Upgraded a system to Windows 10 today

The first time I ever upgraded a system to Windows 10 was not long after it was initially released. The process was sufficiently distasteful to me at the time that I reverted back to Windows 8.1 not long afterwards. Many apps were uninstalled without my having a choice nor being notified. The interface looked bad. Then there was all the horrible stuff in the news about privacy violations, etc.

But my experience today was quite different. I downloaded the Windows 10 update to a USB key and did the installation that way. It went very smooth. It did not even touch master boot record of the drive Windows is installed on which is shared with Linux which is what controls the MBR via the Grub bootloader.

I didn’t have many apps installed on the system but anyhow none of the ones I did were touched. They all worked fine after the upgrade. By the way, this was an upgrade from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10 Pro.

As for the privacy stuff, I know it is a concern but my feeling now is that what Microsoft is doing is basically similar to what Google does with Android and I’m sure Apple does with their devices. There is some data collection and of course there’s bundling in of all their preferred apps. They all want you to use their version of messaging, photo sharing, social apps, cloud apps, etc. I chose to pretty much disable everything, all forms of data sharing, etc. except for Cortana which I’m curious to try. On an Android tablet I have I’ve been using Google Assistant and having fun with it. Cortana will be interesting to try. It seems like voice command stuff with computers has moved at a snail’s pace over the years. I remember when Dragon Naturally Speaking was big but even then it never seemed to really be that great. Now maybe things are progressing somewhat.

One thing that unexpectedly turned out to be a huge plus with Windows 10 was installing Winaero Tweaker which has a lot of options to customize Windows 10.

So this is the first time I’ve used the Microsoft Edge browser and it seems nice.

One reason I wanted to install Windows 10 was to install Docker.