Reply to post: Re: You should go right ahead and upgrade

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

Updraft102

Re: You should go right ahead and upgrade

It's time. MS has been abusive from the start, but until now, they've mostly been abusive to their competitors. Now they've started abusing their own users.

You know, when this GWX nonsense first started to really flare up, back when I had just tried Win 10 and decided I didn't like it, I decided to keep Windows 7 and wait and see if 10 would get any better. Four years is a long time, and surely by then MS would have gotten the picture from feedback from its users, right?

I had 10 installed on a test PC so I could monitor its progress. I also put Linux on that test PC as a dual boot, just to see how it had grown since I last used it (in the form of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn).

As the year-long free upgrade progressed, I became far less optimistic about the odds of Win 10 evolving into something I would want to use. Despite user feedback, MS seemed determined to charge ahead in the wrong direction. I decided, eventually, to step up the "getting to know Linux" thing; with Linux only on my test PC, I wasn't using it enough to really get to know it, and I wasn't working on migrating at all. My main PC then became a Win7/ Mint dual boot machine.

In time, I wiped the 10 install on my test PC. I'd given up on it; no need to keep testing. When the story is over, close the book (I think I saw that in one of the original '70s Herbie movies). My main PC then became a Mint/ Win 7 machine; I use Linux wherever possible, and I am preparing for the day when I can dismiss Windows permanently. I'm not one of those Linux die-hards who hates anything Microsoft (or that isn't FOSS)... I really like 7, and I liked XP a great deal as well. There's just no future in them; XP has already been abandoned, and 7 will be too in time.

If you can handle Linux and its relative lack of graphical UI for administrative tasks (for day to day use, there's no need to go outside of the desktop environment) and incompatibility with some Windows programs that don't have Linux equivalents, there's never been a better time than now. Microsoft has shown us clearly that nothing less than complete control over our PCs is their goal. It's not getting better-- it's getting worse. First we hear that Cortana can no longer be set to use search engines other than Bing. Then we hear that the Windows Store can no longer be disabled via group policy except in the educational and enterprise versions of 10. Then we hear that Cortana can no longer be disabled. Now we hear that the ads for apps can't be disabled.

That last one probably wasn't meant to be discovered until after the free upgrade period, which ended yesterday, but the rest of them happened even while MS was still trying to get people (home users) to accept Windows 10 for free. Now that all of the home users that wanted 10 have it, and most of the future growth of 10 will be in the enterprise sector, we can expect the drip, drip, drip of news about which options MS has taken out of the non-enterprise versions to turn into something a lot bigger.

We're in for some interesting times. I fear that people who have migrated to 10 are in for some rough seas, and we can't be sure MS won't put some extra "goodies" into the 7 and 8 security updates that gradually result in them slowing down in an attempt force people into 10 quicker. With closed-source software, there has to be a degree of trust in its publisher, and it is clear that MS cannot and should not be trusted.

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