Windows 10 is the newest member of windows NT family of which general availability was made on July 29, 2015. It is the successor of Windows 8.1. Windows 10 is supported on Intel Architecture 32 bit, AMD64 and ARMv7 processors.
As a Linux-user for more than 8 continuous years, I thought to test Windows 10, as it is making a lots of news these days. This article is a breakthrough of my observation. I will be seeing everything from the perspective of a Linux user so you may find it a bit biased towards Linux but with absolutely no false information.
1. I searched Google with the text “download windows 10” and clicked the first link.
You may directly go to link : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
2. I was supposed to select a edition from ‘windows 10‘, ‘windows 10 KN‘, ‘windows 10 N‘ and ‘windows 10 single language‘.
For those who want to know details of different editions of Windows 10, here is the brief details of editions.
- Windows 10 – Contains everything offered by Microsoft for this OS.
- Windows 10N – This edition comes without Media-player.
- Windows 10KN – This edition comes without media playing capabilities.
- Windows 10 Single Language – Only one Language Pre-installed.
3. I selected the first option ‘Windows 10‘ and clicked ‘Confirm‘. Then I was supposed to select a product language. I choose ‘English‘.
I was provided with Two Download Links. One for 32-bit and other for 64-bit. I clicked 64-bit, as per my architecture.
With my download speed (15Mbps), it took me 3 long hours to download it. Unfortunately there were no torrent file to download the OS, which could otherwise have made the overall process smooth. The OS iso image size is 3.8 GB.
I could not find an image of smaller size but again the truth is there don’t exist net-installer image like things for Windows. Also there is no way to calculate hash value after the iso image has been downloaded.
Wonder why so ignorance from windows on such issues. To verify if the iso is downloaded correctly I need to write the image to a disk or to a USB flash drive and then boot my system and keep my finger crossed till the setup is finished.
Lets start. I made my USB flash drive bootable with the windows 10 iso using dd command, as:
# dd if=/home/avi/Downloads/Win10_English_x64.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512M; sync
It took a few minutes to complete the process. I then rebooted the system and choose to boot from USB flash Drive in my UEFI (BIOS) settings.
System Requirements
If you are upgrading
- Upgrade supported only from Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1
If you are fresh Installing
- Processor: 1GHz or faster
- RAM : 1GB and Above(32-bit), 2GB and Above(64-bit)
- HDD: 16GB and Above(32-bit), 20GB and Above(64-bit)
- Graphic card: DirectX 9 or later + WDDM 1.0 Driver
Installation of Windows 10
1. Windows 10 boots. Yet again they changed the logo. Also no information on whats going on.
2. Selected Language to install, Time & currency format and keyboard & Input methods before clicking Next.
3. And then ‘Install Now‘ Menu.
4. The next screen is asking for Product key. I clicked ‘skip’.
5. Choose from a listed OS. I chose ‘windows 10 pro‘.
6. oh yes the license agreement. Put a check mark against ‘I accept the license terms‘ and click next.
7. Next was to upgrade (to windows 10 from previous versions of windows) and Install Windows. Don’t know why custom: Windows Install only is suggested as advanced by windows. Anyway I chose to Install windows only.
8. Selected the file-system and clicked ‘next’.
9. The installer started to copy files, getting files ready for installation, installing features, installing updates and finishing up. It would be better if the installer would have shown verbose output on the action is it taking.
10. And then windows restarted. They said reboot was needed to continue.
11. And then all I got was the below screen which reads “Getting Ready”. It took 5+ minutes at this point. No idea what was going on. No output.
12. yet again, it was time to “Enter Product Key”. I clicked “Do this later” and then used expressed settings.
14. And then three more output screens, where I as a Linuxer expected that the Installer will tell me what it is doing but all in vain.
15. And then the installer wanted to know who owns this machine “My organization” or I myself. Chose “I own it” and then next.
16. Installer prompted me to join “Azure Ad” or “Join a domain”, before I can click ‘continue’. I chooses the later option.
17. The Installer wants me to create an account. So I entered user_name and clicked ‘Next‘, I was expecting an error message that I must enter a password.
