It’s fun doing new things. (Rick Baker)

The whole story about Windows 10 feels like one of the fairy tales I was listening to as a kid. From the first idea to all the promises that this system will be the one. I’ve heard that too many times Microsoft! But … but they made it.

From the point of no problem upgrading from Windows 8.1, to the first impression when seeing the desktop, to their Hello welcome screen. I was fascinated (maybe  I’m just getting old 🙂 )!

The settings panel is a little frustrating (I grew up with Win95 and XP). Having no control over downloading updates (I know, you need to use Group Policy editor having PRO, Enterprise or Education version of Windows 10) and all the fuss that upgrading and upgrades are always giving me. Now it is simple, a “dummy” version …

 I was fascinated (maybe I’m just getting old :))!

Followed by standard preparation of my development environment, mail configurations, importing signatures, music, downloads, a few hours went bye bye. Another day or two later, all the servers added, all network drives mapped, all ready to continue my usual work as a developer.

Another really cool thing they have improved in Windows 10 is window snap. Holy grail for developers in my opinion! When left with only one screen at hand, this functionality is the only thing that left me sane. As before, you can snap to left / right side. But this time, when you change the height of the snapped window, the space left above/beneath it, is another snap point for another window which will snap right into the available space. Snaps are not forced to be half width or height of the screen any more! I could finally make an arrangement of seeing my code editor, terminal, browser content and developer tools within 3 seconds of moving windows.

The whole new start menu is a nice combination of old Windows 7 and Windows 8 app list, great job there, but still, missing the old feeling of app list. But … The “but” that led to start hating Windows 10. Extremely slow Windows start menu search. I don’t know if I did something wrong, but a search result for something like “subl”, when searching for Sublime text should not take 8 seconds. I use that search phrase at least 20 times a day. And my computer has i7 CPU, 8G of ram and an SSD drive. IT SHOULD NOT TAKE THAT LONG!

Using it for 10 days gave me no other buzz, still the same small screen on my laptop, no additional candies, slow start searches for programs I use all the time …

Linux Ubuntu …

The greatest ideas are the simplest. (William Golding)

And as for the last 10 years or so, I had to try what’s new with Linux Ubuntu. I’ve always hoped that someday things will become a little easier to manage/prepare the system as a development environment. With console experience from managing servers, this time it felt like home. Quite not sure if I could use it as my primary system, if all the programs and needed dependencies would work, I got my shot of Linux feeling and deleted it from my PC. Little trouble removing dual boot and starting Windows 10, but that was expected.

Then windows search started to annoy me so much, that I gave Ubuntu another shot.

A couple of found scripts from the web, I had everything ready and connected within 2 hours. I could not be more impressed and angry at myself at the same time for not using Linux before.

Every script, compile, program, system startup only used ⅓ of the time, Windows needed. Battery life expanded for 3 hours. Booya!

Fonts, menu bars, icons are all smaller but still readable. Every PC user who tried Mac, was amazed by the size of screen data you can have on a small resolution. I know that HD screen (1366×768) on a Mac screen gave me the feeling of at least full HD screen (1920 x 1080).

Here it was the same. I was trying to get that feeling on Windows for years (forcing resolution, trying to lower DPI below 100%, changing font sizes, … ) but always ended up with blurred fonts and not humanly acceptable experience.

Things simply are the way you want them to be and they work.