If you must run Windows 10

I see a lot of angry posts like this, but fail to understand how it&#x27;s reflected in reality in 2019—I agree that Windows 10 was a little messy at launch, but it&#x27;s come a long way from where many of these complaints seem to stem from.<p>Yeah, Windows has a bad rap, but in the last 2-4 years has come leaps and bounds from where it was—implementing great, thoughtfully designed features on a regular basis, for free. With WSL2 and the other developer-focused improvements in tow, most of these are a shitlist of nitpicks, than things you&#x27;ll run into every day. I switched from macOS about two years back, and couldn&#x27;t see myself going the other way anymore ever again. But, that said, I can see why people want to stay there! That&#x27;s the beauty of choice.<p>These types of posts are based on historical grudges, rather than modern experiences with Windows. Sure, there&#x27;s going to be annoying things to change out of the box, but every machine, with any OS, has that.

I&#x27;ve been using Win 10 on my main desktop for the past four years or so. I almost feel embarassed for saying so.<p>Microsoft definitely has a systemic &quot;Software Quality Problem&quot;.<p>It does get really embarassing at times. Or, at least I would hope someone there is embarassed. I&#x27;m not sure. Maybe Raymond Chen is the single one embarassed person and everyone else are new recruits happy to be there?<p>Really, the only reason I run Windows 10 is that it&#x27;s the fastest way to use the web, which is what I do all day long. The browsers are optimized for Windows in three critical ways:<p>a) general rendering speed<p>b) font rendering quality<p>c) site quality&#x2F;functionality - a particular browser not working with a particular site is a much more urgent issue on Windows, where 90% of the users are than anywhere else.

Counter-anecdote: I&#x27;m the happiest I&#x27;ve ever been with Windows both as a development platform and for everyday use. The release of WSL has solved a lot of daily annoyances, and I&#x27;m hoping that the new Windows Terminal app will soon be usable so I can replace cmder which has been great, but a little clunky and slow in my experience.<p>Other new features that I enjoy: Windows Sandbox, new Snip and Sketch, the current iteration of OneDrive (though I think I still prefer SkyDrive from many years ago..), Your Phone app for sending messages, emoji keyboard, clipboard history, local PIN instead of password.. I could go on but those are all things I use on a frequent basis and they make for a great experience.

There is basically one reason why I use a Windows machine and that is <i>games</i>. I know linux has seen a lot of movement in that area (tks Valve) but I&#x27;ve tried it, and it works great, but performance is better in Windows for my machine. So I bought this machine where I can game (it is not anything fancy) and I would really like to work on it as well.<p>I have a notebook with Ubuntu installed and if you would ask me I would rather work on the linux machine, but I&#x27;m trying to push the envelope with WSL2 to develop with RoR... Weird bugs and slow sometimes (better than WSL1 tho). Oh well...

This post recommends LTSC because it has been pre-de-crappified (e.e., no Candy Crush pre-installed).<p>However in January 2020 Microsoft will not support Office 365 (ProPlus?) on LTSC. This is because the &#x27;official&#x27; LTSC use case is for things like medical devices, and not &quot;regular&quot; desktops. It&#x27;s just that many IT sites got tired of the Windows 10 what-a-mole with non-helpful features, phone home stuff, etc, that they went with the cleaner version.<p>Doing a quick search, it seems people are saying &quot;just buy Office 2019&quot; to square this circle.<p>Can anyone comment the pro&#x2F;cons of using Enterprise LTSC or not?

LTSC is not intended as a desktop operating system. What people should be looking for is Enterprise: Which has all of the telemetry 0 options and such, but still works with modern Windows applications.<p>It&#x27;s highly likely especially after Windows 7 goes EOL, you&#x27;ll start seeing a lot more consumer applications that depend on Windows 10 functionality that&#x27;s not going to work in LTSC.

