With Microsoft's free Windows 10 upgrade ending 29 July, I wanted to go ahead and get myself upgraded, so that I wouldn't have to worry last minute. I had remembered (I had forgotten before then) that whenever I have a reason to reinstall Windows on Melty, that I would upgrade the hard drive for the operating system to an SSD before doing so; the price wasn't bad, so I went ahead with it. The only problem with that was that I figured I should also do the same with Triela.
While I prepared the SSD for Melty, I ended up using it for Triela instead, as it was more likely that I'd need her first. I installed Manjaro first, so that Windows didn't try anything funny (though I read that the Windows 10 upgrade process leaves anything non-Windows alone), and because it'd be a bit faster, even if I had problems. I tried net install first, but while trying to download the entire XFCE environment, I was getting download speeds similar to dial-up internet. When I was trying to update packages after using the installer from the live disk, I found the speeds weren't much different, and then remembered about the command for
pacman to rank mirrors, which turned out to fix that problem.I also read to remove the
discard option from fstab and use the fstrim service instead, which was one of the first few things I did. Interestingly enough with net install, discard isn't added to fstab at all, while it's the obverse for the installer from the live disk. Booting from GRUB 2 was quite quick, as well as shutting down - while Manjaro was already quite snappy with the stock hard drive, the SSD just blew me away. Needless to say, there wasn't really any major problems, beside a strange theme glitch with Firefox, which was fixed by installing firefox, which removed firefox-gtk2 (why it was installed, I haven't a clue).Windows was a different story. For whatever weird reason, after installing Service Pack 1, Windows Update became very slow, and I tried all sorts of things here and there to try to fix it, eventually giving up and leaving it. It took a while to get fully updated, but when it was time, I tried to use the "N" upgrade ISO (because I didn't want it installing things I was going to uninstall anyway), which asked me for a key, and so I decided to just use the upgrade program instead. It took a while for the program to do it's thing, including downloading the necessary files, and once it was ready, I let the program upgrade to Windows 10.
For whatever weird reason, while looking at the screen, which was a black screen with a turquoise-coloured Windows logo and the loading dots, I had a very slight anxiety. Eventually that anxiety turned into reality and the upgrade failed. I looked online and found that the simplest method was to try different settings when running the install program (e.g. "Keep my files, but not my settings" instead of "Keep my files and settings"), and when I tried the upgrade program again, it wanted to download everything again. It was irritating, so I decided to download the standard ISO instead of waiting for the program to do it (especially if it decided to fail again). But Microsoft kinda gave me the run around on Triela, so I had to download it with Mei-chan and transfer it via ethernet.
The update succeeded this time (could have also been the ISO, I don't know), and I was met with no internet - no wireless, no ethernet. Device manager had some yellow triangles on both, to which I installed the driver for ethernet first before uninstalling the driver from device manager. After successfully getting internet, I proceeded to do the same for the wireless, but turning wireless off afterwards.
I was quite pleased to find that Windows 10 was able to keep a constant connection to the internet with the ethernet, unlike Windows 7 (might be how my network's set up, I don't know). Other than that, I just reinstalled GRUB 2 with
mhwd-chroot and hadn't any major problems with Triela and Windows 10.Melty was a different story with Windows 10 (Manjaro wasn't much different than Triela, besides that I didn't feel like spending time manually installing
lightdm and XFCE after net install).I expected the upgrade to fail, but it didn't, which was fine with me until I wanted to reboot to be able to reinstall GRUB 2 - I watched the loading dots spin around for a few minutes before holding the power button down.
I found that it shut down fine, but not reboot, and then while trying to fix it, I ended up fixing the reboot while breaking the shut down. I decided just to keep it that way, as I hardly use Windows and didn't want to continue to try to fix it.
One detail I didn't mention was that I did the upgrade for Melty on 5 March and not the same weekend as Triela. I'm glad I did, because I probably wouldn't have slept any (it was already bad enough I spent 20 hours on Triela broken up by 4 hours of sleep).
Is Windows 10 (6.3 for those actually paying attention to the version numbers) really worth it? Yes and no.
I also forgot that Windows 10 decided to install the drivers for the Radeon HD 7000 series on Triela even though the GPU is the HD 6750M, so there's a bit of screen tearing, but as I've said before, I don't use Windows all that much, so it's something I'll worry about if it becomes a bigger problem.
I've really been considering ReactOS, and have yet to test it, but if it turns out well, I may migrate to it. Overall, the process of upgrading a fresh Windows installation wasn't very positive, but at the least, it won't take Melty as long as it did to boot into Windows.
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