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Comment by 3amOpsGuy | Hacker News Reader

I've been evaluating Win8 on behalf of an old client I still sometimes help out.

It's nowhere near as bad as the press has been making out. It's certainly different but I can point out a larger volume of improvements than the measly 3 obvious regressions.

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Compare Windows 8 to OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows 7. Where would you say it ranks?

It's a brand new OS, it wouldn't matter if it was the best thing since sliced bread, I wouldn't be able to recommend full scale deployment at this point in the product's life.

It'll continue to rank behind Win7 for some time yet, but my point was its not massively behind Win7 as has been the storyline in the press.

The scope of this evaluation is to determine whether to avoid Win8 like the plague, or to tolerate its introduction (typically through new hardware acquisition).

Unfortunately in this instance, as if I hadn't backtracked enough from my initial statement, I won't be recommending the integration of Win8, however this has less to do with Win8 as a product than it does a whole slew of complex requirements around that company's IT needs.

In order of my preference:

Windows 7 Ubuntu 12.04 OS X Windows 8

Windows 7 earns my bread, it works, and most of the time works well for clients and friends. Ubuntu is my goto "Unix/Linux" for OSS development, friends and resolving Windows issues.* OS X, use it part-time at work and friends, couldn't justify the cost of the hardware and some other quibbles. Windows 8 is a UI failure for the power user and admin.

>> failure for the ... and admin

Coupled with server 2012, it's actually a huge leap forward for the admin.

But I agree that for power users (who are one of the rarer user types in your typical office environment and notoriously hard to accomodate) it is not an improvement at this time.

In my experience: worse than OS X and Windows 7. On par with "Unity/Ubuntu". (and that should not be misconstrued as praise of either Unity or Windows 8).

Better than all of them.

I find it hard to imagine someone in the hacker news crowd rating 8 over 7 on developer hardware. From my limited experience, the only major improvement I noticed was the improved task manager (which is really nifty). What other substantial improvements over 7 do you think Win8 provides?

(I am not the original poster)

  * improved file copy dialog, including pausing    
  * much faster boot    
  * improved task manager (as you said)
  * better multi-monitor support (I have 2 monitors)

It's not much but was worth the $30 upgrade. I don't mind the new start screen but I understand that is subjective.

Isn't the faster booting thing just exactly the same as only using hibernate on Windows 7?

Granted I haven't looked into it fully but I doubt the actual cold boot speeds vary wildly between the two.

The hibernate is only for ring 0: user space still gets wiped out.

That's correct.

I think Win8 is a downgrade in almost every aspect, but it does boot faster. Granted, I think that it's doing something akin to hibernating in Windows 7 and not actually shutting down.

I wonder if people are comparing the boot time of year-old Windows 7 installations to brand new Windows 8 installations.

I know my SSD-based Windows 7 system could boot to the desktop in less than 10 seconds when it was new, but now that it's over a year old with dozens of additional installed programs and drivers, I'm lucky to see the desktop in less than 30 seconds.

As a developer, I care about some of the under the hood changes, new features and improvements:

    - lighter memory usage
    - better power management
    - address space randomization (forcible) 
    - full hardware (direct-x) rendered UI
    - storage spaces
    - hyper-v 
    - incremental file histories
    - mandatory DEP
    - system refresh

Of course, at the UI level, there are various changes that are a mix of good and bad IMHO, but overall, I would say more parts of the UI suck a little less than before.

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