Frankster said:
People might roast about win8, but I've gotten used to it now, why should I upgrade to something new? (honest question, is there something amazing about win10 that should make it of any interest to me?)
Of interest to you
specifically? I don't know you that well to be able to say. I can only give you my opinion on the matter. You can refer to my first post in the thread for a short summary on whether to upgrade.
For a longer one, here is a brief rundown of the more generally "interesting" features according to me:
- Bash on Windows (not out yet - but will be next month?) - probably the only feature I am really interested in. My Windows installation is pretty useless and I mostly use it to play games. Also, when I can't be bothered to boot into Linux. With this, I'll be able to do something actually useful, if I need to. Right now, if I need something that would take barely a second to process using a *NIX tool, I'd either have to reboot into Linux (for trivial stuff, that's a waste of time) or hunt around for something that will be able to replicate functionality (which usually takes upwards of 5 minutes). So, if I want to do something useful on Windows, I either waste a lot of time, or just don't bother.
- multiple workspaces - really, Microsoft? It took you
this long? Better late than never, I suppose. If you don't know what that is, this allows you to have different "desktops", so to speak. You can open different applications on each and they all work at the same time, then just switch around. Say, you can have a browser open on one, another one could have a media player, a third could have Excel open with a bunch of spreadsheets there. It sounds a bit weird, but...it isn't, really. And you may say "but I could just Alt+Tab through them anyway"...well, no, that's not the same. Alt+Tabbing is great, but if you have many applications open, it becomes annoying. With workspaces, you sort of "cluster" your open applications into groups. To supplement this with an example, you could have one workspace with a music player, and your email client and an IM - the more "chill out" applications being there, while you can have another workspace where you have your main task (say, writing an essay or report, if you're a student, or otherwise something that's separate from "chilling out") and a third which has supplementary materials, e.g., documents open with instructions, browser with articles, etc. While you could just have all of these on one workspace (which is how Windows has always done it), you'd be amazed at what the cognitive load is with that. The only real way to realise it if you compare it with a reduced cognitive load...which you couldn't do on Windows until now. After I started using workspaces, I couldn't completely go back to using a single one. I can only compare it to using an old and crap monitor for a decade, getting a good new one then trying to go back to the previous one.
- (finally!) proper window snapping. I believe Windows 8 was still absolutely shit at this but Windows 10 has
at fucking last managed to include this. To explain what it is - back in Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced the ability to snap a window to the side of the screen - left or right would resize the window to exactly half the screen and place it at the appropriate side. Now, you can also snap to corners which resizes the window to quarter of the size of the screen. Oh, and if you have multiple monitors, you can snap to the transition edge without using the keyboard shortcut - only using a mouse[footnote]although, I must say, the edge snapping is REALLY overzealous. If you drag a window from one monitor to another you completely stop at the edge unless you use more "force" when dragging or just continue dragging for quite a bit. It's probably the thing that most disturbs me when using Windows 10.[/footnote]. Finally.
I've used it for
ages in Linux and I really started disliking using Windows because it lacks it. Yes, I know it sounds small but I really have been getting massive mileage out of this. And Microsoft just never really got how snapping should work, even if they introduced the snapping thing mainstream [footnote]a feature that at the time was completely available under Linux but it took but moments to setup, it wasn't auto-configured. Since then, all window managers I've seen started including it by default.[/footnote]. OK, window borders still don't snap to other window borders, which is a clear indication that Microsoft doesn't completely "get it", but at least they are on the right track. There are few other features about snapping that can be useful
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So, these are the features I'm most excited in Windows 10. Yeah, two of them are pretty much "cosmetic", so to say. And yeah, all of them are things that Linux has had for a very long time. However, I do think that Windows has been missing these. OK, I'd say for the general case, the Bash tools might not be so popular, but the cosmetic stuff? I can honestly say that pure Windows users
have been missing out.
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Now with those aside, here are other features that seem interesting but less so than the above:
- JavaScript/HTML5 apps installed as native Windows apps - I really like the sound of that, actually. I think it opens up a lot of possibilities and it's an exciting new development in both web dev as well as desktop OS usage. On the other hand, the question how the average user would be affected by this is still up in the air, I think. It's overall something worth having but I hope it pays off. I must say, that is definitely not a reason to hop onto Windows 10, though. It is, however, a nice-to-have.
- DirectX 12 - meh. So far, the higher the number, the better. It's never really been needed to get access to the new version
immediately. Overall, another nice-to-have but not really worth upgrading for.
- Windows and Xbox game integration - it sounds good in theory but...honestly, after about a minute of thinking about it I feel it's quite "meh". It's probably going to work for some people but I don't see it as being
that massively useful in the grand scheme of things. Nice idea but I wouldn't really class it as nice-to-have. It's just "a thing" that, at most, would be useful to some, at worst, it will do nothing.
- reduced memory usage - I've not seen enough of the OS but so far it seems it's using less RAM overall. At least, it's not more than before. Assuming that is correct, then it's a nice thing, however, at the same time it's yet another I don't think it's worth upgrading for. Windows has been a hog for quite a while which means that most PCs have been over-provisioned with RAM to cope. While the gains can be classifiable as "significant", they may not necessarily be noticeable. May vary from case to case, of course.
- other (long term) - that's a catch-all for things that are going to start making a difference over the next few years. The JS apps for Windows are one thing, but I think it merited mention on its own, other stuff are not as easy to name outright but would all capitalise on Windows 10 in various ways. One thing would be PC games development which would gradually shift towards Windows 10 as a main target platform, other apps that would spring up for the OS, the extra support from both Microsoft and third parties and so on. It would take at least a year, most likely more for the difference to become noticeable but overall, these would be in favour of Windows 10 over the previous OSes.
