Microsoft Windows 8: Mostly A Crap Wreck

[Windywoo]

You really think, that mom'n'pop, 13 year old sara first laptop or .. well you catch my thrift, really know what they are buying and would switch too? Let's ignore all the big offices where the OS is forced uppon you by ICT/Management. Let's just talk home users. They buy a "computer" (not a pc/mac) something that they can get online with. "Oh this apple computer is much more expensive then this acer computer." And that's as far as their grasp of computing goes. They don't know browsers, let a lone operating systems. Also even if knew that most of their computing griefs was related to Windows, they wouldn't even know what to switch too. Something as Linux or Ubuntu, is completely unknown to them. Their routers work as magical wireless boxes etc. I think the fact that people DO know that there is apple, android and windows phone is one of the reasons windows phone only has 0.41% market share? Not because it's so new etc, but because people don't "want that same shit" on their phone? So yes, people have been driven mad by both PC manufactures, driver makers and Microsoft. But when their virus infested, dog slow machines are annoying them, they just buy a new one and the cycle repeats. True, there's some more witty peopel out there, but I only coverd 80% of the demographic there.


But people did drove off in bunches, because it was so bad. No they didn't go to Linux. Some went to macs, but most went to ... XP. Yes, a lot of PC manufactures pre-installed XP instead of vista, due to demand from users. Now Manufactures going against Microsofts wishes. Yes MS wants everybody to go to their latest offering as quickly as possible. So for HP, Dell etc to offer XP when MS wants to push vista is pretty big.


Ok now your digging yourself in quite deeply. First off, your talking about linux the kernel? Or linux as a platform, which usually totally gets raped by manufactures. Long story short (I could put a huge rant here, really) The kernel usually isn't the problem. Manufactures just slap something together, sometimes using binary blobs (more on that on your video bit) and when it works in their labs, they'll ship. Usually not taking into consideration the amount of ram needed for their setups, the amount of flash etc etc. They try to cut as much of the costs as possible, and like in this case with disastrous outcome. Most of the time, installing one of the best 'distro's for accesspoints out there, openwrt fixes nearly all problems. Mostly because they know better the limitations of the system based on the amount of ram or trying to replace binary blobs with proper opensource drivers. To summarize, linux isn't the problem here, but manufactures who don't really know what they are doing, but refuse to standarize on openwrt with their own webskin.

P.s. you do know it was running linux, not vmworkss


Chances are you where using a binary blob? Yeah, though this could happen on any os, but problem here is most if not all the time, the binary blob. They have funny ways of installing their drivers if not fully removed, can cause trouble no matter what you put in after that. Also, I don't find this a 'general consumer issue' at all. Probably not the 80% demographic, maybe 75% demographic. Users generally don't swap their video card. They buy laptops! or normal tower "computers".


You would think this be true, with more windows users then linux users, ignoring the cooperate and mom'n'pop/13 year olds etc. Thing is, it's simply not true. Most of the windows problems people also find them and often recommend you to try to reboot, try X, try Y and ... reinstall. Reinstalling btw is often the solution to many many windows problems (the 75% demographic btw, would just buy a new one. "Oh it no longer works right, time to buy a new one, it was "old" anyway".).

May be, may be not. Either-way, the 80% demographic (overuse, I know) will probably whine and complain how annoying their new computer is and HP/Dell will offer 7 as an option to new models.


Someone after you said this wasn't true or he could fix up any 'crufted old setup'. But everybody really knows, that windows gets 'slow' after a year or two and reinstall is required.

He has a point, clearing out the startup/run sections, uninstalling crapware helps a lot. But there always creeps in some bloat that won't get uninstalled. One of the worst offenders is office. Notice how a freshly installed PC starts in a certain amount of time. After installing office, the PC would take longer to start and things where slightly slower. Yet startup, run etc everything remained the same. DLL's bloating the memory/preload? Who knows. But it's a fact. most people btw, don't reinstall, after 1-2 years, they just buy a new one.[/QUOTE]

Worse than any Mac fanboi. Horrible.

The point was made in the article or maybe in these comments that Windows 8 was going to destroy Microsoft and drive people to alternatives. My point was that Microsoft already had one "failure" and Linux failed to benefit. The reasons why are irrelevant. It simply means that this time around it's unlikely to be much different.

