I've been on the "insider preview" for a few weeks now, and I must say that I think Windows 10 is an absolutely amazing OS. Definitely the best Windows I've ever used. Also the best desktop OS I've ever used, but I hope you'll believe me about the "best Windows" even if you can't imagine why a developer would possible want to run something other than $YOUR_FAVOURITE_UNIX.
If Windows 10 is as well-received as I expect it will, this might really impact Microsoft's position on phones as well. A core feature of Windows 10 is an app store that doesn't suck, with apps that can easily be used on devices that don't resemble tablets. Windows 8 really had this wrong, and 10 fixes it. I think the Windows 10 store might actually get used.
I've seen a glimpse of that future with the mobile app of Dutch weather site "Buienradar". They made a new Windows Phone app which totally rocks, to replace an old extremely crappy one. I didn't understand why they invested in an app ecosystem that is so clearly on the way down, until I found the exact same app in the Windows 10 store - just larger and with more info on the same screen. But it's very obviously the same codebase. My guess is they actually wanted to make a Windows desktop app, but adding phone support was such a minor extra investment (because of MS's "Universal app" thing) that they did it, despite the abysmal market size of Windows Phone in the Netherlands.
My experience has been the opposite. To me Windows 10 is the continuation of the 8/8.1 trainwreck, with the ridiculous Metro skins, a broken start menu, the half-assed fragmentation of the UIs into Metro/non-Metro, ham-handed app store/online services integrations, and various new features that do not work. I'll be going back to Windows 7, in which at least the UI works. And really, the only thing keeping me attached to the ecosystem is the PC games.
I liked Metro on Windows 8, despite it's rough edges. Just needed to get used to it, that's all. I could get to any part of the OS in a few key presses. If it's a tile on the desktop itself, arrow keys, enter, done. If not, win-key + type first few letters, arrow keys, enter, done.
I cannot understand how people like the tiny start button and menus and right-clicks and multi-level navigation in the old Windows UI. I used to overcome that by simply having shortcuts to the applications I used most on the desktop. Metro with its large tiles for those same applications was a much better fit for that.
That tiny start buttons and menus are not that tiny, if you have a monitor in front of you. They are tiny only if your real dpi and the dpi that the apps expect do not match. And on the contrary, the controls became huge, wasting ton of space in the Metro/Modern versions.
Metro tiles are OK for simple apps, but you are not going to make CAD or NLE with that. For these apps, you need those tiny controls, ability to cram lot of them into small space and ability to adjust the design to the target intent. Metro tiles won't help you with that.
I love Windows 7, but do you honestly think the Windows 7 start menu is not broken? I believe we just got used to it over time.
In Windows 7, I can either have an unstructured list of "pinned" programs, or I can manually categorize the real ("All programs") start menu.
Option 1 doesn't scale beyond ~15 items (I have 22 pinned programs and it's a mess), and option 2 breaks whenever a program updates itself and puts new links into the top level. Also, option 2 is not an option at all for 99,9% of users, so it's quite obvious why MS wouldn't optimize for that use case.
The single thing that I like the most about Windows 8.1 machines is how I can group programs on the start page. Now that it isn't fullscreen any more with Windows 10, I am pretty much looking forward to it.
My biggest problem with Windows 7 and especially the start menu was that certain folders were first class citizens and other were not. I could never quite figure out how to instruct someone to get to their user folder or understand why downloads were not a library.
Oh yeah, those libraries are a PITA. I disabled them entirely (using some registry hack I guess). It's easy to forget about those little pain points once you have worked around them.
In my experience muscle memory is just as easy to pick up with typing the name of an app than clicking - apps I use all the time I can open by typing their name without thinking about what the name is, apps I don't use all the time I find myself opening the metro start screen and wondering which will happen first, remembering the name to type or spotting it in my tiles.
You're right. Though at least on Windows 7, typing to search apps in the start menu was a miserable experience that takes dozens of seconds to find the application you're looking for. I hope they have improved it in 10.
I had this discussion several times when Windows 8 first came out. As much as I didn't really like the Start Page, it didn't affect me that much as I search for everything. I've been doing that so long that actually using the mouse to find an application (not on the desktop or taskbar) feels awkward.
Can't you just put Steam in the equivalent of the startup folder?
I've not used Win10 but all I do with Win7 is act as a bootloader for Steam. I don't really anticipate ever doing anything else with it, either. I assume there is something analogous to the old startup folder.
I mostly seem to spend my time running modded minecraft (FTB) on linux anyway.
It'll start as "better on DirectX 12," there'll be a Crysisesque "DirectX 12 only" game that is the prettiest thing anyone has ever seen, everyone will move and the holdouts can keep playing old games off Steam and GOG if they don't like it.
