows 10 are well known. A crappy and inconsistent GUI on the desktop, although better than Windows 8, endless stream of bugs related to the updater, high CPU usage, etc, the updater that reboots the OS while the PC is in the middle of task, whole same data collection, etc. If Microsoft wants to improve the OS, that's fine, but people want to have the GUI and the level of control of Windows 7. Windows 8 and 10 were an inconsistent mess that took one step forward from Windows 7, then two back. No wonder people are hanging on dearly onto their Windows 7 licenses and PCs.

Re:The salt is real

[Ayanami_R]

That's called life, nothing is 100% the way you want.

What's really sad is that all Linux vendors and Apple did precisely 0 to pull people away.

Re:The salt is real

[david_thornley]

Yup, that's life, and people can't necessarily use their favorite OSes and are sometimes forced to use ones they dislike, and so it's not helpful to tell people not to use MS Windows.

Re:The salt is real

[Ayanami_R]

"Forced" How? You mean at work? Who who isn't at work is "forced" to use windows. Many things are a voluntary choice. If you choose to keep a windows install to play a game, that's on you, you can (and should) choose not to play the game as you don't want windows. People are forced by their own entitlement ro decisions, but outright, no.

Never gonna give you up (to a point)

[lucm]

why feed the troll? i mean really....

I have seen ugly flame wars turn into really interesting discussions, and while it's the exception rather than the norm, it just cannot happen if one gives up on trolls too quickly. Things can turn nasty because some people are unable to manage their emotions, not just because they're being mischievous, so it doesn't always mean there's nothing worth discussing under the layer of childish insults.

When the discussion becomes only empty insults then it's a dead end, but as long as there's something to address that could be of interest to other readers I don't see a problem with feeding trolls.

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it... I must list each and every bug in some exhaustive reply and, if I don't take the time, they don't exist. Cute.

You didn't even list one thing and now you're trying to exaggerate what I said because you have no argument.

I gave an example...managing the music on my phone via Playlist and both Amarok and banshee having problems doing so. That was just one instance right off the top of my head. I'm sure everyone here that has used Linux can add a ton more...including you if you were being honest.

Wait, so you're butthurt because a music player application doesn't work as a phone manager application? That's like getting pissed about VLC not working as a web browser.

That's the thing...it's not. It's my online identity and you're still too chicken to pin your comments to your Slashdot identity

"Online identity"? Come now, even someone as simple-minded as you must see how pathetic that excuse sounds. I am no more anonymous than you are.

Good lord.... no it isn't. They all use the same kernel. The "core" is the same and they build on top of it: just like you don't have Samsung Android, Nokia Android, etc. It's all the Android OS.

Actually, yes, it is. Your lack of knowledge shines through because you think Android OSes are the same as desktop Linux OSes though.

So you buy what the MPAA and stores tell you to buy... see how nonsensical that is? You have the thought patterns of a religious fundamentalist. No one is free and making their own choices unless they're making the choices you make. Otherwise, they're misguided and misled.

I search for specific things that I want directly, I don't look at ads or get fed a pre-chewed stream of low quality shit like you do with Netflix.

Hahaha. Oh, that is rich. Try to discredit me because I'm not making the same choices you are. I get it... "free as in beer" and the whole spiel. Use the buggy crap, but convince the people it isn't buggy crap hodge podge together. It's a movement! It's for a greater purpose! Nevermind the fact that's been linux's spiel since way back when it was a decent alternative to Windows 98. It no longer is. It's fallen sorely behind, not enough people fixing bugs and most of the software has stagnated. To do many things, you have to resort to software that isn't even being actively developed anymore. Oh, but not you, true believer...never you.

Yeah, sorry if you need to play video games all day, your best bet is probably to buy a console. When you grow up, your priorities might change.

BTW, your two (2!) additional fit-of-rage posts below do nothing but undermine your shreds of fabricated arguments. The fact that you haven't seen a Linux OS in almost twenty years means you have no place to talk.

Why the double standand

[dbIII]

I really hate it when I'm treating someone like a professional

Your fanboy shit of "clearly has no clue what the hell they are talking about" is the way you treat people like a professional? As I see it, I am not treating you as a professional because you are not acting like one, so that makes two of us with mutual contempt, but I most certainly have not made this personal. Suggesting that you are completely and utterly incorrect is not personal - your "clearly has no clue what the hell they are talking about" came in many posts before my much milder "if you are under such a delusion" .

is because its easier and better to manage all your disk assets from a central location than many different locations

Only if your remote management tools are shit two decades out of date. Also guess what runs on those SANs - it's not MS Windows is it?

It's not the year 2001 with the mythical "longhorn just around the corner" that was going to be better than everything else so what are you still pushing that very stale old line?

Re:Why the double standand

[Lord Apathy]

Oh bullshit. Grow a thicker skin, or better yet just fuck off. You clearly have no god damn clue what the hell you are talking about. An if you did you would certainly know I'm no god damn fan boy of any fucking thing.

But here is the point. Every thing I said if fucking true you little god damn cunt whether you like it or not. Deal with it and grow up.

Fuck It I'm done here. You're not worth my time.

Re:Why the double standand

[dbIII]

You are the one who jumped in with an insult on my comments about not needing "elite skillz" to set up a home MS windows box, and then kept trying to change the subject into platform evangelism, so there is a very simple solution.

Stop doing it.

Seriously - you jump into a thread and tell people to leave it?
WTF is your problem?
You behave like that and tell others to grow up? Seriously?

Re:Why the double standand

[dbIII]

Grow a thicker skin

Wrote the person that dished it out but couldn't take something far milder in response.
Seriously?

Re:I have yet to have any problems with Windows 10

[tannhaus]

Ok...last post, but have you stopped to wonder why people on Slashdot are downvoting you in this?

You're trying to twist this, but it doesn't work. You'd like it to be that I haven't seen a Linux OS in almost 20 years, but I've already shown that I started with Linux about 20 years ago and was developing software for it in 2013. I'd be willing to bet that gives me much more experience with the OS than you will probably ever have.

As far as the difference between operating system and distribution, I will summarize it as follows:

The operating system is called linux. It's mainly the kernel along with its drivers. It's what makes the computer operate...turn on, recognize the hardware attached to it, etc. But, while that makes the hardware operate, there is nothing for that hardware to do at this point. So, you package together a lot of software from different parties to get a full fledged OS that does all the things you expect your computer to do. Now, if you package together all these programs with the linux kernel then turn around and offer it to others (ie distribute it) then you have what is called a linux DISTRIBUTION. It's not a separate operating system. The core is still the linux kernel. But, it is a separate linux DISTRIBUTION.

Now, as far as your android question, you're attempting to create a strawman and put words into my mouth, but we will let linux.org answer this one:

Many of you may be unaware of this, but Android is Linux. True, they are not quite the same, but Android is Linux. For example, Ubuntu is "GNU/Linux" while Android is "Dalvik/Linux". If an operating system uses the Linux kernel, then it is a Linux system.

Now, the point he brings up is an interesting one. Richard Stallman is correct on that point: when most of us say linux, we actually mean GNU/Linux. Android may be a version of linux, but it is NOT GNU/Linux.