Windows 8 Is 'a Work of Art.' But It's No Linux 371
colinneagle writes "Earlier this week I installed the final version of Windows 8. And it is awesome. That's not a joke. Windows 8 is absolutely, unequivocally stellar. And yet, at the end of the day, I am right back to using Linux. Why is that? What is it about Linux that makes me so excited to use it — even while enjoying another operating system that I view as, in all seriousness, a work of art? Why do I not simply install Windows 8 on every machine I own and be happy with it? For me, it's the ability to slowly chip away and remove items from your user interface until you are left with only want you want, and nothing more. The option of looking at an item on the screen, right clicking on it, and declaring to said item 'Listen up, mister Thing-On-My-Screen. I don't want you anymore. Be gone!' Panels, bars, docks, launchers, widgets, gadgets – whatever is on your screen, there is probably a way to send it to whatever form of the afterlife is reserved for unwanted Desktop Crud. And, I'll tell you this right now – as great as it is, you don't find a whole lot of 'Right click, Remove Panel' in Windows 8."
A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME3's GNOME Shell fails the same way! (Score:5, Insightful)
I know others will say the same thing. But I wanted to say it first if that's possible.
On my list of most annoying things about GNOME 3's GNOME shell is that I can't remove or customize the bar on the top... not easily anyway.
I want my old panels back.
lameness (Score:3, Insightful)
you're lame; linux isn't about the UI dillhole.
Yah Right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Paid Troll anyone?
One man's art, is another man's trash (Score:4, Insightful)
'Work of Art' is an interesting choice of words. The art world is full of examples of 'art' that shocks and offends the viewer for precisely that purpose.
So when someone says Windows 8 is a 'Work of Art' I have to ask "Do you mean The Mona Lisa or L.H.O.O.Q.?"
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially not one as bizarre as this.
The definitive feature of linux is being able to right click and remove a panel... good for it? That wouldn't even be a feature on windows, it would be a disaster, because my 70 year old aunt would accidentally remove something important, not be sure what it was, and call me to find out how to fix it. All the people in my office would remove things, want them back, and not be able to find them. Etc.
You can have an opinion piece that makes some sort of interesting argument about why this feature really changes the computing experience, and how its absence in windows renders the OS unworthy to use, ok, that could actually be interesting. But TFA spends 3/4ths of its length on superficial discussions of things - and the places where a serious and sensible discussion could be made are given no real treatment.
TFA sort of ends on what he should have started with - the different philosophies between linux and windows 8 - that could have made for a very interesting opinion piece that would have been worth posting on /. But it's not there.
Then why not a Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
OS-X is almost entirely free of OS-derived graphical gunk. You have the desktop (which can be blank), and the doc (which can be hidden), and a few things along the menu bar in the upper right hand corner (which can be hidden).
Other than that, it already meets his "graphical gunk free" ideal.
I'm not even a fan of Windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but this piece just reeks of trolling the Windows crowd. Why do we need a multi-hundred word paragraph explaining that you can hide items in Linux but not in Windows? An even better question: what reason do we have to be interested in colinneagle's opinion? It's neither insightful nor unique, let alone relevant to most people, since this is not the feature that will make or break the deal for the vast majority of users choosing between the two OSes. I'm glad he's been able to make a decision for himself, but why should a typical nerd be interested in this opinion piece?
Re:First TROLL (Score:5, Insightful)
not a troll, maybe a stealth shill. Look at the print in bold:
That's not a joke. Windows 8 is absolutely, unequivocally stellar.
It boots fast, looks great and, right out of the gate, fully supports every bell and whistle on my laptop (including the touch screen). Applications launch faster, and are generally more responsive, than I have ever seen on this piece of hardware. Hell, I even like the copy file dialog.
As I sat in traffic yesterday for a few hours -- as those of us in Seattle seem to enjoy doing so much -- I thought long and hard about this.
What a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech-savvy user prefer highly-configurable things that can be customized by tech-savvy users and dislikes things designed to be used as-is by computer idiots. News at 10...
What I'm really wondering though is whether this "article" is a cleverly disguise Windows 8 plug: the Linux bit is there to prevent the poster for being marked as a Microsoft shill, while the real message is "Windows 8 is a work of art". Because really, that's the only thing people who are afraid of Linux will read.
Linux lovers who find Windows 8 a work of art seem suspicious to me...
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA sort of ends on what he should have started with - the different philosophies between linux and windows 8 - that could have made for a very interesting opinion piece that would have been worth posting on /. But it's not there.
That's because a rational discussion on the philosophical and design approaches of different user interfaces is not troll clickbait. The purpose of this article is to drive as many people here to flame about how Windows 8 is terrible and ugly and the worst OS in the world. And what do you know, take a look at first 5 posts below this one and you'll see exactly that.
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>That wouldn't even be a feature on windows, it would be a disaster, because my 70 year old aunt would accidentally remove something important
Strange..... I've been right-clocking and removing shit off my Windows for years. My XP and Seven desktops are completely blank (except for the start button). I'm not sure where either you or the /. reviewer got the idea you cannot remove things from the Windows desktop.
And yeah Windows 8 may be a work of art (pretty to look at), but I'd really like to get some actual Work accomplished thank you very much The digital equivalent of T&A doesn't let me do that. It slows me down and makes me want to switch to a OS for offices like Seven.
To some, Goatse is a work of art, too (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows 8 will be great on tablets and phones. Laptops? perhaps 20% less annoying than desktops, where Win8 is a UI fail. Touchscreen UIs are not useful for desktops. We've had touchscreens for ages, but nobody wants to spend 8+ hours a day using gestures, nor does the idea of cheetos-stained fingers smudging up the screen excite me in the least (not that my fingers are cheetos-stained, but I've known plenty of people who fit this general type).
