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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?
Deal with it.
Unballmering Windows
Seriously, give me transparency, name it whatever you want, just give it to me. I don't want your flat color bs.
Haters gonna hate, but I think it looks awesome. Love my two touch screen ultrabooks; they are truly awesome. Hate the Surface RT (sucks balls), and love my two Windows 8.1 desktops (home and work). A better working start menu is most definitely welcome for lots of people I know. It sucks that I have to post anonymously here because there are so many fan girl haterz.
then it may be worth taking a serious look at. After all, MS seems to get every other major version right.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Speed and stability. All the drama about new features, missing features, start menus and other preferences are all just nonsense. Just make it fast and stable.
How my users react to it. I demoed 8 to my users, and got a resounding "HELL NO", due entirely to the start screen. They weren't buying it, and I don't blame them.
Given the leaks so far, I expect my users will be onboard with the new version ( possibly with some grumbling about the "look" ). But I won't really know until I get it in front of them for some feedback.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Rather than creeping you out by peering over your shoulder waiting for you too blunder so he can offer unsolicited advice instead He just sits there and serenades you with the Beatles song "Number Nine" until ask him a question
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Windows 9 will be interesting, and will break all kinds of things like every other upgrade does.
But Server 2012 is unusable. R2 improved it, but they clearly hate their customers.
1. Why does a Server install have boxes called "this PC" to click on. Just bring back "My Briefcase" and get it over with you lazy pieces of crap.
2. Why does it have a snazzy new front end that then puts back up screens we had in Windows 3.1?
3. I will cut the bitch that decided to use URLs for error messages, but not have them as active links so you could follow them.
I wasted hours of my life trying to make .Net3.5 install on 2012 because a vendor swore they wouldn't support R2, but had to have 3.5. I finally just did R2 and told them it was that or no .Net. If Microsoft didn't want me to install .Net 3.5, they shouldn't have made it the top feature in the list to install. Hide it. Make it separate. Something. But top in the list, incapable of installing saying it can't find media no matter what you do with copying files locally, powershell/DISM/whatever? Bite me you no-testing-code-shipping pieces of crap!
But I'm not bitter.
My mom says I'm cool.
One word answer: "Disappointment"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Anyone that does freelance IT work knows that this means $$$. Hell I'm still counting the money from WinXP's death. Yehaa!
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I've used workspaces extensively since discovering Linux in the early 2000's. I find it rather interesting Microsoft is /finally/ introducing native, proper, workspaces.
Any time I try to explain it to someone who has never used them, they always ask me "Why would I use/want that?" and then they always jump on the multi-monitor mantra and say "Why not just get X number of screens?"
I personally have 8 workspaces configured. I use them all. I have my pager configured in 2 rows of 4 grid. My window manager is configured to 'skip' to the corresponding workspace by dragging the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen (with a configurable amount of resistance), so its as close to physical screens as it can get without the cost of buying 8 screens, video cards, plus power costs.
I've argued this in the past on Slashdot here, but I honestly don't see the appeal of physical screens. Maybe Windows people will finally 'get it' when Win9 comes out.
Given Windows 8 just clear-texts your login over WiFi/Ethernet (WPA2 Enterprise or 802.1x systems that do not behave like an Active Directory), I think Windows 9 may simply publish all your logins on an open port 80.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Must have: Useable start menu, (a button to dump us into the "start screen" was just plain insulting) a useable desktop, and the ability to not run any metro (or whatever it's called) apps whatsoever.
Important but not a deal killer: Put all the control panel functions back in the control panel. You can keep the charms bar for tablet compatibility, but I'd want some way to turn it off on a desktop. In fact, I would like a way to turn off all hot corners, hot sides, and swiping gestures while on a KVM machine. Registry changes to do this would be fine, as I would intend to do it once and never revert back.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I evaluate new software primarily based on two areas.
1) What do I gain with the new software? Currently running Windows 7, what do I get that helps make my life more productive with Windows 9? Thusfar, I see nothing. From Windows 8 to 9, yeah, I can see the improvement, but so far it is simply "improved" to the point of reverting back to what 7 already has.
2) What do I lose with the new software? From the current leaks, Windows 9 is just as ugly as Windows 8 desktop mode. The Win8/9 UI looks like Windows 3.1. They've switched back to centering title bar text from the previous decade+ of left-align title bar text. They've taken the UI from the clean and modern Aero Glass and turned it into flat colors just like Windows 3.1. The OS as a whole is simply less visually appealing.
So, the question still remains: WHY SWITCH!?
My Windows 7 laptop does everything I need for Windowsy stuff, so I won't be replacing or upgrading it unless I win the lottery.
