I hate it. My 60 year old father and his wife, however, love it. "It's just like our phones!"
You win this round, Microsoft.
You win this round, Microsoft.
Poll: Windows 8
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I love how they spend Seven iterations of operating systems devoted to making things look more fluid. I love how the windows in 7 look. Then they throw that all away.
They OS is fine in what it's trying to do. It's great for tablets, great for entry-level PC, but for the some of us that are packing i7's and NVidia 550ti's it feels like nothing but a waste of time. Not too mention, getting rid of the start menu, alienates a lot of poeple like it did for me.
If they continue this stupid trend I might have to look into linux or something
They OS is fine in what it's trying to do. It's great for tablets, great for entry-level PC, but for the some of us that are packing i7's and NVidia 550ti's it feels like nothing but a waste of time. Not too mention, getting rid of the start menu, alienates a lot of poeple like it did for me.
If they continue this stupid trend I might have to look into linux or something
I use it with Start8 and its just fine, it is faster than 7 and has some under the hood improvements like better dual screen support and better memory management that made it worth upgrading for me. Personally I wish they went with the normal start menu approach and didn't treat actual PC users like they don't exist all of a sudden but its far better than Vista was when that came out, it was pretty much unusable.
Because, as has been noted a billion times by now, it's absolutely critical for Windows 8's target market.McKitten said:
Yes, Windows 8 does boot up faster than 7, and yes, we do live in a "NOW generation" where people think their computer is broken because it takes four seconds to load up a website. Not so much of an issue on laptops, of course, but I will scream and scream and beat people over the head with this until it finally breaks into their skulls - Windows 8 is not designed for laptops or desktops, it's for tablets. Some Microsoft nobjockey asked around to find out why people are using their tablets for internetting instead of their old XP laptops that they're refusing to move on from, and the answer was response time. I can grab my phone out of my pocket, type in my unlock code, punch something onto the Google search bar on the home page and be online in about fifteen seconds. Or I can turn on a desktop, wait for a minute while it starts up, another minute while it sits there and thinks about it, and by the time I've got where I'm going I've forgotten what I ever wanted to look for.
Slight exaggerations, of course, but the point is that speed of startup is exactly what you need - on a tablet. And Windows 8 is aimed at the tablet market first with everything else as an afterthought - it has sacrificed power user demands of customisation and efficiency for low end goals of simplistics and speed.
While I can understand what Microsoft was going for here, I'm just as certain it was something the world didn't need. This whole notion of creating one OS for every single device and platform they sold to link the whole mess together really wasn't appealing to me. Especially on a laptop it feels like someone crudely sutured the new Apps menu on top of Windows 7. All of the upgrades under the hood are meaningless if the "updated" version looks and feels like a Fischer Price toy designed by the Byzantines; Colorful, shallow, but somehow still annoyingly complicated.
Here's me staying with my 7 until something better comes along.
Here's me staying with my 7 until something better comes along.
It's even easier than that to access Control Panel, just use the keyboard shortcut windows key+i and it brings up the settings menu. This shortcut makes it easier/quicker to access shut down and other power options as well.devotedsniper said:
A list of keyboard shortcuts I found helpful:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/hyperyash/archive/2012/08/28/windows-8-shortcuts.aspx
I like Windows 8, I got it for free with Uni and adapted to the newness in minutes, the new Start Menu looks different, but is functionally exactly the same as the old one, just hit the windows key, type the thing and hit Enter. It has a fantastic boot up time and task manager and I haven't encountered any changes that make me want to switch back to 7.
I didn't use it much, but from what I used; it was okay.MorganL4 said:
I feel like it was kind of the target of a massive smear campaign.
You didn't see much advertising for it when it came out, but you saw so much negative advertising from the other side.
When 7 came out there was oh so much advertising for it, because they learned that lesson from Vista. Unfortunately they forgot how to make a usable OS.
Here's my feelings on Windows 8: Its a touchscreen OS, plain and simple. If you DON'T have a touchscreen, you should format your PC and go back to Windows 7. There's plenty of places you can get Windows 7 still... just know that new (pre-built) PCs will automatically have Windows 8 installed...which means you will be forced to format to get to a non-terribad OS.
