Thoughts on Windows 10 21H1…

Hello, and welcome back. I used to be active on WordPress as izanbardprince.

Today I’m here to share impressions about Windows 10 21H1.

I bought a Lenovo ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2 last year to replace my aging Yoga 900 ISK2, and it came with Windows 10, the latest and final marketing number of the much reviled operating system from Microsoft.

While some things have certainly improved since the last time I experienced it, others have taken a turn for the worst and I’m here to share some observations, which largely assume the user is familiar with Windows in general.

Lately, Microsoft has seemingly deprioritized the Windows division and has left it rotting on the vine. The once rival to UNIX is now choking on its own bloat and unfit to power much more than a laptop. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I would argue that it’s still better than a Mac, but that certainly isn’t saying much as Apple’s OS is rotting worse somehow and the GUI is absolutely insane as ever.

One thing that did hit me about upgrades for Windows 10 these days is how likely they are to apply cleanly (other than running Disk Cleanup afterwards, as Windows is still a big pig that throws garbage everywhere as you use it). I’ve been through three six month upgrades and all of the Cumulative Updates (security/bugfix) since November and nothing disastrous has happened so far.

Almost out of desperation to get anyone at all to stay with Windows, Microsoft has been backpedaling on years of aggressive and hostile behaviors directed at the user to prevent them from getting at recovery/installation media, and their Product Activation has apparently been defanged to the point where it will accept product keys issued to most SKUs of Windows 7 and 8, will reinstall and activate itself on any system that has ever had a “digital license” without the user entering a nuclear launch code-style serial, and will mostly work (sans personalization options and with a big watermark) without activation at all, forever, if you don’t want to burn a serial number.

OEMs have been pushing GNU/Linux distributions and Chrome OS (now with a GNU/Linux subsystem) as an alternative, and Microsoft’s licensing has gotten a lot looser than it has been in the past.

How is the OS itself holding up?

There are, obviously, known issues and certain systems that each update has problems with. Microsoft has been suppressing the problem by using “telemetry”, the part of Windows which reports back a creepy amount of information about the user in its default state, to figure out what went wrong, which powers a thing called Known Issue Rollback. What happens, is, essentially, that if your system has a bug, then Windows often can be told by the Windows Update system to revert a single patch among that month’s updates to the older code path that still has the bug that they were trying to fix. If the patch for that bug introduces an even worse bug, then theoretically, Microsoft can roll it back in the background without the user being any the wiser.

The problem with this system is that it shows just how sloppy they are about testing their patches. Most of the product testers that Bill Gates (lately under fire for being a sex predator) boasted about in the days of Windows 2003, are fired, and a certain percentage of Windows 10 users are guinea pigs with each rollout, and automated testing tells Microsoft whether the latest upgrade worked, or how badly and why it failed. Or as GLaDOS may have put it, “You will be baked, and then there will be cake!”.

What’s notable about Windows 10’s “major updates” lately, is how they’ve gone from features to simple housekeeping.

So many of the release notes are unremarkable, more about what holdovers and junk from Windows NT 4, 2000, or XP have been removed. In 20H2, for example, they removed syskey.exe because it was never a secure way of protecting your data. It only encrypted a few things, it relied on encryption that the National Security Agency had backdoored from the beginning and was weak by late 90s standards, and……tech support scammers in India were calling people and convincing them to screw up their computer so they had to pay a ransom to get their files back. In 21H1, Microsoft removed vestigial pieces of the display driver model from Windows 2000 that had been hanging around to enable remote desktop use cases, which had been superseded since Windows Vista, and the browser shell of Microsoft Edge Legacy (which lasted for 5 whole years), not to be confused with their newer Chromium-based web browser.

Microsoft’s consumer division has indeed found itself under heavy pressure from several angles. Most notably the much more user-friendly and maintenance-free Chrome OS which is sold on inexpensive devices that people can even purchase at places like Walmart these days. Chrome OS is lightweight, virus-free, and enables a consistent end user experience that follows you wherever you sign in. In fact, the Linux applications support has recently come out of beta in Chrome OS 90, allowing users to activate an environment where they have compatibility with real desktop applications, and even some Windows programs (through Wine).

In comparison, Windows 10 is a total mess. When you power on the computer, you’re still, in 2021, likely to find a lot of bloatware. Microsoft is leaning on OEMs to knock it off with their own, although you’re still likely to find some trial antivirus that should probably be uninstalled (as Windows Defender with an Offline Scan every week or so should suffice and is provided gratis). Other than that, most of the bloatware is Microsoft’s.

