Windows 8.1 is a big pile of crap.

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You can pin any app you like to the tile screen and organize them under any heading you like.

You just need to spend a few minutes to learn how.

Win 8.1 doesn't really close apps like you are used to. Also, if you need to GET BACK to the start screen or desktop or whatever, all you need to do is swipe in FROM THE EDGE of the screen on the RIGHT edge. That should bring up options to get back to the start screen, app settings, etc.

Also swiping in from the left edge of the screen will let you 'shuffle' between recently used apps. Like I said before, windows only closes apps as it needs to, so once you start them, they are always running in the background unless to OS needs to free-up system resources.

You should be able to find any info you need on the webs. I found several tutorials with google to help me figure out the OS.

Windoze is a big pile of crap and has been for ages.

My Dad's old laptop has Windoze 2000 on it. Much better than anything since then.

Windoze could be a lot better, but Microsoft aren't happy with the fortune they make off that. Instead they use it to make them even more money by building ads into media player and so on.

Windoze has passed its use by date. Linux is far better, more powerful, and faster. The only reason Windoze still exists is because Linux doesn't have as much software yet and because Windoze comes pre-loaded on every computer you buy.

Based on experience, Windows is actually faster than any GUI based Linux. The reason why Linux hasn't taken over, is that the drivers aren't nearly as good, and at the end of the day, it's no more stable than Windows 7 and Windows 8 (note that 90% of all system crashes here are due to faulty 3. party drivers). Vista is another story, but if Microsoft didn't give a damn about it's customers, it would have a much longer shelf-life.

Terminal only versions of Linux are excellent for module programming and server usage, but apart from that, they serve few purposes to regular consumers.

If this was based on experience you wouldn't have said "any GUI based Linux".

No, the reason why Linux hasn't "taken over" is that no-one developing it gives a flying wombat about it "taking over" anything. That isn't why Linux exists.
But the fact that it's practically ubiquitous powering web servers and embedded into various devices says much. It's not all about the so-called and nonsensical "battle for the desktop", you know...
"The drivers" is meaningless, as is the general assertion - and doubly so when someone like NVidia writes GPU drivers for Windows and Linux. You think their hardware somehow changes when it's plugged into a machine using Linux? You think these developers lose the ability to code just as effectively in their own time on their own projects?
Other hardware manufacturers provide Linux drivers for their own hardware or assistance to OSS developers to write them but the bulk of it comes down to pretty standard code using pretty standard and well-documented hardware: there isn't that much in the PC hardware world which is new, exciting, unexplored and undocumented - but often, what there is, tends to be proprietary and locked down with the manufacturers refusing to give any information until an NDA has been signed and licensing payment requirements hammered out - all involving a prohibition on disclosing any code details and entirely against the principles of OSS.
Have you tried writing code for a secret black box?

No. More realistically, it just says that at last, after all these years of floundering around and bad jokes like WinME and Vista, the stability of Windows is almost as good as the stability of Linux.
In Windows.

"Terminal only versions"? Wut?

I'd prefer a sensible GUI design which didn't hide things to the extent that typing an application name, in a GUI, gets promoted as a convenience.
It's odd that this was a common complaint about DOS and people still use it as a stick to beat Linux with (despite working in a shell being optional, and the shell having autocompletion implemented years ago) - yet now it's a shiny new thing?

Which it then apparently ignores, hence the "update" to Win8.1 with its approximation of a Start button. Not to mention the third-party utilities re-implementing it.

Waving the mouse about in a certain way over invisible "magic" areas of the screen to pull up a menu containing stuff of no interest, amongst which is something I'm looking for - say, "Show Desktop" - seems a very poor substitute for a visible, unobtrusive button labelled... "Show Desktop".
Was the Taskbar and existing menu structuring so poor and so intrusive, even though it could be made to auto-hide, that it had to be removed entirely? Win8 seems designed for mobile devices where the relatively precious screen space is a bigger concern and fondling things on the screen is expected - but trying to shovel this in as a replacement on a desktop machine is bizarre.