I've tinkered with a couple of friends' laptops that came with it pre-installed; I was impressed by how fast load & boot times are, example the friend in question installed Photoshop(we use it heavily for work) after the initial start & configuration, 2nd time he ran it after closing it, loaded up & ready in 1 second flat. On an i5 2700K laptop. I shit you not. On a decent Win 7 DESKTOP this would take around 7-8 seconds at least.
On the other hand the interface is a mess considering the majority of people who have Win 8 installed don't even have a touchscreen to use it with; I had to show said friend how to access settings instead of the previous "msconfig" menu I had shown him to use before. Took me a couple of minutes of swearing before I figured out how to shut it down, heh.
Of course, it would also perform & boot faster considering it was developed(I hope) primarily for smartphones & tablets, these are considerably less powerful than a decent laptop or your average desktop.
Nothing new in the way of DirectX or gaming support to speak of; That's a deal-breaker for me, personally.
From me, a resounding "meh". I'll stick to 7.
On the other hand the interface is a mess considering the majority of people who have Win 8 installed don't even have a touchscreen to use it with; I had to show said friend how to access settings instead of the previous "msconfig" menu I had shown him to use before. Took me a couple of minutes of swearing before I figured out how to shut it down, heh.
Of course, it would also perform & boot faster considering it was developed(I hope) primarily for smartphones & tablets, these are considerably less powerful than a decent laptop or your average desktop.
Nothing new in the way of DirectX or gaming support to speak of; That's a deal-breaker for me, personally.
From me, a resounding "meh". I'll stick to 7.
Yup.itsthesheppy said:
Anyone who's bright, professional, productive, creative and decidedly non-stupid absolutely hates Windows 8, it's poopy Charms Bar, it's faulty use of input devices, hands and brains.
Anyone who used to spam everyone with viruses, worms, viagra and sexy teen shower offers absolutely loves Windows 8. So far, Microsoft seems successful, but I can't really say because I've only serviced a fistful of Windows 8 installations so far, mainly to add proper Windows functionality back in and get rid of Metro/Modern UI. I sit on licenses for Windows 8, but, so far, I only run the RC in a vbox, as that is plenty enough for me.
captcha: cor blimey
I didn't know you speak my language, captcha. How about dinner tomorrow?
Having used 8.... Bleh. More than once I've had to switch between the Control Panel and the Settings charm to do what I would consider a single task because the Control Panel is gimped and Settings is incomplete.
Two UIs competing on the same machine doesn't work.
Two UIs competing on the same machine doesn't work.
Souplex said:
Huh, because I had Vista, and upgraded to 7 the week it came out, and other than having some issues when SP1 was released, it has worked just fine for me. As far as Vista's marketing goes, I remember seeing Bill Gates going all over the place trying to promote the thing. Vista's main problem was that it was the initial switch over to 64bit for most people, which meant that a lot of the hardware they had did not work.
If you assume the target market is "idiots", sure. Wouldn't surprise me, the developers sure as hell are idiots.Kinitawowi said:
[quoute]Yes, Windows 8 does boot up faster than 7, and yes, we do live in a "NOW generation" where people think their computer is broken because it takes four seconds to load up a website.[/quote]Loading a website is not booting. Loading a website is not something where you will notice a performance difference between Win7 and Win8, ever. Hell, even if you're playing a current high-performance game, the actual difference between 7 and 8 is minimal. We're talking 10% tops, if you're very, very lucky. And actually negative percentages if you're unlucky and it's a game where the better driver support for Win7 makes Win8 actually slower.
I already mentioned the simple solution to that: put the machine in sleep mode instead of switching it off. Waking a Win7 machine up from sleep is going to take ten seconds tops. Your phone isn't doing anything different anyway, and neither is Win8. If you want to see how long your phone takes for an actual boot cycle, take out the battery, put it back in, and then time how long it takes to get online now. Win8 may shave around 30 second of the time required to boot, but most people only boot once a day anyway. Hell, in many companies, the machines aren't even switched off in the evening, users just log off, and the machine goes into sleep mode on it's own after a while.
