Slashdot Mirror
Windows 8.1 Passes Windows Vista In Market Share
An anonymous reader writes "With the release of Windows 8.1 to the world in October, January was the third full month of availability for Microsoft's latest operating system version, which was just enough time for it to pass Windows Vista in market share. While Windows 8.1 is certainly growing steadily and eating into Windows 8s share, the duo only managed to end 2013 with 10 percent market share, barely impacting Windows 7."
Aren't windows 8 and 8.1 the same thing?
did you forget to take your meds?
Honestly, if you ignore the Metro interface, Windows 7 and 8 are the same thing. Except 8 performs better. Get rid of the tablet interface and everyone would want to move to 8.
You're being too kind on the Slashdot beta by just calling it "annoying". It's much, much worse than that. It's pure and total shit.
Every single aspect of it is flawed in one way or another. It wastes space. The font sizing is disproportionate. The text color and background color do not contrast enough. The layout is confusing. The story images are way too big and pointless. The discussion threads are far more difficult to read. It's harder to post comments. It feels a lot slower than the existing site.
The Slashdot beta is a failed software project in every single sense. The only sensible thing for Slashdot to do is cancel the project, throw away the code, apologize profusely to us for subjecting us to it randomly for at least a month now, and then never again do something as utterly stupid.
Of course, I don't think that'll happen. I suspect we'll see the beta site replace the existing site at some point soon, and it'll be a Digg v4-style disaster. The few remaining valuable users will flee, and Slashdot will wither more than it already has these past few years. It will be forever remembered as yet another casualty of a hipster-inspired "Web 2.0" design shitfest gone wrong, up there with Digg, GNOME 3 and Windows 8.
I have no love for Win 8's UI. But Classic Shell to the rescue. My current system has the best of both worlds. Win 7 UI, Win 8 OS under the hood (which does have some nice improvements).
We found an easier solution. Press F9 on boot, choose system recovery. After about 40 minutes, we have Windows 7 UI, and Windows 7 OS under the hood. Don't have to mess around with the Windows Marketplace, we don't have to worry about third party tools to make the OS usable, ain't no "hot corners" or "charms bars" and it doesn't go full screen at random frakking times. The Windows 8 Pro box goes back on the shelf until some future update where perhaps Microsoft gets their collective head out of their collective ass.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You're leaving out the fact that the start screen is full screen. This has been discussed many, many times.
This isn't a case of people just not wanting change - it's a case of trying to force a square peg (tablet/phone UI) in a round hole (desktop environment).
No, users don't want a start screen that is full screen and completely obscures the other windows that are loaded. On a desktop it's distracting - especially in a multi-monitor setup.
Can't say I'm too bothered with the live tiles on a desktop machine
There are few enough live tiles and they can be deleted by hand. What you cannot delete by hand[*] is the Start Screen entries that are created by software that you install:
> dir "C:\Users\tftp\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" /s /s
[...]
Total Files Listed:
52 File(s) 77,633 bytes
77 Dir(s) 395,226,988,544 bytes free
> dir "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"
[...]
Total Files Listed:
485 File(s) 743,447 bytes
401 Dir(s) 395,092,660,224 bytes free
How long will it take you to scroll horizontally through 537 tiles that all look alike?
[*] You can delete the tiles from the start screen; however you have to do it one by one, and instead of using the DEL button you need to use the right-click and then select from menu at the bottom. It can take quite a while before you figure out what needs to be deleted and then delete it. Worse still, some of that may be still necessary, but there is no backup. It's insane for millions of people to be forced to do such things in this day.
Windows <8 has this problem taken care of by using hierarchical start menus. MSVC may drop 50 shortcuts into the menu when you install it, but you will never see them until you need one... and if you use it often you can copy it into the next tier of access (Pin to Start, Pin to toolbar, copy to desktop, assign a hot key.) The idea of the Start Screen comes from mobile world where one application has at most one launcher. This is not how it works on a PC - a large application may have tens of sub-components that are all independent applications, and you may need to run them from time to time.
So at this rate, Windows 8 and its derivatives will have less than 20% market share even after two full years since the release of Windows 8. That's a terrible statistic for Microsoft. Granted, another issue is that people who just use web browser and office productivity apps really don't have any reasons to upgrade if they already have an Intel Core 2 based system or better.
The "noise about nothing" is that Win8 is a solution in desperate search for a problem that turned into a problem in desperate search for a solution.
Win8 changed something that was useful, and now you tell us about "solutions" that allow us to emulate what we had in the first place, i.e. what was useful to us and what we wanted. We should not have to reach for solutions for problems we should not have.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.