Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
My favorite goof of Windows 8 was the most googled question: "how do I turn it off?"
It required stupid mouse witchcraft and incantations to shut off if you weren't in a touch screen.
Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
I'm using it on CachyOS with on old intels(Kaby Lake Core i5-7500t/Core i7-7700t) with old intel integrated graphics(HD630), and it never did that. Since early Plasma6/late Plasma5 times. Cant recall exactly anymore, for about 2 years now. In fact, since Plasma6 it reminded me of the good old KDE3 days, again. Except for the memory usage maybe. OTOH the systems have much more memory since the times of KDE3, so shrug?
If everything else fails, there is still https://www.trinitydesktop.org btw.
It felt great to watch Gnome stumble after all the shit-talking, some schadenfreude was in order. I didn't care much for Windows 8; Vista was a the bigger mess of a release.
Plasma criticism was pointed and deliberate and grownup. Windows 8, less so.
The problem was that it was a bunch of people who had no good ideas and no insight trying to come up with new paradigms for interaction, and they were all bad. What the Linuxen desktops were doing was even worse than Win8, and the ones on that journey were all determined for some reason to deprecate the old WinXP clone UIs at the same time. Gnome really moved into a position of harassing and mocking its old users (basically regulation redhat behavior.)
Click on a pdf? The whole screen turns bright red for a second before loading. Click on a Word file, same but blue. It was hell to use for people sensitive to flashing lights.
I got special permission at work to stick with Windows 7 longer than the rest of the company for medical reasons.
The only redeeming thing I could say about Launchpad is that it did not replace Spotlight (unlike Windows 8 Start Menu which was a replacement to the previous start menu)
Launchpad appeared for the first time in Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" in July 2011.
Windows 8.0 launched August 2012.
Personally I think both are inspired by the full-screen launchers of iOS and Android, and not by one another.
> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"
My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?
Nooooo, please don't touch my screen! I can't stand fingerprints on my laptop display! Pretty much every gesture you mentioned has a touch pad equivalent that works just as well or better for a desktop OS.
I feel like trackpads do most of the above better than a touchscreen? Mac trackpads, at any rate (I do recall a lot of PC trackpads and/or drivers being hot garbage)
It really depends on what you do.
The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.
Say you had a mechanic you brought your car to for an inspection and they would set it on fire in the parking lot because of "evil ghosts" since they heard a squeak that sounded like evil ghosts speaking. Calling what they did "good intentions just poorly executed" isn't really fitting is it?
Microsoft got hit by a case of delusion on a corporate level where seemingly good arguments combine to create the completely wrong conclusions.
- there was already an extremely heavy expectation that clicking the start button or pressing the windows key would bring up a menu, not a full screen takeover where all contextual sense of place (that you had in the past experience) was lost.
- the UI being a full-screen takeover on a phone (Windows Phone) or a tablet (10"-ish tops at the time) was OK but on a 21~27" desktop it's absurdly overwhelming.
It felt like wasted space on the desktop because it was originally hard for desktop apps to opt-in to Live Tiles and send Live Tile updates and not enough people were using the sorts of multi-platform apps that had great Live Tiles.
At least in my experience there was a lot of sense to it. I had a lot of data organized to my liking in Windows 8.
So it was a bit of a love/hate relationship.
Windows 2K is still the best ever made by Microsoft. I wish they'd just stay on that design and make incremental improvements to keep it fresh and modern.
Agreed and it happens with almost every sunsetted version of Windows. At the time of XP, it was how great W98SE was, and in 7, XP was so amazing, etc., etc. I think the "every other version" meme has only recently been killed by MS because it has been so long from 8.1 to 10 to 11. But even when 11 is sunsetted, there will surely be articles about how amazing 11 was and how much they dislike 12.
Windows 8.1 combined with StartIsBack was a much better OS than Windows 10 I was actually surprised when everyone praised that ad pushing piece of crap with mandatory spyware, forced updates and inconsistent UI all over the place.
It was last seen perhaps in the Windows 11 Beta 1 release, confined within the start menu and I think this is where it peaked. It was removed shortly after to the yuck we have now, perhaps slightly coming back in 25H2 with the New Windows 11 start menu experience app groups (I have not personally used it)
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
At the time (1993, when NT came out) there was a good reason.
C-A-D was a special reserved keystroke that couldn't be intercepted or redirected. So you could use it even to interrupt a task that had frozen the entire UI.
Using it for login meant it could bypass and circumvent any malware that attempted to steal credentials, etc.
Then MS let people replace the GINA that handled it, and then they let people turn it off, and it joined the rest of the slide into junkware...
This is some of what I wrote in July 2013 as suggestions for how Windows 8 should change behavior when mouse and keyboard is present:
• By default, boot to the desktop. (This is a new individually available option in Windows 8.1.)
• By default, return to previous applications. Similar to Windows Phone and Windows 7, when you close an application, you should return to where you were before. If you are in any kind of desktop experience when launching an application, whether it's for the desktop or in the Modern interface, you should return to that desktop environment upon closing the application.
• By default, open media files and documents in desktop applications. Fortunately, when you select these as your defaults, you are properly returned to the desktop when you close the application. Unfortunately, any Modern applications return you to the Start Screen when you close them.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, disable hot corners and edges. Provide an option to enable them within your mouse-driven experience.
• By default, if there is no touch screen, provide a classic Start Menu in addition to the Start Screen. Mice are well-suited to smaller menus that pop out and allow you to remain largely in the desktop experience while you select new files and applications to open. Provide an option to disable the Start Menu and jump to the Start Screen if desired.
• Upon first run and selection of the mouse-driven experience, run a video demonstration introducing users to the Modern interface, Start Screen, hot corners, gestures, charms, Windows Store and Modern applications, focused on how to access these items with a mouse and keyboard.
• By default, provide a Search experience tailored to the desktop environment.
"Most of the above options already exist in Windows 8, but it takes some information, time and effort for users to change the settings and get the experience you expect when using a system without a touch screen, largely driven by mouse control. It is in these conditions that users are frustrated by Windows 8, as they find themselves faced with interfaces that are much friendlier to touch screens, and are unexpectedly removed from the desktop experience and placed into the Modern interface and Start Screen, disrupting their workflow and adding extra steps to return to the windows, applications and tasks they were working in. An overall one-click default upon first usage of Windows would allow users to select the mouse-driven experience they prefer on systems that are not primarily driven by touch."