Has Windows 10 become toxic as an OS?

It seems that with every major release the system becomes ever more worse, unreliable and buggy beyond belief, that should be its tagline... Windows 10: Buggy Beyond Belief (Don't forget to get your daily dose of bugs from Microsoft). Apps installing without permission, updates doing what the hell they like without permission, duplicate settings to change the same functions, legacy and modern code clashing at every turn, ugly interface that does not know who it is anymore, the whole system should delete itself and take itself to the recycle bin as it's no fit for purpose

At lease when we had numbered releases we got a finished product even though with each release, companies had to still update their drivers etc but now things are being updated root and branch after merely a few months and it's no wonder that people and companies and productivity as a concept is just put by the wayside, at lease with Bill or Steve at the helm we knew where to go in terms of pointing the blame but now who do we turn to, Satya, I don't even think he uses Windows, he probably uses a mobile platform as his daily driver and he doesn't seem like the type of guy who gives 2 shits what people think so can never take the blame, I think some major stink across the community is required to get them to wake up as the Windows brand has become toxic and it will only take a rock solid upgrade to Windows 11/12 or whatever they will call it to wash away the stink that is Windows 10

Windows would be a great system, but let's be honest. MS's main goals is not an optimized, fast and/or lightweight system but to bloat as much as they can and to collect as many bullshit about their customers as possible.

Size

I'm suprised that somehow MS's applications is ridiculously huge. I mean Visual Studio is 10+ Gb, Ms office is 6+ Gb and Windows. Thats another dimension. When we were learning Linux in school, we could install ubuntu onto a 4 Gb partition with all its updates within 2 hours (configuring included for school environment). While installing Win7 taken us 18 Gb of space and 3 days (6+ hours) to install with all the updates.

Speed

When I was using Linux it felt strange that on a mediocre HDD it wasn't struggling to open the file manager, start an app or browse the web. Also it was kind awesome to see that it could shut down in 15 secs max. While windows?

When I load up the system on my laptop (5400 RPM HDD) it is bullshitting around for 40 sec just to bring up the login screen. And then another 20-30 to make the desktop responsive to mouse. Opening even the explorer (not IE) takes several seconds. Navigating in the files often freeze or lags like hell, especially when the folder has 50+ files.

Disk usage?

I noticed it especially on Win10 that it uses the disk fucking lot, way too much than it should. When I leave my laptop running for the night, after several hour of non-using it, I can hear that Windows is starting to spin up my HDD, and it runs it on max RPM for 10-20 minutes, multiple times per day. Dear MS. If i'm not doing anything on my PC, I won't want your stupid system to do ANYTHING on my PC. Also even when I'm just using my PC, Windows sometimes switch to "hella-fucking-slow" mode and when I check the task manager, the "system" process is running my disk on 100%, without any clear reason.

Bloat

Nearly every single long-time Windows user know the feeling, that when you use your system for 1+ years, you can notice that your free space is constantly decreasing. No matter if you uninstall the installed stuff, you will never be able to actually clear all bloat stockpiled in the wast depth of the Windows system. And the need to reinstall the whole system every 2-3 years sounds like a "what the........?"

This all is such a thing that should have been fixed LOOOOOOOOOONG time ago.

And before you attack me: No. I will not switch to Linux due to several reasons beside I hate it's stupid overcomplexity.

Windows could be such a great system if MS would finally make it customer oriented.

A guy I reinstalled his entire PC not even half a year ago called me that he installed some updates and now his printer doesn't work and some other stuff. I had no idea what was going on, thinking he managed to install drivers from Windows update even though those shouldn't appear they way I set everything up, until he started complaining about graphics and some other really weird stuff.
Turned out he upgraded to Windows 10, because he doesn't know fuck all about computers and simply decided to click on update when the system asked him to (I can't blame him for that).
So now I have to go there, pick up his PC, take it home and spend several hours reinstalling what was perfectly fine working PC. Fuck you Microsoft, fuck you very much.

I see many people talking about "debloating" Windows 11 and I honestly don't understand where these suggestions are coming from. Windows 11 isn't "bloated". In fact, it contains just about the same utilities that many other operating systems come pre-installed as well. Just because someone doesn't use those utilities, doesn't mean they are automatically to be considered bloat.

As someone who has been using macOS and various Linux distributions, if W11 pre-installed applications are bloat, these operating systems contain a lot of bloat as well. For instance, many Linux distributions even come pre-installed with a discontinued IRC client. Seriously? If Microsoft did the same thing on Windows, people would be very upset.

Also, lots of people complain about the fact that Windows 11 contains more processes than previous Windows versions. That is true. However, what they are not taking into account is that this is a design choice that aims to improve stability. For instance, rather than throwing all services into one process (svchost.exe), which is what has been done earlier, Microsoft has chosen to create a separate service host process for each instance. A standard Windows 11 installation may come with 80 service host processes. This doesn't make those ran services any "heavier" (many of them take only 0.1MB of RAM as task manager shows), they are just spread across multiple processes. This way, if one of the processes were to malfunction, it would not cause system-wide issues, compared to if they were all stacked together as one process. So the high process count people refer to is an illusion of OS being bloated, even though it (technically) isn't at all.

