Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Five (Lame) Reasons for Windows 8 (A Linux Users Perspective)?

22 Sep 2011

Today I ran across an article by Preston Gralla titled “Five Reasons You’ll Want Windows 8”. I figured, why not read it? I could use a good laugh.

I didn’t even understand what I was getting myself into. These reasons are sad people. I thought I’d go through them for fun.

  1. Metro:  Seriously? Metro? I will grant that there is some functionality in Metro that is interesting, but damn is it ugly. I have Windows 8 running in a VM on my home computer, and I can’t get over just how ugly it is. Add to this, it just doesn’t seem practical in a non-touch environment. I can see where it would have it’s uses on a tablet or even a phone, but on a desktop computer, it’s terrible.
  2. Built-in apps: I don’t even know what he’s talking about with this one. The built-in apps that I’ve seen in the developer version I’m running are sparse and lame. They operate in a tablet mode (meaning taking the whole screen), and lack functionality that I think would make them useful. Tweet@rama is the example Preston used, and it doesn’t come close to comparing to Tweetdeck.
  3. Cloud integration: Is it 2009 still? Yea, Linux has been doing that since there was a cloud, and Microsoft’s version certainly provides no motivation to switch.
  4. It’s fast: So? Linux is faster. Try again.
  5. New Windows Explorer: This one I thought was the funniest of all of them. The “New” Explorer is virtually identical to the old Explorer, but now it’s got a ribbon! Keep in mind that this is a ribbon that takes up 1/4 of the window, and rarely needs to be used.

Seriously, these are the best reasons you can come up with to try Windows 8? Anyone that’s already using Linux will just look at this and shake their head in wonder. I’m reading it again because I still just can’t believe it said what it said. OK, moving on now.



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