Windows 10 RTM In 6 Weeks

Billly Gates writes: Ars Technica has the scoop on a new build with less flat icons and a confirmation of a mid July release date. While Microsoft is in a hurry to fix the damage done by the Windows 8 versions of its operating system, the next question is, is ready for prime time? On Neowin there's a list of problems already mentioned by MS and its users with this latest release, including Wi-Fi and sound not working without a reboot, and users complaining about tiles and apps not working in the new start menu.

Comments

Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[nickweller]

Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[BronsCon]

Yes.

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[BronsCon]

I answered the questions as asked. It's not the fault of the Linux community that Autodesk does not offer a native version.

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[epyT-R]

Well, I think autocad was used as an example and not as a complete list. The point being that most people expect to be able to run whatever software they need on their machines. Since most of their time is spent interfacing with proprietary software stacks at work/school and for hobby/entertainment use, linux is of limited utility. Sure, linux is fine for web browsing, but so is everything else. There's actually quite a bit of useful software out there in OSS land, but the unfortunate reality is that software is not usually the industry standard. It's certainly possible to use linux as a desktop for personal use and be productive, in fact, much more possible than it was a few years ago, but it does not replace systems that do run industry standard software like autocad/adobe/etc. Most users don't care what os they run, they just want access to the software they need to run.

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[epyT-R]

They're not going to do that. Their goal is to turn out complete projects ASAP and get paid. Certified acad drafters command high premiums so companies who employ them are willing to spend thousands on workstations. No one is interested in crippling that for politics.

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[BronsCon]

How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? Have more applications. How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? ***ERROR: Infinite loop detected.

By that logic, nothing new should ever be successful.

Re:Linux Mint 13 (Maya) MATE desktop demo

[Altrag]

You do realize that "enough AutoCAD users" just doesn't exist? Most users, especially those who are using the software for their work, don't really give a rats ass if they're using a "FOSS" system. Most of them probably don't even know what that acronym stands for never mind what it means.

Most users only care if the software works, and works with as little effort as possible. End of story. Just like most people don't really pay attention to the cleanliness of your kitchen as long as the food tastes good and doesn't make them sick.

Of course we have government food inspectors to ensure that your kitchen is clean and that your employees wash their hands and whatever. Something similar might be interesting for software development but would be a lot more challenging as there's not really any globally correct best practices like there is with food prep (and of course there's the political aspect of empowering government over business practices, which never goes over well in the US even when its demonstrably beneficial never mind a situation like this where its somewhat questionable.)

There's no confirmation of the release date.

[Anonymous Coward]

This synopsis is in error. The article linked does NOT confirm the release date, only still says it's a rumor.

Re:There's no confirmation of the release date.

[Frescard]

The confirmation is on the linked-to Microsoft blog: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

Windows Me Part 2

[Great Big Bird]

If this prerelease set goes "to market" within the next six months, it will be Windows Me all over again. A performance worst than Windows 8, they might just go down a little more.

MS Paint

[nmb3000]

I hadn't seen them laid out so clearly before, but now that I have, all I can say about the original Windows 10 icons (middle row) is oh my god.

Seriously, what happened here? When did we go completely off the rails and let pea-brained designers start throwing this kind of bullshit around, calling it "modern" and "clean". No shit it's clean -- that recycle bin probably took all of 30 seconds to draw with the Line tool. No, faster probably, since they were just pulled out of the Windows 1.0 archives.

I look at those three rows of icons and truly cannot fathom why someone would ever choose (especially) the second or third rows. They're low contrast, simpleton drivel that doesn't even do a good job of representing the objects they're trying to depict. Whoever created them should be fired, along with the manager that approved them.

In fact, Microsoft would be well-served by firing the whole damned "UX" group and replacing this new-age cargo-cult mentality of user interface design with a scientific approach of usability studies and research. You know, that thing they used to do. Let Google and Apple waste their time with that hipster crap if they want to -- normal people and business just want to get shit done and you don't get off on the right foot to do that by making all your icons indistinguishable pale pastel blobs.

Re:MS Paint

[ArmoredDragon]

Not exactly. Microsoft's "theme" now is flat UI. A lot of people think that means it just looks clean and simple (like what Google has been doing since...forever,) which is wrong. Flat meaning there's no sense of depth. So no shadows, no overlapping, no gradients, no sense of 3d whatsoever. The only differentiation between UI objects is a solid color change.

Having a flat UI is easy to scale. But IMO it is very uninspired.

GP says it's a hipster design that Google and Apple have been doing. Apple yes, Google no. Apple did copy Microsoft, however that was after Microsoft really badly learned from (but did not copy) Google. Microsoft dropped the skeumorphs Google doesn't use flat UI's. For example, open up chrome, and notice a gradient over the button bar, notice how the tab corners overlap, etc.

Google's new Material Design specifically includes both overlapping objects and shadows. Simple in appearance? Yes. Flat? No. But it still scales to different resolutions just as easily as a flat UI.

