After a recent (slightly heated) discussion and much reading/watching tech reviews I decided to give Win10S a fair shot. New laptop with Win10S, be still my beating heart, let's go for it. Conflicted with it right away - didn't think it needs to know my name, email, phone number, etc - and no option to "skip" or "later" or "none of yer business ya creeps" - before I even saw the desktop. Conflicted with it the moment I clicked my first icon from desktop - didn't want Microsoft browser and Microsoft search engine - and it turns out that the ones I did want aren't "approved downloads" on Microsoft Store. Spent about an hour doing the usual new laptop cleanup chores - removing "value added" junkware, killing unwanted tasks, top-to-bottom through all settings, check the locks on firewall/etc. Conflict, conflict, conflict - Win10S doesn't allow advanced firewall rules, network monitoring tools, command lines, registry edits, access to anything anywhere in "protected" file folders. These chores would normally take about 15min, but being denied all the basic toolbox stuff meant me and my new laptop accomplished little while starting to overheat. Still, I forced myself to use WIn10S a week. Not looking good but maybe user and machine could reach a compromise? I only made it four days. Enough time to learn that it's basically the PC Windows version of smartphone-style user lockdown. All the dangerous things are kept away from clumsy end users, all executables must pass through Microsoft Store. Restricted. Controlled. Locked. It's the opposite of an unrestricted OS. Not for power users, super users, root users. Even the one-way "Switch Away from S" (through Microsoft Store) is not always cooperative, though it does eventually comply if you're tenacious. It promises a performance advantage. My before and after benchmarks didn't differ. I'm guessing Microsoft's promised performance gains assume that uncontrolled users install tons of malware or something, or the usual reality (they'll never admit) that you've just gotta reinstall a WinOS every long while because it just gets too elderly and cluttered to keep going at full speed. I know I'm biased, Windows has to do a lot to impress me. But this version did a lot to unimpress me. It's a great system for "normal" users running in the box. It's a lousy system for "abnormal" users trying to make the box run for them.
