Even Windows 8 Users Prefer Windows 7 436
judgecorp writes "Windows 8 is not proving an instant hit amongst the early adopters who have got their hands on it. More than half of them prefer Windows 7, according to a survey by a Windows 8 forum. Skeptics cited fears of price and compatibility issues. Meanwhile, Intel is busily applying damage limitation to criticism by CEO Paul Otellini. Apparently he did say Windows 8 wasn't ready — but added that it was still a good idea to get it out before the holiday season."
Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple: Xmas is only 3 months away.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's _not_ buggy.
it's the feature set which isn't ready.
Windows 7 Will Be Around for A While (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Well this time there's merit to it (Score:5, Insightful)
I find 8's new Metro UI to be genuinely worse for desktops. I gave it a chance, just like I did 7's new taskbar, but it has failed to win me over. It is not a good way for working with a desktop. My desktop is not a tablet, I do not use a touch screen. So a start menu replacer (Start 8 is my choice) gets installed.
Also I'm sorry but it is ugly. It is a step back looks wise. 7 looks pretty slick. All the desktop composition is put to good use making it look nifty. In 8, it is just ugly. The desktop composition is still there underneath, and is in fact even improved, but it is used to render a very ugly UI. Worse still, the UI changes make it more difficult to navigate, it is hard to tell if something is a window for a separate program, or just a window under the current one. They all look the same.
It's sad because technically, 8 is quite competent. It is very fast. Cakewalk found basically across the board improvements in Sonar (http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/) and this is just their release software, not a special 8 build. So it looks like under the hood, 8 is a good OS. However its UI is truly a step back and the UI is the first thing most people notice.
It isn't a horrible OS, but it is worse than it should be, all on account of them wanting to try and use their desktop and server OS to push tablet sales.
Re:This Poll is Dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Hanging back might, on the contrary, send a message to Microsoft to fix things up and release an OS people actually want to use.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 8 isn't so much buggy (at least not on microsofts end), it's just badly designed. Those are two different problems. Deliberately choosing something to behave stupidly isn't a bug.
Also, both of your examples (SEL4 and TeX) have no relationship to a full product. One is a single piece of the product that, as an isolated microkernel might be bug free, but is not a full OS, and the other is a typsetting specification. The core kernel in Windows 8 could be bug free or close thereto (I'll show some sympathy for compatibility with new hardware, but it would still be a bug).
Windows 8 is badly designed. There will inevitably be some bugs related to the new UI, UEFI, new hardware, etc. But those are easily at the level of satisfactory. The problem is that it's just hugely inconsistent in how it behaves. It still runs 7 or 8 year old directx 8 code fine. But it can't figure out if it's 'metro' or a desktop, which one it should be in when, or how to just produce a list of installed software that I can semi easily navigate. No, metro is not easy to navigate, it tries, and it makes sense for 'apps' but it fails for serious software that has both applications and documentation.
Gee, maybe if they had listened to their users... (Score:5, Insightful)
And just extended the Windows 7 shell so it had a "Tablet" mode with some sort of auto-detection, they might have kept the desktop people happy AND the tablet crowd happy - just like the actual users suggested on the Windows forums, again and again and again....
Microsoft, missing the obvious since the 80s.
Next up? Microsoft ignores 3d printing until Linux dominates the field!
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
it's _not_ buggy.
Then it's the first OS ever released by anyone that wasn't.
Re:And the other half... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.
It depends on how buggy the product is, and how big you think that the first mover(or at least not-quite-as-tardy mover) advantage will be for the product in question.
Given that (relatively) seamless online patch delivery is now an expectation, shipping a product in the 'rough but usable' stage can work just fine, no matter how much the purists loath it(and, unfortunately for the purists, that now seems to be the mark of a good launch, with 'overtly broken' being a distinct option).
The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.
It would seem totally sensible if they were to rush Windows RT/Metro out the door so as to get Wintablets on the shelves by Christmas(it's not as though iOS or Android started as terribly finished products, and 'ship now, then iterate' seems to have done them minimal serious harm). What seems weird is tying that to a push for Win8 on normal desktops. Rushing out a product where you currently don't have one isn't ideal; but that's how the world goes. Rushing out an unfinished product with negative buzz in the face of a (now reasonably polished) product that your customers mostly like? That's weird.
