Windows 8 Available in October | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 Available in October

windowsteamblog.com

46 pointsderpenxyne54 comments

I have been using the Windows 8 beta on my secondary machine for some weeks. Initially, I was really a fan of metro, but in the end the context switching that a single-task environment requires (yes, I know, you can split the screen) is annoying when doing serious work on a desktop. Taking aside Metro, Windows 8 is really an incremental upgrade for regular desktop use.

I do believe Metro is great for tablets. As a five-year long OS X user (and Linux before), I'd seriously consider buying a Surface tablet if they nail things right: I'd like to be able to use it like an iPad on the road, connect it to a screen and Bluetooth mouse/keyboard at home/work to use it as a traditional desktop.

We will see ;).

Agreed. Also I think a big chunk of the regular desktop users out there are going to be nothing but annoyed at the interface, and will do what they can to avoid Metro. It's been what, 17 years of clicking on "start" (or equivalent) and picking from a list. A lot of office workers are going to be horrified when they realize that doesn't work now.

the start button is still available but its on the left side now (or on the keyboard where it has always been) The only difference I see as a desktop user is a startling experience where the new "start menu" takes up my whole screen instead of taking lower left corner. Other than that there is nothing that really annoyed me to the extent of being horrified. What particularly you think that is horrifying?

If they merely renamed "Start" to "Menu", there'd be a mass of horrified users. Both power users and casual users hate change, as evidenced by the amount of both groups still using Windows XP and refusing to upgrade.

An incremental upgrade?

I have not been keeping exact count, but from what I have read on the engineers blogs, articles and MSDN - This release exceeds any past windows release for the mere number of major and minor changes to the UI and Core OS. If you want to call it incremental fine (it is version 8 after all) but the way you say that is a bit misleading. you makes it sound minor. Perhaps many of the changes you are not aware of because you are a surface user.

Although I have a Windows 7 machine sitting next to me, and while I consider Ubuntu to be my primary operating system, I still use XP for much of my work. XP will for a very long time be the OS I most feel at home with. My comfort zone. It reminds me of back in the day when I was clinging onto Windows 3.11 for dear life -- never wanting to upgrade to Windows 95. Memories.

I avoided vista for similar reasons of not wanting to be alienated, but when I installed the win 7 beta I loved it instantly.

The most visible feature: No more ridiculous searching through the start bar. Everything was just windows-key + some string + enter

windows-key "sub" enter = sublime text is opened

windows-key "ch" enter = chrome is opened

windows-key "control" enter = control panel is opened

Going back to windows XP after using Windows 7 was a nightmare. It felt so unusable.

Should point out that the Win8 start screen still has the behavior, even though the search bar isn't visible at first.

One change is that it groups results. In particular, hit Windows-W if you're specifically searching for a setting.

I've never understood this mindset (though I completely respect your right to have it). Whenever a new version of the OS, or IDE, or whatever tool I'm using comes out, I tend to try to upgrade as soon as possible. For me it's about finding new ways to optimize my workflow. There are almost always improvements to the usability of the product, and once I get used to them I generally feel happy about it ... I'm always trying to find a new comfort zone :)

Some of it is plain-old resistance to change. Much of it has to due with a loss of productivity for a period of time while I get used to what has changed. Sometimes the latest version of my favorite editor contains some change to the UI that I wish had never been made. I always fear there will be a change like when Microsoft switched Office to 'ribbon' toolbars. I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

I still use Ubuntu 9.x partly because I'm not stoked about the new window manager. Though I'm going to install it anyway because in Ubuntu terms I'm ancient by now and apt-get has become pretty much useless at this point.

> I completely gave up mastering new versions of Office after that. They threw away years of learning.

If you'd stuck with it for even just a couple of months, you'd have rapidly realized that the ribbon UI was much more efficient than the old, menu-based UI. I hated the ribbon UI at first too, but now I don't have any problems with it.

I love the new Office ribbon, but I always end up using it on underpowered machines and it takes forever to switch between menus on the ribbon. On my desktop, it's wonderful. On my netbook or work laptop, it's a horror.

