There has been a little bit of excitement amongst some quarters at the arrival of Windows 10.

I must confess my attitude has been one of rapturous indifference.

My curiosity had been tickled a little, I confess and I wondered what to do about it.

I have Linux running on this laptop but I also have Windows 8.1 [tweaked to look and act like 7] which is there for emergency use in case I really need something that won't run on Linux.  I thought about installing 10 there but decided against it as it could fuck up everything including Linux.

I also have an old PC in my office.  Well, I call it my office but Herself calls it a junk room and uses it accordingly, so the PC is usually buried under a heap of stuff.  That PC also runs Linux, but also runs Windows 7 [dunno why I never stuck 8 on it], so I thought I would try to update that to the supposedly wondrous 10.

I fired it up into Windows.  Bugger!  It has been a long time since I did that and as a result there were around 150 updates.  I told it to apply them and went about my business.  That evening, I stuck my head around the door and the fucking thing was still updating.  I went to bed.

The following morning I checked again.  Still updating.  "Ah here!" I says to myself and pressed the Reboot button.  It eventually fired up.  I went into Updates and it still said there were around 150 updates!  Once again I told it to go ahead and left it to it.  Later that afternoon, I checked and it was running Linux.  The PC is set up to run Linux by default so I presumed it had rebooted.  I went back into Windows and it presented me with a screen telling me to "please wait" and all that shit.  I left it to it.  Later I went in and Windows was running normally.  I checked Updates and there were 15 more.  Fuck!

To cut a very long story short, after a couple of days of rebooting and rechecking and finding new updates I eventually got it to a stage where it said it was fully up to date.  No mention of Windows 10 though.  I haven't dared switch it on since.

Anyway I believe 10 is a mighty load of crap.  Its only claim to fame is that it's a bit faster, has Solitaire [which you have to pay for] has looks like Windows 7.  It also apparently screws up just about every machine it's installed on.

In contrast, there was a major upgrade to Linux Mint a couple of weeks ago.  I noticed the little Update Icon was indicating there was an update available.  There was only one little update – the Update programme itself.  I updated it [took around 10 seconds?].  A new item appeared on the Update menu – did I want to upgrade to the new release?  I said go ahead and went about my business.  I scribbled a post or two for the site, poked around the Interwebs and generally carried on while the upgrade went on in the background.  Then a little thing popped up on the screen to tell me the upgrade was successful and that it was very very sorry indeed and it knew this was very inconvenient and indeed rare, but could I please reboot, but there was no hurry.  I did.  It took about half a minute.  Upgrade done.

The new Mint is a little faster and has some nice new features.  It has always had Solitaire [12 different versions] which doesn’t cost a red cent, along with a potential 1926 other games [including Flight Simulator and Shoot-em-ups], all free.  It has 1175 graphics packages and 338 Office packages and not a licence to be seen.  I can run Photoshop and Microsoft Office on it and if I really wanted to I could install Windows 3.1 on it, because Linux can run virtual machines where you can use any operating system you like.  It's fast, it's efficient and it's free.  Linux doesn't demand that you sign up with a Microsoft account nor does it demand that you use any particular software.  Microsoft on the other hand seems to think that once you install their software you become their property and you had better damn well do as you're told.

They can stuff their 10 where the sun don't shine.