Design wise, which one is best, Windows 10 or Windows 7?

[Rafael Mestdag]

Setting aside all the automated stuff, the Store and other quircks of Windows 10, which one do you like the most when it comes purely down to design and beauty? Windows 10 or Windows 7?
If it were up to you, which design would you have on Windows 10?

 

[canadianvice]

Setting aside all the automated stuff, the Store and other quircks of Windows 10, which one do you like the most when it comes purely down to design and beauty? Windows 10 or Windows 7?
If it were up to you, which design would you have on Windows 10?

Skin deep? Windows 7, without question. I like that Win10 removed the aero fluff, but Win7 was a really solid, dedicated OS that I never felt got in my way or pawned off random adware crap on me. With that said, I use Win10 full time, but I will admit that I am reminded from time to time of its inadequacies.

Deep down? Win10. It has huge performance improvements over 7, is designed in a modern way, and has integrated a few really cool improvements, in particular a competent OS-default antiviral solution. It's faster and uses RAM better, along with working nicer with newer tech like SSDs. Win10 also got a dose of meds which helped a bit with Win8's schizophrenia. I still find things like Settings vs. Control panel to be absolutely cancerous. A prime example being the uninstall dialogs for the two. CP's is far better designed.

However, Win7 still holds a place in my heart. If they gave me Win7's GUI with Win10's under the hood (minus some of 10's ads and telemetry), I'd switch in a microsecond. Shouldn't rip on 10 entirely, another really neat thing they did is created competent BSOD screens that aren't just a bunch of rando text.

A lot of the visual hacks, unfortunately, break around certain apps or are not entirely consistent, so I don't really consider that a full replacement. I know, as I've hacked quite a few of them together, and you can definitely tell the difference.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Either of them can "look" any way you want, with skins, and themes and especially using shell modifications. Nothing to see here, move along. One has no benefit over the other in this regard. Both can look totally different OR look like any other version of windows if you use the right shell modification and theme.

Windows 10 has clear benefits over Windows 7, not least of which is the fact that it won't ever lose official support, at least according to Microsoft, at the current point in time. 7 will be dead and unsupported soon.

Windows 10 also supports modern 3rd party applications and driver frameworks differently, and better, than 7. It's better optimized to use higher core and hyperthread counts than 7.

No directx 12 support in Windows 7 either.

The list goes on and on and on. Really, it does. People who claim Windows 7 is better are no different than those who claimed XP was better than 7 or that 98SE was better than ME or XP, at least at first. Fear of change and of course having to learn new things is the majority of that.

The only, and it's a big one, real reason to dislike Windows 10 is, or was, or is, the telemetry of Windows 10 reporting back to Microshaft. Mostly, that can be mitigated as can any of the advertising some people see. Cortana, that *****, can also at least mostly be shut away in the closet even if you can't actually throw her and her bags out on the street. Yet.

No way I'd go back to 7 and I was an avid fan of it for a long time.

But as far as aesthetics, I can take a Windows 10 installation and mod so that you could not tell the difference between it and Windows 7 without delving into some of the advanced settings to see that the options were clearly ones not present on Windows 7. Mostly, there isn't a lot of difference there, just different window dressings and a different color pair of shoes.

 

[Solandri]

People who claim Windows 7 is better are no different than those who claimed XP was better than 7 or that 98SE was better than ME or XP, at least at first. Fear of change and of course having to learn new things is the majority of that.

Windows 10 clearly has improvements over Windows 7. But the thing that kills me is that Microsoft removed a lot of nice features that were in Win 7 when they made Win 10. The biggest one I can think of is the ability to control and decline individual updates. That's caused me no end of pain (it's made me a lot of money from emergency support calls from my clients, but frankly that's money I would've preferred not making since it was completely avoidable). Here's a cut and paste of the list I came up with last year:

