Re: Anyone Running it in Virtualbox?
Thanks, that worked. I thought I had tried setting it to 8.1 already and VB rejected it (inconsistent setting or some such nonsense), but when I tried it again (at your suggestion) it worked. Obviously, I did something wrong the first time.
First impressions: It's not as bad as Windows 8. In fact, I suspect that Windows 7 users will get used to it pretty quickly.
There is an interesting inconsistency in the version reporting. If I use "ver" in a command terminal, it says "Microsoft Windows [6.4.9841]. However, if I query the version using Python platform.platform() (one of the first things I did was to install Python), it says its Windows 8 version 6.2.9200. So, it's identifying itself as Windows 8 (I assume so that applications don't have a fit yet), but as version 6.2 in one case, but 6.4 in another.
I used IE to download Firefox, and I got a quick reminder of just how bad Bing is. Searching for Firefox using Bing (which Microsoft really, really tries to make you use) throws up a bunch of links to various dodgy, spammy, download sites as the first set of choices (I gave up scrolling down after a bit). Searching for Firefox with Google takes me straight to the proper URL on the first link.
The Windows 10 installer isn't too bad. However, a major complaint is that they try really hard to make you sign up for a "Microsoft Account", including getting their greasy little mitts on your email address. If you struggle with it long enough though, you will eventually find a way to bypass that and just install it without one.
It seemed to be a bit of a memory hog even with no applications running, but I will reserve judgment on that until I can look into it further.
All in all, on first sight enterprise users will probably be happy, assuming the admin spends time configuring it properly (out of the box is a problem though). For home users, the installation is pretty user hostile in that data collection is turned up to max (they seem to want to know everything about you, including a photograph of you) and turning all that off takes more effort and thinking than most people will want to put into it. That's not exactly new though, as I seem to recall going through the same effort when I tried out the Windows 8 preview.