Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8.1 RTM Trickling Out, With Start Menu and Boot-to-Desktop
poofmeisterp writes "It's about time. Windows 8.1 will be released to end users in October, and RTM is being released now: 'Windows 8.1, codenamed "Blue," is introducing a number of changes designed to make the new operating system more palatable to current Windows users. Windows 8.1 is adding a Start Button, a boot-straight-to-desktop option; the ability to unpin all Metro apps; built-in tutorials; an improved Windows Store and a host of other consumer- and business-focused features. Microsoft launched its one and only Windows 8.1 consumer preview test build in late June.'"
Start working on Windows 9, you won't redeem this one so late in the game.
Bottom line? Don't make me learn new interface stuff. I hate it. If it takes a non-zero amount of time for me to think about it, it's not a value, add; it's a value-subtract.
FYI, this goes for ALL software AND programming languages. Adding a few things incrementally to use new features is fine. Changing interfaces or behaviors wholesale isn't.
This should fall into the "common sense" category - something the software industry isn't exactly famous for being able to perceive or implement.
Disclaimer: I write software for a living. Please don't hate me.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Please rewrite headline, it is misleading. There is a world of difference between the Start "Menu" and the Start "Button". 8.1 forces you back into metro through the Start Button and doesn't resolve people issues in the slightest. Metro is still forced on you and it is still wholly unsuitable to the enterprise. While Microsoft at least listened to people about boot to desktop, they showed continued contempt for their customer base by refusing to replace the Start Menu.
Fix the headline and stop propagating Microsoft's spin, this is a band-aid on sucking chest wound and nothing more.
Once you get used to it, the new Start menu is ok. You don't spend much time in there anyway.
The real pain in the ass are the stupid full screen Metro apps. Yeah, they just pop up with brightly colored interface that is optimized for touch. They completely disrupt your workflow, there is no visible Exit-button, and they do that for one screen only (if you have multimonitor system, you will totally hate this).
This happens more every now and then and I have to go through some trouble to replace them with better OSS alternatives. If you are watching a video, default app might pop up, and maybe nag about codec or not being up to date - when you really just want to see the video now, with clear controls. PDF reader pops up with no clear navigation and ofcourse fullscreen, and these ofcourse always go to the same monitor, even if you would like to read the PDF on screen #2, while coding. Shit like this happens also with images and music, and the interface is just .. horrible.
I don't even care anymore, if they fixed this. I've been downloading OSS replacements for just about every program and I am curretly ok with my Windows. But instead of fixing the Start menu, which is only a minor nuisance, they could make WINDOWED and USABLE default apps.
They should also shoot the guy, who designed all their new software (Office, Visual Studio..) USING ONLY CAPS FOR TITLES, patch them back to normal and make my eyes hurt less.
> If you know, I don't sit on my ass and whine like a spoiled brat who can't take any initiative.
You don't get it. (1) Yes I can fix it. But why should I buy something that I need to beat into submission, when what I have works fine? (2) Yes I can fix it, but the 10,000+ users in my company, most of whom have other jobs than being a computer geek, would struggle with it, and I'd lose my job if I foisted that off on them.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The old menu allows quick access to the majority of system functions. It did this with a minimum of clicks, mouse movement and extraneous information.
If I am working, I don't want to see weather information, stock quotes and baseball scores. Sure, you can remove those tiles from the start screen, but then that defeats the purpose of having that information available when I am not working.
I actually might enjoy the start screen when I am not working, but that goes back to the core malfunction of the start screen: it is mixing core functional areas:
(1) Program/System/Settings Launcher
(2) Information Provider
Why is so freaking difficult for the so-called User Interface experts at Microsoft to understand that this is a colossal fuck up to jam these two key functional areas onto the Start Screen?
Whatever products Microsoft craps out, there are always a handful of people somewhere who against all reason like it. There were a handful of people who liked Microsoft Bob. A company I used to work for actually started rolling out Windows ME, based on user trials, although they realized their mistake and pulled it back a month later. I have a friend who still has a laptop running Vista, and she's fine with it, although whenever something goes wrong or needs to change, (which is annoyingly often) she always brings it to me.
