Hacker News Reader

Comment by emehrkay | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of windows 8, just not the execution. If MS' future is Metro, they should have went the iOS route with dedicated devices -- windows phone 8 and windows tablet metro that run the same apps -- and eventually added classic desktop as an app when x86 emulation was good enough on arm.

There should had been a clear distinction between the two environments. As it stands now, metro is billed as the only start menu on x86 devices, but the full os on RT devices. This is confusing and offers no compelling reason to buy the RT version.

I see Apple releasing OSX as an iOS app in the near (>=5 years) future. The reason that will work for them is because iOS is a standalone brand that people understand.

Just my 2¢, I'm not a windows user.

View on HN

> metro is billed as the only start menu on x86 devices

Metro (Windows 8 style) is not billed as "only the start menu" (assuming that's what you meant) on x86. You're hearing that from hanging around HN, not from Microsoft. Windows 8 fully supports Windows 8-style apps on x86, and it's expected that you can and will install some of those apps. However, Windows 8 on x86 also fully supports all the desktop applications you use on Windows 7/Vista/XP. So if you want, you can indeed avoid all the Windows 8 applications on x86 and stick to the traditional desktop, in which case you'll only see the new style on the start screen and perhaps in various settings screens. But that's not the expected experience on x86.

You do realize that Microsoft is going to release exactly that in a little under ten days.

The "desktop" is a tile on the Start Screen.

Well, the "desktop" in RT is completely different than the desktop in x86. What I said was that Metro and Windows 8 should be separate products until the x86 desktop can be emulated as an app inside of Metro.

As it stands now, your RT "desktop" apps will not run in the x86 desktop and vice versa. Those two desktops are only similar in look and feel. I do think that the Metro apps will run on both x86 and RT, not too sure about this though.

This is so fucking confusing. We have two versions of Windows 8: x86 and RT, both with two separate environments: desktop and metro. If an app can run on metro in both rt and x86, the consumer is faced with a 1/3 chance that a given app will work on their Windows 8 machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com