Re:MS Paint

[Sevalecan]

Perhaps normal people and businesses in general just want to get shit done... But it seems like the hipsters always end up running the show. Somehow companies like Microsoft see that as innovation. After all, trying to enforce Metro on 8 was pretty much a hipster move. Not very good for usability or familiarity in my experience. Then masses of people trying to get shit done had to inform the hipsters at Microsoft that this was a really dumb idea. It's different so it must be good!!!!!!!

Honestly I don't care much about the icons though. Metro was much more annoying. My problem is I don't really know of a good way to change to a different theme for windows. I prefer the colors and contrast of Windows 7 and the previous versions. Instead, Windows 10 TP comes default with funky colors. I don't want a purple desktop. I'm not a 12-year old girl. Reminds me of the Windows XP Fisher Price interface, except that was less annoying, AND you could change it back to windows classic. I'm aware you can change colors, but I've not had good success finding a clean set of colors that have good contrast without hurting the eyes. I don't want to have to spend time coming up with a theme that doesn't look stupid. And maybe I don't care for flat-mode.

Re:MS Paint

[Bite The Pillow]

Yes, exactly. They want the same UI everywhere, from a phone to a 4K display. Which is stupid, but exactly their stated plan.

If it seems uninspired to you well, that was not part of the plan.

Adding shadows and other indicators becomes tricky when scaling, given different potential backgrounds and contexts, so they went to the lowest common denominator. Obviously Google and Microsoft chose different paths, but yes exactly planning for a unified interfac is what caused Microsoft to fuck things up starting with Windows 8 and aalmost anything 2012 or later.

Re:MS Paint

[Tailhook]

art blogs

Uh huh.

Art blogs.

Pretty much do exactly the opposite of anything advocated on art blogs and you're going the right direction.

Google ... started

The latest Android has icons are so abstract they are effectively meaningless. The clock looks like a pie chart; they can't even suffer the hour tick marks that might assist in conveying "clock." The "text" app is a huge left double quote — so out-of-context that it has no association with the concept of "communication." The Google Drive icon is a three color triangle that bears zero resemblance to any sort of storage concept. Basically you must read the label of every icon and slowly try to associate these pictorial abstractions to their actual purpose. In reality users are just memorizing the locations of these meaningless icons, and if you were to rearrange their locations they'd be totally lost.

It sucks. It's stupid. And I'm 100% certain there is a cabal of "art" fucks behind it.

Think of Stop signs

No. Don't think of Stop signs. Stop signs aren't trying to convey an association to anything. You can't buy and eat a box of "stops." Many, many road signs use useful pictographs to convey things; a vehicle skidding due to ice; immigrants hand-in-hand running across a road, the silhouette of a bounding buck.... GUI icons need to convey association; storage, trash, communication, people, news, dates and times, etc.

Trying to boil all these things down to abstract vector art is idiot.

Re:MS Paint

[nmb3000]

What you describe is skuemorphic design which objects mimic real world objects which is the old way of doing things.

Yes and no, I think. I don't think icons generally get classified as skeuomorphic since they just represent targets or classes of entities. Another poster mentioned the Android clock icon -- I don't think the Windows 7 date/time icon was made to resemble another material or object -- it's just a pictogram that clearly presents the idea of a calendar or clock. Compare that to the Android clock icon. I suppose that sort of looks like a clock if you already knew what it was, but it's certainly not clear. In my view that icon has failed at expressing any clear idea and is therefor a failure. Which one do you think a new user would more quickly identify as the way to bring up a date/time widget?

Compare this to one of Apple's absurd interfaces. This day calendar program is clearly trying to emulate a physical day calendar, complete with leather stitching and yellow lined legal paper. This is what the current trend has pushed back against, and that's probably not entirely a bad thing. You can take emulation like this too far, and Apple almost certainly did with their suite of apps.

But I don't think the current "UX" trend has as much to do with a severe over-correction to skeuomorphs as it has to do with flat, near monochromatic designs being a lot simpler to scale and make look uniform on a wide variety of screen sizes and pixel densities (as others said). It might be easy but it looks like shit and is about as usable.

Re:MS Paint

[Shados]

The design and usability field in general is going to hell. Once upon a time, people actually sat down, did usability studies, thought about how humans deal with computers, how our eyes, ears, and hands work.

There was strong science behind some of these user interfaces, how the icons were shaped, how things were worded... It wasn't perfect mind you, but people tried.

Today, so called "usability specialists" are generally only interested in how shiny and pretty things look. It sucks.

The real reason they skipped Win 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Win ME was awful. Win XP was generally considered serviceable. Vista was a disaster, even had to Microsoft execs complaining about it in public. Win 7 was OK (although no XP). Win 8 is, well, Win 8. The trend was becoming apparent and people expected Win 9 to be acceptable again. So Microsoft decided to skip Win 9 and jump to Win 10 and have a back-to-back disaster with Win 8.

