Windows 8

So I tried Windows 8 today at work. The operating system is pretty zippy even though I'm running it on a virtual machine on Oracle's Virtual Box. That is about the extent of the nice aspects of Windows 8 for me. Once I got to the DESKTOP (This is a DESKTOP OS right?) it all went down hill from there.

The DESKTOP starts out as a bunch of tiles on a single colored background. The tiles are bright and cheery and there are no menus to use such as the old faithful Start menu. Installing applications just adds a new tile to the pile of tiles on your desktop and you have to page through things when there are more tiles then the screen can hold. (Swipe if you were on a tablet or phone.)

Using non-Metro applications causes Windows 8 to go in to a stripped down Windows 7 desktop interface. This interface has no Start menu and is just a very basic version of the Windows 7 desktop. This whole experience reminded me of OS/2 and how fun that was going between OS/2 applications and Windows 3 applications. Talk about RETRO for a modern operating system.

Finding standard Windows things took a bit with me. I shudder to think how my own mother would handle Windows 8 on her DESKTOP computer. She has a hard enough time finding things in Windows 7 and when she switched to that from Windows XP and the changes there confused her for months.

I hope Microsoft stops dorking around and actually puts out a useable DESKTOP operating system and not some stupid phone or tablet interface bastard child. Right now I consider Microsoft in the same light as Ubuntu Unity and Gnome 3 when it comes to DESKTOP interfaces to avoid. The only thing that makes Microsoft's offering worse then Ubuntu's or Gnome's is they want you to actually pay for the rotten thing.