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Microsoft Releases Windows 8
Orome1 writes "Microsoft today announced the global availability of Windows 8. Beginning Friday, Oct. 26, consumers and businesses worldwide will be able to experience all that Windows 8 has to offer, including a new user interface and a wide range of applications with the grand opening of the Windows Store. Launching at the same time is a new member of the Windows family — Windows RT — designed for ARM-based tablets and available pre-installed on new devices. In addition to Microsoft Office 2013, Windows RT is designed exclusively for apps in the new Windows Store. In addition to the range of new Windows-based devices available, consumers can also upgrade their existing PCs. Through the end of January, consumers currently running PCs with Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 are qualified to download an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for an estimated retail price of US$39.99." Also at Slash Cloud, where Nick Kolakowski writes: "If the operating system and its associated hardware capture the attention (and dollars) of mobile-device users, Microsoft will have successfully expanded the Windows brand to a new and rapidly growing market segment. But if it fails, and Apple and Google continue to rule the mobility space, then Microsoft is left with few alternatives."
It is a better OS from a technical standpoint. It is faster (Cakewalk found it sped up Sonar X1 in all heavy load cases) and some of the tools like the task manager are much better. However it isn't major.
On the down side its UI is ugly, and the metro stuff is crap. You don't have to use the metro stuff. Start 8 or Classic Shell will get you a real start menu and you can then ignore the tablet crap.
I'm fine with it, I use it at work since Windows support is my profession and I need to be familiar with it and it works well. However it is not a major update. Internally it calls itself Windows NT 6.2, 7 being NT 6.1. It is improved some, uglied up some, and has tablet bits it tries to shove down your throat.
In general I would say don't worry about it. If you've a reason to get it or a system comes with it, it'll work fine. You'll want to get a start menu replacer but it'll be fine after that. However I wouldn't rush out and upgrade. 7 works fine and 8 really does have an ugly UI.
This should explain it well enough: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx
4) Improved out-of-the-box multi-monitor support (it's been likened with Ultramon, but without requiring third-party software). /. has been clamoring for MS to add for ages.
5) Client HyperV. If you do anything with virtualization on your PC, or have even thought you might like to, this is a solid reason to look at Win8. There simply aren't any better virtualization solutions available for client Windows versions right now, certainly not at anything close to the same proce.
6) If you use multiple computers (most of us, probably, just like I imagne most use multiple monitors when posible), the ability to use Lindows Live for single-sign-on and profile roaming is excellent.
7) The Windows Store, which holds both "Metro-style" and desktop apps (at least on the x86 version of Win8). You may choose to avoid it for its tablet-friendly UI, or for the fact that it's basically a DRM system (like other commercial and integrated "app stores"), but you may find the ease of software discovery, installation, and updating to be useful.
8) Built-in antivirus. Just like a certain vocal portion of
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
My assessment of the dev preview is pretty bad. I was doing some consulting for a company, and we had installed windows 8 on a PC there. Me, the IT admin, and another guy who was fairly tech-literate couldn't figure it out due to the unintuititve UI that ends up getting in the way. They have plenty of good ideas that are just poorly implemented.
You're probably already aware of Client Hyper-V, but since you didn't mention it, I'll drop a mention here; not only isn Win8 lighter weight than previous versions (making it a good choice for a host OS), it also includes a seriously excellent hypervisor-based virtualization system.
As for *nix tools, there's things like Cygwin, and even Interix (full POSIX environment running on top of the NT kernel, but not through win32). Sadly, Interix appears to be deprecated; it's still possible to use it in Win8 but it may be gone in Win9. I've been using Interix bash as my primary command line on Windows since 2006. It also offers ssh (both client and server), incidentally (although you have to install them it a Microsoft-funded repository rather than having it in the base install).
As for "advanced command parser", have you looked at Powershell? Included in all recent versions of Windows, and in some ways much more powerful than *nix shells. Commands consume and produce, and pipes pass, objects. These objects are sometimes just strings (especially if you pipe in text), but are often more complex data which are simply presented in text form when the end of the pipe is reached. PS also supports aliases (and comes pre-configured with a bunch of *nix-like ones), command completion, scripting, and so on. Additionally, because it's built on top of .NET, you can actually create .NET objects and invoke methods on them in your scripts, which is handy if you're familiar with the framework. It's basically .NETscript.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
If you think Hyper-V is the same as VirtualBox you know nothing of virtualization. Here's a start.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Downgrade rights are an end-user right, documented in the Software License Terms that customers accept upon first running Windows software. Note that end user downgrade rights will be available through the sales life cycle of Windows and Windows Server operating systems, which is up to two years after the launch date of a new version. ... Windows 8 Pro includes downgrade rights to: Windows 7 Professional, Windows Vista Business
So if you buy a Windows 8 PC, you can downgrade it to Windows 7 until 2014.
Further, Windows 7 support continues until 2015, with extended support until 2020 (or 10 years after launch, for those counting).
Windows 7 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.