30 Days Is Too Long: Animated Rant About Windows 8

First time accepted submitter Funksaw writes "Back in 2007, I wrote three articles on Ubuntu 6, Mac OS X 10.4, and Windows Vista, which were all featured on Slashdot. Now, with the release of Windows 8, I took a different tactic and produced an animated video. Those expecting me to bust out the performance tests and in-depth use of the OS are going to be disappointed. While that was my intention coming into the project, I couldn't even use Windows 8 long enough to get to the in-depth technical tests. In my opinion, Windows 8 is so horribly broken that it should be recalled."

Comments

What else runs Windows applications?

[tepples]

Tens of millions of licenses have been sold because there's no choice. One buys a PC with an operating system to view and edit files, and a lot of industries have standardized on file formats exclusive to applications that are in turn exclusive to Windows. Windows 8 is the only thing that sort of reliably runs these applications that Microsoft still sells for bundling with a new PC. If Windows 7 were still widely available, tens of millions of Windows 7 licenses would be sold instead. If application publishers made a point of supporting Wine, at least millions (if not tens of millions) of Xubuntu licenses would be sold instead.

Dunno...

[roc97007]

There's inevitably going to be fans for any OS, even windows ME.

Since we have a Windows 7 slate that I really wanted to upgrade (read: make usable, as 7 is pants on a slate) daughter and I went to an Office Despot that had Win8 running on a big touch screen monitor, and I tried to get it to do stuff. Never touched Win8 before, but had worked on most previous Windows operating systems, (starting with 3.1, 3.51, 95, 98 SE, NT 4, 2000, ME (shudder), XP (still using it) and 7, plus experience with server 2000 and 2008) how hard could it be?

I massaged the screen for about ten minutes and couldn't get it to do anything useful. Oh, you can touch a tile and something happens, but it's easy to get into a mode where it's not at all obvious how to get out. GUIs, especially touch GUIs, should have visual cues on how to navigate, or at very least do things in consistent ways.

After awhile, daughter pushed me aside, as she has experience with Windows 7, Android and iOS on touchscreen, she wanted to take a crack at it. She figured out how to get out from where I had gotten stuck, but not much else after another ten minutes of pawing at the thing. Like 7, there seems to be little cabalistic gestures one has to learn to perform certain actions in 8, and they don't seem to be similar to what you had to do in 7. We finally gave up.

Mind you, I'm sure it's possible to learn Windows 8. The point is, it's not at all obvious how to use it.