What is your opinion of the new Windows 8?

[Olas]

It's disjointed. Instead of having everything in one place (The desktop) everything's split up into all these separate screens with half of the operating system still designed for the old windows 7 desktop and half exclusive to the new metro interface.
And the 2 are simply incompatible.

It feels like Microsoft is preparing to undergo a major redesign of their OS towards the new Metro style with the next version but Windows 8 has it's foot stuck in the door and doesn't know which OS it wants to be.
So you have 2 default video players, 2 calenders, 2 things for music (Zune, XBox Music), 2 control panels. Basically you have programs which open in windows on the desktop, and then you have apps which fill up whole screens separate from the desktop.

From a aesthetic standpoint Windows 8 looks terrific, it's the intelligent design of windows 7 but without all the needless embellishments of vista and 7. And everything works well, I haven't had any errors or technical problems since I've used it.

Overall I still like Windows 8, I won't switch back to windows 7, but I hope it either gets some dramatic updates soon or Microsoft rolls out Windows 9 before too long.

 

[girzwald]

I used windows 3.1 until they stopped making games for it. For a good while, they made games work for 3.1 and 95. Then when I couldn't stand passing up any more games....windows 98 was out. Then I kept that till I got DSL, and the router wouldn't work properly with 98 due to it being so old. So I got XP. Kept that till I heard windows 7 was actually good.

The pic the OP posted is very accurate. I knew windows 8 would suck. The moral of the story is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it still works, keep using it.

 

[StrixMaxima]

I think W7 is probably the last Microsoft OS I'll ever use. The person who designed placement and layering in W8 should be given a nice crunchy dish of glass shards to enjoy.

All in all, other posters were quite elucidative about my problems, so I'll leave it at that.

 

[LastArchAngel]

I really do not like the beginning interface, and besides that, I don't see any improvement.

 

[Kirtap]

I suppose it's not awful when you find the desktop...

 

[-Dragmire-]

Had to use the search function to find the control panel due to the lack of a start button, not the greatest introduction to the OS.

Anyone know if there was an easy way to find it that I missed?

EDIT:

The power-user menu is great (right click bottom left corner). Every important administrative tool or location is available there

THANK YOU!

Man it was irritating not knowing where to find those options.

 

[Moderated]

It looks like shit, but I wasn't able to try it. Couldn't get it to work in a virtual machine.
It's supposed to be faster, and I assume that I would be able to find something to get rid of all the parts I don't like.

 

[zzkill]

On a tablet, it's good. I have an ExoPC Slate and it works nicely, even though hardware wise it's bad, the OS moves well with a few hiccups sometimes. It has great compatibility with the touchscreen, hell, it was made around the touchscreen feature.

For PCs? NO. As I said, it was build around the touchscreen. Using a mouse for that is weird. Style wise, I don't like it. I honestly like Aero, it make the computer seem more alive. Making everything square and uniform in colour puts me off greatly, that piece of silicon, iron and plastic seems even more artificial. As for the Metro, I don't use it at all. When I log into the tabelet I just enter the desktop instantly, no second look at Metro, but I have to admit I only use my tablet to search the web when the PC is busy or play some flash games.

Microsoft entered the touchscreen market with this, and it can offer good competition, but it's not geared towards the PC market where MS dominates. It feels to me like they abandoned this market while trying for a share of Apple's slice.


On a side note(offtopic), I saw some thread on the escapist where people were saying smartphones and the like will replace the PC in the future. Just dock it and you could have monitor, printer, mouse, keyboard connected. I find that the most stupid idea. Technology has one problem that won't be solved with current materials: heat. The performance of a PC in a smartphone will melt it. Any mobile CPU has less performance then a PC equivalent, caused by the reduced scale and lack of ventilation. Not to mention battery life. Battery technology is one of the most underdeveloped, they discharge quickly, they break quickly. By using a new phone mildly intensive (music during the day for 3-4 hours and sometimes during recharge at night) for 2-3 months causes a noticeable decrease in battery life. A phone/tablet as powerful as the top of the line PCs would eat those batteries in one week at most, if they wouldn't melt before that .

 

[evenest]

I have a vista laptop that annoys the hell out of me. "Did you mean to click that button?" "Are you sure you meant that you wanted to indicate that you clicked that button?" "Having signalled that you meant to click that button and to confirm that you hit that button, are you sure that you want to run the process indicated by clicking that button?"

So, I thought that I would get windows 8 since it was being sold for only $50.00. I installed it on the 28 of December. We want that machine primarily to run netflix on the living room tv and not much more (I had knocked the laptop, in its travel bag, from the dining room table and cracked the screen). After installing the OS and downloading firefox, I found that I couldn't run netflix through my browser; I had to download and "app" for it from MS. This is a warning flag in that I don't want to cede any control to MS that I don't have to. I downloaded the "app" and started to run it only to get an error that explained nothing more than that the app failed, gave me a code and stopped. Thinking that the OS didn't have the drivers for the laptop's video card (it was listed as a generic card), I attempted to download the ATI program only to have it fail. I couldn't find the device manager (not being accessible in the same way as several previuos versions of an MS OS); I did finally find a driver install from ATI and had to run it as Windows XP to get it to work, only to find that it didn't do anything.

I don't care much for the interface. Previous posters have indicated the purpose and intent of the Win 8 UI, so I won't be able to add anything to it here.

I really don't like that I have to associate an email address with the login.

Since I can't use the laptop for what I intended (sucks to me that I can't affort a new laptop and have to use one that is still functional even if it is five years old), I've opted to put Vista back on the machine and install Linux Mint.

When the next computer show rolls into town, I'm going to get a Win 7 update.

Mind you, I am bitter toward MS because six months after I got a windows phone, the company stopped supporting my phone's OS version, leaving me with a phone that couldn't really access any webpages that had required an updated flash player (this website as well) and the MS app store was tiny and useless.

 

[yeti585]

I think windows 8 is a step toward all touch screen computers. Y'know, where tablets should be if it weren't for the Apple iPad. Also, who had the bright idea of calling them "tablets"? I was looking forward to having a "datapad" or something of the sort.

 

[SD-Fiend]

I basically have no idea what i'm doing.
Can anyone tell me if moving an image in a file freely is a setting or something? In vista I could do that but it seems that I cannot in windows 8.

I have no idea what you mean... Moving an image? If such a basic operation doesn't work it doesn't bode well for the rest of your computer!

Like this:

Pic1 Pic2 Pic3

In vista i could Drag a Pic2 behind Pic3
Pic1 Pic3 Pic2

but in windows8 I can only put them into a certain order such as alphabetical or size.