That was the plan with DX10 and we have seen, how that one went.
The thing is, the majority of gamers will update based on the available cash, and so gamedevs will be targeting the expected hw base at the time of release.
So it really depends, whether you except the gamers to go on spending spree (nvidia and intel would certainly love that), or not.
Except gamers will upgrade because of the performance implications of the DirectX 12 API. With an incentive like that, no one will care about the few holdouts that refuse to upgrade because they're uncomfortable with a few UI changes that don't affect what you can actually get done.
You mean like when Microsoft tried to force adoption of Windows Vista by not bringing DirectX 10 to XP, and in response developers stuck with DirectX 9 for years?
A huge portion of the gaming market (China and large parts of Asia) is still using Windows XP. D3D9 renderers aren't going anywhere.
No, DX9 renderers aren't going anywhere, but they're being abstracted away and all the shiny new code is being written for DX11 and DX12. So all of the fancy high end features will be on newer systems only, with the others having less and less support. I know because this is what I'm doing at work at this time.
I would add to that list that it is a mixed bag of various versions of UI. When you go to the control panel you are welcomed by some big grey square. In sub menus you will find some windows 7 style white control panels. And if you keep digging deeper the old grey non-resizable dialog box are never far.
The only consistency with the other versions of windows is that the hierarchy in the settings is all changed again to make sure it will take everyone time to find its way.
One thing I noticed from the tech preview I tried the other month was that whilst the press excitedly noticed new "settings" apps in parallel with the control panel and proudly announced new technologies, there is still decades of old cruft lying around. I know they have much work to do but it still feels like an operating system of many parts, all glued together.
Some issues I noticed in the preview I tried:
1. The underlying system hasn't changed (still life in COM land with the joys/distresses of the registry and cryptic UUID keys where half of the configuration is secretly stored)
2. The icons in MMC don't match anything else on the system (even the icons in Control Panel are not consistent - are they flat or should they have depth? Should they have no perspective or should they be set at a jaunty angle?)
3. Even the icons in Explorer don't match each other (my user directory doesn't match any of the icons beneath it)
4. The new Settings window is not resizable even though it is 50% white space
5. Control Panel is still there despite this new Settings window (duplication!)
6. Explorer permits you to show menus but they're actually just the tabs on a frustrating ribbon bar
7. Notebook theme issues that were introduced in Windows XP still persist (Explorer's Folder Options window has a white tab and border for the General page but the General page itself is grey; when you switch to the View and Search pages in this very same notebook those pages are white without a hint of grey; this General page is written without knowledge of theming..? plus none of the controls line up!)
8. There is still no consistent Open Dialog (Notepad uses a different Open dialog to MMC, for example; the MMC one is from about 1995, I was surprised there wasn't a briefcase on it!)
9. There appears to be no HIG for menu placement in relation to toolbars (is the menu ABOVE the toolbar or below it?; control panel menu is below the toolbar, Explorer is above, Settings app doesn't even have one), should true menubars be allowed (like in Notepad) or should they just be placeholders for ribbons (like in Explorer)?
It's all just a big ball of different GUI styles and fashions from 25+ years of fashions, windowing toolkits (yes, you can find the MFC40 and 42 DLLs in the Windows directories in this, and yes .NET is there too, but the ancient Windows API will still work fine too, plus Win32!), user-interface guidelines from different decades and generally a mess.
I will wait to see how people rate it before installing.
EDIT: I notice downvotes but no responses?? I thought my points were valid - the mishmash of libraries from decades and decades with artwork from those decades makes for a convoluted jumbled experience. You wouldn't feel comfortable in a car that had a klaxon for the horn, a handbrake outside and a gear system with no synchromesh but that sported a brand new LCD illuminated dashboard - it would feel a mishmash and a mess. This is precisely what this feels like, and something I thought they would like to jettison or at least tidy up.
Backwards compatibility is a STRONG point of windows, not a drawback.
Remember that this is something used by business users. Technologies like COM are without equal in the field (native automation of every major software for example).
The only negative points you mention are icons and the pure existence of things you obviously don't and can't use. It's all in all a very silly paragraph you wrote.
Backwards compatibility is a STRONG point of windows, but the GP is right that it doesn't make for a nice, consistent user experience.
The file picker is one of the worst offenders, as the applications that you use the most have a tendency to use the worst version available, and it's impossible to pass your settings from one version of the dialog to others. There are versions of the folder picker that don't even let you paste a path copied from your current open Explorer window.
