“Windows 8 is Unusable”
January 3rd, 2013 - 4:15 pm
I haven’t found it unusable the few times I’ve been forced to work with it, but this video sure does a fine job of explaining how poorly conceived and executed W8 is.
I haven’t found it unusable the few times I’ve been forced to work with it, but this video sure does a fine job of explaining how poorly conceived and executed W8 is.
I found and installed something that de-8s Windows 8 a little, though still not enough. RetroUI lets me bypass the Start Screen on logon and gives me something sort of like the old Start Menu. I can play one Metro game, Minesweeper, in the classic desktop (though the Solitaire games won’t play that way and I have to use F4 to quit them.
It ain’t Windows 7, but it makes the mistake of believing the order page I used for buying my most recent laptop (when it said W7 instead of W8) slightly less regrettable.
It’s still regrettable, just slightly less.
Okay, now having watched Boyko’s video…
First, YEAH!!! I hope someone at Microshaft is listening.
Second, I’ve only had one goblin-fart incident with Win8 and that was while trying to type text into the search window on Firefox; some Control Panel thing popped up whenever I started typing. I had to reboot to make it stop.
I have figured out Win8 enough that I can do just about anything I want to on it — but I’d still rather be using Win7, for the very reasons Boyko outlines. Which is why the Win8 laptop lives in the family room and is for passing time doing not much worthwhile — Facebook, Twitter,
PJM— and the computer where I do real stuff is in another room, still running Windows 7.I pray that computer survives until Microsoft regains its sanity, or I can afford a Mac — whichever comes first.
Just. Install. Linux.
“Charms Bar”!?!?
WTF is that! A charm, in everyday life, is a trinket on a girl’s wrist or some marshmallows in my cereal.
WTH is Microsoft thinking?
People still use Windows? Like.. intentionally? Wow.
I dunno, sounds alright…as soon as somebody comes out with a utility to disable all the Win8 stuff and turn it back into Win7.
Seriously, Charms Bar?
Why does the author spend the first five minutes refusing to say anything specific about anything? All he does is complain about stuff he cannot name or describe.
This is clearly a MS hater who has no logic or reason just hate. It is a shame to spend so much mindless and pointless invective saying absolutely nothing. He cannot name a single thing that bothers only that everything bothers him.
He has nothing to say. Like a totalitarian liberal all he can do is name calling with out ever offering specifics. After five minutes of nothing but name calling I ran out of patience. He could not name or identify one single problem in five minutes. Name calling is not as impressive as so many people think it is.
You tuned out after those first five minutes, didn’t you? Start the video again, skip those first five minutes, and watch the rest.
Having used beta versions of Win8 I had a lot less trouble with it than he did, but I recognized and agreed with every single specific complaint he eventually made. The fact I had the experience with it made me willing to wait for the specifics.
Maybe he raged and flamed like that in malicious hope that peiople who didn’t already know Win8 would stop watching and go find out for themselves how lousy it is. Then they’d rage and flame inarticulately for several minutes too.
I agree with Steve that the video comes off more as a rather well organized rant about how Windows 8 sucks when using a trackpad rather than anything else.
That being said, Win8 does have a couple of big problems that MS should have fixed, or should fix right away if they don’t want to piss away their market share.
First of all, when using a mouse, the Metro UI needs to have the mouse pointer show context. Have tiles highlight when passed over by a mouse, change the pointer when the mouse reaches a corner or side that can initiate an action, etc. On a touch screen, it’s much more logical. You touch, you swipe, it works.
Second, they need to bring the start menu back as an alternative UI. I was at a seminar sponsored by NetCom and MS to introduce Win8 to corporate IT types, and the presentation did not go well at all. The primary complaint was basically that in the PC environment, the WIMP model is 20+ years old, and that the Win8 UI is going to cost millions(maybe even billions) in training non-technical users who have spent decades getting used to mice, and that Metro is singularly UNsuited to multiple monitor setups, like you would see on a trading desk.
I’m not an MS fanboy, and I really do think Win8 is a very good way of integrating touch screen technology. But the lack of a start menu or the old desktop is going to kill it.
Exactly. Windows has a distinct advantage in the workstation market and business computing. They seem to be trying to eliminate that advantage by forcing us to use our high-power multi-screen setups as though they are tablets.
I do corp IT in a multi-monitor environment. We’re still on Win 7 and I’m getting the shakes just thinking about having to support this thing.
This http://youtu.be/Nh5JjErbXE8 makes it even worse. It’s like they’re not even thinking about their business customers.
Hmmm, having watched that video I think there’s just a few things they could have done that would make Win8 much better. Simply having a visual demarcation for the “hot” corners and edges would be huge. A floating tooltip or something to tell you what you can do from each corner would have probably fixed almost everything else.
How hard would that have been, really?
Heh. I tweeted this a couple of weeks ago. It looks the Win 8 was designed by software engineers who a) don’t know what the customer wants and b) don’t actually care.
Bill Quick seems to like it just fine on a tablet (Surface), which is what it seems designed for. Well and good. But as a desktop OS? Let’s just say that my Linux hobby might receive a little more attention in the near future.
Oh, the engineers care. They don’t want to make products that suck.
Win8 positively reeks of executives dictating How It Will Be™.
Ballmer needs to go.
If your attention was lagging recently, you’re in for some bad news. The good old desktop environments seem to be pushed out by the likes of Unity and Gnome3. For the life of me, I don’t understand why the tablet experience — dependent on entirely different interface hardware and mode of use! — should be ported back to desktop with its square yards of screen space and honest to God keyboard and mouse.
Spot on – Win8 is a hot mess. In particular, the “Metro” touch-screen interface needs to be OPTIONAL, guys. Lots of folks HAVE NO TOUCH SCREEN, and do not need to have that crap hanging around, waiting to pounce. Make it an installation option, for crissakes.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If Mircosoft was in charge of road signs, they would change all the stop signs to purple trapezoids, and after millions of deaths and accidents, they would change it again…first to an orange hexagon…then eventually back to the red octagon in the next update.
As an attorney, I have to file pleadings in Federal Court using the Court’s electronic filing system. Windows 8 & Explorer browser will not work on that system. After the Clerk’s office consulted their IT guys, I was advised to use any browser except Explorer. I now use either Safari or Firefox which do work on the system.
There is historical precedent for Windows 8: the Ford Edsel.
Will Ballmer get tossed because of this? No, because it would hurt share prices and executive compensation.