I’ve been using Windows 10’s technical preview a bit today in a virtual machine.
It’s far, far better than Windows 8. Still too garish, and too flat though.
But an absolutely terrible feature in the OS is that like Unity and other crappy OSes and interfaces before it, it sends all searches inside the OS to Microsoft with no way in the UI to turn it off.
So for instance if you search for “rectal thermometer,” Microsoft knows about it.
This is what happens when you click on the built-in Search feature:
First of all, why would I want to see come crap about Alyssa Milano when I click on “Search?”
Second, why would I want to send any search to Microsoft, ever, if done inside the OS itself?
Yeah, yeah, cloud everything. But I’m not interested in the cloud. I’m interested in having a computer that does only what I want it to do, not a machine that spews my data all over the internet for the NSA and everyone to see.
There is no obvious way to turn this “feature” off in the UI, though I am sure with a GPO or similar it’s achievable.
But there should be a way to kill it that doesn’t require someone with a career in IT to find.
Still evaluating the OS – probably something more comprehensive about it all later.
What happens to the obscenely garish “trending now” if you set your default language to something other than English? I found switching to French worked wonders for Yahoo! News; much less celebri-news anyway.
You don’t have to use Unity to use Linux. I use Ubuntu Studio. Think of it as Xubuntu with a low-latency kernel.
I’m going to find a way to kill that search feature completely, but haven’t really looked yet since I’m mostly studying these days. There has to be a GPO for it because that just won’t fly in an enterprise.
Yeah, about Linux, I run Mint MATE Edition on our server and run Mint KDE in a virtual just because I like it. Also ran various Linux flavors on my desktop full-time on and off for 12 years or so, until 2010 when I switched back to Windows 7 full time.
Going to get my RHCE in the near future after I renew another cert. Should be fun. I haven’t used Red Hat heavily in the enterprise or at home, though briefly used Red Hat back in ancient days (the 90s) and a bit of RHEL for a complex phone system in the enterprise.
My favorite Linux distro was actually Corel Linux. Sadly long dead.
Corel as in draw? Sounds vaguely commercial, but of course so does Mint. My favorite is Slackware.
I use Ubuntu Studio because I share a computer with my SO (we’re po enough to be a 1-computer couple) who is a musician. And I’m quite happy that the Studio folks decided not to jump on the Unity bandwagon along with vanilla Ubuntu…
But I’m itching to pick up a jalopy to run Slackware on.
I’ve never tried Slackware. Back then when I was using every distro I could download I was less concerned with the “freedom” aspect of Linux and just liked trying new things.
Favorite OS of all time is BeOS, though. I’ll always be sad about its passing.
Ah well! Time marches forward and all that.