Look at his list of terrible things in Windows, and compare to MacOS. Other than telemetry, MacOS is very similar:<p>* no Cortana (MacOS has Siri on all systems)<p>* no semiannual feature upgrades (Mac OS upgrades annually)<p>* not a single tile on the default Start menu (UI difference, mostly personal taste)<p>* telemetry can be set to 0 (the lowest level) (MacOS has some telemetry, although the specific amount is less, and Apple has been a lot less transparent about what they track)<p>* no &quot;Show suggestions occassionally in Start&quot; (This is stupid, but easy to turn off)<p>* despite some misbelief, WSL and Hyper-V work just fine (Apple doesn&#x27;t offer virtualization at all, you have to buy a commercial product)<p>* receives security and stability updates for ten years (unlike Windows 10 Home &amp; Pro versions, which reach &quot;end of service&quot; after just 18 months from their initial release) (MacOS only receives security updates for 2 years, approx.)<p>* no Metro&#x2F;Windows 8-style&#x2F;Modern&#x2F;Windows Store&#x2F;Universal&#x2F;Windows apps like Store, Edge, Calendar, Camera, News, Weather, etc. (Apple has all of these apps in the App store too)<p>* no zombie games like Candy Crush Soda Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, March of Empires, etc. that refuse to die (part of Microsoft&#x27;s plan for &quot;post-license monetization opportunities beyond initial license revenues&quot; much like the recent Mail app debacle) (Plenty of these in Macos)<p>All in all, the differences here are pretty minor. Unless you&#x27;re willing to run Linux on your desktop, your only options are pretty balanced in the unpleasantness they offer. MS supports Windows 10 for many years, Apple requires a full OS upgrade every two years. Both have App stores full of both good and bad apps. MS does a little more pushing of apps and suggestions, but it all can be disabled, and with Group Policies, it can be disabled centrally.<p>The main difference is in the telemetry, and MS gives you plenty of options (at install, even) to turn those down&#x2F;disable those.

I feel like there&#x27;s this continuum:<p>Linux: Free, Doesn&#x27;t spy on you<p>MacOS: Costs money, Doesn&#x27;t spy on you<p>ChromeOS: Free, Spies on you<p>Windows: Costs money, Spies on you

Microsoft needs to realize they are doing their name harm by not giving power users and evangelist-style technologists an obvious and easily-selected low- or zero-surveillance Windows version.<p>If this article is mislead to select LTSC instead of Enterprise as that option (as is suggested in this thread), the confusion of Microsoft&#x27;s messaging is largely to blame. Microsoft should have marketing material aimed at individual technologists who want a premium Windows experience with ~0 surveillance.

There&#x27;s some really great info in here!<p>The school I work for has been pushing out an LTSB image to most of our PC&#x27;s and I can attest that it is a huge improvement over Pro.<p>The article also recommends Optimize-Offline and O&amp;O ShutUp10 for users who can&#x27;t get a license for the LTSC image. I hadn&#x27;t heard of Optimize-Offline, but ShutUp10 is great for making Windows 10 way less annoying and invasive. I&#x27;ll be checking out Optimize-Offline tonight!

Before I abandoned the Windows ecosystem, I loved Ninite (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ninite.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ninite.com&#x2F;</a>). It repackages most well known free software creating a single installer which will contain all of them, minus bloatware, adware, toolbars etc, so that one can replicate identical installs of the same software on several machines very easily and much faster.<p>Another interesting repository was <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aplusfreeware.com&#x2F;last_freeware_versions.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aplusfreeware.com&#x2F;last_freeware_versions.html</a> It contained the last free version of lots of well known software before their makers decided to turn them commercial, add adware or discontinue them.

Another option without Edge, Cortana and Candy Crush is Windows Server 2019 which is what I have on my Dev PC.<p>I’ve always run desktop server when I could - back to NT4 - initially to avoid any differences between local behaviour and deployed, though this is not really ever the case now. So now it’s for this reason - to avoid the cacophony of recent Windows versions, weird behaviour from updates and the like. I don’t know offhand how much a license is, mine is MSDN.

