WINDOWS 10’S TAKING AWAY YOUR CHOICES
Bear with us. This may seem off topic, but it’s the crux of the issue for a lot of people. Linux’s most alluring feature for many won’t be anything that it does, but whatit doesn’t do. And it’s all due to Microsoft’s folly.
Windows 10 may be the best Windows ever (and we use it daily on our primary PC), but Microsoft has pulled some tricks that range from questionable to downright gross in order to drive its adoption numbers higher, and to coax you into using the myriad Microsoft services and paid upgrades baked into the operating system.
It began with endless pop-ups on Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs – popups that started innocently enough before crossing the line into deceptive malware-like tactics. When that didn’t boost adoption numbers high enough, it morphed into nastier tricks and full-on forced upgrades that prompted some fearful owners to disable Windows updates completely rather than be pushed into Microsoft’s new operating system.
More recently, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update bundled some severe negatives in with its plentiful positives. The Cortana digital assistant, which pings Bing servers whenever you search your PC, is damned near impossible to disable completely now. And when we upgraded our primary PC to the Windows 10 AU, we discovered that all of the settings related to the many ways Windows 10 pushes ads at you were re-enabled, after we’d explicitly disabled them prior. None of our other system settings appear to have been touched. What’s more, Windows 10 changed the way it handles updates to more closely resemble mobile operating systems. You can’t pick and choose which patches to install or even refuse updates on consumer operating systems. If Microsoft pushes a Windows 10 update, you will receive it eventually. The company also tweaked the way Windows 7 and 8 handle patching. Now, you can no longer choose which individual updates to install; you have to take the whole kit and caboodle.
By default, Windows 10 beams much more of your data back to Microsoft than previous Windows versions as well. Most of it can be disabled, but most people don’t dive that far into system settings.
Lots of people are still plenty happy with Windows 10, don’t get us wrong. But these moves are also ruffling the feathers of a lot of users.