Windows 8 Preview

[Red Devil]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYSSdSNF ... ded#at=193

[General BlackDragon]

Can it play Crysis 2?

*Imagines Crysis 2 on a touch screen*

[AcneVulgaris]

I see lots of smeary fingerprints.

[General BlackDragon]

I see windows making a critical mistake.

They think playing a movie in windows media player is a good judgement of "performance"

They need to go load up the new duke nukem.

[Clavin12]

Or UDK.

[Ded10c]

I was seriously worried until I got to 12:09.

That new start menu is terrible. And it seems that's pretty much all they've really done. The rest of the video seems to be mostly boasting about somebody else's hardware.

NB: No, I didn't sit and watch for half an hour.

[HitchcockGreen]

I haven't really been playing close attention to Windows 8 development. I do know that it is going to be marketed towards home users and tablet users mostly. Personally, I'll likely hold out til Windows 9, which will be geared towards professionals and businesses.
I'm not all that gung ho about cloud computing.
However, that being said, I'll likely download it once it hits TechNet and take a peek in a virtual machine.

...

After watching the first 10 minutes or so of the video it appears Windows 8 is basically the same as their Windows 7 Mobile.

[Ded10c]

I haven't really been playing close attention to Windows 8 development. I do know that it is going to be marketed towards home users and tablet users mostly. Personally, I'll likely hold out til Windows 9, which will be geared towards professionals and businesses.
I'm not all that gung ho about cloud computing.
However, that being said, I'll likely download it once it hits TechNet and take a peek in a virtual machine.

...

After watching the first 10 minutes or so of the video it appears Windows 8 is basically the same as their Windows 7 Mobile.

I think the first 10 minutes just showcases the start menu

[GSH]

New UIs don't compel me to drop $$$ for an upgrade. Killer features do. Win7's 64-bit support is why I'll drop WinXP when I next rebuild my rig at home. Not Win7's UI. Accessing more than 3GB of RAM is the #1 reason to drop XP. Period, end of discussion. Other than the 3GB limit, XP is still perfectly serviceable, still usable, and isn't bad.

MS's biggest competitor isn't Apple. (Despite Steve Job's wet dreams of desktop relevance, let alone dominance) Or Google. MS's biggest competitor is themselves, specifically the older, still functional versions of MS's software. Only when there's a killer feature that I absolutely can't live without do I upgrade Windows or Office at home.

-- GSH

[HitchcockGreen]

Win7's 64-bit support is why I'll drop WinXP when I next rebuild my rig at home

You could always go Win XP 64 bit.

I've always been a bit of an early adopter. Win8 doesn't do much for me. Guess if I had a windows tablet it might be a different story, but I have no interest in tablets, really.

[Red Devil]

btw, i got the link from Sentient's post on TD.

this os will be perfect for all the new tablets coming out. other than that, meh.

[Zero Angel]

The new Win8 overlay looks really ugly. I think they shouldve invested efforts into things that mac and linux (and BSD) have had for years. Virtual desktop integration, a universal notifier, a universal updater (so that 5 different apps don't each hit you with popups saying that they need updating), usability features like Scale and Expo, GUI hooks to control application docking, etc.

I think if MS were to implement things like that, they could pull it off extremely well. Instead they are going towards a really plain HTML5 interface thats optimized for touchscreens. I hate to break it to them, but touch will never have the traction that good old fashioned keyboard and mouse have. Perhaps someday, but I don't think what they're doing to the UI is revolutionary at all. Smartphone OS's do it, only they do it better.

Win7 is evolutionary because it leverages desktop compositing to pull off a nice UI with some nice usability improvements like peek, snap, thumbnails, etc -- and its a stable, efficient OS to boot. However I think they can still go along way towards leveraging desktop compositing to improve usability for tablet and non-tablet OS's as well. I think they are going in the wrong direction.

[Commando]

I'm not impressed by Win 8 either. It looks like garbage to me. It looks like it would work great for a tablet, but that's it.

[TwinShadow]

I haven't seen the video, and not about to now. I've lost interest in Windows during XP, with Vista being a horrible turn-out, and then with W7 still being butt-ugly to the core, XP is the only OS I can see that has a simple, but effective UI. Even then, I don't really utilize half of W7's features anyway because its just full of bloat. Microsoft does nothing more than to bloat their OS' to a point that it works against the OS rather than making them functional. This is partly why I want to move to Linux instead, but with no real support in terms of games, I'm forced to continue using Winbloat.

You could always go Win XP 64 bit.

I've heard many stories about XP 64-bit, and many of them are not good. If someone desperately needs 64-bit, W7 is probably the best bet. Or hell, Linux if you're not a gamer or something.

[Clavin12]

I use 7. It's not that bad.