Sadly, my 10+ year old 3.8GHz Pentium-pre-Core2 box is finally dying, so I'm in the midst of shifting my development and personal stuff over to the laptop. I've used Windows for years as a developer so it's not *too* painful, but I'm going to miss Linux. Linux just *works* without getting in my way; I can't say the same for Windows, even on trivial issues as to which widgets get auto-focused when you open them up (who is the brilliant idiot who came up with the idea that the file browser should focus on that damned library panel instead of the list of files?)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Oh yes, let's bring back twenty year old themes! That's moving forward!
Other points:
* Start up times is not useful when most users don't shut down save for Windows Updates
* I type stuff at the search bar that I need to see what's on the screen to type out completely. I need it to just be a small area (like Spotlight on OS X)
* Hyper-V doesn't handle what I need it to do. So primitive compared to it's competitors.
* I liked Areo glass effects. For the same reason I use Compiz on Linux - I want my desktop to look good.
I'd comment on battery life, but I haven't run any benchmarks myself to compare with.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Metro Apps aren't particularly good or useful. They haven't seen mass usage by the Market or Developers, why keep it around on the desktop? It's a design clearly meant for touch interfaces. The design insist on hiding things in a submenu of a hidden side-menu - all that's visibly left is padding.
There might have been a reason for it a couple of years ago, when the world thought all laptops were going to have a touch screen but that's clearly not going to happen. The use cases are thin - and they're just plain uncomfortable to use. What the world really needed was better trackpads.
MS should remove Metro from the desktop and license WP8.1 for tablets.
Likely because he is a Linux user. Linux doesn't have much in the way of malware so you can be a complete idiot and install whatever you want and run whatever you like as root and still not get infected. However when the same idiot uses Windows then due to the popularity of the platform they end up installing and running malware.
The intelligent approach is to be careful about what you install and run making sure it is from trusted sources no matter what operating system and not just rely on the fact that you aren't a large target.
The biggest problem in terms of security is the user allowing malware to run and Linux is no better than Windows in that regard, we are often told how Linux users are "smarter" however if that were the case they wouldn't have so much difficulty with Windows.
You put your grubby mits on my nice clean monitor and you're pulling back a bloody stump.
Are you fucking people blind? Smears and fingerprints drive me nuts!
Yet another year of windows 7 on the desktop to be precise.
Microsoft tried it already with 8. REALLY really tried it with 8, removing 7 from everywhere it only could.
It was a disaster. PC sales crashed. As we discovered, forcing 8 on people did result in marginal increase of sales of 8, and a massive reduction of sales in PCs.
Finally someone important at microsoft realised that in winning the battle of 8's adoption over 7, they were losing the war of keeping PCs being the primary customer computing platform, and 7 was quickly pushed back into OEM chain. I think that this particular lesson was painful enough for microsoft not to even think of trying it again for at least a few years.
Something is wrong with either your machine or whatever is controlling the switching. I have never, ever had anything like what you've mentioned and my system has been running for months on end as well. You sir, most likely have non-Windows related problems.
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)
Changing a theme for the sake of changing a theme isn't moving forward, it's just remodeling the kitchen. I happen to like my older theme because it's become invisible to me now. That's what I want in an OS UI. Why change for the sake of? It's like comparing car styles. Meh.
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.
What I find strange is my MATLAB simulation run about 15% faster in Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 on the same machine. Now Windows 8.1 runs at almost the exact same speed as MATLAB does under Linux. I don't know about all the other stuff MS did to windows but they did manager to make it faster and unlike Linux I get longer battery life under windows and it still hibernates correctly.
On linux after I installed the intel thermald and p-state stuff according to the directions I found from intel the linux side did get MUCH better battery life than I had been getting before but still worse than windows.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
You do realize desktop Linux distros have been unbelievably easy to install (or even run from a Live CD) for the last decade or so don't you? Nobody has been "forced" into using Windows just because it happened to ship as the default for a very long time.
That's like telling someone that "a space shuttle is really easy to use, someone on the ground actually presses the "launch" button for you!"
Sure, automated initial installs have been all wrapped up in little wizard-like packages. That's not the point, it's the ongoing installation and management of packages and versions and such that you have to keep up on.
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 - I just don't have that kind of time to spend on it consistently. You have to "keep up" with Linux as a hobby way too much for folks that just need to get tasks done on a PC when they sit at it (especially with tablets in the picture, as for a lot of us we spend a lot less time tied to larger machines since we do a lot of consumption that way now).
It's one of those things that I'm glad it's there, I wish I had time - and maybe someday, but since I don't install crap on my PC and I don't go to sketchy websites (well aside from this one LOL), and I take a modicum of security precautions, I do OK with Windows. I never have to ask if I can run something on my machine, why I buy a product that can connect to a PC via USB or network (camera, Blu-ray, etc.) I never have to wonder if the driver software will work for me or if I'll have to spend hours hoping to get it working with whatever I can scrounge up, I never have to search out solutions around how to do what I want, etc.
