Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards OT: Windows 10

Except that you won't have it.

As private consumer you will always get the newest and buggiest edition of Windows 10 installed automatically via the Internet with no option to opt-out from that. Windows will continuously send telemetry and crash log data back to Microsoft, so they know how bad it runs on your machine (you can't disable that either).

This way you will always test the "latest and greatest" Windows for Microsoft's enterprise customers, so these can get a bug-fixed and stable experience via the LTS program. This is not available to the general public.

What? No way to opt out of Windows 10? I'm already opted out.

What? No way to block the telemetry/crash data? Not true. Easily blocked if you wish.

You will STILL need daily "updates" (Haa, the M$ term for patching unfinished code) to get it to do the things that M$ didn't even THINK to test.
Plus "security" updates to patch each "hole" that users and hackers discover in the lace (more like fishing net).

I think there are more reasons to go straight to a Linux distribution than to backgrade to Win10, which will almost certainly carry more BLOAT and commercial "free trials" than ever - plus a few buggy new "functions".
Ubuntu Studio (for example) brings with it a LOT of audio and video packages, graphic arts too. You can select to not install any/all of those.
You can re-partition your hard disk with it and not impact Windon't, other than taking some free disk space for the new partition(s).

Lots of people and companies would move to Linux ... if it were easy.

But none of my apps will run on Linux. Few of my document files are fully compatible. And re-training is expensive.

If Linux had predated Windows the computing landscape would be different, eh?

Unix did predate Windows, and was probably used on corporate desktops (at least large ones) before Windows took hold. May not have been run locally on the desktop, but all the same, there was a period when desktop computing was significantly served by Unix OSs - and quite likely, served by mainframe OSs prior to that.

Many corporates do use Linux (and proprietary Unix OSs), often at web layer level - and many actually pay for licensed and supported distros.

Truth be told, I find OS advocacy rather passe - I've worked with many, and at different levels, and as a techie, I may be as at home on Unix, Windows (of various flavours or levels), Mac OS, and some rather outdated mainframe OSs. In the home environment, I tend to use Windows because most of the apps I want, run most simply, on Windows - and as a techie, I can make Windows behave as I want.

it's so easy nowadays that you can even run it from Windows to play with it and decide if it's worth installing to disk



are you sure. I've heard those excuses forever through all these years. Linux is better supported now than ever, with Valve's SteamOS and Android. Heck, even Microsoft makes money off it, both by claiming patent infringment and other such nonsense and having its share of illegal profit from other people work on android and by actually offering Office for Android. She won't offer it for desktop Linux of course, because that would be the end of desktop windows.



Unix (the OS Linux is modelled after) predates it by a full decade before even when windows was just a window manager for the DOS that microsoft bought from other company.

anyway, enjoy your ad-infested solitaire...

Those pro linux debates get me wound up, the fanclubs as it were I don't have an either or attitude with linux or windows, so why not use both, I use both since both have their pros and cons for me and I use when it suits depending on application. It is a bit of a blinkered vision IMHO those Linux user extremists. I suppose we get the same debates with modelled versus sampled often around here

For music I use Cubase for recording, it doesn't exist for linux, where is Ivory pianos, drivers for my audio interface don't even exist. etc etc. the list goes on.

That stuff about performance for average desktop use with modern distros that is pretty much old hat these days too, there is a lot more than just the Linux OS to run for typical desktop user these days. KDE or GNOME with all its bells and whistles is more of resource hog than windows often times, since the GPU drivers are just not there up to par with windows in terms of hardware acceleration, and it is not even utilised nearly in full with the open source GPU drivers. With the never cards they are in fact orders of magnitudes slower for serious work that usitilise GPU, that simply can't work for me, where robust CUDA/ OpenCL support is needed in my case as well.

The proprietary drivers for linux for Nvidia are pretty decent but will always be behind the windows ones, and the open source developers don't get the inside scoop from AMD or NVidia, so they will always be behind as long as that remains so. In fact when I bought my NVidia GTX 980 GPU there wasn't one Linux distro with an open source driver for it to even work at all, and for some time.