YMMV. I used it every day at work for years. I never got used to it, never fell in love with it.

Well in some cases. We become extremely proficient using a particular tool. I'll admit, the more time I've spent away from using MS Windows, I've really begun to suck when relatives call for support. I have one Windows 7 machine in the house now and I wanted to map a network drive to a share on the Mac. After fighting through all the wonderful wizards in the network control panel, I still could not browse the network. Finally I just said SCREW THIS CRAP. Start->Run->cmd..... net use m: \\server\share /persistent:yes

Screw you Microsoft for making a mundane task so damn difficult....

I find it ridiculous to use an OS that is almost 12 years old but to each their own I guess.

Well... The OS I'm using right now traces its roots to the late 60s and early 70s. I use the terminal a lot and that's an interface that was designed for teletypes. My favorite editor, Emacs, is similarly old. Yet, those metaphors are profoundly powerful and enable me to just forget I'm using a computer and focus on my work, which is, to borrow from Google, to teach computers do amazing things.

I find using a GUI ridiculous most of the time, but, like you said, to each its own ;-)

While I agree that there is less and less reason to use XP these days, age alone is a pretty terrible way to judge the merits of an OS.

How old is Linux now?

XP is receiving less and less support, and the time for when it will stop being supported altogether is coming up fast. Linux on the other hand is being continuously worked on.

A more fair comparison would be to ask if he was still using the same distro without doing any updates from the same time the last update to Windows XP was released(which still isn't even fair because it assumes that the updates solve the exact same thing, which they are clearly not).

apple and oranges, mate. linux is not a monolithic release like windows XP. its thousands upon thousands of individual programs pulled together ad hoc and at will. My kernel is less than a few hours old, but my version of some software is 7-8 years old.

Seriously? Windows 3.11 was a horror compared to OS/2, which had proper multitasking, memory protection, and could even run DOS and Windows as a program for compatibility.

But then, OS/2 was a horror compared to Windows NT 4.0 ;).

Ah, the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which I have written about in comments many times, including for example on os2museum.com. Why did it take ten years after Intel introduced the 386 before 32-bit programming became popular?

Being a Mac user myself (now), I enjoy windows XP every time i have to use it. On todays machines, its just snappy as and has a certain bare-bones feel to it. I love that.

Then again, I hate configuring XP, it is a horror.

True. Using XP on a machine from today is actually not so bad. You can fly around the interface with ease.

Flashback to 2003: Dell ships their Precision/Optiplex towers with a base level of 256Megs of RAM. XP will install... but you're going to WAIT if you do something crazy.... like hit the Start button.... And you'd better leave that PC running, cause you do NOT want to have to reboot and wait for the systray to load. God forbid you have Mcaffee or Norton installed....

Assuming you're a developer, why would you have clung to 3.1? NT was available then and was considerably better operating system for development.

I maintain an XP partition for when the corp I work for require mandatory training (ethics, insider trading, workplace safety etc) but there's no way I'd ever consider using it over Ubuntu for development. I suppose if you're coding in python then the underlying os makes little difference, the abstraction level is so high. Personally even in python missing the unix toolset is a primary reason to stick to unix-like operating systems. I couldn't imagine not having sed, awk, grep, vim, wc etc. I am aware of ports and even the Cygwin environment, but it's just a lot easier to skip the whole thing.

Speaking as someone who started his career on hp-ux and since then included probably every major unix distribution both proprietary and open source, having an intimate knowledge of unix has served me well. Windows has finally caught up and (despite still getting the path delimiter wrong) is now a robust and usable operating system. The two worlds have merged, unix added curses, then x, and now looks as pretty as anything else out there, meanwhile windows added multitasking (yield didn't count) and ever wider addressing, a native tcp/ip stack, support for larger drives and so on.

