Thanks for the advice. About the updates it seems that using Group Policy works. Fortunately I am not using Home. I would not recommend Home at all, since it does not even include Sandbox, which helps so much if you need an easy virtual environment.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-stop-updates-installing-automatically-windows-10

What I hate more about force updates is that often they come with horrible timing. If I am working on something important, I do not want the risk of anything breaking the week before the deadline.

Then, what to do about these security updates? Supossedly they are necessary, so they ought to be included eventually, right?

Something I did was setting the Sleep button to just shut of displays, in the power options. Useful, while the other use was unnecessary, there are other ways.

The shift-shut off is helpful! Nice









This is especially interesting to keep in mind. Thank you!
Sorry, I had missed your post. Yes, I later found the LInux support pages in GOG. They say they support the Ubuntu family. For playing games with Linux, it seems like a no brainer to stay in the family, unless one needs another distribution for some reason.
Thanks for the insight. I was happy with W7. But then again, I was happy with the looks of XP. I loved the usability of W7 and how things that in the past had to be added now were there out of the box. The change to W10 has been forced and, well, maybe that is what we are to expect in the future.
Thanks! also I will think about shutdown /s Good tips there!

Thanks to the heads up. Just changed the settings so that it does not auto start etc.

I feel it still needs work, especially when it comes to repositories and software center. Still, as it is today, I like it. Not only for its snappiness, but also for its design and overall consistency. I have tested only Budgie so far and I was impressed. Some look at Budgie as a more polished, streamlined GNOME. I'd say I still favor GNOME on the whole, but Budgie is high up in my list of desktop environments.
Definitely keeping an eye on this project.

I am sure many people were happy with both XP and 7, myself included. But then a sudden shift occurred and frankly I can't tell what possessed Microsoft to take such an odd decision. While I dislike the fact that Windows 8 (or should I say 8.1) strayed so far away from its predecessor, I was content with it overall. True, I had to tinker and make it my own so to speak, but the end result was great. Gaming on 8.1 was a pleasure, still is to this day.
10, on the other hand, is a mess on about every level. If the core is rotten, not much can be salvaged. I recommend you have a look at Ameliorated (AME for short) and see how it managed to remove more than 2GB of utter crap from the system. And while an interesting project in itself, it has shortcomings. I doubt anyone can make Windows 10 an user-centric experience.
Yet, and I am reminded of Todd Howard's words again, for most people out there "it just works". Convenience over anything else.

More like inconvenience. They didn't try to make it more convenient to use it the way they wanted people to than it was to typically use previous versions, but far more inconvenient, if not impossible, not to.

They went so far as to make any minimally conscious user to tame the system to the extent of their knowledge, by carefully managing the privacy settings, updates and whatnot. It is like the cookies advice: making you take the effort of rejecting them again and again, and exploiting those too lazy or unknowing to care.

The OS is supposed to be your ally and your tool, not your Stasi surveillance officer nor a squatter that uses your machine for his own purposes.

but every OS sucks.

The fact is more users embraced it one way or another. You might hear them complain every now and again about privacy (or lack of it I should day), about the UI, overall design, forced updates, etc. They will recommend using something like O&O Shutup 10 thinking that is the be-all and end-all. That's naïveté right there, if you ask me. Not even edits through Group Policy Editor or registry hacks can stop the system from executing its functions. Spins like AME or LTSC dropped much of the irrelevant "features", yet somehow they are still not intended for general use. The Pro version, the one meant for that, is not much different than Home edition at its core. You want to keep all the nonsense away from your desktop computing experience? Fat chance.
All in all, most people will find Windows 10 as convenient in some form (and especially for gaming). Users deliberately asked for inclusion in the Insider program, basically becoming beta-testers for Microsoft, now some of them are delighted at the prospect of having colorful icons/folders. Plain ridiculous in my book.
Things will not improve, of that I am sure.

It was never meant as a proper tool for the user. Nor will it ever be.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here icon free for several years, wondering what exactly they might even see in those windings. Of course, I'm also sitting here with Sway (doesn't have a desktop), Windowmaker (As Atraditionally traditional you can get), and KDE Plasma 5.

I loved those 64x64 dock apps.
KDE 3.5 was the last desktop (Linux, Windows or Mac) that perfectly combined functional and pretty, IMO.
Everything computer related has gone downhill ever since, dagnabbit! And get off my lawn!

Well, you can have fun with that, then.

Or KDE 1. Seen here.

Well, talking about the OS means any OS, what an OS should be.

Also, in the past older versions of Windows had a variety of shortcomings, with some versions being worse than others. But Windows 10 feels like something that is actively exploiting the user in several ways. It feels like something that eventually might start showing ads in your own desktop. All while it sends the user's information to MS headquarters. That is, in some ways it works actively against the user. More than any other version before.

Well said.
Maybe something like "Hey, before using this program, would you kindly watch a 30sec ad? It's for your own benefit, since we know better."
They already have ads integrated, albeit on a different level. Next step seems pretty obvious.

:D

Very funny. The remark about the computers used in the Apolo program is welcome. If you read about how they worked, it is really amazing what they managed. It was a pain to program, yet they did it, and it worked. These machines were subject to tremendous stresses at launch and later, and they kept doing what they had to do. There is something to learn there.