Solved Is it OK to use the Release Preview Channel on your only device?

Since it's a very stable Insider channel it should be fine, but I would still like to ask.

Been using the beta release (now same as RP as of today) as my daily for a month, yeah it's stable

Pretty much yes but bear in mind you have to send optional data as well to MS if on an Insider version. Only you can decide if this is an issue to you personally.

cereberus said:

Pretty much yes but bear in mind you have to send optional data as well to MS if on an Insider version. Only you can decide if this is an issue to you personally.

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@cereberus If I'm honest given the amount of data collecting other companies do (e.g Google) I really don't care anymore if MS does so. So I will probably switch.

When I joined the Insider Preview [when it was called Technical Preview] some time ago [about 2014] everything in print at that time warned not to use the test version on the only computer or a production computer due to instability, incompatible software or devices, etc. It was plain to the average user there would be changes and probably failures, some catastrophic.

Berton said:

When I joined the Insider Preview [when it was called Technical Preview] some time ago [about 2014] everything in print at that time warned not to use the test version on the only computer or a production computer due to instability, incompatible software or devices, etc. It was plain to the average user there would be changes and probably failures, some catastrophic.

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Certainly 100% true back in the day, but MS changed the policy and made new builds more frequent, and generally reliabilty was much improved.

This was reflected a few Dev builds ago when MS gave a whole load of feature updates in one build and a few problems arose all in one go.

People forget that in early days there was not an RP Ring (now Channel).

The RP Channel is of limited use, as it only contains updates intended to be added to RTM via cumulative updates a few weeks later anyway.

As we get close to RTM, RP is quite stable but maybe slightly unpolished but very unlikely to have major issues.

Of course, one should should understand the risks and make an image backup first

Whatever data Ms have collected - at least from me - hasn't resulted in my getting any spam from Ms or other annoying stuff whatsoever -- If you join the Windows insider you might get an email once in a while when a new build appears or some podcast advertising new windows features but that's minimal compared with the amount of junk you get whenever you buy anything on the Net.

There's often so much paranoia with this stuff -- I'll bet some people get really bored if they hear even 3 people using mobile phones on public transport -- just imagine monitoring the Pb (Petabytes) of data to access just a small amount of data being generated on the internet daily -- unless you become a "Person of Interest" there's 100% no reason to worry over this stuff.

Cheers
jimbo

Yes, it is absolutely safe. The preview builds are in fact supported by Microsoft, and recommended not just for home, but also for commercial deployment, meaning they must be really close to the retail builds.

On the other hand, I would not recommend the other "flavors" aka the beta or dev builds. The beta ones used to be reliable, but recently they merged it with the dev build timeline (to allow a "time window" to switch between them as you can only upgrade and not downgrade) and this essentially resulted beta ring users getting dev ring builds, wrecking havoc in terms of stability.

This trick should not threaten the preview builds, hence why I can recommend that, but not the other two on your only machine. However, in a virtual machine all of them should be great to try.