I was a PC/Win user for almost 20 years, went from Atari ST to PC in 1991, kept using PC only throughout the Win95/98/2K/XP days, started with Mac on the side in 2007, and since 2009 I'm using only Macs, with Win7 installed in BC on one of them because my bookkeeping software isn't available for Mac.
Win8 is an eye-roller for me and here's why. Ever since Win95, I've been waiting for MS to make another all-new, all-fresh OS with no visible traces (with the emphasis on visible; I'm OK with old underpinnings that have to remain for legacy reasons, as long as I don't have to see them) of the previous one. A front end that is to the current Windows what Win95 was to Win 3.1. But every goddamn time they come out with a new Windows, the front end is just the old one with another layer of make-up smeared on top.
I thought Longhorn/Vista would be the one where they'd start fresh again... and sure enough, they did extensive work on things like the driver model and a desktop graphics engine that utilizes the GPU for the first time... new system font (Segoe UI), and quite a few dialogs that looked deceptively fresh... but all you had to do was peek one level underneath that to find rotten old NT dialogs with the oldskool NT appearance (MS Sans font etc).
Then Win7 came out with some major Vista gripes fixed, it looked less toyish and the new taskbar and some modicum of 'Exposé-style' functionality added (window previews above the taskbar etc) was nice... but once again they had failed to jettison the oldskool NT crap in places like the Device Manager.
So I install Win 8 release preview and I'm greeted by the Metro shell... go down to the desktop and I'm in a slightly re-skinned Win7... go to some dialog and I'm in re-skinned Vista... and there's the device manager... from NT... with MS Sans all over the place. In a few clicks I've time travelled from Metro to the late 90's when computers were beige boxes and there was this newfangled thing called "the internet" which you accessed through a dial-up modem.
Seriously? In 2012 there shouldn't be one single pixel of the NT UI left in any place you interact with the system, and I don't care if it's a secret diagnostic tool that only one bearded weirdo in Microsoft's basement can access using a magic 128-character password. Get that moldy old sh** off my computer NOW and give me fresh OS that isn't layers upon layers of skins and make-up hiding artifacts from the stone age. If you're introducing a new UI like Metro, have it be consistent across the entire system. Right now it's a mess where you can interact with 4-5 different generations of Windows on the same desktop.
Win8 is an eye-roller for me and here's why. Ever since Win95, I've been waiting for MS to make another all-new, all-fresh OS with no visible traces (with the emphasis on visible; I'm OK with old underpinnings that have to remain for legacy reasons, as long as I don't have to see them) of the previous one. A front end that is to the current Windows what Win95 was to Win 3.1. But every goddamn time they come out with a new Windows, the front end is just the old one with another layer of make-up smeared on top.
I thought Longhorn/Vista would be the one where they'd start fresh again... and sure enough, they did extensive work on things like the driver model and a desktop graphics engine that utilizes the GPU for the first time... new system font (Segoe UI), and quite a few dialogs that looked deceptively fresh... but all you had to do was peek one level underneath that to find rotten old NT dialogs with the oldskool NT appearance (MS Sans font etc).
Then Win7 came out with some major Vista gripes fixed, it looked less toyish and the new taskbar and some modicum of 'Exposé-style' functionality added (window previews above the taskbar etc) was nice... but once again they had failed to jettison the oldskool NT crap in places like the Device Manager.
So I install Win 8 release preview and I'm greeted by the Metro shell... go down to the desktop and I'm in a slightly re-skinned Win7... go to some dialog and I'm in re-skinned Vista... and there's the device manager... from NT... with MS Sans all over the place. In a few clicks I've time travelled from Metro to the late 90's when computers were beige boxes and there was this newfangled thing called "the internet" which you accessed through a dial-up modem.
Seriously? In 2012 there shouldn't be one single pixel of the NT UI left in any place you interact with the system, and I don't care if it's a secret diagnostic tool that only one bearded weirdo in Microsoft's basement can access using a magic 128-character password. Get that moldy old sh** off my computer NOW and give me fresh OS that isn't layers upon layers of skins and make-up hiding artifacts from the stone age. If you're introducing a new UI like Metro, have it be consistent across the entire system. Right now it's a mess where you can interact with 4-5 different generations of Windows on the same desktop.
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