Unlike you I have no good memories of windows 3.11

I wasn't a developer back then. I don't think I started programming until I hit Windows 98 (I was 12 in '98). I prefer developing under Ubuntu. It's a vastly superior environment for most kinds of programming work (a notable exception being game development). IMO Windows is better for web development and that's what I've been working on the most lately so I spend more time in XP for that. Windows 3.11 wasn't a good OS -- I just have happy memories of it because it was what I used when computing was mostly new and unexplored territory for me. That and my only prior experience was DOS.

3.1/3.11 was what was bundled with almost all store bought computers at that point. Most people weren't out there grabbing up NT 3.51 licenses to do dev work. There were quite a few OS/2 devs around. The hardware support for NT was just craptastic. NT 4.0 got a whole lot better.

The thing for many people was, Visual Basic was the entry point. Or Turbo Pascal in my case. But it was DOS based, so it didn't really matter to have a real 32bit OS under the hood.

I'm a bit curious why you'd never consider Ubuntu for development. At the end of the day, it's all the same if you're doing C/C++/Python/Ruby/Node/PHP. Then again, I've been a Linux fan since Redhat 5.2. (1997ish) I had to use IRIX at work (Graphics animation stuff for TV) and even though it was "unixy" I rarely had to fight the typical unix battles. Same for AIX at my next job... dealing with cell masters and all that crap was an IBM thing, not a unix thing.

I'm a bit curious why you'd never consider Ubuntu for development.

I intended my words to mean the exact opposite of that. Unix for development gets my vote every day.

Also, dev's don't use store bought computer operating systems, they install the best one for the job, which back then was NT. OS/2 was good but nobody else was running it, except Lotus Notes shops.

*edited for typos

> yield didn't count

Interestingly enough, I've been using yield in Python for what could be described as cooperative multitasking. Works very well with web workloads, btw.

python's yield and the windows api yield() do quite different things, but at some abstract level, in windows 3.1 the yield() function would let the UI service the main event loop, thus keeping your ui responsive to user activity. yield in python is abstractly similar but returns control along with a reference to the generator. Why I said these are abstractly similar is because in python the yield function saves away the stack frame and restores it upon the next iteration of the generator. In this respect it's similar to windows 3.1 yield because when the event loop comes back to your process, you have a minimal 'stack' consisting of the original hwnd, along with wParam, lParam, where the lParam was a ub4 that could be used for a pointer allowing a larger 'stack frame'.

I know they are completely different. I just thought it was curious that I have been using the same word with completely different meanings in completely different environments to similar results.

Doesn't Windows accept forward slashes in most situations?

So this means I can get my hands on Windows 8 in August. However, the more pressing matter is when I can get my hands on a Surface tablet.

Been using Win 8 as my main OS (because i'm developing a WinRT app) for about 4 months now and it's great. Eagerly awaiting the RTM build.

Been using win8 in a VM for testing and ... it's fine. I'd like to be able to pay for it, and the 'upgrade price is $40' is a nice step, but really... I'd just like to be able to pay $40 for it full stop. I'm not 'upgrading' from anything, and this will mean I've got to shell out $200+ for it if I want to use it legally.

I do have an old vista ultimate license, but I don't have it installed and probably won't install it again because I moved VM too many times and the process for reactivation was annoying. Maybe I'll have to suck it up again?

Given that most people just get Windows installed on a machine, and the mfg aren't paying more than $50 per license, why can't we have lower retail prices? $50 for a copy of Windows - I'd have no incentive to pirate. $200+... ??

Will I be able to upgrade to Win8 with a Vista license key? Does anyone know for sure?

>Will I be able to upgrade to Win8 with a Vista license key? Does anyone know for sure?

Yes. Microsoft has said any version of XP, Vista, 7, or 8 will get the $40 upgrade.

It's $40 if you upgrade from release preview as well. So you don't have to buy anything.

Oh wow - that would be nice. That doesn't seem to be how they've run previous trials, but if it's true, that's great news.

If the retail is $200, then manufacturers will pay $50. If the retail is $50, no manufacturer will pay even $25. Same applies to volume discounts though Open and VLSC. The retail price is the anchor.

You talk like OEMs could buy their Windows licenses in a competitive market. They'll pay whatever price Microsoft demands. Its not like they have much choice.

