The overlooked issue of Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

The overlooked issue of Windows 8

binarypassion.net

44 pointsdaniel_t55 comments

The overlooked issue with Windows 8 is that it is fucking awesome. I've got the desktop for clutter and the black background for reading and other focused tasks...when I need them. All just a single keypress apart.

I still spend most of my time on the desktop, but when I want something all it takes is a single keypress and to start typing. No navigating an arbitrary hierarchy of menus where how things are filed made sense at the time they were filed. It just finds the damn thing.

It is better Windows, but change is hard.

when I want something all it takes is a single keypress and to start typing. No navigating an arbitrary hierarchy of menus where how things are filed made sense at the time they were filed. It just finds the damn thing

Wasn't this available in the Win7 (and maybe Vista) start menu?

Yes, but it wasn't obvious. The groovy corduroy paisley bell bottom paradigm of the 1970's was front and center - I think the search came in with Seven, but I skipped Vista.

And scrolling with the mouse wheel when I insist on using Windows 8 in the old paradigm is much better than clicking through a menu tree.

This is also available in GNOME 3 (and previously you could use tools like Gnome-Do, Quicksilver or Kupfer). Quite useful, I think.

Metro apps are entirely optional, and the desktop is not going away. I don't like Metro apps, but I just don't get it when people seem to think that their very existence is a big problem. Windows 8 on x86 has almost exactly the same desktop paradigm as Win95-Win7, but with the added ability to run mobile apps if you really want them.

Widgets in Vista sucked, but everyone just ignored them. Why not just ignore Metro apps if you don't like them, and wait and see if they get better?

It's hard to ignore something when you are forced to click past it every time you start up your computer.

It takes about 20-30 seconds to remove all the preinstalled metro apps from the start screen. By the time you have installed the usual programs like VLC they will grab all the file associations and you will never see Metro again, unless you want to.

As I understand it, this is not true.

Personally, I like to hit the windows key, type "fi", and hit enter to start Firefox. On Win7 this is a pleasant experience, on Win8 I feel like I'm being punched in the face by a wall of colour.

I almost exclusively launch programs in Windows 7 and 8 by pressing the start button and typing the name of the program. I've found Windows 8 to be better at finding the right program, and a lot better at finding settings when I want to change them (although I would prefer it if they displayed apps and settings on the same page).

I can see how some people would prefer the old menu in the corner to the full screen, but personally I think the full screen is better.

I'm not sure what part of my comment you are saying isn't true?

> (although I would prefer it if they displayed apps and settings on the same page)

this is coming in 8.1, thankfully.

Source?

http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/blue-s-clues-new-search-ex...

It takes one keypress to get to the desktop.

I'm on Windows 7. It takes one click to postpone the update for four hours. And yet every four hours I get angry at Microsoft for a minute because of this.

Microsoft's mistake was trying to force the metro screen on desktop users, which is blindingly stupid.

Windows 8 in desktop mode on a desktop machine is a great operating system, better than Windows 7 (which was already pretty good.)

Wholeheartedly agree. Personally I like the Metro start screen (not the metro apps), but if they had just made it boot to desktop and leave the start button as a startscreen launcher, I think that the reaction would have been more positive.

That's how it was in the first public beta. The start button launched the start screen.

I have heard people saying how Microsoft is FORCING Metro Apps on desktop and other crap... I started using Windows 8 from day one and I never used a metro app... I really do not understand some people.

I bought Windows 8 when it was released and mostly had the same finding. Never used a single metro app and the desktop experience was degraded from Windows 7. No start button, lack of shadows behind windows made everything confusing, control panel issues, etc.

But the moment I decided to stop using it was when I had to copy and paste a very long random user/pass into a new vpn connection. Have you tried this? It's not possible. When you leave the vpn creation window to copy the password, it forgets the username.

I've had enough. I'm back on Windows 7.

I just cannot understand why the metro start screen exists in Windows Server 2012.

And why are the color schemes everywhere are so darn awful.

You still have to use the Metro interface to start and switch apps. It just feels wrong to me to use a very large monitor that way. You can replace the startup screen with a third-party Start menu, of course, but that doesn't make a case for out-of-the-box Windows 8.

