Windows 8 Release Date: October 26th

Several readers sent word that Microsoft has selected a release date for Windows 8: October 26th. Steven Sinofsky made the announcement today at the company's annual sales meeting. The new version of the operating system will be sent to manufacturers next month, giving them plenty of time to prepare for general availability.

Comments

Ubuntu 12.10

[pak9rabid]

Just in time for Ubuntu 12.10, eh?

Re:Ubuntu 12.10

[Grishnakh]

KDE is good, I use it myself. And yes, the interface is indeed a no-brainer for (pre-Metro) Windows users.

The problem with KDE is that none of the leading distros feature it in a leading role. Linux is utterly dominated by Ubuntu and Fedora; act like a Windows-only person who knows nothing about Linux and google for "linux" and you'll probably find all kinds of stuff about Ubuntu, with Fedora a distant #2. There are distros that feature KDE, such as Chakra, Linux Mint KDE edition, Kubuntu, and of course SUSE, but someone new to Linux isn't going to see any of those; they'll be lucky if they stumble across SUSE somehow, amid all the Ubuntu stuff everywhere, but the others are hopeless. So, to someone new to Linux, all they're going to see is Unity, and maybe Gnome3, and that's it, and they're going to equate one or both of those with "desktop Linux". They're about as likely to learn about KDE at this point as they are LXDE or Enlightenment.

Heck, I work in a job doing embedded Linux and Android development, and my fellow Linux/Android developers all use Unity, and complain about it, but they use it because "that's what Ubuntu uses" and they want to stick with "the standard". I'm the lone weirdo for using Linux Mint KDE. If professional software engineers working with low-level Linux aren't using KDE, then not many regular users are going to either, and newbies certainly aren't going to. If they even hear about it at all, they'll just consider it "one of those odd things that a small number of highly-skilled people use, and not worth the bother for little ol' me", just like Enlightenment or WindowMaker.

I won't be buying...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running the Windows 8 Release Preview since it was available. I'm not that impressed. I've been in IT for almost 15 years and have tried and used every OS out there. This one feels like a letdown. As savvy as I am with tech, perhaps I'm jaded now that I've "seen it all". The last time I experienced a "wow factor" with an OS was back in 2000 with BeOS. Since then, only BSD and Linux have kept me somewhat excited about tech.

The notion that everyone is enamored or wants an interface resembling a tablet/phone device is nonsense, despite recent successes with the iPad and Android devices. I have always preferred a smallish laptop to anything else and likely always will if they keep the form factor.

Getting back on track... the Metro interface is... awkward. It feels like a suit that doesn't quite fit right no matter how good it looks.

I'm waiting for another BeOS myself. The current paradigm in all it's flavors is boring and leaves little to the imagination. BeOS didn't get any traction because it was ahead of its time. Written from scratch. Beautiful, but alas no "supply train" behind it and no one willing to un-entrench themselselves from the Wintel/Mac world. I can only hope...

Re:YASIR

[hairyfeet]

That is one of the few nice things about MSFT, as you can just skip the crap releases completely and hope they come to their senses for the next one, or the one after that.

I actually skipped XP for the most part after finding the RTM version crap so i went from Win2K Pro (great OS that was, light and solid) to XP X64 (another great OS, made for an awesome workstation) and then skipped Vista on my main system for Windows 7 which is quite nice, a little more bloat than XP but the features make up for it and its got a hell of a lot better memory management than Vista.

So just skip win 8, hell skip win 9 too if they don't fire that damned Apple wannabe Ballmer and his pet Sinofsky, win 7 is supported until 2020 so either they'll get their collective heads out of their asses before then or they'll bomb hard enough nobody will care for using Windows anymore anyway, no problem. It isn't like Win 7 is gonna suddenly have all the programs dry up, hell most programs still have XP support and that thing is old as dirt so I'm sure you'll still be able to run anything you want (well except for maybe IE, but who gives a crap about IE anymore?) for years to come and can avoid Win 8 like the tweeting twitting FB shitting social mess of an OS it is.