This appears to include ReFS on Windows (although with the creation of ReFS volumes being limited to enterprise-targeting editions of Windows 10, perhaps this won't affect too many people).
I don't mind Facebook crawling pages as long as it respects robots.txt, but for the last few weeks we've been hammered by requests from Facebook-owned IP addresses (millions of hits daily, 50+ for the same URL at times). They don't even set the User-Agent header.
A 0.05% drop is well within the expected margin of error with a perfect statistical methodology and large sample size. The steam survey is opt in, it's a good rough guide but you can't read anything into month-month changes.
Even if we generously agree that it's correct, how much has steam grown? A 0.05% drop could still be more total users than the previous month.
The usage share was 0.97% at the end of 2015, 0.87% at the end of 2016 and 0.75% in the latest survey. This might still translate to a growing absolute number of Linux users, but it would be nice to see the momentum start going in the opposite direction when it comes to those percentages.
Microsoft totally wrecked font rendering in Windows 10 (W8 too?). Edge browser doesn't have ClearType either, which is braindead for a program you spend so much time reading in.
Edge 14 in the Anniversary Update actually brings back ClearType support for at least some text, so there's still a glimmer of hope that Microsoft will work to improve text rendering in Windows. Raymond Chen had an interesting post on how subpixel scrolling makes ClearType smoothing impossible: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...
These days .NET 4.0 is probably a better target for maximising compatibility - Windows 8 and above don't come with .NET 3.5 installed by default, and a lot of Windows XP/Vista/7 machines will already have .NET 4.0 or newer installed thanks to Windows Update.
Do you need to target versions earlier than Windows 10? If so, you'll have to rule out a Universal Windows Platform app (which might otherwise suit your needs, though you wouldn't be able to use it to write to AppData).
A Windows Presentation Foundation or Windows Forms app targeting .NET 4.0 will get you pretty good compatibility - Windows 8 and above come with it pre-installed* and it's an optional Windows Update for Windows XP/Vista/7. I don't think the XAML learning curve is as steep as some people claim, but it'll still be quicker to hack something together in WinForms over WPF if you haven't used the latter before.
Also check out the Desktop App Converter for Windows 10 - you can now package up a WPF/WinForms/Win32/etc. app into a UWP app for Windows 10 users and pick up some of the benefits that those apps have†.
Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet.
I believe part of the reason is that it was never fully compatible with screen rotation, often still assuming RGB order from text-left to text-right. Another part would be that the world is moving towards much higher resolution displays, where the effect of subpixel rendering is negligible.
Triskaidekaphobia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia). The same thing happened to Microsoft Office - Office 2007 was version 12 internally, yet Office 2010 jumped to version 14. On the plus side, it means that the upcoming release (Office 2016) has an internal version number that matches the year.
I guess the question is whether the people at Microsoft who decide these things are themselves superstitious or whether they think their customers are superstitious (to the point that they would avoid a product with an unlucky internal version number).