No you don't need boot speed on a tablet. Tablets, just like phones, are rarely ever switched off, only put into hibernate or sleep mode. Comparing boot times of Win7 and Win8 has absolutely nothing to do with that. Of course, it's what M$ does because "halved boot times" sounds a hell of lot better than "wake-up cycle is 1 second faster!"
And Win8 users do it because of a little thing called post-purchase rationalization.
I'd say the main problem with Vista was that it was a horrible bloated resource-hogging mess on release. Calling Vista the beta version of 7 is somewhat lacking because really, release Vista was the beta version of post-SP Vista. (Sort of like XP, people don't remember much now, but release XP was godawful, but turned out very well with SP2 and later updates) There's a good reason why most companies wait for a couple of service packs before switching to a new Windows version...MorganL4 said:
MorganL4 is acutally right, to some extent.McKitten said:
Vista during its developtment phase was called Longhorn, which was ended prematurely (due to having spent too much time developing it) and you ended up with Vista and Win 7 is Longhorn in its full glory.
I fucking hate Windows 8, just as I used to hate Windows 7.
It's mainly because whenever Microsoft makes a new OS, it's far too advanced for the shitty computer I'll be running it on, I don't understand how to do everything, and it hasn't had enough time to be polished or gain enough compatibility with older stuff to be useful to me.
In addition, it's clunkier this time around, while you can set it to look sorta like Windows 7, it's still clear they designed it for a tablet, which is great because I would never, ever run fucking Windows on a tablet.
It's mainly because whenever Microsoft makes a new OS, it's far too advanced for the shitty computer I'll be running it on, I don't understand how to do everything, and it hasn't had enough time to be polished or gain enough compatibility with older stuff to be useful to me.
In addition, it's clunkier this time around, while you can set it to look sorta like Windows 7, it's still clear they designed it for a tablet, which is great because I would never, ever run fucking Windows on a tablet.
This is such utter bullshit. Just because people are disagreeing with you doesn't mean their opinions aren't genuine. It has nothing to do with aping Notch. People are complaining about the same basic problems because these are actual real problems that people are having! You have a different opinion? Great! Good for you. You can even pretend like yours is more valid or educated or whatever. Go right ahead! But don't for a moment assume that these people's problems and observations are any less real than yours.devotedsniper said:
And it seems to me that the Windows lovers are just as loud mouthed. They're just in the minority.
His delivery could use some work and it's ridiculous that someone with his "expertise" couldn't figure out how to close the weather application, but I agree with 99% of the points he is making. I guess we have similar backgrounds in usability theory or something, and it's absolutely true that Microsoft completely screwed up on these issues.devotedsniper said:
I have. In fact, it was the exact same thing. You won't run into this if you use an actual mouse and not a touchpad, but if you do and your mouse movement starts too close to the edge, it's considered a swipe and it will bring up an App if one is open. If you're not expecting this (and why would you? Windows doesn't indicate it in any way) you go through a bit of a discovery process to find out what has happened. I don't really think it's plausible to expect this to only take 10 minutes. It might be possible if you don't have anything better to do and tried to get back to your task ASAP, but still you run into the problem that you don't really know what caused it, so it's kind of hard to reproduce in the beginning.devotedsniper said:
As an aside, I find it totally unbelievable that this guy didn't know how to get out of the Weather app. I also didn't find closing Apps very intuitive, because there are no menus, right-click doesn't work and there's no X in the top right corner, but an OS "expert" should know to press Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, Windows-Key, Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Shift+Esc. However, I don't think this completely invalidates his point here, because the vast majority of people is not actually going to know these things.