• 
  ■Upgrade was supposed to be optional, but happened anyway on a *lot* of systems. Two clients called me for Internet problems, and it turned out to be because they were on slow DSL connections and Windows had been saturating it downloading the nearly 2GB Win 10 upgrade. (A couple of these were standalone server-type machines which sat in a closet with nobody touching the mouse and keyboard, so there's no way anyone could have "agreed" to the upgrade. But it happened anyway.)
  ■The scammy way Microsoft tried to get people - who had already said they ddin't want the upgrade - to upgrade to it. Including changing the normal functionality of the confirmation dialog box (clicking cancel agreed to the update and scheduled it for later; you had to click the X in the upper right to avoid it).
  ■It prioritizes generic Windows 10 drivers over hardware-specific Win 7/8 drivers. I've had multiple calls for equipment which initially worked after upgrading suddenly stopping working. Upon investigation, Win10 had overwritten a working driver with a non-working generic Win 10 driver. It used to have a setting to prevent updates to specific drivers, but they inexplicably removed that option in the Oct 2016 update.
  ■Can't turn automatic updates off. Well, you can on the Enterprise version. All my clients are small businesses which use the retail versions (Home, Pro). Combine it with overwriting functional drivers above, and you have a recipe for disaster.
  ■You can disable automatic updates by disabling the update service, but it's all or nothing. Win7's option of security updates only, security + other OS updates, or security + OS + app updates was much better. My (older) gaming laptop never got Win10 drivers, so I have to keep it disabled or Win10 automatically installs nonfunctional graphics drivers. Once a month I have to enable updates to get security updates, disable it again, then manually reinstall the graphics drivers which work.
  ■Certain updates keep changing your settings back to default, re-enabling Cortana and/or putting the Windows Store back on your task bar. I didn't want them so I disabled them. Re-enabling them in an update isn't going to make me want to use them, it's going to make me hate Win 10. (You can guess what's going on. iOS and Android get a 30% cut of everything sold through their respective stores. Microsoft wet themselves thinking of collecting a 30% cut of every Windows program sold. So they tried as hard as they could to get people to use Windows Store, including re-enabling it even if you'd disabled it. It's why they made it the *only* way you were allowed to sell full-screen Windows Metro apps.)
  ■These updates sometimes reset lot of default apps back to Microsoft apps. If the user took the time to change a setting, they did it because they wanted to change the setting. Changing it back to defaults just because you're butthurt they didn't pick your app wastes the user's time and builds up enmity and resentment against you.
  ■A lot of control panel settings confusingly split between the Windows-mode control panel and Metro-mode control panel. It'd be ok if all options were available on both, but some are only available through one or the other.
  ■Needlessly rearranged the locations of a lot of settings and controls.
  ■Encrypted telemetry sent back to Microsoft which they won't say what it contains. I hate to go conspiracy theory, but if it *really* only contained OS feedback, why do they make it so hard to turn off, and why is it disabled in the enterprise version? The evidence points to it containing usage info that companies and probably most people would be upset about if they knew they were collecting it, which is why the enterprise version doesn't have it.
  ■Tries really really hard to trick you into creating a Microsoft Account to login. Unless you use Microsoft's online services a lot, there's very little reason to do this. And a huge downside in that you may not be able to login to your computer after a period (a month?) of no Internet connectivity.
  ■No boot time way to enter safe mode. You have to select to boot into safe mode while in Windows. Which is kinda hard to do if the reason you need to enter safe mode is because normal boot mode isn't working.
  ■System restore disabled by default. This is a real PITA when combined with the driver update problem mentioned above.
  ■That stupid flat UI trend which makes it impossible to distinguish UI elements from displayed data. This has been scientifically proven to slow down people's ability to navigate the UI. It's change for change's sake (i.e. following a trend), and a change for the worse at that.
  ■Shutdown doesn't shut down the system. It puts it into a quasi-hibernate mode. To do a true shutdown, you have to paradoxically pick Restart. Which has the unfortunate side-effect of restarting the computer immediately after it does the full shutdown. I can see why they did this on systems on HDDs. But it does nothing for systems on SSDs, and complicates the troubleshooting process.
  "I shut it down, and when I restarted the problem is still there."
  "You have to Restart it."
  "But I did restart it."
  "No, not shut down and power on again. You have to select the 'Restart' option from the power menu."

I don't mean to dis it. It has clear advantages over Win 7 and I use Win 10 on my main system. It just strikes me as a three steps forward, two steps backward thing.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

People who claim Windows 7 is better are no different than those who claimed XP was better than 7 or that 98SE was better than ME or XP, at least at first. Fear of change and of course having to learn new things is the majority of that.

Windows 10 clearly has improvements over Windows 7. But the thing that kills me is that Microsoft removed a lot of nice features that were in Win 7 when they made Win 10. The biggest one I can think of is the ability to control and decline individual updates. That's caused me no end of pain (it's made me a lot of money from emergency support calls from my clients, but frankly that's money I would've preferred not making since it was completely avoidable). Here's a cut and paste of the list I came up with last year:

