The Author's Nest

As I had been using my new Surface Pro 3 as my primary device for my typical “30 day trial”, I was also forced to use Windows 10. I must say, even an unstable Arch Linux partition would be much more stable than Windows 10.

First of all, application stability. Simply switching applications would often cause background applications to become unstable. For example, going from Word to Pale Moon and back often caused Word to simply lock up and crash. Word, OneNote, and Store apps were the most problematic, but any app had a chance of falling apart just from using Alt+Tab or Win+Tab. Just today alone, I lost almost 10K words worth of work in MS Word, both from Word itself crashing, and OneDrive crashing. Even Windows Vista does not have these issues, and yet, Windows 10 does.

Then there is OneDrive’s stability. OneDrive has been my primary cloud storage solution since the drives in my home’s NAS began to fail, and in Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows Phone 8, it works extremely well. In Windows 10, OneDrive becomes so unstable that a 4KB file could instantly fail to upload, and do so silently in the background. I do not know what level of idiocy has befallen Windows 10’s APIs, but to go from “working perfectly” to “working less than 10% of the time” is absolutely unacceptable for a productivity environment. Mercifully, I do have an external HDD, and I can use Dropbox for some documents until I can revive the NAS with new HDDs.

Then…there is the update problem. Windows 10’s updates being forced on the user is bad, but when they break functionality and have no way to fully roll back the update, that is completely unacceptable. Windows 10 is made for a beta testing environment, not a production environment. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 allow the user to stop an update from taking hold, and this is a key requirement for having a stable system.

In Microsoft’s efforts to have an evergreen operating system—a feature that many people in the technology industry want, but not as many non-technical users—they have managed to copy Google’s eternal beta design a little too well. Unlike Google, Microsoft’s Windows 10 is actually in a perpetual beta state.

I will continue to use my Surface, but only as an art tablet. My laptop will be used for writing, as I can rely on it.