Still trying to wrap my my mind around why anyone would want to use Windows 8. And eventually I am sure my four readers will get tired of hearing me rant about this, but sub-standard OSes make my world substantially worse.
Since the craze of making everything resemble a phone and/or tablet, many OSes have become unusable to me – I can no longer use mainstream Ubuntu, any OS that uses Gnome Shell, and now Windows. I can still use Mac OS (as long as I do so on a retina-class display, otherwise the fonts are too blurry), though I am not sure how long it will be before that OS is also converted into a clowny phone OS.
I do take solace as I’ve already mentioned that even those who think they are more efficient will be much slower and much less productive on such an abomination. It will give me fewer people to be competitive with in the workplace, and that is a good thing as far as it goes.
And I am pretty confident in saying that as often (it has been shown repeatedly in studies) that things people perceive as making them more productive actually often do not – like the sneering keyboard-only users who condemn mouse users as dabblers and incompetents while study after study shows that mouse-as-primary users are just as quick at all tasks as the keyboard snobs.
It has to do with cognitive load – if something requires a greater cognitive load, then it’s perceived as being more efficient. And not being able to see your windows, being able to only single-task, and having no way to organize things in Windows 8 will certainly present a much-higher overall cognitive load.
To be fair, I think Windows 8 is probably a fine – and maybe even a good – tablet OS.
Using it on a desktop, laptop or anything with a screen larger than 11” is a damn nightmare. How could it be otherwise? My 30” monitor is not a touch-screen phone, for fuck’s sake. I can see many, many apps on a screen that large. And I often do. Not to mention that I have another large monitor, and in the future I will likely add one more as well, for three total. Using a phone OS on that will not even be an option.
I can’t believe Microsoft has no OS – and no plans for an OS – for professionals.
It’s been absolutely ridiculous seeing full-blown idiots who use their machines only for playing Angry Birds and watching cat videos tell me that a phone OS is “good enough for anyone.”
Great, someone who clicks on two icons ever telling me how to use a box with 32GB of RAM, hundreds of apps and that sometimes bogs down even with all the power it has.