And this isn't even like the 'XP 4 lyfe contrarians hate Vista/7 because it breaks their shitty software' problem that they had last time. IT departments have, mostly, worked it out and switched or are switching, and Win8 isn't, if you ignore the 'we shipped an entire separate shell because, uh, fuck you, that's why' part, nearly as much of an architectural break. It's just unpolished and offers nothing interesting to current Win7 users. With XP, at least, while the legacy investment was massive, XP legitimately sucked a lot and needed to go; it just wasn't going to be pretty getting there.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true, though it is imposable to prove a piece of code has no bugs there it is possible to verify that a subset of bugs do not exist within the code.
You failed programming didn't you. This type of programming is NOT impossible, but it is extremely time intensive. NASA's systems are example where there is a mathematical proof behind every piece of logic (hardware or software) to ensure things work as intended (read: no bugs). Why else would they still run on 40 yr old equipment? You don't run tests to verify it works as intended because you can easily miss tests that would reveal bugs, but if you create code that has a mathematical proof to it, you effectively already tested ALL possible test cases.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Windows 8 hopefully makes you love tiles so much that you buy WinPhone8, and sign up for the subscription version of Office.
Correction... (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 8 isn't buggy... it's unfinished and unpolished. What is there works well.
The desktop and metro side by side experiences make you feel like Microsoft put a lot of effort into getting the system running fast, smooth, and seamless, and then forgot to do anything with the desktop, or bring over any of the options. I posted about this yesterday, but suffice to say, Windows 8 is really great in terms of technical prowess, but the UI is unfinished, unpolished, and jarring, to say the least. And this is coming from somebody who actually *likes* Windows.
Re:This Poll is Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
This might be blasphemy, but IMO windows 7 is far more polished than *any* flavour of Linux.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft know Windows 8 will be a flop, but it's deliberate. They've finally realized that the second iteration (ME, Vista) has been a failure with corporate uptake especially low. This gives them space to experiment because it can't have much affect on low sales anyway.
By the time Windows 9 rolls around, they can keep what people liked about 8 and ditch the crap. This was the same transition in Vista to Windows 7. Suddenly Windows 9 will be the most amazing thing ever. If you're used to being kicked in the balls, being punched in the face isn't so bad.
Re:Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can think of more than one time I have taken advantage of a bug and turned it into a feature. Always a bit dangerous in the event that they 'fix' the bug. I would imagine this why so much software inexplicably breaks with service packs (especially back in the nt4 through early xp days).
Re:Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems to depend a lot on hardware. I have one laptop (my own) which is a 4 year old HP and the touch screen that works fine on vista doesn't behave at all on 8. But the work laptop everything seems to behave as expected.
My lingering suspicion this is a manufacturer problem not a microsoft problem. Though I could be proven wrong.
Re:This Poll is Dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to sneak into your house and change the way all the doors swing. It's change and that's a good thing.
You'll be really keen to see how I changed the toilet lid hinge!
Re:Makes sense? (Score:4, Insightful)
Vista was a disaster
Mainly because drivers weren't updated correctly to the new architecture.
Re:This Poll is Dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
This might be blasphemy, but IMO windows 7 is far more polished than *any* flavour of Linux.
If by "polished" you mean "pretty" and "shiny" I agree, W7 is much prettier and shinier than Linux. If, however, you mean stable, feature-rich and bug-free, no way. What takes three clicks in KDE takes ten in W7. W7 is far less useable and far less stable, although it's head and shoulders above previous OSes in stability.
I currently have three computers, one with kubuntu, one with WXP and one with W7. We'll ignore the WXP machine.
Maintenance -- Windows still lags badly. In W7 you get the update notification, and you have to download and install the updates (unless you use autoupdate, which I stopped after an XP update replaced a perfectly good network driver with a 100% nonfunctional one). Then you have to reboot the computer.
Kubuntu, one click and you're done. No reboots, no muss, no fuss.
When the Windows computer reboots you have to enter your password (even on a single-user machine in your house that you live alone in) and reopen all the apps and docs that were open before you booted. In Linux, if the power goes out, you can have set the OS to enter your password for you on bootup. The machine restarts, and your password is entered and all your apps and docs that were open before are open again. That, to my mind, is polish, and W7 lacks it.
If you add new hardware to your W7 box, it will detect it on startup and maybe (but not usually) find the right driver. More often you have to insert an install disk and run an installer.
Then, of course, you have to reboot after a bunch of UACs.
Linux? Start it up and the new hardware just works. No installation, no muss, no fuss, no reboots. It just works. That's MY idea of "polished" and by that criteria, Linux is far more polished. But if your criteria for "polished" is "pretty" than yes, W7 is prettier than any Linux distro. But far less functional and with far fewer features. I have yet to find a single feature in W7 that kubuntu lacks.