I'll be writing a cumulative 'review' here, along with any problems and workarounds I encounter.
Day Zero The download of the upgrade finished at about 11PM. I was tired already, and had work the next morning.Nevertheless, I thought I'd start the installer and leave it running.I remembered after the fact that I have a non-standard boot setup. My PC has two physical drives. The first is my "Windows" drive, and contains the EFI boot partition for Windows.The Second is my Debian drive, and contains a boot partition for GRUB. This didn't cause any problems, just a minor annoyance. The way I have Grub set up is to boot into Linux if I don't enter a response (About 4 seconds to respond). And the setup process restarted about 5 times in total. So I sat wrapped in a thick blanket with the cat on my lap, half asleep, watching the numbers crawl. Took about two hours from start to finish.Crashed in bed as soon as I could and decided to leave it for the next day.Day OneWoke up late, so it was a mad dash to get ready for work. I quickly peeked at my 'new' installation and noticed that my primary display wasn't usable. Needed to install the drivers for my Nvidia 750.I set that to download and ran to work (Ended up forgetting my lunch).Got back and booted up. And all told, everything is looking pretty good. The system is basically exactly how I had it before I started the upgrade. Icons in the same place across both screens, network mappings intact, applications intact, etc.Even my slightly weird startup batches are working fine (One of them is a call to SUBST to map my C:\Dev\ folder to a drive letter on startup).And the only thing I was a bit leery of, the "forced" updates, was easily solved by a trip to the Group Policy Editor. Details at bottom of blog.So far, so good. Everything works that I've used so far. I have yet to play any games, but my normal "work" stuff is perfect. Will update tomorrow.EDIT: Oh, and Microsoft has finally changed the default CMD font:
And in the process of poking around CMD, I found that my entire MSYS style setup was still in place, as well as my SSH stuff. Heck, even my context-menu entries are intact and working as intended. EDIT2: All my games seem to be working so far. Also tried out Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition, which led me to poking around the XBox app, which further led me to discover that it supports XBox Live Avatars and even has an app for creating them.Then there's the built in game recording tools. They're pretty decent, showing a measure of elapsed time on the top of the screen.But I've already got both OBS and ShadowPlay to use.Speaking of ShadowPlay, I had to turn it off and on again before it would work (Probably had to reinstall the service layer). Working flawlessly now.Day One Point Five / TwoWoke up earlier than normal this morning and tested a few things out. I could post a long checklist of what works and what doesn't, but I literally haven't encountered anything that doesn't work as normal. The Command Line spontaneously returned to its old self again, and I have encountered one or two runtime errors while using the Windows Store and the new "Settings" app.Hasn't happened since.Performance wise, I did a comparison with The Witcher 3. I intentionally set it up on my Windows 8 installation so that it was running at a sub-par framerate (40FPS), and tried it with the same settings in Windows 10. Again, 40FPS. So no major improvements (DirectX12 doesn't affect everything just by existing, as many of my misguided customers seem to think).Anyway, so far my experience is "normal". I've set up the Email app for a bit of use testing, and it's far better than that piece of crap in Windows 8.The Notification/Action Center is a welcome addition, and I haven't properly used Task View yet (Though I did discover that additional desktops retain settings between reboots). This weekend I plan on testing out my build environment and compiling the most complex project I have on-hand: Exile.Workarounds and fixes
This only works for Windows 10 Pro. The option for other users is to disable the Windows Update service, but I wouldn't recommend it. > Open Search and type in "gpedit", hit Enter.> Traverse through Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update> Double click on the entry labeled "Configure Automatic Updates"> In the window that pops up, click on "Enable" and choose one of the familiar options from the dropdown below (I chose Notify before Download & Installation)
I like the old CMD font…
I was surprised when all my settings except for the Nvidia driver were exactly how they were before. That must be a first for windows!
I think windows 10 is very, very cool. And I still use chrome, but my god, they finally get IE right! Even though its a new name, its dead simple to use (maybe even a little too simple..), and I wouldn't mind other people using it at all compared to every IE version ever made.Task view is awesome, the start menu is better than I expected, its very quick, and not confusing for the casual user, especially with the settings. Only thing is that you'll have to reorganize your start menu, but its worth it.There are a few glitches here and there I've noticed. But it is very minor like the start menu or window not opening/closing right away, and I'm sure it'll be fixed in an update. Very impressed with this free upgrade.Nice to hear that it kept pretty much 100% of everything intact, I've had a lot of trouble finding confirmation for that. Sounds like I've got no reason to avoid upgrading my laptop at some point in the near future =D
Not so sure about my cheap tablet though, I've got to confirm that they have a windows 10 compatible camera driver.Well my Windows Update actually works now, so that makes it 100x better than 8.1.
There are other improvements - they finally fixed the apps so they aren't fucking annoying hurrayThat search bar is a brilliant addition. It's still Windows button or Windows+Q for me to open search, but it's awesome to have it there, particularly for less-skilled peopleI still don't find the gui as nice as Windows 7. In many way it's more minimalist, but I find it pretty fugly, and I had to change the theme colour to blue. Black is just hard to look at.The things I like least of all won't affect me personally, but will affect home users who don't know what they're doing - for instance, sharing out your network password with your contacts, convulated way of changing default browser (although it's actually a better system). And the mandatory updates. You're overall aware that the way Windows is set up by default is the way most people will be forced to use it.Tbh I think this policy is intentional - take advantage of people's lack of knowledge about things, but at same time satisfy more hardcore users so they don't just leave WindowsHonestly, I have no problem with mandatory upgrades - massively reduces the unpatched attack surface of Windows machines, and makes the platform as a whole more consistent. Given the more rigorous testing cycle 10 is doing with the insider update track, I think stability in patches will be less of an issue.
The WiFi sharing is… almost a good idea? It's sort of a web of trust for Wifi networks, but people aren't knowledgeable enough about that sort of network for it to actually be something you can point to and say "yes, these must be secure networks because Steve from marketing said so."Which is exactly why the Pro versions of the OS allow you defer updates, and Enterprise allows you to turn them off altogether. Corporate networks are less of an issue than the legions of unpatched home users.
Installed Windows 10 on my desktop last night because I had nothing to lose. I've had a long-running issue with the system periodically eating 100% of the disk, causing the computer to slow to a crawl to do simple things like open a program. If anyone knows about a fix for that (I was running Windows 8 on an HDD), I'd be deeply appreciative because I've tried everything (including installing another OS!) apart from just forking out $200 for an SSD.
I was hoping the upgrade might do something about it, like it was just some weird Windows 8 quirk, but no such luck.Apart from that, I've barely scratched the surface so far. Seems functional and even has some nice new features, but I haven't been able to really use them because of this long-running issue. We'll see what happens over the next week.EDIT: Oh hey, the disk usage just dropped from 100% to 3%. Then it spiked back up to 80%. God I love this problem.Also, the equalizer is awful now, holy shit.I am not too pleased about Windows 10 so far. Why? Well because it won't even let me upgrade in the first place. Despite saying it's free, it doesn't show up for me and I have everything up to date and I am running a version of Windows that it's supposed to support. (W7 SP1 x64) Ran the troubleshooting app and all it tells me is "unsupported version of windows, must have Windows 7 or Windows 8.1" what da f*ck is this shit?
@death You can now directly download Windows 10 at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10, you don't have to go through all of the reserving shit. If you have a valid 7 or 8.1 license key I don't see how it will have a problem
(you have to choose the upgrade option though, in order to get a windows 10 key)