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Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing'
CWmike writes "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday, Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."
Let me get one thing straight. I do not like Ribbon... I really really hate Ribbon. Before Ribbon on my windows system I would use MS Office and on my linux system Open (libre) Office, These days I run Libre on both and make damn sure that anything I program, does not contain ribbons. Too many damn clicks to get to what you want. That's not what automation is about.
For me it's quite simple Windows 8 interface doesn't make me more productive.
Unless you use a tablet; where its just fine. Or count the fact its genuinely snappier than Windows 7... both of which are positives for productivity.
Looking at my physical desktop, I don't have fancy clocks, tons of post-its, shinny gadgets... No, just a couple of books, some papers. I don't want distractions. I want to be focused on my work.
And when you launch 'desktop mode' its pretty much windows 7; but faster, and even fewer distractions. Sounds good to me.
Really, I've been running windows 8 on one box for a couple months now. My biggest complaints are that there isn't a button on the task bar for the start menu -- its 'hot corners' and the shutdown command is a bit klutzier to get to. The former is an easy tweak to fix if i care enough; disable hotcorners, add a 'button'. The latter even easier.
The new start menu is really no less efficient to use than the old one on a desktop. Its a bit more distracting that it goes full screen, but thats about it, and as a result I'm motivated to pin more apps so i use it pretty rarely.
I expect we'll see some refinements over the next little bit, but really, on a desktop I never use the metro tile stuff, so its just not relevant. I cleaned up my start menu so there are no pinned tiles for shit i don't care about, same as i've always removed irrelevant default crap from my start menu. Overall the win8 desktop experience is fine with minimal tweaks.
As a tablet/ultrabook OS its a big improvement over win7.
WinRT (ARM)-- I'm not impressed or interested in it whatsoever, and hope it gets axed.
I was going to write I actually have come to like it but my fingers borked at it and I realised it's not true. I've been using it for weeks now at work and have come to peace with the UI. I have learned how to work my way around its nuisances without circumventing it entirely (I made a concious effort to work within the Windows 8 framework rather than just avoid it altogether as I figured I need to at least know how to use it).
In short, I hate not having a start menu and I hate note being able to just start typing an application name to find it and run it (I know I can press windows+f in Win 8 but it's no where near as easy).
However, I will say this. Windows 8 and more importantly Server 8 is fucking brilliant -under the hood-. The ability to natively team NICs, ReFS, the *enormous* improvement that is SMB3, better clustering, better management of machines from one location, storage spaces, the improvements in Hyper-V etc leave me stunned - compared to Server 2008 it's like comparing Windows 2000 and Windows 98. The underlying tech is miles in front of the old architecture. It's just such a pity they put this bloody interface on at the same time and made it compulsory because a lot of people are going to skip on Win8 and never notice how damn good the underneath tech actually is, this time around.
Like they did with Vista? Oh wait, nobody bought it so they had to go back to the drawing board and give the people what they wanted with Windows 7.
This is actually an advantage that proprietary has over FOSS, if you don't like Win 8? Don't buy it and if enough agree with you and don't buy it they'll have to go back to the drawing board or watch the company go down the shitter. Don't like Gnome Shell or Unity? Tough fucking shit, they don't owe you a damned thing and don't give a shit WHAT you think. its their personal playtoy and if you don't like it you can go piss off.
So if you hate Win 8 join us that aren't gonna buy it, or machines running it, we'll see Win 7 rushed out by the OEMs who'll just drop a Win 8 DVD nobody will use in the bottom of the box to give Ballmer some bullshit numbers and everything will go back to normal. Hopefully the board gets tired of Bill's little buddy and punts his ass like a 30 yard field return and the next guy actually listens to the customers, that's how it works. All you can do in FOSS is play the distro shuffle and hope the part you have a problem with isn't a core component everyone uses because again, they don't owe you a damned thing, its free, like it or lump it.
Personally I'll stick with the OS where I can skip 2 major releases (XP and Vista) and still be supported with updates until I decide they put out a product I liked with Win 7. You could go straight from 2K to 7 if you wanted and been under patch support the entire time, you just can't do that in FOSS land unless you have the money for a major support contract.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'll go one better.
The company I work for is starting our mass rollout of Windows 7, upgrading from Windows XP. The team I work on has fully automated this process to the point where a site technical coordinator goes to a web page, clicks the assets he wants to migrate, selects "roles" for the machines (what application package sets they get for the user's responsibilities) and then clicks a button to execute. The XP machine then does the following:
1. Check to see if there's enough free disk space to complete the migration
2. Download a RAMdisk image of WinPE to boot from
3. Swap out the bootloader for the Windows 7 version, which allows booting from the RAMdisk image
4. Update the firmware on the device (BIOS / uEFI)
5. Reboot to the RAMdisk image
6. RAMdisk image detects if the device has an encrypted file system (laptop) and retrieves the unlock key from the encryption keystore server, and unlocks the filesystem
7. Create a virtual hard drive file from the network that contains everything this system needs to remotely reimage, minus applications.
8. Data is migrated out of user profiles to a temp folder
9. Old OS and applications are moved to a backup folder
10. New OS image of Win7 SP1 is dropped on the disk around the migration store and backup folder, from the VHD created before
11. Drivers specific to the device are injected into the new Win7 install, from the VHD created before
12. Reboot back to the hard disk
13. Drivers are found and installed
14. Applets and agents necessary for hardware (Laptop power management, Lenovo "craplets" necessary for hardware features, etc.) are installed, from the VHD created before
15. Antivirus is installed and updated
16. Encryption agent is reinstalled if it's a laptop (no mandate for desktops to be encrypted at this point)
17. Reboot
18. User data is migrated forward from the migration store temp folder
19. Applications are delivered by our software deployment infrastructure
20. User is presented with "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to login".
21. When they log in, they find all their stuff is still there, and all their applications are freshly installed. Total time on hardware that isn't an antique? 40 minutes.
All kicked off from a web page. On an 11 year old Windows XP. Don't knock what you don't know, or haven't spent time to learn.
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