I don't know what these companies are thinking. First my rant was with Gnome3, but then Microsoft comes out and creates what many people are calling the worst blunder in OSes since Windows ME or Vista
MS is trying to do all the wrong things with this OS. Picked up a Sony VAIO Tap 20 for my wife and daughter over xmas to replace her aging laptop. HW shortfalls aside (should support 1920x1080, have HDMI in, an eSATA port, more RAM), the idea of the thing would be great, except for Winblows 8. This doesn't deter my wife; she's happy because she can lug the thing all over the house sans keyboard/mouse and my three year old can now operate a lot of things autonomously thanks to the touch screen (not being much of a precision mouse driver yet).
However, in the name of unifying their 'user experience' across platforms, they've shot themselves in the foot in the only market where they maintain dominance, the desktop pc. If anything, Windows 8 is 'inside out'; all the touch crap should be an alternative gui mode invoked by swiping on a touch screen, otherwise out of sight. Their glorious tiled main desktop should be, well, just another app. Touch/gesture interpretation and feedback settings should be available for all apps and users (perhaps this is the case however I haven't found any low level tweaks). Meanwhile the tablet market is owned by ios and android, same with smartphones and MS goes and alienates their last remaining user base (ignoring the xbox for the moment). Brilliant.
The most irritating things to get past was figuring out the modal side menu, originally finding how to bring up the desktop with a mouse when in a modal app, and adding a shortcut to the 'legacy' desktop for the start/programs directory (since there is no longer a friggin' start menu). The thing I still don't like is having to figure out how to set/force each app to behave like a normal desktop app and not go all full-screen/modal/touchscreen retard. And the 'clean' touch interface causes lots of other useless activity in the way of extra clicking in order to get at buried options in dialogs. Was all this fluff really necessary just to get rid of the awful legacy visual control styles they adopted way back when? While touch support is great to have for hardware that supports it, the rest of the gui was just a poor excuse to move up a version number. I won't be putting Win 8 on anything else around here unless 7 disappears.
Why was this (and the Surface) such a bad idea by MS, aside from the fact that no one needs 20" diagonal file save dialog? Because hardware prices are falling off a cliff. I could have bought
several Android tablets for the price of a single copy of W8. Basically their model for OS revenue
is gone; they've been
discounting Windows 8 Pro upgrades to try to boost adoption in face of this. Surface directly competes with other tablet manufacturers, rots o' ruck that they'll willingly adopt 8. With all that in mind, I suspect fewer developers are going to look at this as their primary target platform. More will look to things like Unity to get away from platform lock-in, I know I am.
