Comment by cptskippy
8 years ago
What's your opposition to Windows 10 if you're already running Windows?
We're running Windows 7 and I'm begging to get into the pilot for Windows 10. As time passes more and more things break in Windows 7 and it becomes less useful. Most of Intels drivers are garbage and their Bluetooth stack is next to useless.
I'm running VMs ontop of my Windows 7 install for all development work. Anything that's Windows based is either a 10 or 2016.
I guess I should have noted that I do all my C# dev work in Windows 7 and run Arch VMs for everything else. My Windows 10 setup won’t be much different, but I just don’t trust Windows 10 and won’t be running my VMs on it.
I haven’t followed up on whether this “feature” made it into an actual Windows 10 update, but I remember reading about keylogging to the cloud as a way to pre-load your start menu with things that might be relevant to what you’re doing. Maybe it’s just being a developer and knowing what this kind of casual abstraction can cause, but I’m not okay with the philosophy that gets it into a test release of Windows 10. Microsoft is doing cool stuff these days but they still haven’t won me over.
I'm not aware of any keylogging to the cloud "feature". That sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory dreamed up by the people who hate Windows 10 and or Microsoft.
Windows 10 has the same frequently used app feature as Windows 7, which you can didable. You can optionally allow Microsoft to gather data about onscreen keyboard usage to improve suggestions, like Google Gboard on Android. Cortana's searches are obviously cloud based, but can be disabled. And Windows 10 offers suggested apps and features in like 3 different places in the OS, which can also be disabled. Maybe someone dreamed up a fantastic spyware feature based on all of those things.
I hear what you're saying, but none of it makes me feel better about using Windows 10. It's not high-quality HN discussion, though here's a Reddit thread about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/31rxsv/disable_k...
You've told me three things that I can disable in Windows 10. Why is this stuff enabled by default in the first place? How do you know this is everything I need to disable to address these concerns? Or better, why isn't user consent requested before any serious "diagnostic tracking" like this? The answer, I think, is that it's too complicated for the average user. Once this "diagnostic tool" is effectively hidden from the user, and enabled on all devices, the tool either has to be monitored regularly (to make sure more features aren't auto-enabled like these were) or eliminated completely. I've spent too much of my life "monitoring" closed-source software to give much consideration to that option, at this point.
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