So yes, I'm sure there are one or two people out there who like the retro-8bit-arcade look-and-feel that is the Metro interface. Maybe it reminds them of when they were playing Space Invaders on the cocktail table machine while sipping their wine spritzers and listening to a bad cover of "Shadow Dancing". People like a lot of things, for a lot of reasons. But to have a successful business, you need a large enough number of people liking the product to meet investor expectations. Doesn't seem likely.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Patch XP past its EOL, and charge $30/yr for the patch subscriptions. I'll buy it.
What I will NEVER do is use a locked-down phone platform as my primary device.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'd like you to replace your computer with this laptop. The case is an ugly mix of blocky colors and they keyboard is a 5x4 array of keys the size of business cards, but there's a pair of left right buttons that lets you scroll through the list of keys you're used to having. Trust me... it's a much better way of accessing the keys on the keyboard than the previous way which put them all in front of you at once.
If you aren't happy with it not working quite the way your old one worked, you can always go find a new keyboard and install it to make it work the way you want it to.
And if you're complain about paying for product that doesn't do what you want it to do and is demonstrably worse than the one it replaced until you spend the time and effort to fix the problems we designed into it, it's purely because you're sitting on your ass and whining about it like a spoiled brat who can't take any initiative, RIGHT?
Name one OS that is just right out of the box and needs no tweaks. Linux always needs fiddling with (that's why you love it) and MacOS's two-finger scroll scrolls the wrong way by default.
At least with Windows 8 you can use AD to roll out suitable settings for everyone in one hit. I'm sure you can do the same thing with Linux/MacOS somehow too.
This is more than tweaks. You don't understand what "lack of control, conveyance, continuity, and context" means to people who are not computer geeks, don't have a job even remotely close to the computer industry, and only need computers to do certain business related tasks. When you're not a computer geek or Microsoft employee, you don't necessarily touch computers every day, and trying to remember which hot corner to touch or where your application is, or how to get out of a full screen Metro app, is not something they're going to remember or even want to try to figure out. This can't be fixed by using A/D to roll out settings.
However, there is a solution. And that is, to stick with Windows 7 until Microsoft abandons this crap. (Actually, we're still largely on XP, but are starting to roll out 7 on new hardware.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This actually isn't redundant. Windows 2.0 introduced overlapping windows as a part of the OS and those have been present in every version up until Windows 8 and Metro. Microsoft has quite literally brought back a limitation of Windows 1.0 and is new calling it a feature.
> Vista wasn't particularly bad. It mostly had serious bugs on launch and poor driver support. But, the system itself mainly suffered from the way the UAC worked.
Like they say, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. By the time the initial problems were fixed, we had already decided not to deploy it. I suspect the same thing will be true of Windows 8 -- even if they fix it now, the damage has already been done.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
But how is having a windows account different from your iTunes or Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Slashdot, or countless other social services
Because it's my personal computer that I'm logging into!
It is a big deal if you have to replace a core component of an OS with a third party solution to make it usable.
Windows 7 was mediocre? Sure, its not as good as Linux, but its by far the best OS Microsoft has ever made
I think what he means is that 7 was only an incremental improvement over XP. I upgraded to 7 for the superior memory management (and went to 64 bit at the same time so I could install more than 4 gigs) but in day to day usage, it's not much different from XP, and some of the differences (like going full screen if your pointer gets near the top, and the pointless rearrangement of the control panel) are annoying.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Guess where I use Windows? At work, on an administratively locked down machine.
Compared to Microsoft's other OSes it's the best they've done.
Agreed, Win7 is pretty darned good, in fact its probably the first version that is better than Windows 2000.
I suspect it will be hard for Windows 8 to dislodge win 7 from the work place, even with the 8.1 changes. Microsoft has this habit of one horrible version followed by one reasonably good version.
Unfortunately, unlike the Linux world where you can totally step away from a botched UI, windows pretty much locks you into the struggle till a totally new version comes out, or you get so fed up you nuke it and install Linux, (which gets you fired from most companies).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Mod this up to five guys as actually a pretty good idea and then link it every time somebody complains about a linux, mac, gimp or whatever interface being unintuitive (eg. yes it sucks, but not like win8).
Take note interface designers of the future - if the interface is so broken that putting stickers on the screen to tell people how to use it is a good idea it's time to improve it or put someone else in charge of setting it up.