Nope, they're going even more in with Win10. Calc.exe is replaced with a shitty, functionally inferior version that takes 1-2 seconds to start.

The metroization is all over with its terrible blurry font rendering and gimped settings.

I like to call it "consolification" as it seems apparent to me that this is where MS is heading with their OS.

Not long and Xbox and Windows will be identical. And sadly, it will be the Xbox that has the dominant genes, UI wise at least.

It is all over their corporate speak, too. "Life time of device" when discussing the upgrade cycle of the OS... What is the life time of my PC that I built myself out of many different vendors offerings?

I, too am a bit worried that all this cloud business is getting more and more traction. When I saw the big warning "Not recommended" when trying to create a normal user account and not one of these windows online account deals I though "You can't be serious". Why would it not be recommended to use a local account which was the norm for so long? Unless they already plan many changes to the OS which would leave users with local accounts in the dust so better to try and convert as many people to our online accounts as possible, they must think.

Either way, I am in the process of building a new rig. The old one didn't even have an i3/5/7 CPU to let you know how long I've been using my current PC. And on this new PC, Windows7 Ultimate will be running the show and I will be watching from the outside over the next 5 years minimum how this Win10 business develops. From my point of view they have 5 years to do a lot of 180s and actually make a Windows11 which will take the under-the-hood advancements of Win8-10 and plug that into Windows7 so we can actually have that Windows7 improvement we all want.

A: I'm not sure how much MS really cares about enthusiasts. Reading the Win 10 forums and user voice, most of them seen like idiots, with all sorts of stupid suggestions and just plain drama. Though I agree "lifetime of the device" is a bit worrying.

B: I've talked the to the person responsible for MS Accounts in Windows 8. Really cool, smart guy. It was a hard thing to get right, and their intentions were not malicious like it might seem. For most users, using an online account is simply the better solution. Their photos and documents will automatically sync. Apps will automatically sign in and work. They can enable full disk encryption without worrying about losing keys. Enthusiasts can make two extra clicks to avoid it. While it personally annoys me and makes machines easier to compromise (by government), it's the only competitive option for most consumers.

Windows 10 is unpolished and downright janky, but if they get it cleaned up, there's little doubt it'll be pretty well accepted. If they had kept the start menu and not made metro apps so dumb in Win 8, it'd have been fine. Though they do need to make calc and other simple apps open as fast as they do on my bloody phone...

More concerning is the Windows Store, which is a cesspool, and MS shows no signs of caring. I've spoken to several ISVs that simply cannot get MS to help or respond to removing fake/scam/phishing apps. Even Netflix had trouble with this, FFS.

A: I personally prefer to buy retail licenses, precisely for the ability to move it around - like, I have an older license of Windows Vista that I still use (unfortunately the upgrade opportunity has come and gone). And I never pirate btw and I respect my licenses, so it has been installed on at most one PC at a time.

According to this new policy, what will happen with retail licensing? I presume that it will be either very expensive, or available only for enterprise/volume licensing, or simply not available anymore. Now that would suck.

B: while I'm sure that their intentions weren't malicious, I strongly disagree with you and with them.

First of all, encryption on Windows 8.1 standard edition is only available if your hardware supports TPM and SecureBoot on ConnectedStandby. There's absolutely no reason for this limitation. Linux's dm-crypt or ecryptfs do not need it. DiskCryptor does not need it. I smell lock-in.

Also, what is the problem with available encrypting solutions? What is wrong with remembering and inserting a password which would be required only on boot and not on waking up from stand-by?

Also, I repeat ad nauseam my biggest problem with the NSA revelations - if the NSA has the capability of installing back-doors and to coerce companies into doing whatever they want, what's stopping organized crime syndicates from doing the same thing, possibly using NSA's trails OR with their cooperation? It's only a matter of cost. Therefore, an encryption method that's saving the keys on Microsoft's servers is extremely flawed and for no good reason.

This also reminds me of OneDrive versus OneDrive for Business. Basically OneDrive for consumers does not have versioning or a fucking log of the events that happened (like both Google Drive or Dropbox do), because by their own admission, that's for businessy/enterprisish things. If for whatever reason a file disappears, a file out of tens of thousands like I have - well, you'll never know when or how. And also, synchronizing things on-disk is extremely hard because at any moment you've got multiple sources of truth that contend on the same files, with no good way to synchronize shit, which means that all clients are more or less buggy. And regular folks are non-technical and they might not know how to look at the log of events and do debugging, or to recover previous versions of a file, but non-technical folks usually have friends or access to professionals for hire ;-)

And I'm thinking that this is my biggest problem with Microsoft (but not only them) - they treat regular people as dumb fucks that have to be hand-holdem, for a monthly subscription of course (which is a totally understandable thing, since you don't own anything). And then you discover that what Microsoft's notion of personal usage does not apply to you and so for the features you need you need the Awesome edition which costs at least twice, possibly available only on volume licensing.

Now, as far as the whole desktop market is concerned, OS X has always catered to grandmas and to software developers refugees from Linux or other Unixes, Linux has always catered to die-hard backend software developers, while Windows has always catered to the people in between, the middle of the bell curve, the people that can get around their computer, but that don't know its internals, the power users. What we are seeing now is that Microsoft has totally lost the developer mind-share and the results are showing - Microsoft has lost the Internet-wide server-side and its app ecosystem only holds because of inertia, otherwise Apple's ecosystem for native apps is way more attractive.

And now Microsoft is going to lose the power users too, because according to their new directions, their user base are only the grandmas and the dumb ones that never made it to high-school. They are even ignoring the needs of the enterprise. And if that wasn't enough, on ultra portables they are also competing with iOS, Android and Chromebook. Tough times ahead for Microsoft.

Is it really that bad for Calc???? I was not impressed how they took the windows photo viewer (whatever that app was called) and replaced it with a Metro version that sat at a full-screen splash screen for 5 seconds.

YMMV, but I can't tell the difference between the font rendering in Metro apps and WPF apps (on a Retina MacBook Pro). I really like the typeface and rendering choices they've made and it's easy for me to read.

WPF apps also traditionally had shitty font rendering. The issue is that they are pixel unaware so at small sizes it blurs. On a HiDPI screen it's fine, as well as with larger font sizes. On the standard Windows DPI settings, it's terrible.

Pixel snapping and ClearType are what deliver sharp small fonts at the cost of less "accuracy" since the renderer may need to bump things around by half a pixel or so.

Some people don't care/notice or simply prefer the antialiased look. Up until Win 8/10, this was a choice at the system level, generally.

I remember the good old days where they introduced that in XP (was it XP?) and suddenly all the fonts were blurry red/orange/black/green squishy messes that were impossible to read.

If they looked like that, then run the ClearType tuner. On most LCD panels for everyone I've showed it to, they were pretty impressed with the improved clarity.

ClearType was also the subject of some stupid partner-level politics inside of MS, actual end user experience be damned.

I didn't know about that, thanks!