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Is Win8 that bad?

Started by April 07, 2014 05:26 PM
74 comments, last by 21st Century Moose 10 years, 6 months ago

I think the problem with Windows 8 is anything Metro. WIndows 8 is actually pretty good. It starts up faster than 7, has some small fry interface improvements (like the file copy dialog, some more task manager data), etc. But it defaults to wanting to start everything metro, and metro is really made for single touch screen laptops/tablets. Which on a desktop, is just irritating. Once you get rid of all the default associations, you don't need to install classic start or whatever, it's mostly unnecessary once you get used to just opening up the metro start menu and typing what you want, it's usually pretty decent at finding it, and even in 7 I mostly just pin the things I want to the taskbar.

Also, it has some good shortcuts once you learn them. win+x, win+i, etc.

Though being able to run metro apps in a window sounds interesting, though I think MS is going to do that as a standard feature. I'd probably be more interested if there was a single metro app that I'd actually want to use.

It's been a while since I worked with Windows 8 (I only used it on the job some time last year), but from what I recall it's really tried to shoehorn touch UI for devices into a desktop OS. The Metro style is great on a phone or tablet. On a PC the poor integration with the desktop makes me want to scream. Because it's two different paradigms you need to keep switching gears. Both mentally, and because Metro and regular apps don't play nice together. I seem to recall that if you had multiple monitors, loading a Metro app on one got rid of the desktop on the other monitor. Very frustrating.

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I'm still running Win7 because I am perfectly happy with it and don't see a reason to update at the moment. And even though Microsoft have done their best to alleviate all the bad points, the whole stuff still leaves a sour aftertaste.

The market leader fucking up their most important product and alienating a large part of their user base, the short sighted "everything metro" approach, the total non understanding of critics at first...

It just feels like something at this company is seriously messed up. I will stick out until Windows 9 comes around.

Windows Server 2012 must be a very different experience from Windows 8. Because everything seems to "just work" on WS2012.

If you're wondering, we use it for development.

Beginner in Game Development?  Read here. And read here.

 

I seem to recall that if you had multiple monitors, loading a Metro app on one got rid of the desktop on the other monitor. Very frustrating.


Maybe in beta but I don't recall it in the final release at all; in fact when viewing pdfs I can drag the view app from one monitor to the other and keep using the desktop as normal.

In fact in Win8.1 I can have desktop full on one monitor, the other split with Reader and the desktop (50/50, or 25/75 & 75/25).

And in a moment of madness I wondered what else I could do and I've now got calculator taking up some space, desktop in the middle and Reader to the right on my left monitor while IE is on my right monitor as the desktop.
Heck, turns out if I feel so inclined I can have calculator, calendar and Reader open on one monitor while the other is in desktop.

(Technically this is 3 monitors as I have a TV hooked up to the third output on the far left; [3rd][2nd][1st] being my config).

Win 8, so far has been flawless for me and I am a desktop user with no touch screen capabilities. The UI has been perfect and much welcomed.

I wont bother going into the psychology of how opinions are formed, though that is rare in this day and age, and more so how / why they are 'relayed' at such volume. If you want to know about Win 8, or anything for that matter, what I would suggest is trying it but make sure you isolate yourself from opinions. Try this for a week then form an opinion and you may be shocked to find that your opinions will be unique and aren't about the UI ohmy.png. Alternatively you can copy paste criticism which people have been doing nicely for years, but don't expect any elaboration a mere link / quote is all one needs to be insightful anymore.

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The way I use Win7 and Win8 are identical (all apps I use pinned to the taskbar), so there is no difference for me. I stopped using the start menu for anything other than typing in app names in the search box when I discovered how well that worked in Vista.

The best thing about removing the Win7 start menu is it removes the possibility to shutdown your computer accidentally if you quick-searched and accidentally hit {right-arrow, enter} due to fat fingers instead of {down-arrow, enter}.

It's as bad as when Ubuntu decided to use Unity.

Well, personally I don't like OSes that don't allow me to customize certain UI elements. Unity (at least back to Ubuntu 10.10) didn't let you disable the launcherbar. In 12.04, you still need some linux-hackery to disable the Super+Number shortcuts from launching apps on the launcherbar. Windows 8 is kinda like that to me. There's yet another sidebar with things that I don't normally use. Shutdown button is somehow hidden under Settings. Although I am okay with the Start screen, it didn't let me resize/organize tiles.

I use it every day on my home PC and I've never had a single issue with it. Here is the jist, most people don't like change. That's it.

I think for an end user, people can, and have got used to windows 8. It has it's problems, and we will wait and see how many of them Microsoft address.

For a developer it's another matter. Some of the design decisions at the core of windows 8 annoyed the hell out of me. Really nice technologies just being dropped for example.

It seems that windows 8 was born with an expectation that people want a unified user interface across multiple platforms, and desktop users would just tow the line.

That of course was a false premise, or you could say the solution they came up with failed abysmally to achieve those ends. Which one you pick is a personal preference.

For me I will treat windows 8 like I treated windows vista. I'll ignore it till it goes away.

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