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What To Expect With Windows 9
snydeq writes: Two weeks before the its official unveiling, this article provides a roundup of what to expect and the open questions around Windows 9, given Build 9834 leaks and confirmations springing up all over the Web. The desktop's Start Menu, Metro apps running in resizable windows on the desktop, virtual desktops, Notification Center, and Storage Sense, are among the presumed features in store for Windows 9. Chief among the open questions are the fates of Internet Explorer, Cortana, and the Metro Start Screen. Changes to Windows 9 will provide an inkling of where Nadella will lead Microsoft in the years ahead. What's your litmus test on Windows 9?
Interesting fact but this isn't new to Windows either. Win2k and maybe even earlier had native multidesktop support. They just didn't ship a default front end for it but they've had a free tool available for years that let you set it up.
Its a sysinternals tool, called "Desktops". Apparently it works on XP, as well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc817881.aspx
It is very limited, however. You cannot drag windows between virtual screens.
I hear ya! I have an HP Envy M7 laptop that has a touchscreen and I never use the touchscreen for that reason. To make it worse, the screen (which is a very good LED HD display) has a high gloss panel that shows the prints extremely well. Why in the world HP chose to put a glossy screen as a touchscreen is beyond me. Touchscreens should have a matte finish to try and hide the print marks as much as possible.
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yea I always found it funny that *nix systems had as many desktops as I wanted, but nothing worth running on them, windows had all the software I wanted to run, but constantly ran out of space (not counting desktops.exe)
Modern UI apps use the WinRT libraries to draw hardware-accelerated GUIs, using a dialect of the XAML language already present in the WPF and Silverlight libs. Standard desktop apps use the old win32 windowing system so they miss that hardware-acceleration -- unless they are made in .NET with WPF or Silverlight, in which case they will draw using Direct3D9 even in XP.
The problem with Window 8.x (and Office 2013 / VS 2012 etc) is how they are breaking established UI conventions for no good reason and with very little payoff.
The Windows 8 Start screen, for example, takes the focus in a big way. The Start screen in Server 2012 is even worse; if I right-click to run a program as administrator, the context menu appears at the bottom of the screen. Talk about breaking context!
With Office, not only do we have the screen-stealing ribbon (not completely bad, but still...), all the tab titles are uppercase. The Microsoft style guide says this is a no-no; yet the Office team do it. The VS2012 menus are the same.
I'll agree that Win 8.x has probably the best Windows kernel ever. The UI is a turn off.
I'm hoping that Windows 9 brings back some vestige of Windows 7 UI whilst keeping the best bits of Win 8. Heck; if that's impossibly I'll gladly settle for a Window 98 UI. At least it was consistent, and didn't obscure the screen with useless tat.
If you're stuck with 8.1, here's a quick fix. Open a file browser, and click the Control Panel icon on the ribbon bar.
In Control Panel, click Taskbar and Navigation.
In the dialog, click on the second tab, the one labeled Navigation. Here you can permanently make the desktop, and not the stupid start full-screen Metro UI menu, your default. Just click on "When I sign in or close all apps on a screen, go to the desktop instead of Start." You can also disable the charms, etc.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
No. It is because people are treating a computer as an appliance. If it works out of the box they keep using it. Also, people won't go out of their way to replace a working product especially one they paid money for.
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I can give you a few...
SSDs under WinXP gradually degrade in performance, because XP doesn't support SSD TRIM. On Win7, this is not an issue, so you don't have to wipe / reset the SSD / restore the operating system once a year.
Graphics performance of video drivers - I gained 20-30% performance switching from XP 32bit to Win7 64bit on the same machine, maybe even doubled performance. This was back when I multi-boxed EVE Online - I went from struggling to run 3 windows (at least one would only get 15-20 FPS), to being able to have 5-6 open (all with 40+ FPS).
The 32bit limit of 3-something GB of RAM is a bit limiting when Firefox is chewing up 500-800MB, Thunderbird is chewing up another few hundred MB, and a handful of other background tasks chewing up 40-50MB each. Moving to Win7 meant I could put in 8GB of RAM on the box, and make use of it.
Multi-tasking performance is just better in Win7 when compared to XP. Less hiccups / pauses / other strange slowdowns.
The window preview as you hover over the tasks in the task bar is addictive. Being able to see thumbnails of each application window makes it easier to pick which window to bring forward (another bonus for multi-taskers).