As it happens you have completely misunderstood what I was talking about with the router. The router was running Linux but that wasn't what crashed it. It was something to do with IPv6 being enabled at kernel level, which meant I couldn't turn it off. Don't talk about digging myself deeper when the point goes over your head.

Maybe the binary blob was a problem, I can't remember if I installed the binary or not, but still, Windows has NEVER given me that problem. Changing a graphics card will not usually give a BSOD, since it has a fallback standard VGA driver. For whatever reason, Linux didn't have the same behaviour and the repair tools offered didn't do the job.

I have "fixed" Windows machines that were over 6 or 7 years old simply with msconfig. Most users will not know about the smaller antivirus packages either. A defrag and a run of ccleaner works wonders too. Linux machines don't have the same mess of crapware to deal with, nor the same number of idiot users to do things the way they weren't supposed to. Linux hasn't really faced the same pounding on the desktop that Windows has, I wouldn't be too smug over Windows "slowing down". In fact I have done upgrades in Linux that forced a reinstall because they messed up so badly. Granted that's maybe just Ubuntu's fault, but Ubuntu is meant to be the "easy" Linux.

Just because I came and posted criticisms of Linux you seem to be treating me as some sort of Windows lover. I have been trying Linux since before Ubuntu finally made one LiveCD to makes things simpler, and I've always been waiting for the day I could just install it for my friends and leave them to it. That day just hasn't come.

[Kano]

It is certainly possible to break Linux systems with upgrades. I know that very well from the time i supported sid. In most cases you can fix those issues, the most generic way of "fixing" d-u problems is repeating

apt-get dist-upgrade
dpkg-configure -a
apt-get install -f

until you don't get any error. thats the basic variant, however when a dist-upgrade wants to remove core packages then something really bad is going on and it should be avoided to try at all. In theory it is possible to reinstall removed packages but thats not always that simple. If just minor packages have been removed, like gimp was removed because only gimp-data was there for the used arch you can install gimp when both packages are available. As i do not use Ubuntu - i only use some interesting parts like kernel (with some mods) or mainline builds, linux-firmware packages. Sometimes i install U to test my fglrx script, but i dont keep that install.

You are definitely right that you can not see Linux as a Win replacement for the 08/15 user. If a possible Linux user just surfs the web and was attacked by a virus/trojan then this one might switch. Usually you can not convert pro-gamers, thats more or less impossible, basically you can suggest using live systems for Internet usage but thats all. For ppl which specific win app needs it can be enough to provide a win vm - as long as those apps dont need 3d support. Sometimes wine is already enough - wine improved a lot, you can even run Office 2007 without problems. Of course there are much more Linux users out there (or dual boot users) than years ago, Linux marketing helped there. But of couse there will be always ppl who have got the wrong ideas what to expect from the system and are disappointed then.

I do not think that the new W8 UI will lead more Linux users. Some might just install W7 and praise the old times but those do not switch to Linux. I mainly test the technical aspects, learn a few new shortcuts and want to be prepared. It is always good to have deeper knowledge of a system, it does not matter if it is called Linux or Win, just that Win becomes much sooner boring as you can not modify/tune it the same way as Linux. Of course for unskilled users every system looks complicated thats not the same as usual...

[set135]

This last paragraph is kind of ridiculous. Yes, ancient versions of Windows don't work well with modern devices. The same is true of Linux. Try installing Linux from 2001 on a modern laptop and see how well that works. Secondly, I've found that most of my software *does* work just fine on Windows 7, even 64 bit. That's not really true for Linux. We never notice because we always just install software from the repos. You can't take binaries, or installers from 2001 and have them work on modern Linux. It's DOA.

This is not strictly true; for example, on my amd64 machine running the main userspace in native 64bit and a 3.3 64bit kernel, I can still run a Mosaic binary from 1998. I have a few legacy applications I still run. This is possible by installing and correctly setting up the required libraries. The kernel does not have a driver ABI, but it *does* try very hard not to break its userspace interface backward compatability (syscalls). This is why even an ancient version of libc5 is still happy to talk to a brand new kernel. Of course, other than supporting 32bit stuff on 64bit machines, distributions do not try to bother with something like this, as their users generally arent interested in retro-computing, and attempting any sort of generic solution would be difficult and involve unknown gobs of archaic libraries.