If removing UI elements is your idea of a "Dream OS" then perhaps you don't need a general purpose PC at all. Stick to a tablet or your phone and you'll be happy forever.
Re:Then why not a Mac? (Score:5, Insightful)
My "shitbox" is fine. I can put a new video card into it.
Its my Macs that will have problems with this nonsense. They can't be upgraded.
Windows 8, who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
There was one comment from a keynote speech by John Carmack a few week ago. And for all the rest of the talk that was brilliant, this comment was the most relevant. And that was that he an iD recently switched from Windows Xp to Windows 7. And that yeah, it was nice. It was a bit better in a lot of areas, it did one technical thing a lot better. But for the most part, he just didn't care.
And for that matter neither did I when I made the same switch. Certainly, I wouldn't go back if I were just given a free and clear choice. But really, there's just not a whole lot there, to ANY new iteration of ANY operating system. It doesn't matter what you're a fan of, because each new iteration is just something of an update, for compatibility with whatever new hardware is out. For the most part there's nothing there to get excited about, I mean we're down to arguing tiny UI semantics. Windows 8, a work of art? It doesn't look that much different than Windows 7, nor does it do almost anything different. In fact the biggest change, of the start menu to start screen, is a bit worse for some people. But only a bit, so who cares?
So, why are people excited? Because we're nerds, because we're reading comments on /. and the internet is a great place to argue. But really, it doesn't matter that much. In fact it's beginning to matter so little that I'm wondering if it's worth it to even have inane arguments over anymore. And sure, it's a pastime as boring and pointless to outsiders as baseball is to many. But what I'm saying here is, arguments over the latest OS update are beginning to smell like fans arguing over a handful of old, decrepit has been teams, when there's a bunch of younger, more exciting lineups out there that could be providing a lot more entertainment.
Re:file progress (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll just be happy if it doesn't take 20 hours to "calculate" which files are going to be deleted when things like "del" do the job almost instantaneously.
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember those couple versions of Office that had "everything is a toolbar, even the menus"? And users would accidentally either drag their menu bar out-of-position or manage to hide it? And there was no trivial way to get them back?
It was an unmitigated disaster.
So yes, I agree with you 100%. There's nothing wrong with customizability, but a lot of time it impacts usability.
I don't want a work of art (Score:4, Insightful)
The "Mona Lisa" is a work of art, but I can't use it to get my work done. I want a *tool*.
Re:The OS Is Irrelevant...Resistance Is Futile (Score:4, Insightful)
No it is not, you fscking moron. Ulgh...
If you mod this down, may God strike you dead at once.
-- ;-)
You and I are both universe. We all are. So why get 'personal'?
Interesting conflict between post content & signature.
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, I believe win 8 is good work. Some idiot in Redmond decided that it was a good idea to unify both the touch interface and the desktop interface into one experience and for the biggest part of it they didn't do a half bad job.
This is fine, IFF you have a touch screen. But baring that, the interface is just an outright non-starter.
Even with a touch screen, scrolling like a whirling dervish trying to find the pane that contains the application you want is just inefficient,
a huge waste of energy (and one that gets more wasteful as your screen gets larger).
The start bar and application menu that every desktop OS had wasn't developed and perfected over the years on a whim. Windows 8 desktop was.
Not a lot of right-click-remove in ANY Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
I rarely use Windows and then only because something absolutely requires it. Like the TFA author, removing unwanted cruft from the desktop (and system) is a key reason I dislike Windows. For example, Windows Update repeatedly nagged to install Windows Media Player 11 (the newest one) which I finally did to watch (I thought) DVDs. However, as many of you probably know, Windows Media Player 11 will NOT play DVDs. Instead, it advises you that the necessary decoder is not present on the system and points you to places where you can purchase the decoder 'plugin' for a price of anywhere from $15 to $30. Okay, fine, now it's time to dump (uninstall) the newly-installed Media Player 11 but...not so easy is that. It can only be removed by (according to Microsoft) either 1) booting to safe mode and running something called 'appwiz.cpl' or, if 1) doesn't work, then 2) running something as '%windir%\$ntUninstallwmp11$\spuninst\spuninst.exe'. This is just one small example but, generally, Microsoft decides what the user should install, use and see and then makes it extremely difficult for you if you try to stray off of the reservation.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:lameness (Score:3, Insightful)
And there you have it folks. The reason that the Linux desktop has never taken off in just eight condescending little words.
Re:file progress (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as it doesn't say "One file in the middle of your large copy / move operation is in use, so I will have to abandon the entire rest of it in an unknown state"
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux kicks ass in certain areas, embedded, servers, HPCs, its just not a great desktop.
It is too a great desktop, I've been using it as such for, oh, 15 years now. It has just one thing going against it: it's not Windows. That means 1. little Johnny from next door can't help you out when you screw things up, and 2. it won't run Windows applications (at least not well), so it's not easy to exchange documents between you and people who do use Windows.
If there was only Linux on the desktop, people would be just as happy with it as they are with Windows. But it's a Windows world, so you might as well go with the flow and use it too, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But I maintain that from a pure usability viewpoint Linux-on-the-desktop is just fine.
(Caveat: talking about the classic Gnome 2/Windows 7-like interface. Haven't used Unity or Windows 8 for any length of time, and not planning to.)
Re:A Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't change the fact that starting new applications should not be a modal event that takes up the whole screen.. not on a desktop.