A Linux User's Perspective Of Microsoft Windows 8

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Linux User's Perspective Of Microsoft Windows 8

For those Microsoft Windows users that also use Linux and are thinking about upgrading to Windows 8, here's the perspective of one Linux user who tried out Microsoft Windows 8...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIxNzA

[zeealpal]

I've never been one for upgrading my Windows OS, but I have upgraded three friends to Windows 8, of which 2/3 upgrades worked without issues, the last one requiring a clean install.

I do think its slightly disappointing that the upgrade does have a decent amount of failures, I think MS should recommend a clean install when the upgrade assistant detects that a system upgrade is likely to fail (they should be able to do that, perhaps too many apps, install is old and messy etc...)

I have always found Ubuntu updates to be a pain myself, especially with my AMD Card and 3 monitors. I like OSS, and the ideologies behind it, and the 3 monitors are very useful when using Blender 3D, LuxRender and Gimp (post pro/textures) which I have taught myself to use over 3DS Maxx (free student licence) and Photoshop (crack lol)

I've read before on Phoronix that if you don't want to change config files to get your graphics setup you shouldn't be using Linux, I think that's ridiculous. The above software (Blender, Lux and Gimp) are all OSS, and don't require hacks to setup properly, and its OSS. I would like to have a full OSS setup, but the 3 monitors make that difficult.

So right now, Windows 8 is the OS that works best for my content/game uses, so that's what I will use until otherwise possible (here hoping) and Ubuntu for web/music etc...

[allquixotic]

OK, I'll go ahead and self-identify. I wrote the mail to him.

For clarification, the poke at Lennart wasn't meant to be disparaging at all. I totally understand if things break in Rawhide. In fact, I laugh at it and move on. I don't like seeing this kind of breakage in a stable release; but fortunately it doesn't happen all that often in a stable release. For the record, I love Lennart's work. I was just referring to the recent breakage on F18 testing and Rawhide with boot looping -- see this bug. Honestly it's to be expected, because Fedora 18 hasn't been released yet (not even beta!) and Rawhide is always a mess.

But I was contrasting the expected instability of Red Hat folks breaking stuff in pre-releases and rawhide, versus the unexpected instability of Windows 8's upgrade procedures for software that spent months in testing and had been officially released "To Manufacturing". Furthermore, I paid for Windows, so I expect to receive a good experience in return. Also, the company developing it has virtually limitless resources. So there's really no excuse.

Other than that, I stand by my assertions that Windows 8's upgrade procedure is a crapshoot. If anyone else here dual boots, you should make sure you have good backups before you upgrade, or better yet, save yourself some time and just reinstall clean, then copy over your data from your backups.

The thing I wanted to get across that I didn't really enunciate in my email is that Microsoft's failure helped "snap me out of" a period when I had been running Windows on both my boxes habitually because of my desire to run Windows games. I hated it and kept swearing to go back to Linux, but nothing had given me a "shove" enough to actually do it, even though the dual boot partition to a working Linux install was right at my fingertips.

Ironically, it was Microsoft and their incompetence which gave me the final shove to move back to Linux. I've been using Ubuntu exclusively all weekend after weeks of running it in a VM only, and I'm very satisfied. I even donated to Canonical after downloading the ISO.

If you need to be reminded of just how terrible Microsoft's software quality is, just upgrade to Windows 8. You'll be glad to use a modern Linux distro after that.

[Kano]

Basically i would always do clean win installs and never upgrade. That's usally lost time to do so.

[allquixotic]

I've never been one for upgrading my Windows OS, but I have upgraded three friends to Windows 8, of which 2/3 upgrades worked without issues, the last one requiring a clean install.

I do think its slightly disappointing that the upgrade does have a decent amount of failures, I think MS should recommend a clean install when the upgrade assistant detects that a system upgrade is likely to fail (they should be able to do that, perhaps too many apps, install is old and messy etc...)

I have always found Ubuntu updates to be a pain myself, especially with my AMD Card and 3 monitors. I like OSS, and the ideologies behind it, and the 3 monitors are very useful when using Blender 3D, LuxRender and Gimp (post pro/textures) which I have taught myself to use over 3DS Maxx (free student licence) and Photoshop (crack lol)

I've read before on Phoronix that if you don't want to change config files to get your graphics setup you shouldn't be using Linux, I think that's ridiculous. The above software (Blender, Lux and Gimp) are all OSS, and don't require hacks to setup properly, and its OSS. I would like to have a full OSS setup, but the 3 monitors make that difficult.

So right now, Windows 8 is the OS that works best for my content/game uses, so that's what I will use until otherwise possible (here hoping) and Ubuntu for web/music etc...

Why doesn't Ubuntu work with your AMD card and 3 monitors? I don't know any reason why it wouldn't. It's worked fine here on my HD5970 and that's fairly "old" hardware by now..

[tancrackers]

Yep. As a fan of gnome-shell, I didn't find "Metro" to bad. I used both with and without a touchscreen and like them a lot.
Windows 8 is on my laptop, Arch Linux on my desktop!

[zeealpal]

Why doesn't Ubuntu work with your AMD card and 3 monitors? I don't know any reason why it wouldn't. It's worked fine here on my HD5970 and that's fairly "old" hardware by now..

That's not something I'm sure about, it was working at one time, but then it broke when I upgraded my Ubuntu to 12.04. I had tried both installing Ubuntu new (64 bit 12.04) (on a spare hdd, no other hdd's installed) and did the auto install from downloaded catalyst driver, the build packages option, and the Ubuntu default driver install.

However, I've found it better to separate my 3d/gaming work on windows to my other crap on Ubuntu (lots of music, pics, testing interesting linux apps etc...) so I'm happy leaving it as it is.

I was not intending any offense to anyone (hopefully I didn't) I just said what I had experienced on both. Perhaps I will try again with 12.10 once I've backed up my new files.

[_artem_]

Wtf is he talking about? I'm using Windows 8 pro rtm since august. Had no problems installing and using it. Everything is just working. BTW I'm mainly a gentoo user.

p.s. the only thing ubuntu does out of the box is to suck. What are you awaiting from an african distro for african monkeys...

[deanjo]

Other than that, I stand by my assertions that Windows 8's upgrade procedure is a crapshoot.

That can really be said of any OS upgrade. I can't count how many times a openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora upgrades have failed over my lifetime, many of them failing at even the bootloader stage. You are usually fine if you stick with the base given config of the OS but once you have a well used OS with a bunch of customization it is nothing but luck of the draw if the upgrade goes well or not.

[grantek]

One thing I've learned from Windows 7 that might be relevant here is that it doesn't like being booted from GRUB. GRUB will boot it fine, but I've had eg. the installation of SP1 fail because Windows can't find the BCD store it booted from (this is normally in the "System Reserved" partition created by a default W7 install).

Having said that, the only OS I'll trust to upgrade without fault is Debian. It's still possible to break it, and I have recently had some Ubuntu installs upgrade without issue (I was amazed), but Debian's the only OS who seem to take upgrades seriously.