How I came to love Windows again
betanews.com
betanews.com
Suddenly the horrible "tiles" dashboard brought up by the Windows key made much more sense to me, was more fluid than I anticipated and after about 10 mins playing on the laptop I walked away feeling "Yep, this is exactly how a laptop should be."
I was really surprised. Found it instantly intuitive and a faster way to navigate my way around the computer.
There are also a slew of more advanced keyboard shortcuts in Win8 as well that make me happy that Microsoft hasn't forgotten about keyboard-driven folks.
I know there is a lot of Win8 hate going around, but so far, I think it was a good move. Very curious how Blue Sky (8.next codename?) turns out though.
I'm quite happy with the tiles concept. In fact I'm typing this on a Lumia 820...
Windows Blue I imagine will iron out these issues. I have some hopes that it will be the next windows 7.
Windows 8 is a broken frankenstein. It fundamentally does not work for anything other than a laptop-on-your-lap. The rest of us are impeded, annoyed or even physically injured by it.
Apple nailed it. Here's your tablet OS. Here's your laptop/desktop OS. Result: my house now has more Apple devices than all the Windows devices I've ever owned.
I really don't understand all this Windows 8 hate. I switched to using Mac-only (due to my new job) about 7 months ago and when I first tried using Windows 8, it took about 5 minutes before I found everything I needed.
If you are a beginner-user, Windows 8 is even easier since you probably just use Office + Internet Explorer which are right there in front of you in big tiles.
Intermediate-users can switch to desktop mode if they need.
Power-users can work even faster since now there are more keyboard shortcuts and that same desktop mode is there if you really want it.
Can you explain what prevents you from using Windows 8 like you would use Windows 7?
Sometimes I wonder if the haters have actually tried windows 8 or if they are only Mac Users spreading it around.
o Add a half decent gcc/bash/posix tool chain (something built in, not cygwin)
o Include a decent terminal/ssh client.
o License apple's touch pad
o Better Games
o The new tablet/wacom SurfacePro blows away anything apple
offers for stylus digitization on the iPad.
What drove me to mac was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with cygwin
What drove me to linux (both ubuntu and debian) was the little bugs here and there when trying to do things with ports/brew
I'm back on windows now (because the linux desktop is just lagging behind in areas) only I'm using a VM to run linux shell. Now I get all the nice gui but can still run shell with no hiccups. (I could have gone back to mac and done VM too, but I just prefer windows)
It's a commercial product, but I've used SecureCRT for many years, and it is very nice. It would be great if a decent ssh client were included with Windows, but I don't mind paying for software like this - it pays for itself many times over.
I don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit that the Terminal application is the single most important driver as to which operating system I use, but I guess it's okay as long as I realize it's not everyone's.
Arcane commands to move between tabs/windows, command keys going to the window and not the terminal (such as pageup, pagedown, home, end), limited configurability and a middle button paste in an ecosystem without middle buttons... all kept me from seeing terminal.app as more than just something to be immediately replaced.
Your experience is obviously different than mine, but I ditched terminal.app as soon as I learned about iTerm2.
To your points - Tabs are cmd+shift { }, which feel very natural on my keyboard given the location of cmd+shift - you 'chord" thumb+little finger and then switch windows with your right hand (or maybe it's just entered my finger DNA).
Windows Switching is the OS X standard Cmd+`
PageUp/Page down are just your standard Fn+Up/Down - but, I'll admit I just normally use the touch pad it's so fast, particularly with two+finger drag + acceleration.
The loss of the middle put-on would probably be painful - but I've never had one, so no huge impact to me personally. (Copy/Paste are, once again, touch pad reflexes that I do constantly).
But - with all that said - I really should spend more time with iTerm2 - lots of people rave about it. Time to give it another try.
Things I like about putty include that you can launch a profile very quickly (start->run, putty @profile_name); it's easy to carry a configuration around (copy a bit of the registry); fonts are fine; easy colour configuration for profiles; quick-switching to full-screen; you can alt-tab between terminals. OSX has workspaces which is an advantage, but lacks some of the others.
But I get the feeling you're talking about the terminal itself - what's the edge for the OSX approach?
And - wear your terminal with pride! 7-day roguelike is next week if you've ever wanted to have a go.
Terminal.App has a wonderful and instant resizing capability. And it's integration with the MacBook Pro/Air's touch pad is, really, second to none.
But, the wrap issue is annoying - you can't do a ps -auxwww , see that the line length is too long, and the resize the window and have your text rewrap. (At least on putty 0.6, the version on my vm instance)
I don't know if they've added tabs to putty (a quick search through http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.62/puttydoc.txt indicates they haven't) - and that's also a feature I use a lot of.
Don't get me wrong - I love putty, and it's one of the first two or three things I put on every windows system. I love that you can use it as a serial console as well - great for consoling into cisco routers - particularly now that Microsoft in it's infinite wisdom has dropped hyper terminal. In fact, Putty is better than terminal.app in that regard - Terminal.app doesn't do console ports!
