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Comment by mikegioia | Hacker News Reader

I just recently recommended Win7 to my dad over Win8/8.1. I tried getting him to switch to Ubuntu but that just wasn't going to happen.

I've been testing our web apps in Windows 7/8 a lot and I can say that getting people to convert to Win8 is going to be a serious uphill battle for Microsoft. The hidden menu, missing start button, and general hodge-podgery of switching between tablet/desktop mode had me ripping my hair out in frustration. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to check my wireless network config in Windows 8 before I got trapped in the white settings screen with no way out. Apparently you have to hover to the top right of the screen for a second to bring up that hidden charms menu even from within the settings screen. Why there's no visible "close" button, and why [ESC] didn't take me out I'll never know but it seems like no one even used Win8 before they released it.

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> Why there's no visible "close" button, and why [ESC] didn't take me out

W8 makes a lot more sense, to me, if you think of Metro applications as each running fullscreen in their own ephemeral virtual desktops. You don't "minimize" a virtual desktop; you switch away from it. You don't "close" a virtual desktop; you quit the program running on it, and it ceases to exist. (In other words, the solution in W8.0 is either "press Alt+F4 to quit the application", or "throw-your-mouse-toward/swipe-away-from at the top-left corner to open the virtual-desktop switcher.")

It's exactly the same as fullscreen app behavior in OSX, or Gnome; the only difference is that your "native" windowed apps are all limited to living on a single virtual desktop, rather than the user being able to spread them out across several.

In the upcoming 8.1.1 update (or whatever it's called), there'll be an additional UX: throw-your-mouse-toward/swipe-away-from the top of a virtual desktop, and you'll get a sort of title-bar with caption buttons for the virtual desktop itself. That's actually kind of brilliantly-obvious, once you see it, and I hope that idea spreads to every OS.

That may be nice and all, but I'm not on a tablet, I'm on a desktop. I know I'm speaking for myself, but I rarely like fullscreen applications in a desktop setting. It's why you infrequently see people using fullscreen mode in their browser unless they're watching videos.

The problem I have is that it feels like Microsoft is forcing me into that virtual desktop environment when I just want a regular desktop environment; and it's that aspect that I feel will turn people to Win7.

Fullscreen apps work great on a Macbook, and you only need to know two simple trackpad gestures: three fingers side to side, and three fingers up. And yes, you can break out of it by mashing ESC.

It's an interface clearly designed for a multi-touch trackpad, and it's a joy to use. It makes a 13" laptop screen feel a lot less cramped. Contrast to Win8 which is an overcomplicated mess, filled with interface decisions that are suboptimal for a mouse or trackpad interface.

Especially with the low screen resolution of the 11" MacBook Air, full-screen mode becomes essential. On a 27" 1440p display, not so much. I personally use full screen mode for iTunes (mainly so that iTunes is always a quick multi-swipe away) but not for anything else.

I think the animations on Mac OS make full screen mode great. Slide some fingers on the trackpad and you switch to the next full screen app or virtual desktop. On Win8 it's a jarring zoom in zoom out animation, without any ability to 'peek', at least using a mouse/keyboard interface on a desktop.

I actually quite like OS X fullscreening on my 15" rMBP. I usually keyboard back and forth between apps instead...I can never quite get the three finger swipes working reliably. It even works pretty well with multiple desktops.

But until Mavericks, it was horribly horribly broken and useless on multi-monitor setups and even now isn't all that great.

For me, the answer is "just don't use Metro". I have 3 computers running Win8, only rarely do I use anything in Metro.

Why use Win8, then? Well, it has some nice small core OS improvements over Win7, licenses were cheap, and it will be supported for longer going forward.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard, all you have to remember is to hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard until you get to the Metro home screen. From there, Desktop Mode is one click away. Also, Alt+Tab works in Metro, and can take you to any process- metro or desktop.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard. . .

This is all true. But the fact that it's even possible to get so lost, and the fact that we don't feel feckless and asinine in sharing hints for how to get out of that situation on a forum for hackers. . . it still betrays a serious, disastrous user experience failure.

Having the user get stuck in situations where they don't know how to accomplish some specific task is probably always going to be an unavoidable risk. But to take the "I have no idea where I am and I have no idea how to get out" level of lost-ness experience that was previously only possible in command-line interfaces, and figure out how to re-create it in a windowed GUI. . . It's really a pretty impressive feat, when you think about it.

Honestly, I didn't want to rag on anybody, but I'm kind of surprised a forum full of hackers managed to get so stuck. Alt+Tab is something I would expect everyone here to know, and it was literally the first shortcut I tried when I got confused on my first foray with Win8. But I suppose use of the keyboard to navigate anything may be a dying art.

What might only be a few moments of confusion for nerds is a brick wall to many other people.

Perhaps that's also something to do with what happened in Redmond. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Windows 8's UI mess is at least partially a product of letting a bunch of technology people get too far inside their own heads.

