Windows 8

December 21st, 2012
I’ve been playing around with Windows 8 a little. I don’t rate it very highly yet. I was impressed with Windows 7; it’s familiar but powerful. Windows 8 takes things in a new direction, and I like to see things pushing forward. However, at the moment it feels like you have 2 operating systems installed. And they gel together even less well than the various VM environments there are, e.g. for running Linux on Windows, or Windows on Mac. Some stuff only seems to be available in one of the ‘OSs’ (such as restarting the system – it took me a long time to figure out how to do that.) And the stuff that’s available in both ‘OSs’ has clunky transitions (such as applying windows updates: I started in Metro, and clicked to see more details about the 20 available updates. I got jumped into the Desktop view, and I had to click again to view the details.)