But, if I am spending many thousands of hours at the console, Terminal.app (or, possibly iTerm) is going to make me happier and more productive than putty. Probably not 2x more productive, or even 50% more productive - but certainly 10%, which is enough for me.
You're right that putty doesn't do this, but I always run screen inside putty, which will rewrap text when the window resizes.
On my personal machine, I basically only use Firefox, Sublime Text 2, and Terminal anymore.
My ideal dev environment is Windows running putty connecting to a local linux VM or a bunch of VMs running on a nearby ESXi server and then Firefox (and occasionally Chrome and IE for compatability testing) and a bunch of other general stuff (Thunderbird for email, Skype, music player, etc).
On a dual screen machine I'll have the putty window (or windows) made fully screen on one monitor and the remaining stuff on the other monitor. Inside the ssh session I run screen to give me multiple shells without lots of windows or tabs. A lot of my navigation is done via the keyboard.
The desktop machine is also for family and guest usage so the ability to switch user accounts but leave existing stuff running is a must.
This setup means I can also login from pretty much anywhere (that I can get an ssh connection from) and resume where I left off, including having tunnelled HTTP connections to my dev network via ssh.
I'd like to believe that if Microsoft were to add POSIX support, and a decent terminal as part of the default Windows installation it would go along way to improving their perception in the minds of technical users.
Thus, PowerShell instead of something like bash.
There is enough info out there that the Wikipedians wrote a bunch of articles that have not been deleted yet...
Then there is the point that Windows is very different from UNIX (even though you can support POSIX as an API layer alongside Win32). As Jeffrey Snover (one of the architects of PowerShell) once put it: They thought about that but noticed that UNIX tools won't help any Windows sysadmin as they are good tools to work with a UNIX system that's mostly based around text files scattered throughout the file system. But they don't work so well in managing Windows which is more centered around the registry and other mechanisms.
And a vast majority of Firefox users don't use the developer tools. They're still doing something about it.
Also, what about microsoft's programers. Are they using Linux when they don't have the tools they need?
Concerning bash: Windows also offers PowerShell (depending on version of Windows either included or can be downloaded for free on the Microsoft website). Many convinced command-line users admit that PowerShell is better thought-out than bash or other Unix shells. Microsoft says for most things on Windows it is better to use the GUI, but if you really need or prefer a command-line shell, we offer PowerShell for free.
If I was starting out now on windows - I'd spend the next 2 to 3 years training my fingers on powershell (there is a difference between book knowledge, and instinctive "finger" knowledge), and I'm sure it would serve me well. But now, I just want to leverage my existing knowledge.
And yes, I realize that makes me a relic.
With regards to "it is better to use the GUI" - scripting configuration of dozens (hundreds?) of remote servers through the GUI is probably possible, but not something I would look forward to. Once again, old habits die hard, and having 30-40 ssh sessions open to various environments is like a good fitting shoe - it's just comfortable.
To add insult to this injury is how badly thought out so many of the little details of Windows 8 seem to be. From creating your user account (forced to choose a password hint?) to using the system search everything feels clunky and always involved an unnecessary extra step.
I will agree that the only thing that does feel decent and well thought out is the touch experience. After trying it out on a surface if you simply use the tiles and IE10 the experience is actually quite fluid and nice. However the problem remains, Windows 8 is still meant to be the next major version of Windows and not just some tablet OS. On a desktop (even a touch desktop) and in the hands of a power user it's an abject failure.
I haven't used Windows 8, but on Windows 7, when creating a user account I was required to create a password hint and could simply enter a space.
It's a deeply flawed product in a lot of ways. I don't know why Google can make a $300 Nexus 4 with Quad-Core Snapdragon + Adreno 320 graphics and 320 ppi display, while Surface RT at $500 comes with an aging Tegra 3 and 150 ppi display. And contrary to what all the apologists on the internet were saying, you miss that extra measure of power when you see simple animations drop frames or when you realize you just don't have enough horizontal pixels to comfortably view a pdf while holding the device in portrait mode (the Surface Pro's screen is a huge step up in that regard). Windows 8 isn't fully baked yet. It doesn't have the reassuring visual solidity of iOS, which comes from a painstaking attention to avoiding redraw flicker. The apps in the Microsoft Store, with the exception of some great ones like the Netflix app or Fotor, are of almost uniformly shitty quality. The gestures are well-implemented, but so undiscoverable I'd never give a Win 8 machine to my mother... There are instances of the "old Microsoft" peeking through--things that make you go "did anyone even use this?" For example, the background level of the headphone amp is very noisy. It's not a problem for music, but if you're listening for the keypress feedback, you hear the background hiss come on and off as Windows turns off the sound-card between bouts of typing.
All that out of the way, it's the first non-Apple devices that I've actually found charming. From the magnesium case to the felt of the type/touch covers, it feels like a device that's worth $500. It looks nothing like an iPad but it manages to look great. It's something you want to touch and turn around in your hands and the PC OEM's have never been able to bring that to the Windows ecosystem. Once you figure out how the gestures work, they are efficient and fluid to use. At least as long as you stay in Metro (and ignore the desktop bolted onto the side like some weird monstrosity), the UI looks coherent. It looks like someone actually designed it, instead of having a bunch of engineers do whatever the hell they wanted.
