Comment Re:People hear "Windows 8" and run away (Score 1) 336
If you piss around with Windows 8 for a while, you can basically simulate Windows 7. But for a long time, you'll still bump into horrible garbage - like "you wanted a weird, functionless fullscreen app to view an image file, right"? Very few things are real showstoppers, but lots of stuff is just a little worse - like they abandoned all the little refinements they've made to progressive versions over the years. Little stuff, like the behavior of the "run" dialog. It used to autocomplete well, and seemed to usually know what you wanted. Now it doesn't.
My job has me doing development on a Windows 8 machine - and it's gotten down to very few times a day I say "oh God, really?", but it's taken a lot of tweaking and adapting to get there. And there's literally nothing I actually prefer about 8. Lots of it just evidences horrible testing/design. Like your default start screen has a tile for the "math input editor" or something. That's a very narrow niche app for a desktop, non-touchscreen computer, and it doesn't work the way anyone expects. Many times I've been asked "what the heck does this do?" - and it actually took me a while to figure out. Obviously that doesn't hurt anyone much to have a stupid, useless app - but the same lack of design pervades the whole product.
It's just a half-baked mess, and I think it's earned it's poor reputation very well.
The fullscreen apps that you mention is one more thing that got me. Even if you go into the Aero desktop, you have just 1. Every app on the PC wants the full screen. I can understand this behavior or phones or on tablets, where fingers would work differently from mice. However, importing those uses to PCs just to try & kick start that market is inane.
Like I said elsewhere in this thread, making it pretend that it's my Nokia Lumia did nothing for me. Despite owning 1 of the latter, I just found the use frustrating. Ever since I dumped it for a more traditional (non-Windows) desktop, my life has been a lot easier. Granted - all I use at home are Thunderbird, Browsers (both Chromium & Firefox) and FreeCiv.