I think the issue you're referring to here has to do with conveyance, not continuity (although there is also a continuity problem with the settings). The point is not that there are no ways to open the control panel. The point is that there is no obvious way. I guarantee you that most people will not have known about the little arrow next to the path in Explorer's address bar. Perhaps you've always extensively used it, so it comes natural to you, but this won't be the case for most people. For me it wasn't that hard to find either because it's also still in the left sidebar's navigation tree (below the fold in your screenshot), but again, I doubt most people knew that. There are many other ways of accessing the control panel, but I bet most people used the shortcut on the start menu or on the desktop, and those are gone.devotedsniper said:And as for "I couldn't find the control panel" and other continuity complaints, if he spent more than 10mins not running around like an idiot he could have found several easy ways to do things, for example;
My first screenshot (2 spliced together) show ways on how to get to control panel, you can use a tradition method (left) or you can use there new menu bar by hovering on the top right side of the screen and then clicking settings on it (right);
[http://s285.photobucket.com/user/DevotedSniper/media/metro_zps39c17c0d.png.html]
First of all, having to spend 10+ minutes on figuring something out is the very definition of bad user interface design. And how exactly do you expect people to figure this out? If you say "check the internet", that's basically admitting defeat from a UI perspective. It seems that the only alternative is to just randomly move the mouse around until this menu will pop up out of nowhere. Some people may just go into a crazed panic and do just that (fun fact: if I try to frantically move the mouse around, I don't actually hit the corners), while some may be more inclined to take a good look at the screen and try to analytically figure out what the best course of action is (which will lead them nowhere because the menu is fucking invisible).devotedsniper said:And just another thing, he says there isn't an easy way to close apps, again 10+ mins and he would have found something such as going over the left side of the screen and hovering;
[http://s285.photobucket.com/user/DevotedSniper/media/Metro2_zps46ddb581.png.html]
These new menu's aren't even slow, you go over to the side and maybe less than a second the menu pops up there not hard to miss, they even pop up briefly if you mouse over even for a second. All you have to do once its up is right click and it gives you the option to close them
But let's say you randomly stumbled upon this one corner pixel and you now have the menu. Is it really obvious that you have to right-click the application and you will get a desktop-style context menu to close it? No, it's not. It's another guess you're going to have to take.
To be honest, I think that may be Windows 8's biggest problem: they broke people's intuitions by changing a lot, made much of this stuff hidden/invisible and then proceeded to not give a good introduction. I actually think most people might have been fine with a lot of the changes if there had just been a better tutorial. The interface would still be pretty bad in 4C theory, but I think there'd have been a lot less hate, because it's true you generally only have to figure these things out once. The problem is that for a lot of people, that will take a really long time or even never happen and they just want to get shit done.
Computational resources aren't the only issue. I'm going to guess that only about 10 applications fit into that side-bar on my HD screen. Also, when I press Alt+Tab, I don't want that overview to be clogged up by 10 apps I'm not using. At some point, switching between them may become more of an issue. And I think you hit that point long before 50 apps are open. Your question "lets be honest who would have so many open at the same time" is actually quite funny, because the answer is "someone who uses Windows 8", because they discourage closing apps. Maybe you don't use many in one day, but what if you use hibernate and rarely restart? Then it's multiple days...devotedsniper said:
This is also yet another instance where people are used to something (closing applications they don't use) that has changed. Not all change is bad, but sometimes some explanation would be nice. In this case it's also exacerbated by the fact that the apps are full-screen. If they had been Windows without Close buttons, I think most people would just click on the application they do want and continue working without worrying too much. But as it is, it can seem like the only way to escape the current application is "logically" to close it.
I'm not sure he was biased. I think he may sound that way because he obviously made up his mind before he made the video, but it's hard to say about his attitude before actually trying out the OS. What I can tell you is that I went in with an open mind and that my experience was very similar. I was fucking excited about trying out the new Windows. And when I didn't initially like it, I didn't immediately install a third-party start menu and exclusively used desktop mode, because I figured it might take some time to get used to this and I wanted to learn the "way of the future" basically. I figured that there was probably some rhyme and reason to these UI changes. Now I think it was solely to integrate the mobile and desktop OS development lines and the UI was sacrificed.devotedsniper said:
I will grant you that the 30 minutes thing is extremely bad. I will also say that I don't really believe him. The video is almost longer than that and I do get the feeling that his experiences require more than 30 minutes to accrue. Furthermore, it's kind of difficult to believe that someone who explicitly mentions the importance of trying an OS out for a month would be such a collossal idiot to give up after only 30 minutes. I don't really understand why he even mentioned this, because it just about completely undermines his credibility. Perhaps he thought this was a good place for hyperbole (or it's actually true)... If it helps, I'm a software developer who shared his experiences over the course of days/weeks and none of my software developer coworkers like Windows 8 either. We're all pretty much used to it now, but you can get used to anything.