And, in terms of ARM-based machines, not even end users will have that choice.

On the other hand OEMs have an incentive to not sell machines without an OS installed. Some OEMs, like Asus, are selling such PCs, preloaded with FreeDOS, or some Linux distro.

Selling PCs with Windows bundled for a price that's lower than a retail license, well, that's a good deal for customers.

Take that advantage away and you'll see many more PCs sold without a bundled Windows. And I think that would be bad for Microsoft, because it would put the choice in front of their customers, and that would be unfortunate as most customers aren't even aware of what Windows is or about the existence of other choices.

I'm not sure what are the terms that dictate the OEM price companies like HP, ASUS, , Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba pay, but I wouldn't be surprised its tiered according to some criteria. It's reasonable to assume OEM's pay more or less according to their compliance to the Windows brand guidelines and so on.

Until recently, I could observe that many PC manufacturers had a "X recommends Windows Y for your PCs". Digging a little has shown they paid less for each license if they put that notice on every page of their website.

I would not be surprised if selling too many computers without Windows would make the OEM license price prohibitively high to compete in the mainstream PC segment (the ones that consider Windows a feature, rather than something you have to remove before you install the right OS)

>And, in terms of ARM-based machines, not even end users will have that choice.

Why? OEMs can choose to ship Android on their ARM devices and are already doing it. How can Microsoft ban that? Also, end users can buy iPads which are ARM-based too.

Perhaps you mean Windows RT tablets? Those are not exactly the same as "ARM-based machines".

If you buy an x86 Windows tablet, the manufacturer may leave the option of unlocking the UEFI boot so that you may be able to boot other OS. This option is forbidden by Microsoft on ARM-based tablets that come preinstalled with Windows 8.

So far, Windows machines have been generic x86 machines with Window preinstalled. From now on, there will be special-purpose Windows machines that cannot be changed by their owners.

edit: there is no such thing as a Windows RT x86 device.

I am sorry, but there is no such thing as a 'x86 Windows RT tablet'. Windows RT, by definition, is an ARM OS.

That's not exactly correct. Windows RT is a subset of the Windows 8 application environment. If you develop for Windows RT you'll be able to deploy to both x86 and ARM devices.

But the argument stands if you call them 'Windows tablets' just the same. UEFI tablets that come with Windows may or may not have another OS installed. ARM-based ones cannot.

Maybe you're thinking about the WinRT API, which is different from the Windows RT OS and devices.

There is a clear difference between WinRT and Windows RT.

The original point about the difference in UEFI secure boot between both is correct though.

Maybe you could save money buying a cheap older version and doing the $40 upgrade?

Well, if they'll allow upgrades from vista, just by putting in the key, I'll be OK, but they may not allow for that. Yeah, buying a 'cheap' win7 license may be the way to go, but the whole install/activation thing might still be a problem if the license key is dodgy.

Hope that they're still keeping the Win 8 Pro upgrade deal available until the end of Jan 2013.

Has there been any info/rumors on the release date for Windows Phone 8?

Microsoft has said WP8 will be released around W8, which places it this fall. HTC has said their first W8 phones will land in October.

http://www.slashgear.com/htcs-windows-phone-8-lineup-detaile...

I've been using Windows 8 recently and have found no discernible increase in my work flow. It looks nice and I get comments on it, but I've found using an app launcher like executor or launchy has all but diminished the usefulness of Win 8. Of course this is just on my desktop, and will wait to see how the Surface tablet pans out.

Full disclosure: I've grown to like the metro interface on my WIN7 phone.

Yeah, I've played with the Dev Preview. It wasn't horrible. Although, I embarrassingly admit, I had NO idea how to 'close' IE after I opened it.

I'm a huge Linux fan, and I use a Mac at home. But much of the development I do at work is Windows only and I really don't hate "The Squares". I love the look of the newer WPF applications. Git for Windows is a perfect example. Now not everything should go this route. But I'm just not willing to jump on the "MS has crapified everything" bandwagon.

I'll be interested to see the general acceptance factor in all of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com