Microsoft To Release Windows 10 On 29 July

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft To Release Windows 10 On 29 July

Microsoft announced this morning that Windows 10 will be officially released on 29 July. I'm excited! Only to run benchmarks and see how the performance compares to various Linux distributions.....

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Windows-10-July-29

[Pecisk]

Run to the hills! Windows 10 will kill SteamOS and will swallow everyone else additionally!

[dungeon]

Run to the hills! Windows 10 will kill SteamOS and will swallow everyone else additionally!

Not me

[chelobaka]

Run to the hills! Windows 10 will kill SteamOS and will swallow everyone else additionally!

Absolutely! But only if M$ will start giving it away for free

[stiiixy]

I now have a virus on my W8 install espousing the virtues of Windows 10 (and they're not even interesting in the slightest from a sales point of view) and it's not readily or easily disabled for the general public.

Yay.

[eydee]

Current builds still look like the UI was designed by a 3-year-old. Release in 2 months? Well, good luck, Microsoft...

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, so is there any new information on how free of charge it really will be, and what's the status of the UEFI requirements? I heard that it was planned to ship Win10 via Windows Update, in which case it not being completely free would be quite weird. As for UEFI, there were some slides from MS saying that it was mandatory, but people were saying that it's only for OEM installs and not retail.

[duby229]

Yea, so is there any new information on how free of charge it really will be, and what's the status of the UEFI requirements? I heard that it was planned to ship Win10 via Windows Update, in which case it not being completely free would be quite weird. As for UEFI, there were some slides from MS saying that it was mandatory, but people were saying that it's only for OEM installs and not retail.

EFI is pretty common now, but there are still a lot of BIOS systems out there yet. If they choose to require EFI for there "free" upgrade" customers then there is going to be some seriously pissed off people in this world a few months from now.

Oh and if they do propogate the upgrade with WU, then they need to devise a way to make it obviously totally optional. Obvious being the key word.

[Daktyl198]

1. Windows 10 (upgrading from Windows 7/8) will be completely free if you do it within the first year. Buying Windows 10 will not be free, but given their recent policies, I wouldn't be surprised if it was cheaper than Windows 8
2. Requiring EFI could potentially be a good thing. Yes, there are plenty of BIOS systems left in the world, but how many of them were bought in the last 4-5 years compared to EFI systems? 1%? 3%? EFI has advantages over BIOS, and it'd be wrong for MS to not take advantage of those. If removing BIOS compatibility fixed some nasty bug, made the EFI code better, or just simply made it easier on the devs, I'm all for it. And this is coming from somebody with at least two computers still using a BIOS motherboard.
3. Yes, it's completely optional. If it's via Windows Update, you can always just un-check it and it'll wait until you re-check it to download and install. Why you would wait to install it if you're on Windows 8 is beyond me. I can see Win7 customers having a harder time being convinced though.

[reub2000]

Yea, so is there any new information on how free of charge it really will be, and what's the status of the UEFI requirements? I heard that it was planned to ship Win10 via Windows Update, in which case it not being completely free would be quite weird. As for UEFI, there were some slides from MS saying that it was mandatory, but people were saying that it's only for OEM installs and not retail.

I think you mean secure boot, which requires EFI, but is seperate. Windows 8 required the option to allow secure boot to be disabled. Windows 10 leaves that option to the OEM.