Technology Ramblings

In 2018 - I've used all 4 of the "major" desktop OS platforms out there - Windows 10, OS X, various Linux distros and ChromeOS.   Here is my take on the state of these OS and where we're going. Let's start with Windows.  Believe it or not the Windows brand is over 33 years old.  Windows 1.0 first released in Nov of 1985 as a shell on top of the MS-DOS operating system and a reaction to the Apple Macintosh of 1984.   Even if you consider Windows 95 - the first of the modern Windows versions you're still talking some 23 years ago.    But what has really changed ?  Sure we've moved from 32bit to 64bit and the hardware has gotten a lot better and some of the underlying components such as memory mgmt and file systems have been updated.  Most recently touch,pen and Hello support has surfaced - but from a general navigation and operation stand-point not much has changed.   When you look at Windows 10 today what do you have ?  A Desktop, Start Menu, Task B

So it's been a several months since I've posted anything regarding Windows 10 19H1 Insider builds and that's because this falls builds have been quite boring and painful.   Obviously a lot of resources were placed on the 1809 release disaster and it wasn't until Dec 24 that MS finally released to the public.  It's was in my mind the worst single OS release issue is the history of MS. There have been a total of 12 Insider releases since my last report on 18234 in September and until recently most of those builds had little to nothing of real value and when the big improvement is an update to the venerable NotePad app - you get the drift. The most recent build is 18305 which I have installed on two devices - a circa 2018 NUC8I5BEH and a circa 2016 HP Elitebook 745G3 laptop.   In both cases MS got over the first big hump with this Insider which was being able to deploy an update in a timely manner.  For most of the fall - updates where taking 2 - 3 hours - re-i