I'm only mentioning this because you also brought up that you were a computer professional and I don't want people to think that Windows 8 is universally liked by computer people. Furthermore, I don't think our experiences are the most relevant because we are very far from being average Windows-users. And I really get the vibe that most of the Windows 8 lovers just don't get that, because you've already gone far beyond what the average user is able or willing to do if your arguments are based around fixing the UI with third-party software, reverting everything back to resemble the Windows 7 UI, spending 10 minutes to find out how to do something that used to be super simple and even effectively searching the internet. Everything used that used to be easy, now takes effort to relearn and the average user finds that frustrating because they don't give a shit about your new-fangled UI technology and just want to get work done.
Grandma is going to open the mail app and get stuck when she wants to do something else. When she somehow opens a Word document (say, from an attachment), it will start in "Desktop-mode" and she won't be able to go back to her e-mail, because there is no icon in the task bar. When she finally figures out she needs to press the Windows button to get to the start screen (because the start button is gone), she's going to forget what she wanted to do because it's fullscreen so the context in which she thought of her goal is no longer visible to aid her memory. Etc. Even if she's going to figure it out eventually, it will be frustrating and she might give up before that.
Do you honestly believe that it will take the average user only two hours to get used to Windows 8? So then why are this many people still complaining? Do you think most of them haven't actually used Windows 8 for more than two hours and are just making up stories? Then you are just as bad as the person I quoted above.devotedsniper said:
The reality is that Microsoft was extremely ambitious and changed the interface a lot with Windows 8. These changes mess with the intuitions people have accrued over the years. Furthermore, Microsoft violated textbook usability theory in almost every conceivable way. Most notably, their changes aren't easily discoverable, because the corner functionality and keyboard commands are invisible. And yes, it will take time to learn to use this.
I disagree that the Metro interface works well with desktop. I'm not sure if you mean on computers that aren't tablets, or with the desktop-environment, but I disagree in both cases. For non-tablets, fullscreen apps are terrible especially if you have a HD screen (which you admitted). The fact that all menus are always at the side or corner of the screen (instead of conveniently near your mouse with a right click) is a violation of another staple of usability theory: Fitts' law (which basically says you shouldn't need to move the mouse too far). This is especially bad with a touchpad. I dislike the fact that there's no constantly visible taskbar and that you can't multitask in Metro.
As for the interaction between the desktop and Metro part of the OS, that's just an abomination. It really seems they just stapled together the two OSes and basically called it a day. The taskbar in desktop mode doesn't show Metro apps. The sidebar in Metro mode doesn't show desktop apps. For all intents and purposes, they are two different worlds (although Alt+Tab mixes it up and does show both). As a user I shouldn't need to remember if something is an app or a program. I just want to have a bunch of software open to do the things I need to do and easily switch between that. I can't drag files from an explorer window to an app or copy-paste most things. There is almost zero integration.
If you say your sister can only browse the web and she can now do that as well in Win8 as in other Windows versions, you realize it really just means she can click one button to open the browser, right? I don't really find that a huge testimony to the usability of the OS. But even if she can do more: people are different in how they deal with having to learn new stuff and some of the frustration that comes with it. People have different attituted towards computers to begin with. Some really just want to accomplish the task at hand and don't appreciate a new OS delaying that. Small children learn faster and may not yet have the bagage/intuition of years of earlier Windows. Even if your sister could learn to expertly use Windows 8 in an hour, the fact that these topics exist should tell you that clearly this isn't the average experience.devotedsniper said:
Damn that got long...
TL;DR: Windows 8's UI is a horrible mess.