Franly no one needed a 24" android phone. The win 7 UI was just perfect for PCs, because was the result of 2 decades of refinements, and crossed contaminations with the Linux desktops environments. They had just to theme it with a more trendy theme and some tweaking, practically the had to make an OS looking like win 8 build 8400 plus classic shell, minus the metro crap. That's what all we needed.
Windows 10 ads = oh wow! It has new Start menu. Oh wow it as new control panel. Oh wow it has Spartan with new look. So many people at Microsoft are working on such simple things which already been presented to users in Windows 7 and were user-friendly.
I give you an information, Windows 7 UI and Windows 10 UI without tiles pinned are exactly the same. Therefore avoid exaggerations.
Following that logic a Ferrari 460 and a Ford model T are exactly the same because both have four wheel and an engine.
Tbh on the other hand I have to say it is not easy for M$ to improve an almost 30 years old concept running on Intel x86 / x64 architecture.... Improvement on the desktop came mainly from the hardware, not from the OS itself...and the hardware improvement on desktops is stagnating. An SSD reads and writes faster, but that has nothing to do with OS development. I mean what could M$ improve at all compared to w7 except to include what others have already? Compare the performance/power consumption of a modern device with a modern OS such as Android on ARM octa-core with an windows desktop PC..... M$ has 2 issues: An almost 30 years old concept and compatibility on old Intel architectures.../ previous products...
Same (great) logic of who use mac and say that windows must be formatted every 6 months, or who say that metro tiles aren't clickable with mouse At this development point all those that you want there is in the new start menù, so useless complain
Yes, it's like someone that sells steam engines, when everyone else sells gasoline powered cars. They wasted the Win on arm occasion too. Trying to use it to make a poor man's iPad instead of pushing an Arm version of the servers, and (real) desktops.
@orlaf NTFS fragments and the longer you use windows the slower the FS becomes. EXT4 is far superior. Generally one can say the longer one uses windows the slower it becomes (also due to bad registry and de-install behaviour)....whether one needs to reformat it after 6 months?....no. On SSD it is just not noticeable anymore. @T-S I completely agree.
There are several areas MS could improve on in terms of its OS. 1. Elimination of the Windows Update Folder (just takes up space) where they should not store the Windows Setup files 2. Open up the OS to be more open 3. Let users decide if they want a tablet OS or Desktop OS That's just the start.
You're right...registry and old file system are the two big annoyance of windows, but from here to say that cause a problem to regardless without ask why...sorry but this is wrong, especially if windows it's used by folk that install everything without see anything of those that have done, and this method sure generate speed problems in future. By me i can said that my system it's reactive how first day that i have installed (7 months ago), all those all you need is to be careful, how for everything (also for linux and mac).
As long as I can continue to not sign in with a MS account, disable UAC, and run a single command to remove all Modern UI apps (without it nuking the entire start menu like it does in 10056), Windows 10 I guess would be fine for me. But as it stands currently, there isn't really anything worthwhile in the technical previews (which isn't too surprising). I mainly just want to run x86/x64 apps and games; the normal desktop stuff. Couldn't care less about Modern UI apps, and would rather them not be forced either. Apparently the WDDM 2.0 Engineering driver for AMD GPUs does perform better than the latest released 15.4 beta (with both DX9 and DX11); at least in certain/most cases. I imagine these changes might make it over to a 7/8.1 driver later on, maybe anyway; depends on whether the improvements are with WDDM or the driver itself.
the gaming performance is amazing much better then 7 or 8.1 also as a dev for game design the ui is pretty helpful and the speed of the os is unmatched so ya tons of great stuff
After reading replies, for which I thank you all, I have reached a conclusion: aside from DirectX 12, there is little to no improvement in Windows 10 compared to Windows 8.1 when it comes to PC Gaming. I've yet to see a feature listed that would somehow help to run games faster than they run now on Windows 8.1. All these new features listed do not seem worth it at all. I mean MS Store apps are crap, aside from Netflix and a few other apps. I cannot believe UI changes are so prized in any Windows. Its UI and there is a ton of apps that can change Windows UI for the better. What's the big deal? These are such small changes that its hard to believe MS spent this whole time working just on them. I really hope the main changes are far more complex and go much deeper than UI, CMD, MS Store Apps, and some scrolling. Hopefully, its DirectX 12 that makes Windows 10 a "new" OS and takes all this time to properly develop and integrate. I bet after Windows 10 release, we're going to see Stardock Start10 app released shortly because integration of MS Store apps, which are mostly worthless, is a sin in itself. Leave Start Menu be classical/traditional!!!
Ok at this time from what I've heard on the DX12 testing front. AMD's mantle is much more capable and efficient than DX12. I don't see that much of an improvement in Powershell apart form a real package management system that allows a unified install and uninstall. Also i meant with tablet mode the ability to turn off metro entirely so I don't have to see any of it on a computer that is not touch capable. It should be very simple to do this because of the ability to use drivers to see if the system is touch capable or not. Also I want improvement in the file system because NTFS is old. There are better ways to format the hard drive. Microsoft needs a drastic improvement in windows 10 for me to even consider it. At this time releasing in July is a pipe dream as the OS is in no way ready to be released by then. They would have to go gold in 2 months and have all the bugs fixed.
I do not want to turn this into Mantle vs DX12 heated debate, but DX12 will end up the mainstream API for both AMD and nVidia. So far AMD was the one showing off that demo in 4K with a ton of lights and units, something not possible with DirectX 11, but possible with DirectX 12. AMD already embraced DX12 and Mantle MIGHT become secondary API for some AMD-biased games, like future Deus Ex games.
My favorite features/changes, in no particular order: flat, black taskbar look removal of the charmsbar running Store apps in windows (working with fullscreen apps has always been cumbersome on non-touch devices) redesigned apps (in particular Calculator and Music Preview look promising) virtual desktops (could get in handy sometimes when doing several tasks with multiple programs at the same time) OneGet (we'll have to see how it turns out but it looks promising) Windows Hello (won't have the required hardware but great for those buying new devices) DirectX 12 (won't have DX 12 hardware but IIRC even DX 11 cards may get some improvements with the right drivers) native MKV support (great to have thumbnails and metadata in Explorer, will probably continue to use VLC for playing though) improvements to the command prompt (it still feels terribly dated but it's certainly better than nothing) Spartan (it's supposed to be faster than IE 11 and I like the modern look, can't see any use for web notes or Cortana integration though)