Lastly, people complain that RAM usage on Windows 11 is high. This is also true. However, this is due to Windows feature called Superfetch. Superfetch is a feature where your commonly used applications are pre-loaded into RAM, so they'll start up faster when you launch them. Superfetch will always allocate memory to other processes based on user's needs, so that reserved memory is free to use any time. Superfetch has existed on Windows since Vista and may take up to 50% of available RAM from the system. So back when people had earlier versions of Windows with 2-4GB of RAM, it would take up to 1-2GB. Now, when they have ~16GB of RAM on Windows 11, it takes 7-8GB. This gives an illusion that RAM usage for Windows has skyrocketed, which isn't true. Again, it will free the reserved memory as soon as you need it.

To summarize this post, Windows 11 isn't bloated. People base this conclusion on falsehoods that can be proven incorrect. By using debloating tools, you not only destabilize your Windows 11 but the performance boost that you get is something that you will barely even notice, as it isn't bloated. Not advisable.

i switched from win 10 and it felt much better and it feels more cartoony which i like and not that hard because of the round corners

It really is time for Linux disciples to shut up once and for all. It's long since become a rarity that you can't read comments about Windows without some troll coming along and extolling the virtues of Linux. Are they serious, or is it a running gag when they write comments like “Yet another good reason to switch to Linux”? We know that Linux exists, no need to keep reminding us.

On ZFS you have filesystems and mountpoints, nothing else.

But as the new Open-ZFS on Windows (currently 2.2.6 rc4 beta with Raid-Z expansion and the new Fast Dedup feature) must be integrate into the Windows methods, you are confronted with driveletters, filesystems, volumes, partitions and paths even in ZFS with sometimes different results for infos depending on method or tool what is propably the biggest problem of faster ZFS integration. ZFS code is quite the same as on BSD or Linux.

This is what you get for a filesystem overview, a volume overview and a detailled list of partitions. (Drive S is ZFS).

The more info you want the more complicated the view. And this does not even include Windows Storage Spaces with Storage pools, Tiering, Redundancy or other virtual disk properties. With Tools in the Windows GUI, it is even more complicated to get an overview.

Propably the reason why hardly anyone is using Storage Spaces despite some unique features like pools from disks of mixed types or sizes, real tiering between disk and ssd or redundancy not from disks but individually per virtual disks setting or that it can be faster as ZFS with proper setting.

Can ZFS be a game changer for storage on Windows once stability of Windows integration is improved?

Now, dont get me wrong. Windows 11 looks great, but when you have an old CPU and no TPM and 10 is working fine for you, you wanna stay there. I like how Windows 11 looks but I dont like the requirerments, they keep saying "Upgrade to Windows 11!" But I can't, Microsoft, atleast say WHY your cpu isn't supported OR why you need tpm.

Recently, I have messaged a friend asking him his opinion on Windows 11. My friend currently uses Arch Linux but he mentioned he also uses Windows 10. When I asked my friend if i should upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 he said "Windows 11 is just bloated spyware filled with bugs". I feel like this opinion is biased since he mostly uses Linux, but who am I to judge, that's why Reddit was made. Anyways just let me know if these claims are true, or if this is all nonsense and Windows 11 is perfectly fine.

Please can we have cortana back, not only can copilot not beatbox but it also sucks completely. So please can we have cortana back.

All the time I see someone just asking a question about windows 7 and people reply with, “Get windows 10 you’re gonna kill your entire computer.” What’s the reason for this? I know there hasn’t been recent security updates, but it doesn’t seem like it’s gonna die as soon as you open a webpage.

I really enjoy it!

Hey everyone,

I was just sitting at my laptop and got hit by a wave of recurring sadness, realizing that Windows 7 is basically unusable these days due to security and compatibility reasons. The world, and technology with it, has become increasingly progressive, and unfortunately, that left Windows 7 behind.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if there is an unofficial version of Windows 7 out there, one that is maintained by independent developers or programmers to keep it alive, bringing it up to modern standards in terms of functionality and security.

The reason I ask is because I grew up with XP and especially Windows 7 (born in 2003), and that’s where I built most of my early tech knowledge. It gave me a kind of freedom that’s hard to find now, with no forced “always online” mentality, no mandatory Microsoft account, no app store, and none of the bloated features we have today. I loved how clean and straightforward everything was before it all became so overcomplicated and locked down.

That’s pretty much it. Just wondering if something like this exists.

I really miss Aero. The gloss, the UI, when buttons looked like actual buttons and not something that would leave you wondering whether it's a clickable element or not.

This flatness trend has made their UI look boring.

Aero needs to come back.

I think the Windows 2000/ME startup sounds like when would people think the world would be over after 1999, but the world has still survived for the new millennium. It kinda sounds like the Falling Action after the Climax that is the predicted Y2K Apocalypse.

Credit to Владислав Голубев on YT

It seems to happen on Windows 7 and Windows 10, haven't tested others... Does anyone know why?

I find windows 11 to be more stable , clean and lean , once I've customized it , it's been great. No ads and no unwanted anything.

Today, I switched from the canary preview of Win11 to normal Windows 10. It was the best choice I've done since the UAC was instant instead of delayed!