Re:Open Source Windows

[Billly Gates]

Oh please coming from a long time linux and freebsd user.

The costs to fly consultants to fix broken IE specific sites like SAP, java applets that look for XP and crap out on other platforms, wine bugs, lack of AD support for lockdowns, and help desk Temps to sort through the angry users, documents created with Libre office looking funny to potential clients with Office, are pure madness to consider! Don't give me the garbage about how users were supposed to save as .docx with no macros. Many are drooling idiots who will want to reprimand your ass for ca using this etc. Wine config? Yeah good luck with a 1,000 users including HR who have a weird java applet where people don't get paid if an error arises ;-)

I am not saying this as a troll. Linux has it's uses for specialized servers.

But if people wanted to be freed they would have last decade. Windows is reliable now since NT came and gets shit done

Re: Marketing-driven deadlines

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it'll be free to upgrade to for a year.

How do I XP it ?

[dargaud]

Genuine question here: I've been using Linux for most things for the past 15 years. For exactly 3 programs I still need Windows, so I run XP in a virtual machine. But I've been warned that the next versions of my progs won't support XP anymore, so I'll have to jump to Win10. Since I don't give a shit about any of the 'advancements' that have occured since then, how can I remove all the gimmicks and simplify the Windows user interface to make it like XP, simply ? Is there some Win10 to XP converter to keep me from trudging through endless options and shitty tweaking downloads ?

Re:Open Source Windows

[trparky]

Windows is reliable now since NT came and gets shit done

Other than the fact that the system contains legacy code that's chock full of security bugs dating back to the early 1990s. Supporting legacy software is why Microsoft can't change and in the end, it's going to kill them. Other companies that are smaller and more agile will kill Microsoft.

Microsoft sees the writing on the wall, they know that the end is near. You can see that in how they are making apps for the iPhone and Android devices. Things like Office, OneNote, Skype, Outlook, OneDrive, etc. They aren’t making these apps for other platforms just for the sake of making them available, they are making them available because they need to or they’re dead.

The computing industry that we have today is not a Microsoft dominated industry anymore and Microsoft knows it. They sat on their desktop monopoly for too long and the rest of the industry flew past them while they were sleeping.

Re:Marketing-driven deadlines

[exomondo]

Speaking of marketing, what's with this "RTM" term?

RTM is Release To Manufacturing.

Why not just use "FS", as in For Sale.

Because it's Release To Manufacturing, not For Sale.

Re: Marketing-driven deadlines

[Rob Y.]

It's free to upgrade for a year, because they need it to become the new 'standard' - fast. They need people writing apps that'll run nicely on the mobile version. And, if the rumors are true, they're planning to make up for all those free upgrades with a hefty OEM price for new computers (isn't it nice to be able to extract Monopoly rates when you need it). $109 OEM for the home version, $149 for Pro. Makes Chromebooks look better and better - not to mention Linux loaded on your old PC.

Not to say that'll keep people from buying laptops with Win10. Unless somebody sells the same hardware with Ubuntu for $100 less...

Windows legacy 'baggage'?

[unixisc]

But one can argue that Microsoft does not fully support legacy software. For instance, I have an Adobe Acrobat 6.x that I had bought. It worked fine under XP, but never even installed under Windows 7. The argument is that one has to upgrade to Acrobat 7 or later, but why would one pay new cash for a software that they've already bought, and which works? Just b'cos the new version of the OS no longer can support it?

Those arguments aside, if Microsoft doesn't support all past software, why is it throwing the kitchen sink at legacy support? In Windows 7, they already had the right idea - Virtual PC and XP Mode. Just extend that here in Windows 10. I never saw the reason for Windows 10 to have a 32 bit version at all. There are a lot of old computers that just won't go to Windows 10 - maybe because their motherboards can't have more than 512MB of memory, maybe because their outdated peripherals manufacturers only maintain but no longer support them, etc. So Microsoft could have made Windows 10 a 64-bit only OS, and then installed on it Virtual PC, w/ free VMs for 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, ME, NT 4.0 and 3.5. That way, people w/ legacy needs can be supported in software, while the main OS itself would allow MS to innovate more. And somewhere down the road, they could even include a Windows 10 VM in the package.

Speaking about 32-bit Windows 10, my Winbook has 2GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage (C:\), and doesn't come in a configuration w/ 64GB. Having a 64-bit only version would have made them support a 64-bit OS, and at the same time, avoid having any upgrade/support issues. Put the minimum requirement at 4GB of RAM, and make the basic OS recognize up to 64TB, so that manufacturers don't put stupid low limits like 32GB. That way, there would also be no question of the OS being able to upgrade from 8.x to 10. I've seen some Winbooks w/ 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage: those will NOT be upgradable to 10. So why have them, particularly when 8 sucks?