Several particularly annoying things popped out at me which I proceeded to remove in various ways. Most notably was OneDrive, Skype, and “Your Phone”. OneDrive is, of course, Microsoft’s response to Google Drive. Google Drive gives the user more free space, works with any Android phone and Chromebook (obviously), and doesn’t need desktop software because you can just drop files into your web browser to upload them. If you want to buy more space from Google, it’s also cheaper to do that than to deal with Microsoft.

Nevertheless, Microsoft is pushing OneDrive hard, and they even want to sell you a subscription to “Office 365” to go with it. I can’t think of a dumber thing to do than to pay boo koo bucks for this, as you won’t really be able to do simple document editing if you have no internet connection, or Microsoft’s servers crash (as they often have). Skype has basically been falling by the wayside and works at Skype for the Web (although Firefox users may have to feed the Skype domains a fake user agent to gain access).

Your Phone Companion was just a total mess. I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, and Microsoft basically threatened a patent lawsuit against Samsung some time back that if they wouldn’t bombard Android users with Microsoft junk and crap that they’d end up in court, so Samsung has been badgering their users to sign up for Microsoft products. As such, a Your Phone Companion co-app is baked into Samsung’s Galaxy firmware these days. The app on Windows 10 is somewhere between awfully depressing and depressingly awful, and I just haven’t decided on what. In theory, it can cast your phone’s screen to your computer and let you drag and drop files and use text messaging on your desktop, which would be freaking sweet if it actually worked. In reality, however, it’s exactly what you would expect from Microsoft. Sometimes it works, sometimes it won’t connect. Sometimes you send texts and they go through on your phone, but “Your Phone Companion” loses track of them making the conversation appear incoherent. The screen casting is jittery and full of lag. In the end, I just don’t think it’s worth the 300 MB of RAM it takes to run it. So I removed it using an undocumented PowerShell command (as Microsoft officially gives you no way to remove it, but GetAppXPackage can chuck it for you).

Besides, drag and drop files works over mounting the phone and its SD card over a USB connection. It’s 2021, and nobody has improved on direct cable hookups for anything.

So, between all of the dancing crapware that Microsoft puts on your computer that takes up about a gig of RAM that can be easily dismissed and uninstalled (kicking and screaming), what else?

Well, the Windows Store is still around, but Microsoft has made absolutely zero progress getting people to accept it since Windows 8 first appeared. It’s been shoved to the side. There _are_ a few real programs in it now and not just imposters and broken games (Microsoft recently dropped their cut of revenue on games from 30% to 12%, but I still don’t think they’ll make any inroads against Steam, which is a much better platform which allows you to take your purchases to the Mac or Linux someday).

When I decided to give the Windows Store a fair shot to see if it had gotten better, I found foobar2000 (without the ability to install encoders), VLC player (without the ability to play DVDs and Blu Ray Discs), and HexChat (without the ability to run scripting language plugins).

That’s amazing….Every single app in this store is wrong. A few that I really like are there, but they’re all shot in the kneecap in some manner which makes installing them from outside the store the only real option.

Furthermore, don’t look in the Windows Store as a safe and supported way to get Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers, because Microsoft’s policy is that they can’t be in the Store. That’s probably okay, because long before you get through Microsoft’s litany of requirements to publish in their store, it would become clear that although you don’t have to be insane to work here, it would sure help.

With the Linux Subsystem, even a Chromebook could run the fully functional versions of foobar2000 (wine), VLC, and HexChat. So Microsoft’s Windows Store is just….well, bad. In fact, they don’t even include it in the LTSC versions that businesses get, and some pirates have noted that they run LTSC for reasons such as this.

Microsoft still just cannot give up using Consumer SKUs as a dumping ground of junk that businesses would never deploy on a corporate environment.

I even found myself in an A/B test for an MSN toolbar I didn’t want with the May Cumulative SECURITY update. Microsoft can’t leave their cotton pickin’ hands off my taskbar. I like the simple Windows 7-like taskbar with the bare necessities on it, and don’t even have the Search bar on it. So I wasn’t amused.

As soon as I got this laptop I turned off all of Microsoft’s Telemetry and Personal Information Collection stuff that Windows allows you to toggle, and it got far less annoying. However, something about 21H1 assumes that OneDrive is going to be there, even though the user is allowed to remove it, and it proceeded to put non-functioning OneDrive shortcuts in my Start Menu and in my quick launch tiles. I removed the tile, but to get it out of my Start Menu I actually had to track down a link that it dropped into my StartUp folder, at which point it disappeared again. DIE DIE DIE!

LibreOffice 7 is a great substitute for MS Office which is free and has good compatibility. They did an excellent job of making it look and feel like a Windows 10 program in the recent major release series and the GUI in general is fantastic for folks like me who never enjoyed Ribbon and will never accept “Cloud” document editing, which may be the dumbest thing to ever happen to computing. If one can still measure these things.