I utterly failed at helping my aunt figure out metro. I did use alt-tab. But there were multiple other points of failure. It's been long enough that I don't remember specifics, but I was utterly baffled despite being experienced with keyboard navigation.

From what has been shown in the previews, I think it's very likely that in W8.2, Metro apps will:

1. be able to be "restored" from fullscreen to become regular windows, and

2. obey a preference in the Control Panel to always start them as windows rather than fullscreen.

I expect people will forget almost all of their objections to W8 after that.

This is the thing I had been hoping for more than anything else for Windows 8.1. And yeah, I will forget all my objections to Win8 after that, because when you get down to it that's really my only objection to Win8.

I've got no real complaint with Metro apps, as such. What I've got a complaint with is that they don't behave like every Windows application I've used since approximately 1990. Not because there's anything broken about the existing desktop PC interaction model that Microsoft had been incrementally refining for decades, mind you. No, it's really just that Microsoft : Captain Ahab :: iDevices : white whale.

> It's why you infrequently see people using fullscreen mode in their browser unless they're watching videos.

Anecdotal, but in every place I've worked or been with people running Windows, most people run everything maximized and switch between applications. MS probably just took the hint that people don't like fiddling with lots of half expanded windows and designed the OS around it. Unfortunately, they did it all wrong for the Desktop.

It's never really been a good experience in OS X so it's just never become part of the cultural workflow. Full-screen mode in OS X (and well, also Windows) is also not the same as maximize on Windows and until pretty recently (Mavericks) was quite broken anyways.

> Anecdotal, but in every place I've worked or been with people running Windows, most people run everything maximized and switch between applications.

Were their monitors small? That could be a contributing factor.

Maybe it is a personal preference, but I never liked fullscreen applications for anything - I'd only maximise if I was focused on one application's content, and it was large enough that scrolling would be reduced significantly if I did so. At any given time I probably have several other things running, and I like to see what the other apps are doing and/or refer to them. I'm also not really a fan of tabbed browsing, since I often compare and look at several pages simultaneously, and with only tabs, I would otherwise have to remember the previous page's contents as I switched between them.

For me it's usually applications with either lots of UI (Outlook, Visual Studio, Eclipse) or lots of content (browser, Far Manager, consoles) that are maximized. Although depending on how I use the latter they might as well be windowed if necessary. Two monitors help in not needing to window applications all the time just to see two of them at the same time, though. Sadly a third monitor doesn't work with the machine here :|

Really? You might have been lucky there, because I always maximize my windows on a 14-inch screen.

What Windows 8 doesn't give you while full screen is the task bar, which used to show the user what is behind the active program.

Users don't like not knowing what's going on.

You maximize because your screen real estate is limited. Try doing the same in an 27-inch screen and it will look quite inconvenient.

Which brings me to one of my everlasting questions, although somehow unrelated to the topic. Why aren't screens square?

As you get further from a square, you get less screen area for a given diagonal. A 4:3 screen with a 19" diagonal gives you 173 square inches, but a 16:9 screen with the same diagonal is only 156 square inches. http://daleswanson.org/things/screensize.htm So it's all about picking the biggest possible number for the crummiest product.

They used to be. Mostly machines with dedicated monitors. Nice, beautiful square screens with gorgeous square pixels.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=298

I have 2 24" monitors and almost always maximize everything to full screen or snap windows side-by-side (Win-Left / Win-Right).

You don't need a large screen if you're going to leave all that space unused.

Because you have two eyes

Because televisions aren't square.

More precisely, because eyes (plural, operating as a single input) aren't square.

16x[9/10] sort-of matches the field of view we have.

Subjective, I know, but 4:3 was a lot more pleasant to work with, at least for me. 16:(9|10) might match movie aspect ratios better and thus would be better for watching them, but I do other things more often than watching movies on my computer screens (it's different for a TV, though).

Conversely, 16x(9|10) allows me to put 2x portrait documents next to one another comfortably. Alternatively, I can work on a document with a 2-page view.

I meant that rarely do I put the window in fullscreen mode, not maximize it. I frequently maximize too, but that still gives you the task bar. My problem was with 8/8.1's insistence on fullscreening the window.

Like you, I hardly ever maximize windows. I have Win8.1 on my work laptop and the only reason I didn't reformat it is because of StartIsBack. With StartIsBack, I basically get all the benefits of Win8 with very few of the drawbacks.

Well, the main difference between OS X's full-screen mode and Windows 8's Metro apps are that OS X's full-screen mode is opt-in. You can't get to it except by pressing the full-screen button in the top right of the window, which hints that leaving full-screen mode is also in the top right. In addition, the Dock and the menubar are visible in normal usage, hinting that hovering on their corresponding screen edges will make them reappear (with a visible leave-full-screen button on the menubar). In contrast, the Windows taskbar can't be pulled up by hovering over the bottom; there's no "switch to windowed mode" button at all; and Metro uses screen corners rather than screen edges - which are less discoverable, and with the exception of the Start button in 8.1, the screen corner menus in question aren't visible in normal usage.

