Windows 10 – First Impressions From A Developer

Upgrade And First Impressions

Like many other people I woke up this morning with a Windows 10 upgrade pending on my  laptop. The upgrade process took roughly 3 hours, and everything worked flawlessly. Microsoft did a good job at rolling out the upgrade. At this point my desktop does is waiting to get its upgrade.

However, after spending some time going through the new settings and features of the OS some feelings of unease began to set in. The new ‘Privacy Settings’ immediately got changed to ‘make me as anonymous as possible’. On his blog Jonathan Porta gives a detailed account of his thoughts about the Microsoft’s new privacy settings.

Intrusive Windows 10 privacy settings.

New GUI At The Cost Of Bloat

One thing I was excited to see was the new start menu, which was a relief from the Windows 8 start screen. Having the tiles as an extension is a good touch. My criticism of the start menu is the amount of bloat that came with it. Gimmicky Siri/Cortana applications don’t speak to me as developer. I’m glad I could disable this feature. Actually the further I dug into the customization I was never frustrated with not finding a way to disable a feature. I prefer a lean system.

Windows 10 desktop

I did notice that everything seemed to be running a bit slower compared to Windows 8. After looking at the task manager I noticed Windows 10 was using 57% of my shabby 4GB of RAM while idle, where Windows 8 only used 37% while idle. My goal is to hunt down the bloat within the next few days, and post my results. I did manage to recover 8% of my performance by optimizing the performance settings.

Windows 10 Performance Settings

Ending On The Edge

Overall this upgrade did exactly what I expected. It fixed a broken user experience, and added the typical gimmicky features I could go without. I know it’s a fantasy, but it would be great if Microsoft would release a lean, deeply customizable, command line oriented version of Windows called Windows Dev – a Microsoft OS for developers. I have not had enough time to thoroughly check all the features of the new browser. That’s what tonight is for.