One of the comments after the article points to one of my gripes with modern services: increasing pervasiveness of single sign-on.

I don't mind signing into Win8 with my live id, in fact it makes migrating settings and such really easy. The problems arise when I want to use an application with a different account than the one that I'm currently signed in as. It just doesn't exist.

This bit me hard when I was trying to set up Metro Skype (on a surface rt) to be a standalone auto-webcam, and as far as I could tell there wasn't a way to log into Skype with an account different than the one I used to log into Windows. I had to create a new Windows Live account just for this task.

This issue isn't isolated to Win8 (I imagine I would run into similar problems with Chrome OS). It's becoming more common and very, very annoying to deal with.

Amen. It bothers me more than I would like to admit that I can't tell how many applications are currently running on my Android phone. Or then when I press "back", sometimes the application quits and sometimes it doesn't.

Can't you just hit the little multi-box icon on the bottom right always (to the right of the home icon)? Then swipe an app away to kill it.

My understanding is that this does not kill the app, merely removes it from the list.

It kills the app on my phone (Nexus 4 Cyanogenmod). If I ever get a slowdown I open up the switcher and swipe away all my recent apps to close them.

Not available on some earlier Android versions — but a nice way to handle it.

On Android, why would you care? They get killed when the device is low on memory anyway.

Because I trust some apps more than others. I don't trust my Facebook app to be running 24/7, for example.

Also, background apps I no longer care about may affect my battery life.

I think your point on application management is a bit weak. I have several applications/services running on Windows 7 without any visible windows present ( i.e Apache, Adobe Service Management, spotify web helper etc..). For a lot of these I had no choice if they were installed, I frankly don't even know how some of them were installed. A suspended Windows 8 app isn't much different than these and at least Win 8 apps consume zero CPU cycles while suspended.

One of the things I immediately disliked about the Ubuntu Unity interface was that it wasn't immediately obvious what applications I had open. The visual cues have gotten better in more recent releases, but I still don't feel that Unity is quite usable without also running a dock (I ran Docky for awhile but more recently run Cairo).

I dislike the dock in unity as well - I find it's too in your face, but I've heard that auto-hide and a few other aspects have been improved in recent versions, so thinking of giving it another go. I do find it all very dark though, and generally preferring Mint.

I decided to stop worrying and love the Unity some time between 12.04 and 12.10, and I've gotten quite used to it. I use the Radiance theme, which is brighter and cleaner looking than the default Ambiance theme. (And I have my minimize/maximize/close buttons on the right side - some habits die hard.)

I tried Mint but found it clunky and unstable. For a while I used Ubuntu with the gnome-classic desktop, but it got harder to make it work with everything else, which kept changing. I also tried Cinnamon but found it extremely unstable - my desktop would crash routinely.

Unity is pretty good and keeps getting better. My other main request would be to make the icons smaller - the smallest default size is 24px.

In unrelated news, I was happy to discover after upgrading to 13.04 that my phone, a Galaxy S3 running Android 4.1.1, now auto-mounts into the filesystem via MTP. (It occurs to me that my gratitude for something as basic as plugging a device into USB and having it Just Work may be a warning sign of Stockholm Syndrome. Yet it also occurs to me that I haven't paid a penny for Ubuntu since I first installed version 8.04, so I think on balance that my gratitude is well-placed.)

Thanks for the tip on Radiance - I found Ambiance too dark, but Radiance does look nicer (more similar to what I like about Mint). I think I'm going to give 13.04 another try tonight.

I used to Ubuntu Tweak to change a few things like making the dock extra small, but that seems to be discontinued. Do you know of any other utility for tweaking Unity (such as moving the buttons to the right side)?

It gets better. I had my LXDE phase. Unity is very usable now, and the demos of Unity Touch look usable, too. There is an irony in this: Ubuntu is past the pain-point with most of their users, and is on a conservative trajectory to blending touch with a "traditional" desktop OS. It won't be as "modal" as Windows 8. It will be more evolutionary, and unified. I don't expect the UX to be as clean as an OS and app runtime designed for touch. But it may be a lot less painful transition than Windows 8 is experiencing.

