Windows 8 forum: Windows 8 Survey: Half Who Have Tried the OS

Windows XP, Vista and Win 7 getting similar responses when they were released, especially XP that seemed so radically different from what went before.

I haven't tried Win 8 myself yet, but I am thinking about it.

Mark

... on the contrary, I remember everybody salivating at the impending upgrade to XP from 95/98/ME/2K ... Vista was also rather highly anticipated, but became widely reviled >post< release, not before. Win7 was held to greater scrutiny from the get-go simply because of the Vista experience, but almost immediately after release it was hailed as the greatest Windows ever.

I've never been an 'upgrade the OS' guy ... I have always just bought a new PC with the most current consumer OS of the moment (Win95 in 1996, Win98 in 99, ME in '00, XP in '03, Vista in '07, and 7 in 09). I've never until now considered purchasing a 'back-level' OS out of concern for the quality of the new, although I've heard of luddites out there still trying to get XP on new hardware ...

There are a lot of people who think Win8 is the shiznits, or maybe they're Microsofty trolls, but there seems to be an unusually large amount of negativity about Win8 being publicized. In large part, methinks, it's due to the greater usage of social media in general, and more people are putting their highly opinionated opinions in public view (every blog / media site in world now links all their guff to multiple media sharing sites, whereas just a few years ago such widespread access was very unusual).

I ain't making any effort to publicize my opinion all over the world, but simply expressing it here it is now visible to far far more people today due to social sharing mechanisms (I'm seeing a Facebook 'like' button and a Twitter follow button at the bottom of this screen as I type) than would ever have bothered to look into these forums a couple years ago. So I think there is simply more exposure to random opinion, as well as more people putting their opinions online nowadays.

But that's just to account for some of the heat in the discussion ... I think that honestly a bigger driver for the ideological wars over Win 8 / Metro is the fact that the Metro interface is a hideous dog dookie.

I've got Win8 consumer preview running in a VM on my Win7 machine right now ... and I -- with 20 years of PC experience -- can't for the life of me figure it out. Never, at any step of the Windows evolution since Win95 have I ever been stymied trying to figure out how to find apps, how to run apps, how to shut down apps. Metro is so radically different from all that has gone before it that in essence it simply breaks the usability of the interface.

If I have to read the effin manual in order to figure out how to use the interface, it's broken. It's garbage. It's trash. And I won't have it. I won't pay for it. I won't use it.

So there. Nyah.

((caveat: this is a repost from that other thread))

First off: I'm running Win8 Consumer Preview Evaluation Copy build 5280 in a VMWare virtual machine.

Second off: VM-related technical issues abound, but I'm too lazy to spend much time in hunting down the answers although I know that there are guides and/or helpful posts which discuss VM. My virtualized version of Win8 can't find my network, even tho I've got any number of other VMs which see my network and other external devices without a problem. So ... in my Win8 VM, I've not got any interwebs, so cannot test many of the functions.

The "desktop" view is very Win 7-ish at first glance. That's the glance that many Pro-8ers will use to excoriate the ludites among us who complain about the metro. "ya dummy" they say, "ya dunna gotta use the metro, just go to the desktop!" ... okay ... so I'm there ... where's the programs? There is no menu available in the desktop view that I can find. I SLAM my mouse over to the wall, or drift down to the corner, and when in these hotspots (whether I go there intentionally or not) some pointer-location activated graphical object suddenly appears on screen (( whether I want it to or not!! )) which apparently is my only interface to the actual functionality of the OS. So if I want to launch a program ... I SLAM (thank you for that idiom, Mark!) my mouse on over, select ... well , I dunno what to select ... there's no button/icon for PROGRAMS ... settings, devices, start, sharing, search ... I don't want any of those options! I just want to SEE the programs available and SELECT a specific program to run!!!!!

... fine ... I select Start ... and CRAP!!!! I'm back in Metro!!!!! Where's my programs????????????? WTH!?!?!?!

man ... what happens if I click on ... oh, no, wait ... crap again! I'm not online (see "second off" above) and this stupid thing is trying to download data from the interwebz ... how do I get out of this ... this ... thing? app? program? widget? what is this thing? where's the menu bar? where's the exit button? there's no window controls at all in this gadget-thingy!!!! How do I get out of it?!?!? oh wait! Alt-Tab!!!! Ha HAA!!! That worked! Or did it? Wait a ... the widgapp is still running in the background! HOW DO I EXIT / SHUT DOWN THE STUPID GADGAPP?!?!?

GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sincerely,
A Dedic8ted Win8 H8er

I agree with you, and your opinion to some extent. I like trying new stuff, especially if they are free. I am trying all 3, Win 7, Vista, and 8, and my first love was XP. I am running 8 right now, and for some reason, it looks and works just like XP. What's up? I have also noticed the videos are not as good as on Vista or 7. But for some darn reason, this reminds me of XP, reincarnated!

That's not amazing, isn't it, that installing a new OS takes some of your available disc space. I don't see any reason to post that fact.

And what 'tip' do you have at the top of the forum? I see 2 stickies, but none of them are yours.

And why do you make all your posts bold? That's considered as inpolite as posting in ALL CAPITALS. Especially, since your posts mostly consist of irrelevant and totally uninteresting stuff.

Kees

i tried the new win 8 beta and it would not install it would go to 29% and say " it has a problem" and shuts down. i would like to install it and try it. although its not that big of a deal, since i run linux as my OS.i just like to give microsoft the benifit of the doubt so i keep trying. oh, im running win 7 partitioned to my linux on a two TB HD with 4 GIG ram, and a intel dual core.

Recently, Ubuntu designed a new desktop environment that is very, very different to the old one. It just happens to use round rectangles around the icons in the dock. It still uses the same indicators, programs, file manager and settings panels. It even has windows and menus like a regular desktop.

People hated the change because of the fact that they had gotten used to the old one, and because of the round rectangles they complained that it was a "tablet interface".

How on earth could Microsoft think they'd be immune to this? Metro is developed directly from Microsoft's smartphone GUI, does not allow multiple simultaneous windows, and doesn't even run the old programs (except for a special legacy compatibility mode). Microsoft should have been able to see from the Ubuntu reaction that most people wouldn't want a drastic different interface.

Microsoft's Metro also seems rather half-baked and lacking in style and functionality.

I wouldn't recommend any software by a company that saw criticism of its competitors and thought "No, our users will be happy even with much bigger changes."

I never knew that until reading your post ... just tried it ... yup, it flips back & forth between 'desktop' and 'Metro' just as if I were doin an Alt-Tab. Which leads me to the question ... why? Why are they pushing the new idiom? Why do we have to learn a completely new & different navigation method and usage pattern? Why can't they just improve the functionality under the covers, evolve the interface to make it look better & work better, but keep the same idiom for usability? Why the radical change?

Even now, with the ability to access "desktop" with the press of a sinlge button, I still cannot see any programs. There's no start button, right? I have to trigger a hot-spot which brings up the bar (I dunno what they call it) with a "start" icon ... and if I click that it takes me right back to Metro. I DON'T WANT METRO. How do I find / access / launch applications from the desktop view without going back to Metro? Why can't there be a fling-flangin MENU of programs available? All that crapola on the metro interface ... WTF is all that? What is that stupid box that says "Messaging" ????

In Win7 if I want to use an IM client, I go to my MENU and SELECT the specific IM client software that I want ... could be Yahoo, could be Windows Messenger, could be Skype, could be any number of random programs, but I can always tell exactly what application I'm selecting because I'm actually selecting a program and not randomly trying to guess at what is behind some generically unidentified blob.

Metro is horrible. Horrible to look at, horrible to use.