A bit more resilient then XP to being infected - not perfect, but a definite step forward.
We run Linux on the servers, but I'm quite happy running either OS X or Win7 on the desktops. Both get the job done well enough and stay out of the way.
(Running Win7 on a 2007-era Thinkpad T series, 8GB RAM, pair of SSDs, and only a dual-core Intel CPU.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
a) my phone is not a computer.
b) you do not need a Google account to use android. You only need it to use Google services. The phone runs just fine without Google services.
On the flip side you can't even receive windows patches without a Microsoft account on windows 8.
"In the end, yeah, Windows, yuck, but deal-able, and it's really disingenuous to pretend that because they have dumb downed the initial install package to Windows levels, that the actual ongoing user experience of Linux is nearly that plug and play for most folks, so to speak."
I don't disagree, and the average Jane won't be able to maintain Linux (although I wonder if the average Jane can maintain Windows, either, if something goes wrong).
But consider this situation: I set up a Linux machine for my wife to use (she likes to click on, well, everything, and I figured it would be safer). I do updates every so often. I support it for her. But it's not like it needs much support.
She doesn't even know it's not Windows. She has no idea what she's running and doesn't care, as long as she can browse, do email and Facebook, etc.
More and more iphone like
Either you don't use an iPhone, you don't use OSX, or you're intentionally lying. Other than the general change in icons/theme, what makes it more like iOS in this version? Are you one of those people that still manually starts Launchpad and then bitches about it looking like iOS because you started an app designed to add some very specific iOS functionality to OSX ... an App that is in no way the default and takes manual lunching every time you want to use it ...
lack of innovation
... One feature: Continuity. Done. I just beat innovation in every other OS for the last couple of years as far as desktop users are concerned. What have other OSes been doing thats so innovative? Linux certainly doesn't have ANYTHING impressive to show off for the last several years unless you want to be really geeky, which 99.9% of the Linux desktop users don't care about, let alone the rest of the world. Most would argue Windows is going downhill in the UI aspect, with the pending save from Windows 9. So what is this innovative OS that you seem to be comparing to? OpenBSD? What?
bugs not getting fixed.
Now you've just proved you're being intentionally obtuse. I know I know, Windows doesn't get any bug fixes either. And yet somehow we see stories on slashdot about bug fixes causing some people problems. Just because your obscure bug doesn't get fixed doesn't make such a generalized statement fair.
You're one of those people who just bitches to bitch, not because you have something useful to contribute.
I have some complaints about 10.10 myself, but most of them revolve around aesthetic preferences, not actual usability. This whole 'everything should be flat squares with single colors and MAYBE some basic gradients at a 45 degree angle' crap that everyone jumped on the bandwagon of its just retarded.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I get Linux, I do. I have used it on spare PC's before. But I just don't have time to use it on my main machines, because while I'd love that much time to tinker around and do all kinds of clever things with it to hone it to be the ultimate OS for me
IOW, you are saying that Linux is only a toy; that you for your condescending attitude.
For your information, I use Linux exclusively because I don't have time to tinker around with Windows. There are things that Windows is good for - apparently it is a good gaming platform, but then I don't play much - but there are so many things where Windows is simply not worth the hassle. And of course, in Windows you have to go out of your way to use open source - every time I've had to install Windows, it seems to come springloaded with incentives to buy applications for things you get for free in Linux. And the reason to use Linux is even stronger in a professional setting - unless you are working exclusively with non-technical administration, Linux (or any UNIX, really) is a must. Just one example: installing databases like Oracle or DB2 on a network of UNIX servers. The installers invariably require X - which is not the slightest problem for Linux; you just connect from your X based desktop with 'ssh -X' and you're set. In Windows you have to first realise that there is such a thing as X, then you have to figure out how to get it to work in Windows, etc. In effect, if you run Windows, you are faced with an uphill struggle.
I haven't used Windows at all for the last 15 years, give or take, except for when friends and family run into problems - again. Every time I have to fix things, it turns out that large parts of the interface have changed, the control panel calls things something new and puts the old things in new boxes etc; it doesn't help make it easier. In UNIX these don't change much over time, and they are pretty much the same across different platforms too. I suppose Windows is OK if all you do is inside the walled garden of MS Office.