When I stopped in the local pilot supplies store today, the lady at the register got to telling me how much she hates Windows 10, and why. I had already heard enough from tech news sources to make me wary of it, but I thought it was interesting to hear complaints from a non-tech source. It makes me wonder if the zero dollars currently being charged may be an accurate indication of the value of the "upgrade."
It has some improvements "under the hood," and the UI stuff can be fixed with ClassicShell, etc. My objection is to the built-in spyware and MS's Big Brother attitude with regard to things like forced updates. If all their updates worked properly and didn't break ****, the latter wouldn't be a big issue for me. But alas, that's not the case.
Speaking of Windows Updates, it's becoming a real chore to run them on 8.1 these days. Microsoft keeps sneaking the Win10 upgrader back into the updates under different KBs to try to rope in users who have hidden the previous ones. You have to pore over every update description, every time updates come out, to make sure you're not upgraded to Win10 against your will. That's simply unacceptable. No means no. Stop bothering me.
MS is hell-bent on getting everyone on the same platform, but all they've accomplished in my case is getting me to seriously consider, for the first time in my life, switching to a Mac. Apple is even more paternalistic than MS, but at least they have some semblance of respect for their users' privacy, and their updates
usually don't break stuff (except for their mail client, for which there are alternatives).
Microsoft's obsession with forcing Win 10 upon users also has me pondering going back to Linux as my primary desktop OS again. I used Linux as my sole desktop OS from 1998 through 2002 or 2003. I had a machine that multiple-booted into various Windows versions because I supported Windows for part of my living, but for my own work I used Linux.
It wasn't until some time in 2002 or 2003, after XP had been out for a while, that I gradually drifted back to Windows. XP was at least usable, and I missed Adobe Fireworks. In fact, FW was the only Windows application that I really missed, and I never could get it to run on WiNE. Everything else either had a good Linux-native replacement or could be run on WiNE, but not Fireworks.
Fireworks is still the only application that I would miss if I switched back to Linux. But nowadays, in addition to simply liking the program and having mastered it, I also have about a bazillion files that I created with it that no other program can edit. It's not that FW does anything special that other image programs can't do. It's that Fireworks buries a ton of metadata in .PNG files that no other program can access, and I have a ****load of those files.
I also heavily use DreamWeaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator, in that order; and on occasion I use Premiere Pro. The first three have Linux-native replacements that I'm just as comfortable with and could easily transition to, and I only use a fraction of Premiere Pro's capabilities. Premiere Pro is for guys like Spielberg. I need to do simple edits that even the cheesiest FOSS video editing software can easily handle. So I wouldn't miss Premiere Pro.
But I do love Fireworks and have a ton of files that I created with it: And if I'm going to keep Windows around so I can use keep using Fireworks, then I may as well use it for the rest of the Adobe software that I regularly use.
But that could change.
If MS is going to keep sneaking up behind me like a mugger in The Bronx to force me to upgrade at gunpoint to Win10, then I may just bite the bullet and export all of my .PNG files to .PSD, which will preserve enough of the metadata to make them at least somewhat editable in GIMP. The uneditable layers (mainly text) would have to be deleted and re-created, which would be a bother, but would be doable. There's also an unofficial APNG patch for libpng that I'm told will make at lease some of the metadata accessible.
The ironic thing is that Adobe's not maintaining Fireworks anymore. You can still buy it and use it, and it's still a part of my Adobe CS subscription, but they've already made it clear that they will not be updating it anymore. They want us to use Photoshop instead and have hinted that FW may not be around forever. I guess they don't read their own forums or else they'd understand that Fireworks is the only reason that many users keep their subscriptions active. Even the hallowed Photoshop and DreamWeaver have worthy and capable replacements -- most of them FOSS.
Long story short, if Adobe ever drops support for FW, both my Adobe subscription and my use of Windows will be history before nightfall. That's kind of ironic when you think about it because both Fireworks and Win 8.1 are considered deprecated by their publishers, so one deprecated piece of software is the only reason I keep using the other.
Rich