I'm not surprised it's not selling well--I wouldn't recommend one to anyone unless they have very specific needs, but at the same time I'm actually excited to see what the next iteration looks like. I haven't been able to say that for a non-Apple product in years.
I'll still be a bit skeptical on the Windows 8 until I try it myself. But as we always say, better skip a version every two windows.
EDIT: I almost forgot what they did with the kinnect those past years.
Maybe Windows 8 works great on the Pro, but I feel like Microsoft did a bait and switch by promoting RT like they did.
But Word, Excel and even PowerPoint are too much for it. Only good for reading. OneNote is very usable on Surface RT though, I do use that to take notes during meetings.
The Windows Mail app also sucks, and on RT you cant install Outlook.
But I've not found RT office to be unusably slow.
For me it lives up to its purpose of being a compaingion device.
The problems I have are basically the Mail app is uselessly bad and the Photos app sometimes grinds to a complete halt.
I'm not their target user.
And use PowerShell ISE as your command line.
"We can bring a tablet to market that has file extensions in the user's face, and a command line, and part of the UI needs a pointing device."
"lolwut? You're serious? Get out of here!"
Microsoft is still dragging too much untablety legacy tail to make a successful tablet.
Courier was the right idea. Windows everywhere isn't. The result wll be a rearguard that only slightly slows the decline of the PC by dressing it up as a tablet, and leaves Microsoft without a competitive tablet product. You can see this in sharp relief in the market failure of the ARM-based, neither-fish-nor-fowl Surface.
Tablets are not replacements for a full computing environment, and never will be.
How many PC users actually use or need "a full computing environment?"
Left-click the same icon, then use the scrollwheel?
For some of us, though, it was an age of enlightenment, having to work on various unices and then picked up Linux at home. (I started work in the 80s on MS-DOS & Novell environments)
What I have found the last 2 years or so is not that Linux is so awesome, but that Windows is, by itself, simply really bad. Having picked up iOS, MacOS and Android devices recently, they all work pretty well. Windows simply sits by itself in being a remarkably sluggish turd that cannot decide what it wants to look like. Of course, I have not actually had to use Windows 8 yet, but 7 was bad enough of a WTF U/I change (and slow as ever, with klugy programming environment).
RANT ENDS.
Edit: I should add that my main environment is Linux running dwm in monocle mode on a 17" MacBook Pro. Noone could be more surprised than me that I would be intrigued by a new UI coming from Microsoft.
I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.
That's a mere 17 years ago.
There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.
I think they would be batshit insane to do otherwise.
Nobody wants to be locked into a single vendor's platform. It's good for the vendor and bad for everybody else. How can they be surprised that everybody else now dislikes them for doing it?
The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.
To be honest, most people really don't give a shit. The next cigarette or pay day is far more important. Perhaps I'm getting old, but there are more important things to worry about.
The difference is that not all ecosystems are tied to a single vendor. Nobody has a lock on POSIX or Java like Microsoft has on Win32. And the hardest part of getting a portable C program to run on Windows, Linux and OSX is to get the program that was much more easily ported between Linux and OSX to run on Windows, because Microsoft has to do a million inane things like using WSAGetLastError instead of errno just to be different.
>The bit people forget is: stop procrastinating and build some shit.
I don't think people forgot that. We've just started building shit for and on non-Microsoft platforms and found it to our liking.
Some other complaints about win 8- the metro apps all seem to take FOREVER to launch. You get this giant c64esque splash screen for 10-15 seconds. Feels confining to me. The task switching needs improvement. Wish I could see a screen of all my running apps and click the one I need. Anyone that can provide advice would be owed a beer.
But what about the developers and power users? Think about those AAA game development studios, Large budget software houses? Will they develop high end software by touch?
This will sound a little off-topic, but I would like to bring this to notice, anyway... -- GNOME 3 --
Yes, the open source community made a similar move like metro some days ago... And to be honest, I will not like to use a touch based UI for development until someone forces me with iron fists!!!
A few weeks is usually how long I will use a "gee-wiz" feature of an OS/app/software until I turn off the unnecessary glitz (that's probably now choking my hardware) and get down to business.
I have difficulty believing that anyone can wax so rhapsodic about Windows 8's UI. It's so clunky and frustrating that the best you can expect to be is "resigned to your fate".
Me, I couldn't wait to scrap that shit off and load me some Slackware.
I remember the first time I figured out Windows xp, Windows 7, fedora , ubuntu , mac OS 10 , yes I was very excited for each occasion. But it was not worth an article . Every OS is useful for some needs so let's move on.
People come back to love their abusive spouses too. Doesn't make it right :)
I don't like windows because:
1. I don't have terminal 2. I can't configure it easily 3. I don't like to have lots of things in taskbar 4. I want multi-workspace and easy to switch between them 5. I want more fullscreen stuff.. 6. filesystem built not ok! viruses in windows are a big threat! I don't want antivirus