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.
Really? Fewer driver problems on Linux? Seriously? I mean WHAT?
What you are talking about is the difference between those that see computers as appliances and those that take an interest in the workings of that appliance. And with today's distros being geared to making the install as easy as possible (for whatever level of literacy you have) it is making Linux easier for those that see it as an appliance.
To put this into the proper slashdot car analogy it is the difference between the guy who always puts new gear and tricks out their cars and their wives who get into it, toss the kids in the back seat and goes. That wife really doesn't appreciate the work done by her husband until something goes wrong.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Just like every linux article is 'infested' with windows apologists..and apple fags too. Welcome to the tech crowd. We're a heterogeneous bunch.
Holy crap. First I've heard of Cortana. Googled it.. Is that for real??? It looks like Seven of Nine got fucked by Bob and this is the offspring. I can already see the protests from middle America. "Electronic boobies from Satan are sending us to Hell". How could anybody think that's a good idea?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You know there are several alternatives that do not involve Microsoft, right?
I want an OS that:
1) Doesn't attempt to hide the workings of my computer from me -- in particular, don't hide the way that paths and directories really work. (As a bonus: remove the spaces from system directories, dammit, because I get real tired of escaping them when I access my NTFS partition from a real OS.)
2) When something goes wrong tell me what the fuck it was. "The internet connection has limited connectivity" doesn't tell me a damn thing. "DHCP timeout" tells me something. Include both messages, by all means, for the benefit of Grandma -- but Grandma likely can't fix her internet connection on her own anyway.
3) Don't be patronizing. Copying .mp3's to a phone shouldn't give a "Your phone might not be able to play this file, copy anyway?" message, and there are a thousand things like that in Windows.
4) Get rid of file locking, or at least allow an override. I can decide whether a file is sufficiently "in use" that I shouldn't delete it.
5) Don't attempt to push other MS products (cloud services, "stores", and the like) on me, and don't keep spewing Windows Media Player etc. icons around after I delete them once.
I find it funny that MS is now the only major OS vendor that isn't running on a UNIX base. Seems like an uphill struggle as the world passes them by. They should do an Apple and virtualise the old Windows code in a classic environment and switch to a UNIX base. Or just stop trying to make operating systems altogether and focus on software.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
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?
I presume you installed a 10+ year old Linux version so that it would be a fair comparison with XP?
Hello,
Driver support, which was mature under XP because of its longevity, took a hit when Microsoft released new models for Vista and was late in delivering its DDK. On the other hand, driver support in Windows 7 and up have been pretty mature. In the case of Windows 8 to 8.1, my employer was able to get away with little to minimal updates of our software, which uses filter drivers, for compatibility with the new version of the operating system. The level of compatibility had previously been rare in Windows for us.
As far as hardware goes, the difference between specifications for Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 has been pretty small. A 1 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM and some disk space were the basic minimum requirements for each, if memory serves. Don't expect it to run great on that kind of systems for all uses, though, but it will run.
And, yes, a new version of Windows usually means new features, both in terms of hardware and software. So, it's not a bad idea to try and time your hardware upgrade cycles to coincide with Windows releases if you want the latest shiny bits, which, as you noted, third-party devs are developing for.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
Fair enough, that's a valid point. But I believe you're the first person I've encountered who seems to love, Love, LOVE Win 8. I know people who tolerate it. I know people who have stripped it off their system and replaced it with 7. I know nobody who feels about it the way you evidently do, though. That's why I thought your comment sounded a lot like a PR blurb from MSoft.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I'd mod you up if I could.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I can't figure out if I'm just too old and grumpy or if operating systems are just desperately uninspired.
It's probably a mix of both.
Of course operating systems have matured. Today they do practically everything we can think about. There are no obvious features left to add. So development, especially from an end user's perspective, seems slow.
On the other hand, I don't agree that there is no development like you seem to imply. I'm using OS X, so that's the only OS I can really talk about. Some of the things we got the last few years:
- Spotlight.
A fast global search can really change some workflows. Gone are the days when I had to trawl through nested folders to find that file from a week ago. Now I can search for name or content or even the date I did use it last.
- Time Machine
Switching machines? Just restore from the last Time Machine backup and everything is like it was before.
That new version of application X sucks? Accidentally clobbered some file? No worries. Restore from Time Machine backup.
- iCloud Sync
OK, so not everyone wants that. But it is nice if data is kept in sync between devices automatically.
Of course there is much more, many of it not directly visible. (There's a reason MacBooks have great battery live. And it's not just better hardware.)
So, I agree with you up to a point. OS development is not as exciting as it used to be. But it didn't stop either. Interesting things still happen.