Would anyone recommend updating to Windows 10?

For anyone who hasn't already found their way to Slashdot, there's a pretty good discussion of the pro\s & cons of migrating going on there. The Slashdot crowd are pretty tech-savvy, and include a lot of IT professionals, and tech support people in particular; although they do seems to skew in a pro-Linux direction, their consensus opinion would be well worth giving a good read, if you haven't already made up your mind (or are considering changing your mind) about MS's new OS.

One of my favourites is this, from ilsaloving:

Windows 10, from a purely technical perspective, is great. It's fast, clean, stable, and relatively secure. Heck, it's the first ever Microsoft OS I've seen that is able to upgrade the average computer without turning it into goat vomit. Prior to Windows 10, this was practically a guarantee.

From a policy perspective.... To quote Darth Vader, "I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further."

That is basically Microsoft's slogan for Windows 10. Unless you are willing to drop $500 for the Enterprise edition of Windows 10, Microsoft has dictated very clearly that you do NOT have control of your machine. They *will* pull telemetry at their pleasure. They *will* force updates onto your machine whether you want them or not. Hell, they even have the power to copy any data you have on your machine. They will not permit you to block them, at least not at the OS level. If you want to block their shenanigans, your only realistic option is to either buy Enterprise or put a hardware router between your computer and the internet, and do your blocking from there. Or just use it as is and hope Microsoft doesn't continue to alter their agreement further. (Fat chance)

And we all know that Microsoft is far from perfect when it comes to releasing stable updates that don't brick people's machines.

Whether you are fine with this, is up to you. As a sysadmin who is ultimately responsible for the productivity of the employees under my charge, this is completely unacceptable, and we're going to be sticking with Windows 7 as our desktop standard.

What pisses me off the most is that Microsoft's obnoxious behaviour is forcing me to set up a WSUS server, because I now need to vet every single update Microsoft release.

Then there's this, from Solandri:

I upgraded my main PC to it a few weeks ago (after blacklisting a whole bunch of hosts and IPs on my router, and immediately installing Spybot Anti-Beacon after).

Pros:

• UI makes more sense than Win 8.1. Less schizophrenia about whether it's a desktop OS or a tablet OS.
• Games run better. A lot of the microstutters I attributed CPU load spikes or having to read stuff off the SSD are gone.
• Icon/text scaling with DPI is much improved, though still not perfect.
• I like the minimalist black and white icons in the notification bar, instead of the horrible color clash it used to be with different apps showing notifications with different colors.
• They "fixed" the popup stealing focus problem. Now when you're typing a reply on slashdot and a system warning dialog pops up, focus stays with your browser. The dialog no longer disappears an instant after it pops up before you can read it because you happened to hit the space bar an instant after it popped up.
• If you're used to Unix from the 1990s, Microsoft finally added multiple virtual desktop support.
• The animated tiles in the Start menu are much less annoying that the full-screen animated tiles in the Win 8 Start menu.

Cons:

• The animated tiles are still annoying.
• Can't turn off updates. Not that big a deal for me since I run most of my apps in a VM running Windows 7 (I got tired of having to reinstall everything every time I upgraded laptops). But could be an issue for small businesses if you're running a mission-critical app, and a forced update breaks it.
• Certain apps don't make the transition properly, and you may have to reinstall them. Others you can get working again with a few tweaks.
• File explorer windows now default to quick access instead of library + This PC view. So it's now a two-click operation to actually browse your drives, instead of one-click.
• It really, really pushes Cortana.
• Network access is flakier. I'll try to open a network share or web page and sometimes it'll take a few seconds instead of opening instantly like on Win 7/8. Might be because I'm blocking certain hosts, and it's getting confused for a few seconds when it can't phone home to report which URL I'm visiting.
• Task manager can't seem to remember the "hide when minimized" option even though I set it every time.
• The popup stealing focus fix causes other problems. If I start a new app, it sometimes doesn't start with focus. I haven't quite figured out the pattern yet. e.g. I'll start a browser and immediately type ctr-l and the URL I wanted to go to, and nothing happens because the browser doesn't have focus. I have to click on it first before I can type ctrl-l and the URL.
• Edge browser is extremely non-intuitive when changing the defaults (like homepage and search engine). You can't enter it manually. You have to browse to the page you want as your home page or your search engine, then go to the settings and the option to make that page your default shows up.
• If you use IME to occasionally type in a foreign language, the desired setup is to make IME your default keyboard. That way you can use the right alt key to switch between typing in English and the other language. Unfortunately, they combined the keyboard preference option with the language preference option. If you make IME your default, now all your notifications and apps and even certain language-aware web pages default to the other language instead of English. If you leave the English keyboard as the default, any time you want to type in another language, you first need to click to switch from the English keyboard to the IME keyboard, then switch IME from English to foreign language typing mode. This is a major PITA for those of us who are multi-lingual but prefer everything be in English.

So yes it's worth upgrading, but no it's not quite ready yet. But you don't have to decide by July 29. You can upgrade to it, and roll back to your previous OS. The upgrade will register your system as having qualified for the free upgrade, and you can upgrade to it again any time in the future. http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-lock-in-your-free-windows-10-upgrade-and-keep-using-your-old-windows-version/

Hmm.. take Microsoft for the free upgrade, then roll back to Windows 7 and stay there indefinitely? That genuinely hadn't occurred to me. I may have to re-think my "never 10" strategy now. Of course, some people have had issues with both the upgrade and the roll-back, and I can't help but notice the length of the "con" list, compared to the "pro," so it's not a risk-free strategy, but it may be worth doing. Dammit.

Back to my reading...