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Comment by twiceaday | Hacker News Reader

I am staying on 7 as long as I can. I get the impression that 7 is the new XP.

I've been a happy windows users for a long time, but 7 will probably be my last windows OS - and not because I want to go elsewhere, they are actively pushing me away.

It really hurts to see that after so many years of searching itself microsoft finally got things right again with 7 and made a great OS, only for them to throw it all away in the hopes of trying to do a OSX-like thing which ended up being subpar, unsurprisingly, and on top of it most of their regular desktop lovers such as me hate them for it.

There were people who shared your opinion about XP->Vista. Then 7 came out many of those people were happy to go from XP->7. So, I doubt 7 will be your final Windows OS... If they haven't pissed you off enough to move yet, you'll likely end up using Windows 9.

There is a big difference though in my opinion: vista was disliked because it lacked polish on pretty much every single thing (the uac spamming you all the time, features that were outright broken, etc ... it wasn't that I disliked the features, but rather that they didn't work and acted against me), and 7 was in a lot of a way a great polish on top of vista. Call it going the last 10 percent.

My dislike of windows 8 however is not on broken features but on the paradigm changes they made. I don't want to focus on one app fullscreen at a time, or be always connected and sync'ed, or use my computer as a tablet, that sort of things.

But let's be honest, if microsoft can pull a 7 with windows 9, I'm all for it and will eat my own words.

I saw an early review of Windows 8 that described it as an excellent advertisement for Windows 9. Every one of my customers (I do IT support in a rural area) has told me they hate Windows 8. One of my biggest jobs is getting hold of legal Win 7 installation disks for them. Me, I don't hate it as much as I did at first, but I'm still happier using Ubuntu.

Windows 7 will be the last good "desktop OS" from Microsoft. They're going to completely kill the desktop mode in future versions, slowly but surely. They will turn it into DOS, where the desktop is but a fading "app", and will bury it deep inside the Metro mode. I'm almost certain they will do this.

There are rumors that with Windows 10 and beyond they will also try to turn Windows's license model into a subscription model, which will completely kill Windows for just about any "regular consumer", and will turn it into a mostly enterprise OS, because only the enterprise customers will (probably) agree to that kind of model.

Consumers already believe Windows is "free" with their laptop purchase, and that they don't have to pay anything else after that. A subscription model will be a huge turn off for consumers, not matter how little it costs (even $1 per month).

We can only hope that before Windows 7 gets too long in the tooth, Ubuntu or some other multi-OEM OS (Android? Chrome OS?) will become popular enough in the mainstream, and mature enough, to make it a viable alternative five years down the road (I think they will be).

Unlikely. Metro software is extremely thin on the ground, and there's no indication that this is changing in the near term. Microsoft has a long, long history of goofball widget UIs (Active Desktop, Sidebar Gadgets, Metro, various Shell plugin technologies, and to a lesser extent MMC and control panel applets). Each in turn has had its moment in the sun before being marginalized or removed outright.

And by that time, if you're right and people actually jump ship, they'll be using something else (either Windows 7 or Linux IMO) and will demand that at their company.

So, Microsoft is taking enormous risks in all the markets: mobile, desktop, consoles... Well, they still have Office going well I suppose. For now.

They really do seem to have jumped the shark and it makes me wonder whether I'll still be using Windows at home and coding in the Windows stack in a few years.

The problem is that they are actively removing excellent features from 7. Not sprucing them up or adapting them to their cloud strategy - just outright removing them.

What has been removed from Windows 7?

A decent backup system that rivaled Time Machine (replaced with "File History" nonsense).

Loads more listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

If you think that Win7 backup rivals TM, did you ever try to restore from it?

- The interface is lying. Last time I had 'system image' checkbox enabled and it only kept the totally useless image of the last backup, probably only a few hours back in the backup itself. All the other images were just stored locally.

- The pre installation environment used for restoring has barely any network drivers - you need to somehow come up with your own CD or USB drive for providing your network drivers, often needing to extract the right ones out of some subfolders that you draw from an unzipped setup.exe, since manufacturers nowadays often don't offer them separately anymore.

- The interface for logging in to your network drive is totally bugged. If you get a network error you will only recognize after you've hand-typed the location, user account and password (on different windows).

It's a total mess.

Yay someone else who had actually used it. This is the same experience i had which is why I'm glad they removed it and promote that fact in other posts.

On the other hand I have to say it's still better to have some sort of backup system, rather than bundling a synch and miscalling it a backup.