There's also a difference in terms of the keyboard shortcuts: in OS X, Cmd+W is "close tab/window" and Cmd+Q is "quit application", and they're relatively commonly used (and easy to use). In Windows, Alt+F4 is much less user-friendly (most laptop keyboards these days don't even let you use F4 without Fn), as evidenced by the fact that users keep on trying to use Esc and being frustrated when it doesn't work.

In Windows, Alt+F4 is close application and Ctrl+F4 is close tab. It's been that way for decades (granted most users don't know Ctrl+F4, but Alt+F4 is almost as well known as alt+tab).

But why would you want apps running fullscreen? Why would you want that at the exclusion of every other option??

Sure, we're often fullscreen, but for many tasks being able to have multiple windows (hint!) on the screen is really helpful.

W8 takes this away and doesn't give anything in return.

I'm guessing you're probably on OS X where multiple windows per app is normal. But it's odd in Windows and most apps are designed not to have lots of little windows floating all over the place. As a result, most people on Windows maximize their applications.

It's not quite full-screening, and Microsoft made a mistake with that, but it is a notable different in the two environments.

Windows 8.1 makes even more sense since Metro apps can run side by side with a desktop full of windows on the same screen at the same time...you could already do this with dual monitors in Windows 8. Metro is not an either or interface and the learning curve is really pretty shallow if anything other than trial and error is used.

missing start button

I continue to be surprised that HN consistently upvotes comments with this criticism of Windows 8. The start button has been present since Windows 8.1 was released last October. The analogy would be criticizing Ubunto for a feater missing from 12.04.

Having largely transitioned from Windows to Linux in the past few months, I'd never have made it if I abandoned Linux every time I encountered fifteen minutes of configuration WTF? and compared to figuring out how to remove the installation media from yum's list of repositories learning the charms bar [before the start button and Windows 8.1] was a piece of cake.

Then again, I watched the Windows 8 tutorials.

Most HN contributors wouldn't have trouble using Windows 8. True and fair. However, the context of the parent comment was recommending an OS for his (presumably less tech savvy) parents. I couldn't agree more in this regard. I recommend either OSX or Windows 7 to anyone in the family who asks.

The missing start menu may not be a current issue, but it's a fair example of what's wrong with Windows 8 from a UX perspective. That is to say - abandoning almost everything that is familiar about the Windows UX in favor of a new and largely unproven desktop interface.

On top of it all, it's a touch-centric interface that feels (to many people, at least) out of place in a desktop. I personally can't imagine jabbing at my desktop monitor with my finger. What works on a tablet in my lap becomes really awkward when the screen is a full arms length from my face.

If the monitor in question isn't a touchscreen, then what's left is a really unfortunate mess that most less tech-savvy users are going to have a tough time getting rid of.

Since upgrading to 8.1 I never see the touch interface, boot straight to the desktop (which will soon be the default on no touch devices) and it just isn't an issue.

I've been using Windows 8 and I'm pretty happy with it, but the first thing I did when I installed it was install Start 8 and configured the system to login directly to the desktop, and hide all the "metro" apps from the start menu and disabled all the stupid charm stuff. (Which is pretty simple, it took about 15 minutes, although granted it took some third party software). I haven't even seen metro in months. Once you do that, it's basically a faster version of windows 7.

I think the improvements to the core os and the desktop are worth the upgrade, but jesus, metro is stupid on anything but a tablet.

Is it really faster than Windows 7? I haven't found any serious benchmarks on the subject.

Here's one: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406668,00.asp

(Scroll down a bit for the numbers)

The boot time is definitely faster. I think removing aeroglass also helped a bit with energy consumption and window rendering speed, although I have to admit I miss it. They also updated a few small things that aren't a big deal but are kind of nice (the file copy dialog is WAY better).

Why do people even need to use Start button? I use Alfred on my Mac and it's significantly faster to type the name of the application instead of navigating the Start Menu. Granted, I haven't used Windows since XP.

Why not have a hierarchical menu and a search box? Sometimes I can't remember the name of a program I haven't used in a while, so I click around until I find it.

I really like the way KDE does things: favourites list with search box above, with an applications list a click away.

Do you always remember the name of all your programs so you can type them?

Because the start button does the same thing as Alfred on Win7/8?

After a year of using Win 8, it still takes me a few tries to get the charms menu to display (it pops up all the time when I don't want it to). I hook a 2nd monitor to my laptop a lot, and trying to get the mouse in that "charm bar sweet spot" without crossing over to monitor 2 is a complete pain. I was really hoping that 8.1 would fix these usability issues, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft was really listening to users' complaints.

I commend you for trying the switch to Linux :D

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