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Comment by webreac | Hacker News Reader

I have used W8 slightly less than 2 weeks on the laptof of my wife (she asked me to install linux instead). Like many, I have not liked the general UX, but what surprised me a lot is that to work around the bad UX, I have naturally started to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Many are identical in W7, but I did not need them before.

I think that W8 could be usable if we first learn all the important keyboard shortcuts.

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This... I am an earlier adopter of Windows 8 and I actually love it. It feels to me like it's the first version of windows that is truly keyboard centric. Stuff like winkey +x can make you wonder how do you survived without that before.

Me too, I was pleasantly surprised that I could actually drive this version of windows with the keyboard. Which for me makes it the only version of Windows that I can bare. Energy use is better, and kernel hibernation feels good. Partitions as file system mounts finally. Better keyboard layout switching. And it feels faster.

I hate all the old Windows cruft that is still there, the split control panel between UIs (like user management), crappy add/remove programs, the fact that there don't seem to be many 64bit programs, not being able to find the network preferences easily - and that I can't get windows to play with my netgear router over DHCP (but that could be netgears fault). Huge updates that use up my allowance. And the horrible start screen etc.

Love the win+X - but detest the tiles. There's no logic or structure or hierarchy to them. Almost impossible to manage. It's obvious the GUI was NOT designed for a desktop - it's terrible.

Thank goodness for Start8 and similar products. If I could uninstall tiles to save memory, I would.

Hold ctrl and zoom out. Then right click on any group to name it. Drag tiles out of groups to make your own, drag groups around when zoomed out to organize.

There's no hierarchy but it's actually extremely usable.

Nice. Thanks for that! :)

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