I personally have no problem with this. One of the biggest vexations when I use Mac at work is that I can't maximize a window without manually adjusting it by dragging the edges. I always want every single window to take up the entire screen even if there's "no content" there.

Usually pressing shift while maximizing does the trick. More recent apps have a full-screen option too.

Practically every application has full screen mode nowadays (not sure it's possible for developers to disable, actually).

In Mountain Lion, most apps now have arrows in the top-right corner of the window that will make the app fullscreen (in its own space), so you can easily switch between fullscreen apps.

That said, I agree that this remains the big difference between OS X and Windows -- especially now with large monitors being standard. When I first switched to OS X it took me years to get used to a true "multi-window" environment, but now I have I find Windows to be claustrophobic by comparison.

I think this is something that often trips switchers up, because OS X and Windows look similar enough that they don't realise there's an actual philosophical difference -- OS X has a window-as-a-document model rather than a window-as-an-application model, and once you realise that, it all makes a lot more sense (e.g. the application menu bars pinned to the top of the screen, and applications not quitting when you close windows).

You may want to check out a program called Divvy. You can set key commands to set the position and size of any window. There's other programs similar to it, but this is my favorite one.

Try http://spectacleapp.com/. Works well for me.

Why would you want an app to take up more space than strictly necessary?

Because he wants to. That's the exact attitude I hate most about this industry.

That is still an option, and various environments have added new features for doing that better (like OS X's fullscreen mode).

The mini-debate is only about the default.

I use Cinch and SizeUp to get the Win 8 aero snap jazz on my mac. Both by http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com

The major problem with Windows 8 is that Microsoft shafted developers/admins with yet another major shift in tools, UI and APIs and system changes. (cha ching!) Metro Apps aren't rich enough to be decent replacements for desktop apps, nor are they good enough to match others rich web applications.

As a developer, if I'm having to shift focus, I'm going to explore alternatives outside the Redmond garden that give me more control and cost less. As much as I love VS and SQL Server, a growing number of my clients/projects can do equally well or better with OSS solutions.

The question is what does it mean for application to be "running". In the past I remember closing applications down when I wasn't using them to save memory, now if I run an application I generally won't close it until I shutdown the computer.

Also many applications will make some attempt to start you again from where you left off last time when they are reloaded and modern OSs will try and preload common applications into memory at boot.

There is a quote I have no attribution for, but I recall seeing it a long time ago, long before 2650x1440 displays were economical: "The desktop metaphor works better when your screen is the size of a desk."

Handsets don't need a desktop metaphor. Tablets don't need a desktop metaphor. So the question is, do you make an operating system for devices that do not need and should not have a desktop metaphor, or do you try to stuff a mature operating system imbued with the desktop metaphor into a tablet?

The inappropriateness of the Modern/Metro UI in Windows 8 goes deeper than the user experience. Modern/Metro UI apps are severely limited in their ability to communicate with other apps. They are over-sandboxed and crippled compared to both Windows desktop apps and Android apps. And yet, Modern/Metro UI is the only way to implement a satisfactory touch UI in Windows 8.

The result is a mess of hardware that enables touch, with dubious ergonomics and software that is limited but touch-appropriate or powerful but bad at touch.

I think Jeff Brooks compared the desktop metaphor to be more like a "flightseat"[1] metaphor. Let me look it up.

Found it, and I meant Fred Brooks ofcourse: http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/2734...

[1] like in an airplane.

I have two 24" monitors and two 17" laptops on my desk right now. Windows 8 is definitely not for me.

What about the app list that is on the left side of the screen (hidden by default)? Doesn't that show you the list of all running apps?

The author's argument is vacuous. All* versions of Windows allow for applications to run when their window is minimized. And there's all kinds of crap that runs as a process or in the systray.

And if anyone wants to know what is "really" running - i.e. using resources - they use TaskManager or a similar tool.

*O.K., I mean "at least since 3.1."

Actually that is an excellent point. And if anything, Windows 8 cleans up Task Manager to make it easier to see what is running and in what context.

I think in summary Win8 provides more views of running processes than Win7.

If Windows 8.1 gets rid of you having to use metro, it will be awesome. I like everything about windows 8 minus the metro part, which is were almost all of the windows 8 complaints go. Hopefully Microsoft will deliver.

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