So... nothing useful provided with the OS to help those moving to this brave new world, then?

The help on the tiles on Win 8.1 seems rudimentary at best. Each new release of windows become less and less intuitive and they even remove features from the help search too leaving folks to Google around the web to find other users who've miraculously unearthed the features.

Here is a simple example: I find the SendTo feature very useful. I write lots of my own software and back in the days of XP I just dropped a shortcut to my installed program in the Windows SendTo folder. It was quick and easy to do. Then came along Vista and the folder had vanished. Windows help had never heard of "SendTo" ... it took a Google search to reveal that one had to go to the Vista search box and type in Shell:SendTo at which point a Windows Explorer like interface would appear for you to drop your shortcut into. I've no idea if this functionality still exists in 8.1 or if there are even more arcane incantations required to invoke it - assuming it even still exists.

Faster than Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware, at least.



The laptop is generally speaking the most important market for both students, writers, web-developers, some gamers, and programmers, to mention a few. Servers are usually powered by terminal only distros. This is because using a terminal for server purposes is a lot less messy and much quicker than using a GUI system. In the latter, you'll get lost quickly.

The Android kernel is heavily modified (in regular desktop versions of Linux, 70% of ther kernel is machine specific code), and almost anything runs inside a java application, which in turn runs inside a virtual machine.



Both the ATi drivers and the Intel drivers are inferior; legacy hardware in particular suffers because of this. NVidia's Linux drivers are better than ATi's, but they're still inferior to the Windows versions as far as performance goes.



No. Linux is not a secret black box, though.



Neither Windows 7, nor Windows 8/8.1 has ever frozen when I've used it. Ubuntu has several times. Bluescreen of deaths are extremely rare if you own a licensed version, but you'll see your fair share of kernel panics (every 2-3 weeks or so) in both Ubuntu and Debian. If any user-space application in Windows crashes, all you have to do is press CTRL-ALT-DELETE (I've literally never had a user-space application crash my computer in Windows 8x); in Linux, a user-space application crash can make the computer freeze, even though there are cases where xkill actually works. Windows 8 has given me the BSOD once, because I made a careless mistake when coding something. You'd almost think that the millions Microsoft invest actually makes an impact...

Windows ME was MS DOS based (the Kernel itself wasn't made for a complex OS), but it's fairly safe to say that nothing in 2001 could compete with Windows XP in terms of stability. Mac OS at the time didn't even have timer interrupts or a mechanism to break deadlocks, and Linux barely had any software.



And since they're third party drivers and the drivers typically run in kernel space, Microsoft can't be blamed for this. Linux will also crash if drivers and modules are very bad.



Plenty of distros are stripped of GUIs. They're about as stable as Windows 7, and won't screw you over and render your GPU useless after the next update, unlike the ones with a GUI.

It's impossible to make file browsing that quick.



Linux servers are almost always set up via the terminal. I've tried using Windows Server and Active Desktop, and you'll get lost very quickly.



Planning and designing an operating system is a much more time consuming and expensive affair than programming it, so I wouldn't think so.

Okay, I'll just come out and say it... If you are using a mouse with windows 8.1, you need to be kicked in the nuts. The os is built for fingers and it works well once you get the hang of it. I actually like it better than android in general...

The only time to use a keyboard or touch-pad is when you are using traditional DT programs like MS Office...

The old desktop environment and windows explorer are still there.There are VISIBLE TILES for the desktop and file browser on the tile screen. They are easily accessed, and work great.

And as far as taskbars and auto-hide goes--that is essentially what 8.1 has. There are autohidden taskbars on ALL 4 sides of the screen.

Honestly, I do not understand these complaints. I took me about half a day of playing around to get 8.1 figured-out. I can't believe you guys are having so much trouble.