If Win10 would just let you <i>do</i> what you want instead of forcing you down various half baked paths it wouldn&#x27;t be too bad. I ran Server 2016 for awhile, which had a few drawbacks, but overall was a much better experience. The lack of customization for basic stuff is obnoxious both in Win10 and Server2016, and third party solutions to core windows things (Start Menu is a good example) can be hit or miss.<p>I&#x27;d be a little more generous if this most recent round of Win10 update hadn&#x27;t messed a bunch of stuff up which <i>was</i> working, and rather than spend 4 hours googling esoteric windows registry settings I think I&#x27;ll just switch to Server 2019.

I would be all over LTSB for all the things except lack of support for Microsoft Store apps, which I consider a vital feature - because for some apps this might be the only distribution channel available.

I&#x27;ve tried LTSC, and to be honest, I prefer Windows Server 2019. It had the ability to set the Telemetry to 0 as well, and has less stuff pre-installed.

The investments I&#x27;ve made in learning Linux well have paid off so many times over. Like VIM, there is a hump, some annoyance and then you get all your time back invested and so much more.<p>At this point I find Windows so hideously unpleasant I believe if I were forced to use it as a daily driver I&#x27;d go into another line of work. Life is too short to be annoyed all day and not have control over your surroundings.

&gt; If you must run Windows 10<p>I must, because it&#x27;s the only viable choice for a blind, screen reader user (me) who wants to get real work done.

I work for an MSP which supports Windows installs. The support teams apparently hate our LTSC customers because they require manual upgrades unlike the standard version.

I guess I&#x27;ll just say it. I love windows 10. I tried a mac for a couple of years and it feels like the OS is stuck in circa 2008.

Maybe I just don&#x27;t use Microsoft&#x27;s built-in software that often, but I haven&#x27;t had many issues with Windows 10.

Holy hell, I had no idea it was that bad over in PC land. I mean you _hear_ things, but jesus.

This is so tiresome.<p>I posted this to reddit:<p>I installed my first Linux in 1994, before there was a Linux 1.0. I use Linux to this day on my router and my server.<p>I have been using Linux as my daily driver 2004-2017.<p>You can&#x27;t say I haven&#x27;t tried.<p>I maintain anyone advocating to use Linux on a notebook has Stockholm syndrome or more amicably, uses a very narrow set of hardware and services (&quot;plain&quot; wifi, no bluetooth, no printers, no scanners, no Thunderbolt). Windows has a Linux subsystem, use it, it&#x27;s great.<p>Your choices include using Ubuntu or a similar system where the six month OS upgrade will break your system so badly you won&#x27;t be able to work for days. Or you can use Arch where at least the main body of your system will stay alive (most of the time but not always) during rolling upgrades but &quot;insignificant&quot; pieces like MFC devices or bluetooth will break all the time. Mind <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;619&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;619&#x2F;</a><p>And if you ever need to work with enterprises, their wifi, their VPN... the company will have an IT helpdesk ready to help with any glitches if you are running Windows or Mac but if you are running Linux? Sucks to be you. And it does suck.<p>I now have an external GPU via Thunderbolt. I plug in, my monitor plugged into lights up, all my running programs move there. It&#x27;s a nonevent. So is undocking. How would that work on Linux?? The hot-plugging-an-nVidia-GPU might be supported on paper but I am very happy not to need to configure that and even more not to need to keep that configuration working. And I don&#x27;t think moving apps from one GPU to the next GPU would just work without an X restart.<p>Nope. The driver support is so far superior in Windows it&#x27;s not even funny. Sure the command line sucks but oh well, just use WSL. Use O&amp;O Shutup to kill the controversial reporting back features. Enjoy.<p>And then I got some answers and I looked up other Thunderbolt uses under Linux and the results... oh my. A quick check shows the Aquantia 10 GbE chipset driver [broke](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.archlinux.org&#x2F;task&#x2F;58174" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.archlinux.org&#x2F;task&#x2F;58174</a>) from 4.15 to 4.16 fixed in 4.17 and then from 4.20 to 5.0 again and there is a patch but the [bug report](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.kernel.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=202651" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.kernel.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=202651</a>) is still open (every affordable, single port 10 GbE TB3 adapter utilize this chipset).

Could everyone chill with this already? We get it, you’re super clever and super privacy conscious. Now let people enjoy the products they like.