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Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Pass 10% Market Share, Windows XP Falls Below 30%
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of Windows 8.1 to the world in October, Microsoft ended 2013 with two full months of availability for its latest operating system version. While Windows 8.1 is certainly growing quickly and eating into Windows 8s share, the duo has only now been able to pass 10 percent market share, while Windows 7 seems to be plowing forward unaffected. The latest market share data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 made steady progression in December 2013, gaining a combined 1.19 percentage points (from 9.30 percent to 10.49 percent). More specifically, Windows 8 gained 0.23 percentage points (from 6.66 percent to 6.89 percent), while Windows 8.1 jumped 0.96 percentage points (from 2.64 percent to 3.60 percent)."
My mother got a new laptop just before Christmas that came preloaded with Windows 8. Over Christmas, she installed the 8.1 upgrade. The amount of swearing did appear to decrease very slightly, but it still did things like pop up the People app for no obvious reason (e.g. when she was in the middle of filling in a password in a field in a web page) with no obvious way of closing it, or send her to the home screen without making it obvious how she got back to the doing-stuff screen. The only way I found to get from one of the randomly popping up Metro apps back to whatever she was doing was hit alt-F4. Hardly the most discoverable UI I've seen...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's why they fixed most of the issues in Windows 8.1. You should try it.
Would love to try it, but after Dell updates and Windows Update had a fist fight on the new christmas present laptop for mum-in-law it meant that neither update system could complete all the updates thus leaving the OS in a position that it would not offer 8.1 in the store. Coupled with no obvious way to back out of the problem (no install DVD, and install-creator fucked up 3 times) - I gave up and she got Linux. It's not all Microsoft's fault - Dell's tools simply didn't work, however, there shouldn't be competing methods that you can't obviously switch off for doing things like this.
The funny thing is she doesn't even know she has Linux. She used to use Thunderbird, Firefox and libreoffice on Windows XP and so it just looks the same for her.
The UI is a mess. It's completely alien to anyone coming from XP/W7, and the features that supposedly make it touchscreen-friendly are completely counter-productive to anyone who doesn't intend to use a touchscreen (for example people with a 27-inch screen that sits two arm-lengths away). Hotspots in particular - just moving the mouse cursor somewhere causing an action is an absolute no-no and very counter-intuitive. How is anyone supposed to know that moving the mouse cursor to the top right corner does something special and right-clicking in the lower-right corner has a completely different meaning than right-clicking anywhere else on the screen? Actions should be initiated by mouse clicks on visible UI elements, not by mouse movements to magic areas on the screen.
And the app store is a mess. I only knew the app store for Symbian and thought it was a mess since Symbian is officially dead and buried (app store full of nonsense crapware, X varitions of the same app with each author hoping you'll miss the best one and install his instead, etc), but the windows app store suffers from the exact same problems.
Oh, and it doesn't come with solitaire. And the solitaire from the app store (for which you nee an "MS account") is an overloaded piece of bloatware. Luckily, XP solitaire still runs on W8. This saved the day.
Tried going the W7 route on a few systems. Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition. Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
The thing works in W8. I've made my own drivers for my custom hardware projects. You literally just have to re-compile the damn thing for the right OS. If I had the windows driver source code I could do it myself. The team they outsource to create the Linux drivers was far less retarding than the Windows morons -- which supposedly has a larger market share... Really though? Each MFG has a different windows driver? Why? They all use a common set of chipsets, so one driver meets many separate devices -- typical windows inefficiency. Linux avoids this somewhat since they write drivers for the hardware, not the vendor. So either it's intentional ineptitude to drive W8 adoption, or just bat-shit insanity. I'd say screw dual booting this bastard, and just use Linux, running Windows in a damn VM like I always do (if needed) -- But the machine isn't for me. Had similar problems thrice now on different hardware vendor lines. If I didn't know better I'd think it wasn't a conspiracy.
Turns out inept windows developers can't even compile a USB and Ethernet driver properly. It all works fine on Linux out of the box, no special BS to do to get things working, but now I wait for the moronic devs for the windows drivers who didn't test the W7 drivers on their support site to get around to fixing it.
Netgear now hands users off to a spyware third party before they permit driver downloads at all. Never buying another Netgear product. Couldn't download the drivers without enabling all scripts. So I haven't. I think I will buy some more hardware rather than turn on scripts. And I hope Netgear dies of ass cancer in a fire.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"