(Why is it that, in the 21st century, NONE of the major desktop vendors has thought of putting the list of currently open folders in the Save dialog window? Not the "recent" folders, not the "frequent" folders, but the actual folders I'm working with, RIGHT NOW?)
I understand backwards compatibility being a benefit, but why keep introducing new frameworks and ways of doing things if the old ones never get truly deprecated or cleaned up? Why highlight all the wonderful new Metro features and Universal apps if Win32/AFX/MFC/COM/COM+/DCOM/.NET/.NET not compatible with that other .NET/Silverlight/Metro never gets tidied up or moved on? It just leads to more bloat.
They've made a clean break with IE, why not do the same with Windows APIs one day? I like being able to run my ancient Win32 app and Windows API app as much as the next guy but there comes a point when they should tidy up, surely? Else why move to the new frameworks and APIs if I can still just write something in the ancient frameworks, replete with security issues?? Why bother moving to .Net?
If you love COM as much as I don't, try writing an MMC plugin in the C++ MMC API 2.0 (not the .net 3.0) one and see how well you get on with the joy of undecipherable COM messages and debugging.
I never said it was easy. It's enterprise features that HAVE to have a long lifetime.
But COM is simple interface dispatching (it is actually much easier to implement COM in C/C++ because you have actual control over the interfaces and marshaling) in the end with syntax that is a bit dated i agree. It is not rocket science by far...
I'll jump in. I understand why the person you're replying to doesn't want to go into it, because the things that count seem small. The task manager, carried over from Win 8, is great. They took the window management updates in Windows 8 to the next level - now I can quickly snap not just left and right, but I can quickly snap to quadrants, which, on vertical monitors, is so minor but so helpful. There were some file management tricks it did that I can't specifically recall, but I thought 'Oh, that's new.'
I don't think there are any updates to the task bar from Windows 8, but the Windows 8 task bar is definitely my window manager of preference. I run uBar on my MBP, but on Win 8, being able to quickly preview windows in a group, close individual windows, drag up to create a new window... I miss that at work.
They've made a lot of progress updating the icons. There's still crufty Win95 ones in there if you dig deep enough, but the overall look is as unified as it's ever been.
I'm still astonished at how bad fullscreen and multi-display support is on OS X, compared to Windows. I don't know that 10 brings anything new to the table there compared to 8, but 8 greatly simplified things like hooking up a projector, or setting a screen to mirror. In fact, a lot of the things I really like about modern Windows involve WinKey shortcuts - Win+P in this particular case.
I just noticed that I can't have my network preferences open at the same time as my display preferences in OS X. Not a showstopper obviously, just really weird to me. Wonders never cease...
Nichey point: They've made notable improvements to their MIDI stack.
Prefer not. Most of it is a mix of taste (I like touch) and "stuff I'm used to" (I'm used to Windows). Whenever people discuss OS features on HN it becomes some sort of flamewarish "your taste sucks" fets. It's like vim vs emacs vs IntelliJ.
I would only deploy and run my code in Linux, but with VirtualBox I get all the benefits of Windows for applications (my favorite editor, mail client, Excel, mp3 player, IM client, a hundred other things) and a local Linux VM that works the same as my production environment. It's the best of both worlds. And no compromises like Cygwin (ugh) or the frustrating almost-but-not-quite Unix nature of OSX.
Woa, mail client. I've always hated the lack of good mail clients on Windows, may I ask which client you think is so good that you're willing to start VirtualBox for it? Thanks :-)
I meant I use VirtualBox only for my development environment and everything else is on the host OS.
Honestly nothing has been better than Outlook if the mail is hosted on an Exchange server. These days I use Outlook 2013 with an Outlook365 backend (their hosted service, it's what my employer uses, outside of my control) and it's not great but I don't like web-based clients and I don't know of a better desktop client.
If Windows 10 is as well-received as I expect it will, this might really impact Microsoft's position on phones as well. A core feature of Windows 10 is an app store that doesn't suck, with apps that can easily be used on devices that don't resemble tablets. Windows 8 really had this wrong, and 10 fixes it. I think the Windows 10 store might actually get used.
I've seen a glimpse of that future with the mobile app of Dutch weather site "Buienradar". They made a new Windows Phone app which totally rocks, to replace an old extremely crappy one. I didn't understand why they invested in an app ecosystem that is so clearly on the way down, until I found the exact same app in the Windows 10 store - just larger and with more info on the same screen. But it's very obviously the same codebase. My guess is they actually wanted to make a Windows desktop app, but adding phone support was such a minor extra investment (because of MS's "Universal app" thing) that they did it, despite the abysmal market size of Windows Phone in the Netherlands.