Windows 10 – the horror of upgrade to 1903+ releases

I had the misfortune the other day that one of my machines updated beyond 1809 release. There are three changes that immediately infuriated me.

1. Colour scheme change and removal of availability of black colour menus

The colour scheme changes upon upgrade. Not only is it a rather bright one going back to the ’90s style and contrary to dark themes that are easier on the eyes, laptop batteries and screen burn, but there is no way to full revert back. In order to get anywhere near black it is now necessary to disable the transparency effects, and even then it is still not black but dark grey.

Visually, this is a huge downgrade that cannot be fully mitigated or undone. And a bit of googling will show that I am far from the only one infuriated by this change.

2. File explorer grouping by default instead of continuing with previous default

As soon as you open your file folders after the upgrade, the files are now grouped by default. I can understand that this might be a new default setting, but on an upgrade, old behaviour should be preserved. If somebody chose not to view their files grouped, they should not be overriden by the upgrade and made to waste their time putting things back the way they were. Worse, this seems to revert the the new annoying default randomly.

Microsoft needs to understand that the ONLY reason why anyone uses Windows instead of a different operating system is long term inertia of familiarity. Chipping away at that familiarity will just push more users away from Windows and toward other operating systems. This is user alienation by a million paper cuts.

3. Start menu auto-expand

This one is incredibly annoying for a change so minor. There is supposedly a way to disable this using the mach2 tool, but it doesn’t seem to have worked for me – no matter what I do, I couldn’t get it to turn off and stay off.

Conclusion

So what did I do? Well, this is a VM – I refuse to run Windows on bare metal since over a decade ago, because it is too prone to getting itself into a state where various things break in a way that all the googlable solutions just don’t work and the only solution is to format and reinstall (windows update getting broken is a common show stopper). Being a VM, it doesn’t run on a real disk but a virtual one. I run my VMs on ZFS zvols, which are regularly snapshotted. So I powered off the VM, performed a zfs rollback to a pre-upgrade snapshot, and as if by magic, all of the damage done by releases after 1809 have been undone and things are back in a state where at least the new annoyances are gone. Best of all, zfs rollback took a few milliseconds instead of the lengthy rollback using Windows restore that probably wouldn’t have put things back quite to exactly the same state the machine was in before.

The upgrade will no doubt be forced on me at some point, in a way that I can’t avoid it any more. The feature upgrades can only be postponed by 365 days and disabled for another 30. But at least – today is not that day.

Plea to Microsoft

Please, for the love of God, stop changing things in ways that nobody asked for, nobody wanted, and nobody likes. Make your designers and developers learn from the fiasco of the ribbon interface.