So different courses for different horses. I'll always be a dual boot man

Nobody worried about privacy?
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/

The privacy issue is not limited to Windows 10, not even limited to Microsoft, as the other Internet giants such as Facebook and Google have similar wide-ranging Service Agreements as to privacy - VERY intrusive!

Hello pianoworld forum members. First time poster here. Nice to meet you all.

I use a laptop with Windows 8.1 for displaying sheet music on my piano (through a secondary touch screen monitor). With this in mind I tried Windows 10 recently and was disappointed to see they removed PDF Reader completely. This was my main application for reading music due to its excellent touch screen interface. I guess since Edge now takes care of displaying PDFs (or people install something else) Microsoft thought this program was no longer needed. This is kind of a deal breaker and forces me to look for alternatives yet again. This is particularly a sore issue for me. I was happy with PDF Reader (as simple as it may be) and hate having to go through the process of searching, installing, trying, and uninstalling programs again. For now I'll stay with Windows 8.1 but will check again in about a year (before the free offer ends).

Truth be told, no - I'm not that worried about privacy.

Least not with anything I'm using either online, or using "free" services, such as facebook, google et al

I've worked in the IT industry for decades, I have a reasonble feel for how to secure anything I'd truly be bothered about keeping private, other than that, I don't really care, really.

You've missed the point ...Quite sure. My company took a look and found that it would cost tens of millions to convert. Linux has plenty of apps, but they're not the same as those on Windows. Switching to Linux would force a lot of retraining and relearning. (Remember: Not everyone is a techie.)

Even the office apps that claim compatibility aren't quite there. That's not a problem in a small company for which Office is a non-starter. But my former employer was a heavy Office user. With 20k+ employees they could not bear the cost of converting. (There was much more to it than just moving MS Office.) After investigating the costs in the mid-2000s, the plan was rejected.

The compatibility problem is worse of all for companies who depend on MS Office for core business use. Excel and Access are programmable, and upon that many companies build their office automation. (It's far cheaper than the six-figure cost of a mid-tier business suite, or the seven-figure cost of a top-tier ERP package. Small companies really don't have the luxury.)

If they try to drop MS Office and move to an alternate office suite, even the slightest incompatibility can bring business operations to a halt. The issues could likely be fixed by re-writing those Office apps, but the cost is prohibitive.

So back to the point ...
Yes, Unix ran on the desktop. I had that arrangement for around ten years ... roughly 1988 through 1998. That ran on expensive proprietary hardware, but neither Windows nor Mac could do the job so the choice was made.

But eventually it became impossible to justify $10,000 for a Unix workstation when a Windows box (by the late 90s) cost around $3,000. So we moved the desktop to Windows.

Business users were fine. The just moved from MS Office on Mac to MS Office on Windows.
Engineering users were fine. They were light users (or non-users) of MS Office. And their server-based Unix apps didn't have to move at all.

But had Linux desktop been there in the mid-90s, it could have run on that lower-cost hardware ... and we might now be in a Linux world.

I think the future will take us down another path (and it has already started). It won't be a Windows vs. Mac item.

More and more work will be done in the cloud. My new company depends heavily on that. We get lower infrastructure cost, faster stand-ups and deployment, rapid up- or down-scaling, and elimination of capital spend.

The desktop OS may soon be irrelevant.

Just one point on the Unix-on-the-desktop in yesteryear thing.

Yes, it was on the desktop - but only fairly rarely using expensive workstations, or not as expensive, but not utterly cheap, X-Terminals.

It was most likely on "dumb" character based terminals (eg Wyse, or other makes) using fairly tradition vt.... emulation, and served over relatively low speed comms lines (given it was all character based traffic).

The reason why PCs moved in to fill that void, being that they were very much more general purpose "New Technology" that meant they could likely serve all the existing functionality by merit of terminal emulators, plus better and more standalone productivity software. Windows apps were becoming increasingly prevalent and there was a certain momentum that was difficult to resist...

