'Doze 8

[friznit]

New laptop, comes with Windoze 8. So tell me, does this OS have any redeeming features at all cos so far it's just a heaving pile of utter shit that is giving me the rage.

[Dog Pants]

Read this from Croteam (Serious Sam). MS are using it as a means to manipulate the market in a direction that will make more money for them. Like Apple do. Unfortunately for them I don't think they can beat Apple at their own game. Hopefully that will leave Win 8 a white elephant and drive MS back into making open platforms. If not we might see a completely closed platform by Windows 9. Although that would probably also see a rise in Linux, and I'd be surprised if Valve aren't working on something like that right now. Even so, a Steam OS may also be a closed platform. I believe from a technical point of view Win 8 is quite fast.

[spoodie]

[Thompy]

I have minimal experience with Mac OS, so call me out if I'm spouting bollocks. Here's what I don't get about arguments that claim MS are trying to make Windows a closed platform like Apple: Mac OS isn't closed, iOS's are. You can installed any program that anyone anywhere has written for Mac, yes/no? I'm with deject, I can't see MS wanting to close down Windows because it'll only harm them in the long run, a bit more income from the app store won't be beneficial. Plus I can't see them wanting to exclude all the millions of programs currently made for Windows, regardless of what money's involved.

Can't answer your question specifically friz as I have no current reason to upgrade. The main complaint I've read is not with either Windows classic or MUI, but the mash up of the two.

[friznit]

All I can say is it's irritating as fuck. I had to buy a start menu from a 3rd party provider, because the utterly retarded interface is a terrible mash up that makes opening programmes a chore. The 'always on' internet connection is a farce - I spent an hour setting everything up only to discover it had stored all the settings on my Live account so as soon as I went offline it all reset to default. And all the bling is just a load of shite that gets in the way. The only word I have to describe it is horrible. The only saving grace is the guy who decided to remove the start menu was sacked. Hope he gets hit by a flaming bus full of underfed crocodiles.

[spoodie]

While I'd miss some kind of Start menu, initially at least, I consider it to be an anachronism. All I require is some buttons for regularly used software (I'm not calling them "apps" on purpose), for which I sometimes use the Start menu. Also the desktop and taskbar and you still have those, don't you? For other software I use the search. Going through the All Programs list is unnecessary these days. But this all applies to Windows 7, not previous. Jumping from XP to W8 would certainly be a much steeper learning curve and I could imagine frustrations there.

And what Thompy has said about OSX is accurate. At least for the one release out of date version I have. I opened the Store maybe once.

[fabyak]

I've gone to Windows 8 at work and while I too found the lack of a start button irritating as fuck at first I started to realise that I didn't really use it that much anyway (granted I'm one of those wierdos who lives off keyboard shortcuts and the run box so I don't consider myself the norm) but being able to type and have it search is nice (same as W7 except there's no sign that you're in a search box). In terms of speed I can confirm it seems bloody nippy compared to the W7 box it upgraded from. For desktops though I can see no point in moving away from 7 (unless you're doing MS Server stuff like SCCM 2012 which relies heavily on W8 )

[Shada]

Been using windows 8 for a couple weeks now, having chosen to update to it purely because I was bored of windows 7.

Once I'd set it up how I wanted it I found I liked it a lot. I use the start screen just as a big start menu and I only use a few metro apps - the mail app is particularly good, a nice clean interface and popup notifications are built into the OS.

Mainly though I just like the metro interface because it looks pretty. I'm a computer hipster now. That's my thing.

Also it boots up in seconds which is rad.

[FatherJack]

Can you put anything that isn't a certified Metro App on your start screen though, like a shortcut to a game you play a lot? For me, that would be its only purpose - although I'd have to be a lot more selective than I am with the 116 shortcuts I have on my desktop.

I don't really use the Start Menu an awful lot - only when I've forgotten what something is called, or to browse what is installed - just hitting the windows key and typing a few letters of the name is generally quicker. I noticed in the latest Ubuntu release they've done something similar - I couldn't find the shell anywhere in the menus, but could easily click and search 'shell' and then drag the search result to make a shortcut.

I'd like the Start Screen to be a useful thing, or what's the point? You might as well just carry on with the desktop and make your shortcuts and folders there. Which is pretty much the same as the pre-start-menu Windows 3.1.

I worry though that it'll be like the similar-looking XBox Start Screen which really fucking annoys me. You have the option to Pin some things to it - only certified apps like Lovefilm, not shortcuts to say the inbuilt movie player, but even worse they don't actually appear on the Main Start Screen, but in a really crappy horizontal list format in a submenu. It might be my XBox and my StartScreen, but I have to have it plastered with adverts of Microsoft's choosing, with anything I actually want to do other than play the game in the CD drive hidden away in another screen.


At least Lionel Messi seems to think it is amusing.

[friznit]

For someone like me who has 90% of what I need as icons on the desktop, it's bloody annoying that it keeps switching to this "full screen start menu". I too only use the actual start menu for rare, seldom used apps - the sort of app I forgot I had installed, download and install only to discover I already had it. The main irritation is MS trying to horse me into a certain way of working, when I've spent years conforming to their way of doing things, why such a radical change now?

[deject]

Can you put anything that isn't a certified Metro App on your start screen though, like a shortcut to a game you play a lot? For me, that would be its only purpose - although I'd have to be a lot more selective than I am with the 116 shortcuts I have on my desktop.

Regular shortcuts (i.e.: .lnk files that point to executables, what you normally think of as shortcuts) work totally fine on the Start Screen. What you see is the program icon and shortcut name in a tile. It works like you'd expect it to, frankly. You can click and drag to arrange them, which works far, far better than it ever did in the Start Menu. Here's my Start Screen as an example (CfB):



As you can see, it's easy to see which ones are Metro and which ones are normal desktop apps. I don't know where the Metro Internet Explorer exists, but who gives a fuck about that? Steam-created shortcuts can't be put on the Start Screen, as they're actually URL shortcuts that start with steam:// but there are workarounds for that.

For someone like me who has 90% of what I need as icons on the desktop, it's bloody annoying that it keeps switching to this "full screen start menu". I too only use the actual start menu for rare, seldom used apps - the sort of app I forgot I had installed, download and install only to discover I already had it. The main irritation is MS trying to horse me into a certain way of working, when I've spent years conforming to their way of doing things, why such a radical change now?

It's for two reasons: A) To give everyone a unified Windows 8 presentation, whether on a desktop, laptop, or tablet and B) to get developers to make Metro apps, as they could potentially be bought from the Windows Store on desktops as well. If there are ever any apps that are worthwhile even on a desktop, I might do that. I'm not holding out hope, but maybe someday that might happen. Developers can write their programs to work on Windows 8 and Windows RT right now, and I'm assuming modifying it for Windows Phone 8 is really easy to do at that point as well.

Whether this strategy is a good one or not is highly debatable for sure. Windows 8 is wholly unnecessary for desktop users right now, and probably will continue to be for the near future, but at the same time it has some good features.