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Comment by CSDude | Hacker News Reader

I'm nearly a power user of Windows 8.1 (using it both coding, designing, using VirtualBox, Photoshop, AfterFX, Office etc), and when you just minimize the icons in the Start screen to the smallest possible tile size, it is not different from Windows 7 at all. The thing I miss most is feeling of depth, which is lost in this flat area. But other than that, I don't understand the hype. Every single application in Windows 7 is available in Windows 8. You don't ever have to use Metro apps. I just remove them from my start menu, since I don't use my laptop as a tablet. I didn't like it first, but I get used to it and I use it faster than my previous Windows 7 installation.

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That's kind of the point though. You can go through a lot of work to undo the changes so that it's just the same as 7. Or you can avoid the upgrade at all.

There's other things that 8 does that's annoying, there's some changes to it so that some drivers no longer work, so there's devices that are left unsupported. There's stupid decisions like how if you want to shut down you have to hover in the top right corner with your mouse, then slide down the right side of the window to go to settings to shut off.

The problem is that they wanted to make a consistent tablet interface, but it's not easy to use a tablet interface with a mouse. Many many people still use mice, and still have many reasons to still use mice, but they didn't design a system that is comfortable with a mouse. Using windows 8 on a tablet is actually not too bad, but I only use a tablet casually.

If you're using the mouse and interacting with windows 8 features you probably aren't having a good time. However, you have no reason to. As of 8.1 you can boot straight into the desktop, if you're a power user (or aren't on a touch device) you aren't using metro apps anyway so their interface doesn't mean much to you, and all other functionality (shutdown, search, settings, etc) is accessible with simple keyboard shortcuts (far faster than using the mouse regardless of what OS you use). The only reason a user without a touch interface should see the start menu in Win8 is for brief moments when they are using the search functionality to quickly open programs. The poster you were responding to is completely correct: they hype against win8 is completely overblown. In my opinion, slight visual changes are worth the back-end changes to things like boot time, multi-core performance, and security.

> I don't understand the hype.

I use a Windows 7 machine for gaming at home, and I have briefly used a Windows 8.1 machine for a personal laptop. I dislike Windows 8 pretty viscerally. The laptop has a split personality, with some applications behaving one way, and others behaving a completely different way. I can guess how it will behave by the presence or absence of a window around my application, but that's extra cognitive overhead which I don't feel I should have to spend on figuring out how to manipulate an application.

I could certainly drop everything Metro, and get a closer to Windows 7 experience, but what is the advantage of that over just using Windows 7 in the first place?

The hype is simply that the historically go-to OS for ease of use is now difficult for so many of its most dedicated users. I used most versions of Windows going back to the early 90s, and have generally been on Mac OS X since 2006 (except at some jobs). I'm still very familiar with Windows up to Windows 7, but I remember being horrified when trying to help my parents figure out their new laptop running Windows 8. It was so hard to show them how to use it for even their most basic needs. Last week I was trying to help a friend locate Wordpad on Windows 8. I thought about cheating and seeing if the search worked as well as Spotlight, but I was determined to figure out the usual path to open it, and the steps seem so much slower than most versions of Windows. I understand that people can simply learn the new ways, but Microsoft's claim to fame was that their OS was good for all the people who aren't good at computers. It's not like the new look and feel is going to convert people from Mac and Linux, so what competitive edge does Windows have now if their own users are struggling so much?

> The hype is simply that the historically go-to OS for ease of use is now difficult for so many of its most dedicated users.

The historically go-to OS for ease of use is Mac OS, not Windows.

Windows is historically the go-to OS for appeal to corporate IT because Microsoft fairly directly inherited the "No one gets fired for buying X" mantle from IBM as hardware became commoditized and the remaining concern was over core software.

I'm wondering if this will stay the same. Prior to 8, I've found that Windows has been easier to work with than Mac OS.

The first example, (not the best example, but illustrative) that comes to mind is I was asked the other day to set up an AirPort Time Capsule. It was unboxed, and so I looked at it, and at first I had no idea what it was. It had no identifying marks, no product name even on the underside. I had to go to the mac store online and browse through images until I could see what it was.

I found the box, and there were no instructions or disks in it. I went online, and found that you had to use a program to configure it. The page to download the program only had a link to the iTunes store, so I had to set up an iTunes account on this computer to download it. Once all of the iTunes linkage was done, I found out that despite the fact the page said it was an iPad, iPhone or iOS app, it wouldn't run for iOS, or at least not in any trivial way that I could find. I then had to hunt around for an alternative download source through google, for the actual iOS application to configure it.

Now the nice part of it is, once it was configured, it was trivial to set up the time machine portion.

And that's always been sort of illustrative of my dealing with Mac. As long as you're doing exactly what is expected, the experience is simple. As soon as you want to do something a little bit differently, it's not simple to accommodate.

Windows is able to accommodate, but sometimes the simplest things become more complicated as a result.

(Contrasted to Linux, which can accommodate anything you want, as long as you don't mind writing it yourself, but has a more limited set of options for pre-compiled software.)

I think 8's real failing is that it wanted to have the rigidity of a tablet while keeping the flexibility that a desktop has historically held. And whenever the question of which to use by default would come up, they erred on the side of the tablet interface, which is frustrating for anyone who would prefer the desktop.

> Prior to 8, I've found that Windows has been easier to work with than Mac OS.

I agree, for much the same reason that you state:

> And that's always been sort of illustrative of my dealing with Mac. As long as you're doing exactly what is expected, the experience is simple.

Right. That's long been Apple's strength: simple as long as you're doing exactly what's expected, and having the strength of design to "expect" things that hit a pretty large segment of the market.

At no point post Windows 95 did any other company has a claim to go-to OS for ease or otherwise than Microsoft. It is fact, does not matter what your likes or dislikes are.

> At no point post Windows 95 did any other company has a claim to go-to OS for ease or otherwise than Microsoft. It is fact, does not matter what your likes or dislikes are.

Personally, I prefer Windows to Mac OS X, so if I was stating my OS preference rather than my perception of the perception common in the market, I wouldn't have said what I did. But I don't think what you say is a fact at all -- its a claim that I've, in the course of using almost every Microsoft DOS/Windows version since MS-DOS 2.11, and most versions of Mac OS, and interacting with plenty of other users over that time, never even heard outside of this thread.

"Ease of use" and "familiarity to people who have been using it for a long time" are two very different things. Every OS has the latter, and Windows has by far the largest base of familiar people -- which, as long as nothing significant changes, is a strength (and MS occasionally gets bashed for breaking familiarity -- this happened with Windows 8, sure, but also with Vista and XP -- and even more often with applications and opposed to OS's.)

I basically agree with you, but even though it was "later" that Windows became the go-to easy OS, its reign in that category lasted long enough to be a big part of consumer computing history. I do remember many friends and teachers loving Macintosh before I used it much, and I can imagine all the reasons they felt it made more sense or was simply more pleasing. However, even though I now prefer OS X to Windows, I know that people have generally found Windows easier, and even if the only reason was because the average user learned it first (at home or at the office), that still gave Microsoft an advantage in holding onto a huge number of users who stuck with it because it was what they were used to (found to be easiest).

I too use windows 8.1 daily. I didn't mind windows 8 at all. It was only different when I turned the computer on, the rest of the time it was just slightly different windows 7. With 8.1 I only see the metro screen when I accidentally press the windows key.

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