18. To my surprise Windows didn’t even showed warning/notification that I must create password. Such a negligence. Anyway I got my desktop.
For the part where you bash Windows for not asking for a password you don’t need a password to have a Windows account, thus, it did not release an error message. Frankly, it seems like you were just finding things to complain about, which normal users would not have even noticed.
how to install a trojan…. lol
The dd command seems wrong. It should have been of=/dev/sdb instead of of=/dev/sdb1.
I use both Windows 10 at work and Debian 8.5 at home. So let me share some observations with you guys.
1. Win 10 system requirements is a bullshit you need twice as much to run it smoothly. But the system is solid stable as hell.
A balanced net installation of Linux will work fine on 1Gigahertz CPU and 1 GB of RAM.
2. OK installation of Win10 is simpler then installation of Linux. No discussion.
3. Have no clue what was installed and how. Windows show me pictures.
4. Yes default win 10 Interface is beautifully clean and system boots relatively fast as long as you have more then 2 GB of ram and at least core duo CPU with more then 1MB on a first cache.
So in 99% of cases system act fine. In another case after it boots you must wait more then a minute until you can do anything besides enjoying the view.
By the way secret of lightning boot up is hiberfile.sys (that is probably created even when you totally turn of your PC). But I’m not sure of that.
5. Its jams your internet connection if you have cheap adsl you are screwed end of story.
6. You can not turn of updates they are obligatory and time consuming.
7. Updates aren’t consume your hd space. Updates replace files instead of adding files to existing ones. Well Linux has it since its beginning. But its a great improvement in Windows.
8. Drivers support is really awesome on Windows 10 its not a joke I was impressed.
9. MS EDGE Is blazing fast and stable I don’t know if its secure.
10. I cant compare Win 10 gui with my Linux desktop cause I use environment that is not so full of bells and whistles in compare of gnome or kde.
11. CLI package management that’s awesome news for sysadmins and advanced users.
12. It wants to send a bunch of stuff to MS see point 5.
You must take some effort to block its activity. Its an impossible task for normal user as our mom’s
13. As you said virtual desktop well we have it for 2 decades.
I feel like this review wasn’t done with an open mind.
There was no need to bash Windows over everything by comparing it to Linux. It’s just a matter of usecase, a particular features might not be useful for you but could be useful for another (type of) user and vice-versa.
Beside I have read about a few nice features which are not present in any of current Linux distros but Windows have it, like multi-touch trackpad with support for gestures, support for 4K display, etc but that side of the coin was ignored completely.
I feel the review could have been a little more unbiased, and the comparison at every single step could have been avoided.
PS: I’m a Linux user myself, the last time I owned a Windows machine was in 2010.
Linux does have support for gestures (I must admit maybe that it is worse than Windows’), but it has very good 4K display support.
I was unable to boot in to windows using dd command to make USB bootable ,is there any way to make my USB bootable.
@Rohit,
Use Unetbootin tool to create bootable USB drives as shown here
you could use winbot in Linux to create a live USB of any windows
do not get me wrong , i am a big Linux fan and i use it as my primary os of choice.
i strongly disagree ” with all respect” to the sentence “Linux is years ahead of Windows.”
basic functions does not work as it should compared to Mac / Windows , even latest builds for many applications that are cross platforms are not available by default or requires some work to do by the end user or wait for a 6 month spin of a new release to get it up and running.
Hi Avishek Kumar, I agree Linux is way ahead of Windows that is why they are copying certain features from Linux. I love Linux but at work I need to use windows because of Office, Outlook etc. I used Ubuntu 9.04 for 1 year 6 months no hassles until I got a new laptop where I worked at my previous company, anyway I want to move back to Linux (Mint 17.2 or Ubuntu but I need help to get Office, VPN client installed so that I can forget about Windows and only look through it at home lol) I saw an alternative of WINE for Linux called CROSSOVER you have to pay for it . Is there a good tutorial that you can help with for this kind of migration. You help will be much appreciated. If I get this to work then I will convince alot of users to move over to Linux.
Fernando Turner (South Africa)
Quite a few errors in this article, and you can really tell that the author is biased.
Nice article, but it should have gone through a basic revision.