Okay, so - given that Windows 10 is generally agreed to be Awful, and the latest Apple offerings are (based off of what I've seen on Seebs' and Jesse's tumblrs) not much better, I thought it might be a good idea to have a thread for discussing what the options are that aren't Windows or Apple. Alternately, share your Windows 10 horror stories here, that's good too! :D I'll go first: it crashed when I was half-way through doing the colours for an Inktober sketch I was doing (and I hadn't saved, of course >_>), and then decided to bluescreen each time I tried to reboot it. Almost half a day of wrestling with it later, I get it back up...and it crashes as soon as I try to connect to the internet; it's eaten its own wifi drivers somehow. And I didn't yet have a wired connection. At this point, I go "fuck this", and get my housemate to help me switch over to Linux, because I was already cranky at Win10 for doing updates whenever the heck it wants. (I was also still annoyed by the fact that they were force-updating people from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.) The transition's gone pretty well, honestly.
Thanks to my roommate's dad's enthusiasm for everything NOT WINDOWS, all our computers run off the same template for Linux that he uses. It's OpenSuse, but with his partition divides and everything so that data's in a different section than any of the operating systems. Two different versions of OpenSuse, in case one of them ever has an update that breaks everything, and Windows 7 because he grudgingly admits that some programs don't work well through things like Wine and Virtual Drives. Very grudgingly. I'm a bare minimum user, in that I know how to open three programs with the command prompt. I wouldn't be able to give advice on actually doing anything complicated, or to give feedback on which versions of Linux are preferable.
Yeah, I - could probably not currently open anything with the command prompt? My contributions to getting this installed was primarily "stand behind housemate and watch, and type in my password every time that needed to happen". I'm on Ubuntu, for what that's worth? And I know I'm probably going to end up writing out a list of stuff I need to know / remember and taping it to the side of my monitor so that it's handy when I need it; if I didn't have a housemate who runs a computer and a laptop on Linux, I would probably not have made the switch at all. If it were an option to switch to Windows 7, I probably would've, but - I don't think the stores are even still carrying Windows 8 at this point. It'd require a higher cost in spoons to find the thing, to me, than the thing actually feels worth, if that makes sense.
I've actually not had much problem with Windows 10; yeah, it sometimes updates when I'd rather it not, but in terms of functionality it works fine. The only real issue I've had with it is a more general Windows problem, in that it isn't great for code development. But from what @seebs is saying, the current set of Mac products might not be much better, or at least have an equivalently-awful set of problems. So I just had my computer dual-boot with Linux Mint, since I still need something more than Linux to run a bunch of music programs.
I'd go for Linux and go through all the trouble of figuring it out and learning how to use it were it not for the fact that like, 99% of the stuff I use is Windows or Mac, no Linux compatibility. so I'm stuck with Windows, because I hate Apple. Win10 is bullshit, though. I hate it. GIVE ME BACK MY WIN7.
My issue with Windows 10 is that it's not recognizing half of my RAM, for some reason. other than that and the annoying updates, it's... fine. not as good as win7 but better than 8 and vista.
oh man i miss windows 7. aero glass was the shit. right now i use linux mint because ubuntu sells your soul to amazon or some shit and i hate the unity sidebar, but the cinnamon ui is pretty buggy so i'm kinda in the market. also today i discovered that my parents' computer hasn't been force-upgraded to windows 10. i don't know how they managed that?
I...actually kinda like Windows 10, honestly. It's not great, and 7 was way better, but it's a MASSIVE step up from the absolute mess that was 8.
I agree that Windows 10 is better than 8 was, yeah. I just got really hackly over having what felt like at least one update a week, with no choice over whether or not it was going to happen (and the auto-scheduler didn't quite seem to work - it'd go "we've noticed that you won't be active at this particular time" and then fail to successfully update when that time rolled around). And having to go in and carefully ensure that I wouldn't be accidentally leaking private data all over the place didn't exactly endear me to it either.
I liked Win8 on my touch laptop, but given tha Win8 was optimized for touch, that's not surprising. Ironically, 8 was more intuitive and much kinder to my brain than 10 when it came to semi-mobile devices. I still miss 7, but 10 is def better on the desktop than 8 ever was. (Had a touch computer with 7. It Was Bad.) I was eyeing Apple for a potential replacement for the laptop, but if Apple's gone to even more shit than it was already, I might not bother. Spouse has a Linux build on the spare, but I have no idea how well I'd be able to fuss with it, and the vidya games issue is pretty high on my priorities. Blegh. Why can't there be a perfect OS with a perfect UI that works perfectly?
