Microsoft Windows 8: Mostly A Crap Wreck

[AJenbo]

Installing a new graphics card broke X windows. I took out a Geforce and put in a Radeon and X would no longer boot. Safe mode and rebuilding the xconf did not help. Reinstalled Linux. Video not accelerated by default in the default Ubuntu media player despite the nvidia drivers being installed. I had to install a new media player from the repository and manually tell it to accelerate to get smooth playback.

I some what agree with your main point, but you excamples aren't the best, leaving the proprietary driver and switching graphics card will just as likely give you a BSOD in Windows.

[randomizer]

I some what agree with your main point, but you excamples aren't the best, leaving the proprietary driver and switching graphics card will just as likely give you a BSOD in Windows.

No, it would simply load up with the standard VGA driver.

[danboid]

ME 3? Bring it on!

I've been eagerly awaiting Mike's W8 review since he mentioned it in the recent visit to Valve article- interesting read and Kano's comments have also been very enlightening - I had no idea of Metros rather demanding (for netbook and phones/tablets at least) display res requirements to use multiple apps or just to run Metro at all.

Windows 2K ME was famous for being one of he most unstable excuses for an OS ever, then they did XP. Then they pissed a lot of people off by dropping loads of features and generally greatly slowing everything down in Vista. I expect this won us a few Linux and OSX converts but then they released Windows 7 which, whilst failing to fully restore the speed and (advanced) lost features of XP it was better and more nimble than Vista and I suspect MS will be supporting Win 7 for some time to come - I think they're going to have to if they don't think about what their users want for once.

W8 is clearly going to piss a lot of people off and I fully expect its actual roll-out is going to make Vista's public reception look glorious. A lot of the sheen MS may have had a decade ago has gone and most everyone has either Linux (Android) or iOS devices so they know MS aren't the only game in town any more and with Windows 8 they're really hammering home just how little they care about what their customers (users) like, want and know. W8 is basically the biggest butthurt, big bro bastard child of an OS ever. Sorry MS but your crappy and inappropriate tablet interface, constant dumbing down of your OS and promotion of your cloud and web services really doesn't interest me in the slightest- in fact its pretty the definition of what I don't want in computing.

I read this article just after the amazing news that now not only Valve but EA(!!) are planning to release titles for Ubuntu! If nothing else good happens for Linux this year the combination of MS force-feeding new computer users W8/Metro and the release of big name games by some of the biggest publishers in the industry can only mean 2012 will likely see the biggest potential surge of interest in Linux on the desktop yet.

[AJenbo]

No, it would simply load up with the standard VGA driver.

I have had both.

[randomizer]

I have had both.

Well the likelihood of BSODs is very dependent on the system configuration. I have not had a video driver-related BSOD for many years, but I won't dismiss your experiences. About the only thing that you can guarantee will cause a BSOD is switching AHCI on and off without the right registry changes (probably 100% chance in this case), as well as excessive overclocking.

[Kano]

@Windywoo

I switch so often gfx cards and i NEVER had to reinstall the os. In the case you installed binary drivers you have to uninstall em correctly. (That's also good on win to get rid of unused startup apps.) Newer X server autodetect the driver, very old ones did not, so this could have been an issue as well, but you overreacted, your baby problem i would have fixed within a few mins using chroot from a live system. Today you do not even need to uninstall binary drivers you got via the repository, when you do it correctly you just switch em.

Of course you should know what you do, but win can have got also very stupid errors. On one system i updated win 7 to sp1, then i deleted the old backup files (using the official cleanup tool as admin). The problem was that somehow the usb drivers were still the old ones but the certificate needed for those old drivers was removed together with the backups. If you know how to extract the new drivers to get rid of the error you must be really clever. There have been similar bug reports but on the problematic system there missed a few files more. Until a proper fix you needed to press F8 on boot and allow unsigned drivers. Ok, when you never had to help others with those weird problems then you really don't know much about win. I have seen Win 1.0 already on school systems and 3.0 on my first box at home. A bit before win95 came out i played with SuSE 11/94 (2nd hand buy).

[Kiori]

Michael, Windows is an ilusion. Reviews about the system should be made 3-4 months after instalation, where the OS has had time to kill itself.
Really, in every MS system, performance is great... till the time comes where the system is so busted, that you have to do a format and reinstall.

Bear that in mind, windows has an "expiration date", linux doesnt.

cheers.

[Windywoo]

@Windywoo

I switch so often gfx cards and i NEVER had to reinstall the os. In the case you installed binary drivers you have to uninstall em correctly. (That's also good on win to get rid of unused startup apps.) Newer X server autodetect the driver, very old ones did not, so this could have been an issue as well, but you overreacted, your baby problem i would have fixed within a few mins using chroot from a live system. Today you do not even need to uninstall binary drivers you got via the repository, when you do it correctly you just switch em.

Of course you should know what you do, but win can have got also very stupid errors. On one system i updated win 7 to sp1, then i deleted the old backup files (using the official cleanup tool as admin). The problem was that somehow the usb drivers were still the old ones but the certificate needed for those old drivers was removed together with the backups. If you know how to extract the new drivers to get rid of the error you must be really clever. There have been similar bug reports but on the problematic system there missed a few files more. Until a proper fix you needed to press F8 on boot and allow unsigned drivers. Ok, when you never had to help others with those weird problems then you really don't know much about win. I have seen Win 1.0 already on school systems and 3.0 on my first box at home. A bit before win95 came out i played with SuSE 11/94 (2nd hand buy).

Very old ones? This was Ubuntu 10 or so. chroot from a live system is a baby problem? I booted into safe mode and tried the options there, I thought that was baby fixes but clearly I should have known how to repair from a live CD with command line. Reinstalling was a faster option than me googling solutions all day until I found the correct shitty post on some shitty forum.

Your problem with Windows 7 sounds obscure, not a common scenario at all. The issues I have described could happen to anyone.

[Windywoo]

I have had both.

Using what? Windows XP?

[Kano]

@Windywoo

As I write scripts to install gfx drivers since over a decade i know how to install (and uninstall). I also helped lots of Kanotix users with a similar problems. I could fix U as well but usually it should be somebody helping you from the #ubuntu channel then. There are less Kanotix users but they know who to ask