I think it must the that Aspie resistance to change thing...

Nope, you're still not getting it.

Nope, you're still not getting this either. There is no Linux "market".
That's not to say that it hasn't been successfully installed by corporates and individuals on many laptops - sadly, stymied in some areas where proprietary hardware is involved for which the manufacturer refuses to provide details.

Indeed not, but manufacturers being anal about their own black box hardware helps no-one with developing drivers for it.

I'm not getting into a fruitless off-topic discussion of stability stories other than to say* that I doubt many people who have used Linux will recognise your experiences with it as being typical for the OS - myself included, using it both professionally (~3,500 users relying on Linux performing reliably - replacing, incidentally, Win2k systems which didn't) and domestically (just the one user ).
*and what follows: I ran WinXP on the same hardware as a couple of different Linux installations and there was absolutely no doubt whatever about which was faster and more responsive, and while I had a few bluescreens from XP for no obvious reason, despite the installed code being stable for some years, I never once had any stability issue whatever with the Linux installations. Not that WinXP was bad, by any means, and it was mostly problem-free - but the devil is in that word "mostly".
This experience is not atypical, but it's only my sample of one so... meh.

The earlier NVidia drivers, the ones only available directly maybe 10 years ago now, often required a manual re-installation after kernel updates because part of it required compilation into the kernel, which involved little more than typing a handful of characters - but I've not had to do that for several years now since they've become part of regular distribution repositories; they're just updated automatically as required, without fuss.
Even back in the early days using tar files and other stuff that probably wouldn't go down too well these days, I've never seen a GPU rendered useless through updating anything on Linux and neither would I expect to.

One of the many reasons why I prefer not to use a GUI for these things - but having a GUI that actively hides things doesn't help any.

The rejection by end users and the release of Win8.1 with a Start button would indicate otherwise.



Gah, damn typo.

Last edited by Cornflake on 15 Feb 2014, 1:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The "Start" button with Win 8.1 is just a token gesture... it still doesn't work like the previous start buttons. I had to download a third party start button to get the functionality back that I needed... and most users have done the same. Very few soldier on without a classic start button - it is like working with one hand tied behind your back.

Fixed that for you!

I think the biggest issue for people moving from the old to the new is that the things they'd expect to see are now invisible and re-modelled, with no familiar buttons to click to find them. It must be the OS equivalent of going blind...

It will be interesting to see how Win8 is described once (if?) people end up with lots of software installed: wasn't it a complaint about the first incarnation of the tiled interface (on one of their phones before Win8 appeared) that was a royal pain swiping through endless tiles to find what you wanted - that the "random access" convenience of a pop-up menu showing everything at once had gone?

Hmm well that's probably part of it, but I think there's a bigger issue involved.

Yep - that would be MS trying to push its decision on end users, come what may. 'We'll give you slightly what you wanted as few breadcrumbs to silence the noise, but not enough to stop you from using what we've served up anyway'.
Didn't many of the Win8 beta-testers also complain about the missing Start button and other well-established familiarities gone AWOL? Ignoring beta testers' comments generally isn't a good move and I believe Win9 will prove it.
A shiny new veneer is all good and well if the old one is flaky and dropping off - but it wasn't...

Like the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Windows7 was well liked and not in need of fixing. Windows 8 / 8.1 have destroyed a good user interface for what in my cynical opinion is an attempt by Microsoft to emulate Apple's business model and push users away from traditional programs and into paying for apps from the Microsoft store. I can't hardly click any of the pre-loaded tiles without it wanting to escort me to Microsoft servers to create an MS Account and then on to their app store. I want none of it. F*ck Microsoft. I've deleted most of the app tiles (some by accident because even that isn't intuitive... I ticked an app and selected uninstall and it wiped out several other apps too!) and I'm now working exclusively in desktop mode... except when the bloody tile interface pops up for no apparent reason when I'm in the middle of doing something.