A Linux User's Review Of Microsoft Windows 10
Inconsistencies Everywhere
Windows 10 feels like Microsoft running damage control over Windows 8, plain and simple. Users and reviewer's complained about how Metro (or "Modern") applications were almost always full screen. Microsoft's solution? Throw title bars on them. People yelled about how the start screen was poorly optimized for desktop systems. Microsoft's solution? Half start screen, half start menu. People screamed about poorly optimize for High-DPI screens. Microsoft's solution? Magnify everything by 200-250 percent.
That last one in particular exposes some of the problems Windows is suffering from right now-- their designers aren't updating assets to be high-dpi ready. At 1080p both of my systems were perfectly fine with text rendering and assets, but on a friend's 4K screen I began to see what he was complaining about. Depending on the age of the application-- including some of Microsoft’s owns-- you may see jagged text, or jagged looking icons, such as the red "X" for errors, or the exclamation mark for information icons.
More than that though is a very odd merging of Windows 7 and Windows 8-- take for example the two different applications for system settings. The "Control Panel" that we've seen since Windows Vista and 7, and the "System Settings" application from Windows 8. Both control similar settings, but they each have ones that the other doesn't. Unfortunately they don't always stay in sync making it a complete guess on what you will actually have happen. Change a setting in one and it won't always be reflected in the other, sometimes a reboot will change that, but not always. Microsoft really needs to either go back to the Control Panel, or move everything over to System Settings. One or the other, scrap the extra one.
Which brings me to my next issue with Windows 10. The Microsoft teams pushing "modern" (Metro) applications at every junction in an attempt to make them High-DPI and cross-architecture ready... but couldn't even update their own applications.
I can understand GNOME or KDE not having the man power to update their applications to new toolkits, but Microsoft? Across the time of three development cycles? There's applications all over Windows, notably the Management center, pictured below, that have not been visibly updated in any way since Windows 7. In fact on the 1080p screen of my 14inch laptop they appear fuzzy and hazy, as if they weren't being rendered correctly by Windows itself.