One thing I don't get in this whole ordeal though: Doesn't Skydrive store previous versions and deleted items like Dropbox (I've never used it)? From experiences with Dropbox it's still not what I'd call a backup (too much can go wrong when synching), but I at least expect it to preserve versions and deleted items, such that in normal operation one can undo everything. If MS has omitted that I really don't understand what they're thinking.

SkyDrive's Recycle Bin stores files until you run out of space or until 30 days is up. So you might randomly be able to recover a deleted file.

That list reads more like a changelog than a list of removed features. For example:

> The Aero Glass theme is replaced by a new theme with a flatter visual appearance in line with the Metro design language. Aside from the taskbar, the new theme uses fewer transparency effects than the previous Glass theme.

In other words, unattractive, resource-intensive, usability damaging transparency effects are out and simple, efficient, usable flat design is in.

>unattractive, resource-intensive, usability damaging

Subjective, compared to what, subjective

> simple, efficient, usable flat design is in.

subjective, subjective, subjective.

I don't know where this utterly moronic "flatten ALL THE THINGS" design meme comes from, but I wish it would die in a fire.

Flat UI, at least Microsoft's implementation of it, has a great deal of fail about it. It's hard to tell what's clickable and what's not, things are not organized in a logical or easy to reach manner, and on and on.

Have a look at this if you have about 20 minutes to spare. Someone goes into a great deal of depth on the 8 UX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo

The biggest obstacle that tech journalist faced was his own perceptions on how Windows should work. I'll admit that when I started using Windows 8 during the CTP, I had concerns about the UX for most of the same reasons he mentioned, but I took the time to learn how the designers intended me to use the system before I took the plunge. What is interesting to me, is that most of the complaints he talked about were introduced in Windows 7 and even Vista - press the Windows keyboard button and type to search. That was the recommended way to start applications in Vista since the Start menu could be rearranged simply by installing applications. Want to open the Control Panel, [Win] + "control panel". This of course is a problem for everyone who has learned how to use a Windows computer since the Windows 95 era, and can't be bothered to learn new tricks, but as a tech journalist, was this really outside his abilities to learn? Windows 8 and 8.1 (I haven't tried the RTM release yet) are designed to favor a new class of touch enabled devices. Swipe down from the top of the screen to close Windows 8 applications. Swipe in from the right to show the Charms bar. Swipe in from the left to bring up the task switcher. These metaphors have a much more strict design language than previous versions of Windows. Printing is always* in the Charms bar under devices. It has a consistency beyond what Windows has offered in the past. The only problem I have with Windows 8 and 8.1 is the Desktop mode. *Printing in Desktop applications doesn't follow the same convention as the Windows 8 applications use; you don't use the Charms bar, you fall back to legacy patterns such as File -> Print, or [Ctrl]-p. Ripping the band-aid off quickly would have worked better because then everyone would have adopted the new interface out of necessity. Instead, users are forced to compare them side by side on a daily basis, doing little to wean users off the legacy interface. Coming from legacy Windows to Windows 8 presents some challenges, but approaching Windows 8 with new eyes, on a device designed to use this OS from the start, like a Surface RT, there is so much they got right. It is a shame that Windows 8 is holding users back more than it is ushering in a new era of computing. Microsoft would have been better off if Windows 8 was simply about touch... maybe call it something other than Windows, like Microsoft Touch, and then had left Windows 7 to run legacy apps only. Even something like Windows 7's XP compatibility mode that launched from a card would have been better than making users think that the Desktop was a shipping part of the OS. I can certainly appreciate that Microsoft's management didn't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but that goose is dying and we'd be better off if it went quickly.

Holy crap man, paragraphs are a good thing.

The biggest obstacle that tech journalist faced was his own perceptions on how Windows should work.

You mean, like it's worked for the last 10+ years? You don't jettison a decade of muscle memory and UI conventions on a whim. At least with 3.1 -> 95 it was more or less obvious that the changes were a step forward.

With their behavior in 8, the desktop UX, where real people are getting real work done, is made a second class citizen to the touch UX, which is primarily consumption oriented.

I think that, behind all the aesthetic complaints, is where a lot of the animus comes from.

The point being made is that those features have been removed from 8 and not from 7.

> The problem is that they are actively removing excellent features from 7.

... is a little ambiguous in reply to a comment saying they will stay on 7.

To be honest I am not seeing a lot of "excellent features" there. Except for the UI changes the rest seem to be mostly small miscellaneous stuff and some of them for the better.

Me too, and I never thought I'd be one of those people.

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