Review so far: it’s ok. I don’t feel blown away. It definitely feels under-cooked, and there definitely some things that I think are just stupid, but there are also some good ideas. I’m giving new start menu a shot, and once I remove all the default pinned items and replace them with my own it’s kind of ok. I feel like the default tile size is too large, but changing them to small is perfect. I haven’t found a way to change multiple tiles at the same time, and I don’t think there is a way, but that’s not too big of a deal.
Start search works better than in 8 for sure. In 7 and with classic shell, you could type just part of a word or the first word of a string and almost always be able to find what you’re looking for, but with 8’s start search it’s a coin toss and you often end up having to put in multiple words for it to find something. So far in 10 it works the way I feel like it should.
I did try out signing in with a microsoft account just to see what Cortana could do. Here’s my review of that: she’s fucking useless. You can, for example, tell cortana to launch a program, but that’s really pointless because there’s never any way to interact with the program once it’s launched. Sometimes it even launches the program behind other programs and you have to click on it to bring it to the foreground. Other than opening programs, 90% of voice commands I tried just made cortana do a bing search for whatever I said. “Hey cortana, close google chrome” >>>bing searches for close google chrome>>> okkkkk… Get a Outlook calendar notification “hey cortana, dismiss this notification” >>>bing searches for dismiss this notification. Like… am I just being to hard on them here? I’m not expecting to be able to do complex tasks with voice commands here but the second you have to do something with your hands the voice commands you used to get to that point become completely and utterly pointless. I’d like to be able to control Netflix by yelling out commands, or something like that. Just anything that would be useful in a situation where I’m not using the keyboard and mouse. Otherwise it seems kind of pointless.
They appear to still be trying to phase out the control panel, but they’re just not replacing some features. There are some things in control panel that they want you to use settings menu for instead, so they hide that part from you in control panel, but it’s still there if you know how to get to it, it’s just hidden.
I will say this though: so far, zero software compatibility issues. Everything has just worked. Drivers work. Hardware works. Software works. Everything just works. Which is good. Which is why I say so far my review of Windows 10 is that it’s “just ok”. It does what it’s supposed to do for the most part. It gets rid of the ridiculous full screen bullshit from windows 8, it brings back the start menu but actually makes an effort to make it better and more modern, not just merely different. If you’re on the edge about switching, I’d say… eh, sure, go for it, but make a backup image first.