Updated 21.08.2015: After quite a few more updates since this post was written there is really nothing of the below that have been fixed. What a mess indeed!
A while ago I got the first couple of updates for Windows 10. I had hopes that a few of the most blatant bugs and issues would be fixed but unfortunately no such luck. Yes this is going to be another Windows 10 rant by me but, quite frankly, Microsoft deserves some flack for this unfinished product. I am a long time Windows fan and I am rather disappointed to put it mildly. I honestly do not understand why they get so many positive reviews for this mess? But then I did not agree with a lot of the negative ones for Windows 8. At least not for Windows 8 on a tablet.
For starters this update removed a bunch of tiles (including email and calendar) on my start page. I discovered, more or less by accident, that they came back after an additional reboot.
As I wrote, the update did not fix any of the issues I have. Here is the (way too long) list I have so far, in no particular order, and now I have tried Windows 10 on several devices as well. Naturally I could have missed some feature or some way of doing things but I am a computer engineer after all so I honestly do not think so.
When the device boots Windows 10 always shows the desktop and sometimes it takes a minute or more before it responds and allows me to switch to the start page. Yes I do have my tablet set to boot into tablet mode.
Many tiles, including the weather app, do not update their tiles properly or at all.
The OS is really sluggish and unresponsive compared to Windows 8 on the same device.
Screen update is unreliable.
There is no consistency any more between applications, especially for moving back. Before you generally moved back by swiping and opened the settings, shared things and printed by swiping left from the right edge to get the charms bar. Now you have to search all over the place for those functions.
Background slide shows still do not work.
Sound notifications do not work at all. It does not matter what sounds I select in the control panel for email notification etc. Windows 10 refuses to play any sounds.
You still cannot edit the names of URL’s pinned to the start page and most URL’s are displayed with the Edge browser icon instead of the site icon. As a consequence you cannot use the small tile size since you would have a dozen tiles that all look the same. It is utterly unbelievable that they released Windows 10 with such visible defects.
Formatting of numbers, time and date seems somewhat random and in many places it seems to be taken from the display language and not the region setting or the specific settings you have entered in the control panel. The mobile Office apps constantly fucks up the display of currency figures for instance.
Several apps are actually inferior to their Windows 8 equivalents.
The photo app is just useless for browsing your photo collection.
The email app is really frustrating You cannot mark email as spam. The formatting of HTML emails is simply bad. My emails from Goodreads was perfectly displayed in Windows 8. Now they come up as a mess. Deleting and moving is not updated diretly and the notifications and syncing is simply unreliable. Still no combined inbox. Deleting and moving (depending on your settings) by swiping left and right is nice feature though.
The app store is next to unusable. Search just does not work. Searching for the MyCanal app for instance yields zero results but I can still get the app by going to CanalSat’s site and clicking on the store link there. The same goes for several other apps. If you want to browse categories it insists on adding “New and rising” as a criteria as well and there seems to be no obvious way of changing this criteria.
Trying to select a specific piece of text and copy paste it in OneNote is impossible. At least I have not found a way of doing it. A single word works but as soon as you want to manipulate the selection before copying the copy paste choices disappears and there is no way to get them back without loosing your selection.
The Grove app constantly screws up OneDrive if you have elected to not sync your Music folder. Then it creates a local folder which OneDrive immediately pops up a complaint about. Since they decided to dump the placeholders I cannot sync my music folder since it would fill up my tablet. This is just embarrassingly poor integration testing by Microsoft.
If one app opens another app, for instance Readiy opening the browser, and you then close the browser the original app do not pop back to full screen but stays half page with a useless empty half page where the second upp used to be.
The Edge browser is a joke right know and deserves a chapter of its own. It is so unfinished that it is unbelievable.
The totally useless popup blocker is of course simply unforgivable. Add to that that there is no way of installing blocking lists and that alone is enough to want to ditch it.
It is generally buggy and I do not feel it is much of an improvement speed wise.
There seems to be now way to tell it not to open tabs but open new windows instead.
The favorites bar is tedious to say the least. If you have several levels of sub menus in your favorites bar you first have to click on one of them to get the submenu displayed in a panel to the right. Then you have to click once more to get the sub menu to close and finally one more time to actually select what you wanted in the first place. This sounds like a joke but it is not unfortunately. Did they even test this crap?
Arranging things in your favorites bar is also like a joke. Before you could just drag and drop things between menus. Now that does not work any more. I figured out that I could rearrange things by manipulating them in the panel that pops up to the right but this is not obvious or logical any more.
I have installed Windows 10 on a desktop PC as well and, luckily, it works a lot better on a desktop. Most of the issues above are still there but anything related to touch and the start page is not relevant when using the desktop mode and a mouse as your primary pointing/clicking device. The new start menu is quite nice as well.
Personally I consider this operating system an unfinished product at best and some of the design decisions and changes from Windows 8 simply do not make sense. They are certainly not improvements. Right now I feel that Android have a more consistent and better working user interface on touch devices and I do not like Android very much so you can imagine how disappointed I am with Windows 10 so far.
PG's Ramblings 
Hej! Interesting and thanks for the excellent review. I haven’t dared install it yet, mainly due to privacy concerns, but also fear that software I need will not be compatible..
I am also still unwilling to use Microsofts “apps” just because they come with the OS
Right now I am thinking – maybe the time has come when moving to Linux is the only option for me.
Would be interested in further updates and your take on the privacy aspects with Windows 10.
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Thanks.
I am pretty sure they will sort out most of the issues eventually. I am pretty upset about the shoddy way they have gone about things. Shipping such an unfinished and buggy product is really a slap in the face of the customers, at least from my point of view.
Linux have its own set of issues and frustrations though. For me Linux is not really an option. At least not on a desktop PC. Most of the software I want to run is Windows software which means that you would have to run a Windows emulator on Linux to run them which is just asking for trouble. I will stick to Windows 10 on my desktop unless they do not fix the many bugs and issues in the near future or, god forbid, manages to screw it up even more.
On a tablet it is not that clear any more, especially since Microsoft decided to screw up the rather clear and consistent Windows 8 user interface by making it more Android (crappy) like when in tablet mode. Android almost looks like an alternative there. I will probably stick to Windows for a while longer there as well though in order to have a consistent ecosystem on all my devices.
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