I must confess that its native ODF format has never managed to gain wide acceptance, but thanks to extensive work to support Microsoft’s competing OOXML format, you can at least handle the files that people are going to send you without feeding into Microsoft’s Office division.

A quick note on the media front. At some point along the way, Microsoft added support for some open media codecs. Notably, Opus, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and WebM should work, as should proprietary formats like HEVC. That should theoretically eliminate the need to go hunting down pirate codec packs that could be brimming with computer viruses.

They’ve even managed to implement support for id3v2.4 tags, so if you have any MP3s left, you can now update to the tag format from 2000 without worrying about whether Windows Explorer can read them or not.

Still, 3rd party media players are much better suited for the task, as they tend to support almost everything and definitely have better GUIs without the spam. I like foobar2000 and VLC.

The browser situation…

Windows 10 supports all of the major web browsers that you’re likely to have heard of, including Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera, but also comes with Microsoft Edge, which is now based on Chromium.

For the most part, Microsoft Edge seems to work fine. I know, that’s a total shock. The same Microsoft that inflicted the horror of Internet Explorer on us for over two decades has a browser that you can use without screaming? Well, yeah, it’s true! And they’ve managed to make quite a few improvements on Chromium.

For starters, recent builds of Windows 10 has a new feature called the Segment Heap, and what this essentially does, without going into too many details, is help application developers who opt into it, to reduce their program’s memory footprint. Sometimes quite substantially. In casual usage, I’ve found that Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 20H2 and 21H1 was using 700-800 MB of RAM total in cases where Brave would use 1.2 GB and Firefox was using 2.8 GB.

Since it is Chromium based, Edge supports all of the same extensions. Microsoft has also given up on trying to lock you into using Bing. I found that, while it certainly takes a little effort to find search settings, it can easily be toggled to use DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Google, or whatever else you like. It’s hard to even remember which browser you have open, except that Edge doesn’t guzzle memory like Firefox and Chrome do. The only other browser that comes close to Edge’s memory usage advantage that I found was Vivaldi.

Gaming on Windows 10? Spotty.

Games these days are often buggy, graphics drivers are buggy, Windows is famous for its bugs.

Put it all together, and what do you get? Bugs, bugs, bugs. (Try to imagine Marcus from Borderlands saying that.) I couldn’t even get Red Dead Redemption 2 to start, Borderlands 3 was chunking along, but seems to have decided to run okay even in DirectX 12 mode lately, and GTA V/Online still spits D3D Initialization Errors at you if you turn Tesselation on. Or give the game a look it doesn’t like. Or sneeze.

Honestly, with the release notes for the Intel driver since I bought this laptop, there have been a lot of problems with the driver itself and it can be hard to delineate blame in these cases. For example, CyberPunk 2077 was the game that ruined Christmas. And while Windows itself has had plenty of these going back to WinG (the predecessor of DirectX) messing up The Lion King in 1994, Intel has squashed dozens of problems on its side of the fence with this one title.

It seems that the reaction from gamers to the state the industry has allowed things to get to is a collective yawn and to try to recover each time the game errors out. Why would they ever fix it when they know you’ll pay $80 for a broken game?

What’s coming?

Windows 21H2 is supposed to be a bigger release with an entire GUI refresh. (Uh oh.)

In reality, nobody knows what’s going on inside Microsoft, as usual. Often, when they start monkeying around with the GUI it results in disaster and a lot of poo pooing from the people that have to use it. The Windows 7 GUI was actually not all that bad, but when Microsoft went the way of “Metro” and different desktops and treating PCs without touchscreens like giant tablets, it felt….well let’s say, forced. There’s never been an innovation in using a PC that has been a worthwhile successor to a mouse and keyboard. Some people use dumbed down PCs called tablets, but they are markedly inferior in every way.

If Microsoft stops trying to manipulate people into using their other products by way of the GUI, they could do okay, but from what I’ve seen, I’m cynical at best. They used to be able to nail a GUI (Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows 7), or at least not screw one up entirely (Windows XP), but now they see Windows as a division that exists mainly to push their other products on you, and often the GUI is their way of accomplishing this.

I hope that if anyone from Microsoft is reading this, that you use 21H2 as an opportunity to clean up some relics and generally decrapify the operating system, and not to push more “Where did the Start Menu go?” (Windows 8) type nonsense and questionable bundled apps that the user has a hard time getting rid of.

You have competition and Windows is not holding up to that competition, as you may have noticed with the recent failures of Windows 10X and Windows S. Nobody wants a Windows that is a glorified iPad except without any apps. Those are not your customers. Do you need reminded that you are _still_ supporting Windows RT? Enough said.