Windows 10 came out this week. Me doing a straight review on it is kind of silly, because who cares what I say? But there are some observations I'd like to make about it, if only because of my history with the products and Microsoft and such.
When I started at the company in 2009, Windows 7 was still in beta, but heavily used internally. It was wonderfully stable and cleaner than Vista. I left in 2011, and Windows 8 came along almost a year after that in part to spur touch screen hardware and tablets. I even jumped in and bought a Surface, which was cool, but not based on x86 processors, and therefore a weird bastard child of the ecosystem. That, and the OS forcing touchy stuff on desktopy stuff was totally rejected.
For me, I thought a lot of criticism was overblown. I mean, your Start menu essentially became full screen, but as a desktop user, so what? Were people really using touch apps anyway? I just assumed people were still using desktops for Office and the Web. I never used any "Metro" apps on the desktop. But sure enough, I scored an 8" Dell tablet in late 2013, and I totally understood Windows as a touch OS. It made sense, it was pretty good, and did I mention that little tablet was only $150? I still use it as my travel/read/consumption device. Heck, it was the smaller size that made me understand tablets period, as I always thought my iPad was too big for consumption activities.
Now, July 2015, Windows 10 is released. Despite a ridiculously long beta period, in public no less, I never really paid much attention beyond some of the developer events. I saw enough to understand that what they were doing was going to nail the one operating system that worked for both the desktop and tablets. And you know what? They really got it right.
I've got it installed in three places: A VM on my Mac (via Parallels), my Surface Pro 3, and that Dell Venue 8 Pro. The VM was a clean install that I'll use for development work. As strictly a desktop affair, the weirdness is gone and it works as expected in a desktop configuration. They did "move my cheese" in terms of some stuff, but it's super easy to find. In fact, the new notification center in particular is fantastic. I like it even better than the OS X version, because it includes notifications as well as the "quick access" stuff that used to crowd the task bar. It's actually borrowed from the phone OS.
The Surface is really a laptop masquerading as a tablet, but after having it more than a year, honestly I mostly use it as a laptop. It's amazing for travel because of it's lightness and thinness. It's just a little awkward to lap it. Still, this is where the OS tweaks are the most awesome. First off, the upgrade was fast and painless. When you yank off of the keyboard, it shifts into "tablet mode," where apps run full screen (or snapped so you can multitask), the start menu can go full-screen, and the virtual keyboard pops up as appropriate. It's very cool.
It was a pain in the ass to get the Dell to upgrade, maybe because there was so little free space on it. Then, today, the day after release, I learned that Microsoft put out an executable you could download to create installation media (like DVD's or USB drives), but it also facilitates a forced download and install, so I used that. Once it was done, and I turned on the full-screen start, it was like a very heavily tweaked version of Windows 8 as it appeared on tablets. It makes sense, and it runs incredibly well even on the sort-of-weak hardware. Probably the best feature is the Edge browser, which is a little snappier in Javascript-heavy web apps.
Overall, I dig it. It's a good release. I look forward to seeing what the last part of the equation is with the mobile version.
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