Windows 10 Beta Testing?

Anyone beta testing Windows 10 here? The Foxtrapper household is seriously considering doing it. Curious if anyone here is doing it, and what they've run into so far.

I ran a release-candidate version of Windows 7 on my gaming PC, it worked well.

Remember, RC is mid-beta, release version is late-beta, SP1 doesn't mean anything anymore and SP2 is ready to ship

Windows 10 isn't a release candidate though, it's more of a nightly build and definitely pre-beta. I wouldn't necessarily run it on any machine I care about, which is why my copy is running inside a VM.

You should probably run Windows 9 first. Skipping two ahead is likely a bad idea.

. .

(they had to skip Windows 9 because there is too much lazy code out there that will see Windows 9 as either Windows 95 or 98)

Nope. I work in supporting Microsoft Windows everyday, have been for decades now and I've been slowly converting all of the PC's at home to Linux, Android, etc. Getting really tired of patching everything all the time and still have to worry about viruses, malware, etc.

If I were a youngin' I'd focus on learning Unix/Linux and/or Android for development and support since that is where a lot of companies will be headed in the future as more and more find that it is nearly impossible to keep their Windows solutions secure and they still have to pay for the privilege of having an insecure environment.

All my computers run GNU/Linux except my gaming PC (Win7) and my "carputer" tablet (Android/Linux).

GameboyRMH wrote: All my computers run GNU/Linux except my gaming PC (Win7) and my "carputer" tablet (Android/Linux).

Yeah, just bought a Raspberry Pi to replace the old XP HTPC in the bedroom that just lost a motherboard due to a bad capacitor. The second of the two HP SFF PC's I've had to fail like that, not worth trying to fix it for a couple of old P4 systems. I suspect between the RasPi and some Mini-ITX systems running 'IX will solve most of the needs I have for the house.

OK. Thanks for the input. Interestingly, signing up let me get into a Microsoft beta testers forum. Spending some time there was eye opening. Windows 10 is in a rougher state of readiness than I expected. From what I could see in the various screen shots, it's not looking like a stunning step forward. Merge the apps start field with the desk top, add a functioning start button, and it seems like you've got Windows 10. I was surprised and a little disappointed that Microsoft seems to have no involvement with the board and issues people raise. Microsoft just seems to be monitoring hardware and internal coding issues via the beta users data tracking and internet connection. No interest apparently by Microsoft in any of the suggestions by the people on the forum (like letting users actually customize their desktop. That feature is removed in Windows 10).

We'll have to have a family discussion about this tonight, but I kinda don't think we do want to do it after all.

Windows?! Bwaahahahahaha!!!

I had no idea there were so many anti-Windows people here. Then again, who can blame anyone that doesn't want to spend 15 min running critical updates every time they reboot.

In reply to asoduk:

You mean, 15 minutes on the once-a-month reboot?

I'm pretty sure that most of the Linux distros I've used (and I use a lot of Unixy OSs) average that as well.

Yeah Windows isn't behind in reliability anymore. It's behind in features, security, and certainly price. But it plays better with the vidjagames...so there's that.

asoduk wrote: I had no idea there were so many anti-Windows people here. Then again, who can blame anyone that doesn't want to spend 15 min running critical updates every time they reboot.

Yeah, try managing software vulnerabilities in a banking environment using Windows. It isn't just Microsoft patches, updates, etc. Its also Advisory's which are not deployable automatically using the tools we have. There's also the applications like Adobe Reader, Flash, Java among others as well as hardening the configuration of the operating system and the services that are running or installed on the systems.

So yeah, I'm part of a team that manages many thousands of servers and we have patching windows each month that run for about 4-6 hours for each server where we have to try and cram several patches, updates, pieces of software and configuration changes onto them in order to reach required compliance levels without impacting the SLA's established by the business.

Needless to say after dealing with all of that nonsense all day long, having to come home and manually run around and patch the systems or deal with something going "bang" thanks to Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle's piss-poor coding. Let alone try to manage some sort of automated tools to do so is just nuts.

Wife just wants stuff that works and I'd rather be enjoying spending time with her or working in the garage.

So yeah, Nettop appliances and Linux distro's are the way to go for that.

Only servers I have to maintain at work run Linux I keep hearing from the MS fanboys that this is a very high-paying job, I should tell HR about that!

BoxheadTim wrote: In reply to asoduk: You mean, 15 minutes on the once-a-month reboot? I'm pretty sure that most of the Linux distros I've used (and I use a lot of Unixy OSs) average that as well.

Also, the criticality of those updates are not at the same levels as the ones for Windows because Unix (and its open source child, Linux) were built with security in mind from the outset and while there are vulnerabilities they are mostly problematic due to poor configuration by the admins and not necessarily by design.

Windows, because of the need to be backwards compatible and the lack of security built-in from the ground up means that you're never going to be as secure and will always be behind the curve and hiding behind various firewalls and the like to try and stave off the inevitable until a patch or a fix is applied.

Microsoft and Windows through their work have certainly provided me a decent career, but that job ends when I leave the office every day.

You guys hear of a version of XP that the USAF was running? What I heard is that they told MS that either MS came up with a secure version of windoze or they would go *IX. Remember what the USAF manages. You don't want that stuff having problems. So the USAF got an XP version with a custom registry hack set that was very resistant to all the problems we have. Funny how the rest of us have to put up with crap MS stuff instead. Now that XP is supposed to be history (despite an update last week,) I wonder what the USAF is running?

I work with several marines who worked in IT for the military.

One in particular supported Microsoft SMS/SCCM for quite a lot of the military's West Coast regions.

What they do use is a "comply to connect" which means that you have to verify your system is fully up to date before you can connect to anything in the environment.

Of course that doesn't stop the various Military vendors to continue to create products for the military that runs on whatever OS they choose. For example: Those lovely drones that are in the news so much lately? What do you think their control systems run on?

Wanna know?

XP.

My buddy only found out because they were sending out patches to various systems and managed to hit one of the control systems for some drones that were flying around some Cali wild fires. Of course that caused the system to patch and reboot and in the interim the drones went into a holding pattern and just flew in circles. Needless to say some higher ups were a bit non-plussed when the feeds from the drones dropped.

So yeah, the military, like so many large organizations has some ideas on security but they aren't all universally adopted or enforced.

Drones running XP. That's phunny. I wonder if that's how the Iranians (and/or Ruskies) figured out how to hack one and bring it down for display.

Co I work for runs a lot of MS SQL Server. MS told us that they were going to do something like raise the price on SQL Server to something insane, like 10x current pricing. It would have put us out of business. So we came up with an alternative to SQL Server. Bigger, faster, much cheaper and doesn't blow up on a terabyte cube. Started the development work. MS came along and said something like "OK, you ready for your butt berkeleying?" and we said, "no, we not going to be using your products anymore when you change your price structure next year." All of a sudden MS was all kissy-kissy and dropped their prices way down, let's work this out. Sorry, we're already 80% of the way off your product.