A lot of the players in the X-term market, suddenly had a reinvigorating few years as Window's thin client terminal vendors when Citrix was first doing multi-user Windows server OSs.

Yes, very.That's why I seldom post on Facebook. I use it to see what my daughters write. But I reserve my words for direct conversation. I have nearly nothing to say online ... unless I'm using a pseudonym.

same here. hey, we're privacy bullies to our children just as those companies lol




well, I'm sure the cost of retraining and relearning when transitioning from traditional Office to ribbon-Office and from pre-W7 to newer Windows' tablet-like interface went fully justified. I'm also sure gpu-acceleration would be a hurdle on those happy hours of gaming in the office.

How about security support? Do you plan to replace all your windows 7 devices by the end of 2019? I'm surprised how people do not consider (or forget) this....


Because Windows 10 is not heavier than 7 or even Vista (Vista was much heavier then XP). Having said that, older machine may not benefit from some new features.


The problems reported so far are essentially GPU driver issues (and a few old peripheral drivers, like expresscards). If there are big issues Windows will say it cannot update (as it said with 2 of my Windows 8 atom tablets, as the GPU is not compatible) so no risk

It doesn't seem so far. I am surprised how well it works on a 2010 Windows 7 pc. But waiting a few months more could be safer, especially if it's the only pc or main pc.

Interestingly one of my jobs back in the early nineties involved evaluating desktop linux back then 1993 with a view to use it on PCs seriously( 486 at the time ) instead of SUNOS, Silicon graphics workstations IBMs we had, all Unix based which, as you say, were so costly.

Well, it worked out, I managed to successfully migrate to desktop linux. Windows was never used at work in those days in our group. I recall using one of the very first slackware distros, kernel 1.x.x or something around there, it took days to build and compile everything, but it worked out, and by the end we had fully fledged x windows running on 486 computers, in those days x widows ran fine on that spec. Indeed, It turned out to be a very good cost effective alternative to the expensive silicon graphics x terminals and work stations we had as well, and it saved quite a bit of money on our total setup.

You could remote login to the bigger machines too with all the advantages of x windows and run SGI graphical apps fine that way on the Linux PCs too.

On the other hand, we were not typical office users and didn't need things like MS office. Any office/documents work, they were all typeset back then in Latex/Tex, and linux already had those tools back then to handle large documents and tables to produce very professional looking documents, that excel and office could just not handle, not only that, they looked far worse in terms of quality of fonts as well so they weren't even an option for us. In fact for many journals and professional publications Latex docs were the only thing accepted back then.

So, ironically, for me, compared to today while dekstop linux is far more popular and better known today, the advantages it offers now compared to back then are much reduced compared to when we were on windows 3.1 and the early desktop linux days, in some respects.
Proper multitasking, which early windows wasn't even able to do, some big bonuses it had going for it.

I was amazed the days it all happened and when we migrated. I was so impressed, fully flegded UNIX running on a PC, free C/Fortran compilers, all the stuff we needed it was all there ... for free, who would have believed it. Guess what the prices of C/Fortran compilers like were on commercial Unix alone in those days, not cheap, thousands. .

Luckily, one of the founders of the Perl language was a few office block away from me and there for a helping hand if I needed it with tricky linux builds, he was an expert and I helped me convince me do it when I met him once on a lunch break.

Desktops for linux have been around since the early nineties fully working, but not well known of course in those days. I also ran it on my 486 at home using a graphics card with 1 Mb Ram an it worked fine for me as it was a much better alternative to windows and windows 95 ... for me and my needs anyway.

As I mentioned, the thread at
https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-co...tions-here.html
will give you a lot of info about why musicians in particular may benefit from the upgrade.

But if what you have is working fine, there's always something to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Microsoft security support. Talk about an oxymoron

That's about the last reason I would "upgrade." Windows is never truly secure.

Then don't use it

This is easy to forget ...... because all of those devices will be replaced long before 2019. My PC will be a nine-year-old dinosaur in 2019, and will surely be replaced before then ... with a box running Windows 14?