If you hadn't purchased a new PC you wouldn't have to use Win10.

That's why I regularly recommend to my uni to purchase refurbished 4th-gen business pcs (Lenovo and Dell) which are hardwarewise ultra reliable, so that I can install Windows 7 on them plus a good antivirus (ESET is my #1 choice). If for some reason staff insists on Win10, I install the LTSC edition, for which we have KMS licensing. LTSC is the best of the two worlds, after two years the people haven't yet complained about any problem.

It's not only the updates that are are wrong with Win10. It's full of annoyances and mysterious bugs. Everybody knows that MS has fired all their QA team and uses the so-called insiders as beta testers. How can a software title (and even more so, an OS) have acceptable quality when there is no adequate testing? It's no wonder that the British navy still runs on Windows XP, as probably is most of the world's nuclear arsenal.

On second thought, it might also explain why cats like computers and dogs chew on cables... Magnetism definitely is the toxoplasma of human civilisation and makes us invent and adopt a new conspiracy theory every semester, sometimes urging us to occupy the Capitol or deny vaccination.

> magnetic fields can ... change an animals' behavior.

Now I know what went wrong with to the human race.... all those years sitting behind a 25" CRT reading Slashdot and compiling kernels surely must have altered most of our cells!

(had to split the post, the previewer complained about junk characters, so I had to kill spaces in the table below)

Now some metrics. Two weeks ago I found by accident a russian guy's attempt to produce a "lite" version of Win10 LTSC x64 and installed it in a VM. Here are some stats on how it compares to a full VM installation of Win10 Pro. The only software added on the Pro were Adobe reader, Chrome, and a minimal Office2016. Both VMs were provisioned with 4GB of RAM.

Lite vs Full

Processes 94 - Processes 111
Threads 717 - Threads 940
Handles 28416 - Handles 38420

In use 834 MB - In use 1.6 GB
Committed 0.7/5.4 GB - Committed 1.6/5.4 GB
Cached 452 MB - Cached 2.4 GB

The above differences in terms of handles and processes are not that dramatic, but look at the memory figures! Then, after using both OSs and making comparisons, you realise that their behaviour is night and day. The lite version is snappy and responsive, zero CPU usage and zero disk activity at idle, almost immediately upon boot almost making you scream 'THIS is what we want! This does feel like Linux'. On the other side, the full version at idle always keeps the CPU busy doing various stuff by its own and seems never stop accessing the disk. As Zappa says, the torture, the torture, the torture never stops.

Conclusion: Quantitative benchmarks imho are not always very useful. Use the OS, test drive it, and realise that beyond the look and feel, the snappiness of an OS is a big part of the perceived polish and quality. Also, less complexity results to more stability.

Yeah, keep adding useless features so that more users start reading the clickbaiting guides that appear first on google search results on how to remove them, thinking that they know how to follow instructions and trusting a big internet site, resulting in their PCs unbootable to boot and then having to read other guides in other sites, in order to revert back the changes, occasionally making things even worse.

Let's face it, 80% of users don't know what a restore points is, a 10% that do, think that they know what they're doing and don't bother to create one, and only 10% or less are wise and careful, knowing that messing with such features is a risky business: dare to remove one feature and watch other 3 features sink with it, along with the ability to properly install updates or do a startup repair. This last 10% is well aware that even innocent stuff like customising the startup menu can inhibit the finicky built-in update mechanism. (thank god someone at MS had the courage to create the Update Assistant, a really new and effective update engine, god bless him).

This is the first candidate for the most wise and insightful comment of 2021. I want to laugh, but mostly I want to cry. The planned obsolescence of Windows 7 and the sabotage Microsoft forces upon hardware (e.g. Intel cpus & chipsets, motherboard manufacturers) and software companies (e.g. VMware) have dear consequences for the 15-25% of Windows users choosing to stay with Win7 until the end of the world.

To paraphrase your post: Of course it never occurs to them that ramming Windows 10 in people's faces and insisting on implementing "features" that no one asked for is what primes them to seriously consider moving to Linux.

I've been waiting years for this: Alexa, draw me a nice cock and balls!

Truncated title should read "& Industry"

You experience such a disastrous period: Brexit, the pandemic, another disruptive and world-changing British IP going down the drain... Who knows what might come next. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Technology, and software in particular, is supposed to liberate us from menial tasks like typing. However, how many of you use dictation software to compose your Slashdot post, write your code, draft your research papers, write up your dissertation, or even compiling your shopping lists?

Supposedly years ago Dragon Naturally Speaking was the state of the art, but why is it not free now and also not available in other languages? Wouldn't such an advent greatly speed up productivity and creativity, given that speaking is so much faster than typing?

Thank god usability software for disabled people exists and progresses. But I can't stop thinking that people in the 21st century are still disabled and slaves of matter, because they still have to use their hands to write down their minds. Everyday I curse my rusty fingers and this goddam keyboard. Don't you?

The lack of comments indicates that either slashdotters are out of jokes on Apple (rather hard to imagine), or that all of them bought an iPhone 12 and are still struggling to connect. Or perhaps we have a case of Schrödinger's phone, which is both connected and non-connected.

Read the excellent recent Bruce Schneier article in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/23/cyber-attack-us-security-protocols)

He can't stress enough why focusing on offensive measures and strategies at the expense of defensive ones will certainly lead to disaster.

Excellent series. What really hit me was the ending. After she won the world championship and was about to fly back to the states and meet the President, she opted instead to go visit the elderly people playing chess in a park and play with them. As I understood it, that was her way to pay back the debt to her elderly chess teacher, a humble janitor, from whom she had borrowed $10 for the bus ticket to her first tournament. She never paid back the debt because he passed away in the meantime.

Respect your teachers, kids!

+10. This is what knowledgeable users do and TFA totally missed the opportunity to mention it. Keep the OS on a small SSD and forever lean & mean - zero or minimal registry involvement. Have all apps in portable form (and user data) on a different disk. Open source apps and several utilities' devs know we exist and offer portable versions. Even commercial apps run better in portable format (if you know what I mean). No background processes when the app is not running, no useless.notification area icons. Instant boot times. Etc Etc.After all, portable apps are the equivalent of snaps and appimages in the Windows world.

Regarding "Multiple application versions can sit side-by-side", I wish Firefox fixes this sometime, you can't run two instances or one FF and one Tor instance (portable of course).