• 
  ■Upgrade was supposed to be optional, but happened anyway on a *lot* of systems. Two clients called me for Internet problems, and it turned out to be because they were on slow DSL connections and Windows had been saturating it downloading the nearly 2GB Win 10 upgrade. (A couple of these were standalone server-type machines which sat in a closet with nobody touching the mouse and keyboard, so there's no way anyone could have "agreed" to the upgrade. But it happened anyway.)
  ■The scammy way Microsoft tried to get people - who had already said they ddin't want the upgrade - to upgrade to it. Including changing the normal functionality of the confirmation dialog box (clicking cancel agreed to the update and scheduled it for later; you had to click the X in the upper right to avoid it).
  ■It prioritizes generic Windows 10 drivers over hardware-specific Win 7/8 drivers. I've had multiple calls for equipment which initially worked after upgrading suddenly stopping working. Upon investigation, Win10 had overwritten a working driver with a non-working generic Win 10 driver. It used to have a setting to prevent updates to specific drivers, but they inexplicably removed that option in the Oct 2016 update.
  ■Can't turn automatic updates off. Well, you can on the Enterprise version. All my clients are small businesses which use the retail versions (Home, Pro). Combine it with overwriting functional drivers above, and you have a recipe for disaster.
  ■You can disable automatic updates by disabling the update service, but it's all or nothing. Win7's option of security updates only, security + other OS updates, or security + OS + app updates was much better. My (older) gaming laptop never got Win10 drivers, so I have to keep it disabled or Win10 automatically installs nonfunctional graphics drivers. Once a month I have to enable updates to get security updates, disable it again, then manually reinstall the graphics drivers which work.
  ■Certain updates keep changing your settings back to default, re-enabling Cortana and/or putting the Windows Store back on your task bar. I didn't want them so I disabled them. Re-enabling them in an update isn't going to make me want to use them, it's going to make me hate Win 10. (You can guess what's going on. iOS and Android get a 30% cut of everything sold through their respective stores. Microsoft wet themselves thinking of collecting a 30% cut of every Windows program sold. So they tried as hard as they could to get people to use Windows Store, including re-enabling it even if you'd disabled it. It's why they made it the *only* way you were allowed to sell full-screen Windows Metro apps.)
  ■These updates sometimes reset lot of default apps back to Microsoft apps. If the user took the time to change a setting, they did it because they wanted to change the setting. Changing it back to defaults just because you're butthurt they didn't pick your app wastes the user's time and builds up enmity and resentment against you.
  ■A lot of control panel settings confusingly split between the Windows-mode control panel and Metro-mode control panel. It'd be ok if all options were available on both, but some are only available through one or the other.
  ■Needlessly rearranged the locations of a lot of settings and controls.
  ■Encrypted telemetry sent back to Microsoft which they won't say what it contains. I hate to go conspiracy theory, but if it *really* only contained OS feedback, why do they make it so hard to turn off, and why is it disabled in the enterprise version? The evidence points to it containing usage info that companies and probably most people would be upset about if they knew they were collecting it, which is why the enterprise version doesn't have it.
  ■Tries really really hard to trick you into creating a Microsoft Account to login. Unless you use Microsoft's online services a lot, there's very little reason to do this. And a huge downside in that you may not be able to login to your computer after a period (a month?) of no Internet connectivity.
  ■No boot time way to enter safe mode. You have to select to boot into safe mode while in Windows. Which is kinda hard to do if the reason you need to enter safe mode is because normal boot mode isn't working.
  ■System restore disabled by default. This is a real PITA when combined with the driver update problem mentioned above.
  ■That stupid flat UI trend which makes it impossible to distinguish UI elements from displayed data. This has been scientifically proven to slow down people's ability to navigate the UI. It's change for change's sake (i.e. following a trend), and a change for the worse at that.
  ■Shutdown doesn't shut down the system. It puts it into a quasi-hibernate mode. To do a true shutdown, you have to paradoxically pick Restart. Which has the unfortunate side-effect of restarting the computer immediately after it does the full shutdown. I can see why they did this on systems on HDDs. But it does nothing for systems on SSDs, and complicates the troubleshooting process.
  "I shut it down, and when I restarted the problem is still there."
  "You have to Restart it."
  "But I did restart it."
  "No, not shut down and power on again. You have to select the 'Restart' option from the power menu."

I don't mean to dis it. It has clear advantages over Win 7 and I use Win 10 on my main system. It just strikes me as a three steps forward, two steps backward thing.

Windows 10 is still in its early stages of development, relatively speaking. Most, if not all of those problems willl disappear with time and constant development, it's just a set of temporary setbacks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I agree that the removal of the ability to decline individual updates sucks. You CAN do this in higher tiered versions of Windows 10 though, and for those who really NEED to do that, they should probably be running Pro or Enterprise versions anyhow as they are likely to be people who will benefit from other advanced administrative features in those versions.

For the average Joe, or mom and pop internet user, I think it should be a hidden, but existing, option. Not able to easily be done by default but able to be done by a power user if they choose or need to do so in the even an update causes serious issues. So you are right, there IS more than one concern with Windows 10 but they are not deal breakers and it is still much improved overall from past versions. Mostly.


I also think a lot of these things will be likely to either become non-issues or return as options in later versions. So far, most of them have not resulted in more than INITIAL widespread outcries, and only from the enthusiast community for the most part. The average person has no idea and does not care.

Crying about forced updates, even to the Windows 10 platform itself, is ridiculous. You do not cry when your automobile manufacturer tells you that you must update because there is a problem with the firmware on your vehicle that must be changed because there are issues with it that must be addressed. You just do it, especially if they offer it for free. Often, these rob some amount of power to improve compliance with vehicle emissions or other issues. Companies have to do what benefits the MOST people, not a specific subset of people, although as I said before, things like this likely should be implemented somewhere in the advanced settings as options.