Concerned-ish

I obtained the Windows 8 Developer Snapshot a few weeks ago, and got around to installing it today, expecting great things. Unfortunately my expectations overreached what Windows 8 can do and ended up somewhere in Australia on my special little metaphorical scale.

Allow me to explain. While Windows 8 is based on Windows 7, the kernel and User Interface have received major overhauls. It’s not that it’s slow or unresponsive, it’s just that, from a user standpoint, it’s a bit too different. While I knew from the get go that Windows 8 was a tablet / touch based OS (maybe skewing my opinion here since I don’t have a touchscreen), mouse and keyboard do work. So everything is fine there. However… it’s just simply not designed for it.

In fact, I don’t think it was designed for anything.

While it does look rather pretty, two major issues cropped up that stopped it from being useful at all. The first is that if you have more than one monitor, in the current dev snapshot, it just simply won’t play nice. Rather than using common sense and extending the screen over onto the other monitor, it stops it up short and makes you use a scrollbar. The second thing – where the fuck are all my programs?

Windows 8 does away with the start menu as we know it and instead fills your desktop with big shiny button things. The thing is, there is no longer an “All Programs” menu, so unless you know the exact file directory and .exe name, you’re buggered for the minute. But even then, it’s difficult to find how to get into Windows Explorer.  I’d be showing you screenshots in this article, but I couldn’t even find Paint, the UI is that different.

Under the shell, I’m sure it’s just good old Windows. But this needs polish. Lots and lots of polish if it’s going to become a good OS. At this point in it’s cycle, Windows 7 was already pretty far along. I’m sad to say it, because t really is such a good concept – an actual proper mainstream operating system for tablet PCs – but at the minute it just simply isn’t good enough. It looks as if the trend of “a good OS followed by a bad one” is, for the moment, continuing. Hopefully closer to release I’ll be proven wrong. But for now? Stick to Windows 7.

But hey.

It’s still better than a Mac.