[steveriley]

But: some boards (and more fun: laptops) are out there that can stop booting with just playing around with UEFI boot options. A cmos clear does not help at all now, as everything is stored in the eeprom now. I got a replacement bios chip for my asus z68 board recently as it stopped booting after changeing the boot order, but thats another story

Yeah, UEFI is cool, but surprisingly easy to "accidentally" hork. See my chronicle of UEFI manipulations on Kubuntu Forums for an example.

[Kano]

Interesting way, but needs 2 systems I would have used another approach, but really interesting what you have done. My board has got an easy accessable eeprom so replacing that was the first choice for me. I wrote several mails to asus support then rma that i will NOT send the board but that i want a chip. Lucky flashrom is possible with that board (it got a few comments on the flashrom site but basically it works fine). As flashrom has got absolutely no check you can flash anything. Therefore i flashed an unmodified rom from the asus webpage to fix my weird nic (with 3 possible different pci ids with the replacement rom). That of course killed the correct mac adress, but as the mac adress is just stored in the first 6 bytes of the used nvram i only needed 6 ethtool commands to write the correct one. I dont know if i would recommend using flashrom on a laptop, but it can be at least handy to create a backup.rom - thats something i did not do before and which i really hate that i missed that as i know have got a weird issue that i dont get a vga bios init for the ivb vga - i got that with a bios updated from 0501 to 0651 to 3203 however. I am currently investing one different approach to reset just the raw data of my old bios dump (which is unbootable), but need to figure out how to combine that correctly... Of course you dont need flashrom to create a backup, you can use the vendors bios tool as well.

[V!NCENT]

No way that I'm installing Win8 on my desktop, because it's not made for it?

It's great for putting it on a tablet and set up shop in a cafe with WiFi, plug in bluetooh keyboard and mouse and switch to Aero. But laptop? No fscking way!

[daedaluz]

What a horrible review. 2½ pages exclaiming how Windows is supriour to Linux in many aspects from user perspective and how Windows 8 has improved on all techical aspects from 7. Then conclude review by judging the system as a crap wreck. Seriously Michael, get a grip.

[steveriley]

Interesting way, but needs 2 systems I would have used another approach, but really interesting what you have done. My board has got an easy accessable eeprom so replacing that was the first choice for me.

Thanks. Since laptops generally tend to be more difficult to tinker with, I consider myself lucky for having two such similar pieces of kit handy. To spare myself from future sips of the flinger, I've backed up each machine's NVRAM variables onto a USB. Never know when I might need them again...

BTW, I finally got something useful to boot on that tablet! Behold, Kubuntu Active Two:
http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?58630

[V!NCENT]

What a horrible review. 2½ pages exclaiming how Windows is supriour to Linux in many aspects from user perspective and how Windows 8 has improved on all techical aspects from 7. Then conclude review by judging the system as a crap wreck. Seriously Michael, get a grip.

Isn't it blatenty obvious how this system is a train wreck from a desktop and laptop perctive? Two different use case interfaces that have to be used simultaniously with two different distribution models? Don't you also know that on classic interface mode, you can only run IE as your browser? And if you want Firefox and Chrome, you have to switch to Metro on a desktop computer? And then have office software on Classic and can't multitask propperly?

If that's not a trainwrecked crapfest, what is?

[daedaluz]

Isn't it blatenty obvious how this system is a train wreck from a desktop and laptop perctive? Two different use case interfaces that have to be used simultaniously with two different distribution models? Don't you also know that on classic interface mode, you can only run IE as your browser? And if you want Firefox and Chrome, you have to switch to Metro on a desktop computer? And then have office software on Classic and can't multitask propperly?

If that's not a trainwrecked crapfest, what is?

Every single question in your post is more or less false, except for the number of software distribution models. Nice going. Besides it's still beta, and according to Michael beats every Linux distro out there on technical and usability terms. Most likely consumers will agree on that, and there won't be a big newbie rush to Arch any time soon.