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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

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If you check the thread I linked to you will see how I documented an adventure of mine looking for a specific tiny app (and it's source code and a way to re-compile it easily)

I'm not surprised by any of it. And that was a straight compile as-is. It reminds me of the time where I wanted to get my Alfa AWUS036H wifi card working on Linux. First, you have to chose between between 2 drivers, either:

-rtl8187, which mostly works (lacking some features still) but namely doesn't let you control power (making my Alfa card 100% pointless), or:

-r8187, which lets you control power and do absolutely everything you want with it.... except connect to a WPA-protected AP (bah, not like you want internet, right?)

To swap between the 2 broken drivers, you have to wget & untar the sources for the driver, wget 2 or 3 different patches (which of course vary depending on which kernel you're using, among other things), and apply them, rmmod the old driver, manually add several entries to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf, make/make install/make unload, modprobe, etc. While using half-working instructions from various forums -- while you have no internet on that box (better wget everything you may need and all dependencies first!) This finally allows you to use a command line utility (iwpriv, there's no GUI of course) to change a value which will then let you use iwconfig (again, no GUI) to manually change the power level... assuming you've already written some scripts to change the CRDA. Hours of fun in a terminal window for half-working wifi.

Under Windows, the driver has one of those newfangled GUIs. And it has one of those slider controls to adjust the power and an "Apply" button next to it, and it just works. You can even connect to an AP that uses WPA or WPA2, so amazing! Installing the driver required clicking on next twice and then finish, or something like that.

Getting Intel HD audio working over spdif was just about the same story: wget/untar/recompile source for alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils (./configure, make, make install). Then edit a configuration file (alsa-base.conf) trying different values somewhat randomly, reboot, see if works and if not try another value and reboot, and possibly having to unmute the IEC958 output from alsa-mixer which is a clunky command-line audio mixer) whereas under Windows, there's a "use digital/spdif output" checkbox and that's all you need to do.

Basic things like that always seem to require so much work. You eventually tire of it.

Then you have the "direct derivatives" basically you take a "main" distribution, you remove something, you add something else, you change it's name and voilà, here is a brand new (senseless) distro, which has more or less the same functionalities of the "main" one but soon will become (or already is) partially or totally incompatible with the "original"

Agreed. There's far too many distros out there, most of which are just about a straight copy of another distro but with perhaps a new desktop environment (gnome/kde/xfce...) and a new theme. Most of them have the same basic problems anyway.

I've heard it said that Linux is for people who'd rather put their own cars together out of parts...

Or people who don't mind having to disassemble and reassemble their car rotated to turn corners ;)

My needs aren't (it seems) as specialized as yours, so I may be able to get away with some flavor of Linux.

That's the saving grace for a lot of Linux users. You don't need any specialized software for anything and don't play games? It'll work I guess.

the occasional but still important need to edit PDF files or extract specific pages from a PDF

That's pretty basic usage as far as PDFs go. I commonly deal with PDFs that contain 3D content (that you can rotate on any axis and hide parts of) and layers, or running preflight checks on PDF/X files to send out for printing (and do some proofing with them), or to de-skew & OCR scanned documents (from our copier than scans in PDF format directly to a network share), making extensive use of the annotation tools on translated documents (commenting/pointing out errors), using the "edit object" tool to make some changes to PDFs (and even edit parts with Adobe Illustrator because Acrobat just can't do some changes by itself), using digital signatures in engineering documents passed around via email, and I even open them in Photoshop sometimes. That kind of stuff. If you got needs like that then Acrobat's the only game in town and that means Windows or Macs only.

CPU speed, RAM, and storage. In that spec box, these were, respectively, 1GHz, 1GB, and 16GB (up to 64GB)

I understand that. Just "1GHz" by itself means nothing at all. They're completely different processor architectures (x86 vs ARM), with different numbers of cores, etc. Of course it's no i7 but it's not like a P3 either. 1GB isn't much at all for a desktop but it's not like you'll be doing a lot of heavy multitasking on a tablet (it's enough and it's also more than any other tablet as far as I know). Storage space wise you can't expect too much from a device that uses flash memory -- just look at flash-based MP3 players. You won't mind too many with more than 64GB -- probably none (unless you want a hard drive in it). I mean, it's enough for things like 1080p video chat or playing nice 3D games like Mass Effect or Dead Space on it. It's definitely not the same as a powerful desktop but other tablets are far worse.

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Basic things like that always seem to require so much work. You eventually tire of it.

But this is true also in the othe other half of the world.

Really coincidentally yesterday I had to re-install an XP on a AMD motherboard with a ATi Radeon 9600 Pro video card. (second hand, low cost machine, to be used for office use only)

Besided the fact that finding the drivers (now they are in the "legacy" part of the AMD site was a far-less-than-easy chore, I learned that to have the lousy ccc catalyst control panel you need .Net 2.0 :w00t:.

No big problem, but once the thingy and the driver was installed (and working allright) at a certain point the video switched off itself.

No way to re-access it, needed to cut power off and re-boot.

So I said to myself, I must have set the "normal" power saving profile and for *any*reason it switched video off after 20 minutes, and right I was, so I set it to "Always on", and after some other 20 minutes, the video switched off itself again. :ph34r:

So uninstalled the stupid drivers, and tested the machine with the standard Vga one: no problems at all.

Tried installing a slightly previous version of the drivers, same video switch off.

BTW uninstalling a Radeon video card driver and reinstalling another one is not for the very faint of heart, as it involves some small trickery (I had to do quite a few searches to find the keys in Registry that remained "set" after uninstall).

Continued searching the internet and found quite a number of reports of people with this exact issue, with "expert" replies such as "You have been playing a game that needs a lot of video processing power and the CPU is overheating" (the OP having reported he was playing a golf game), "Check the fan, it is not spinning" (the card has a passive cooler) and similar pearls of wisdom (sigh :().

Finally I found (on an italian IBM dedicated board) that the issue could be a stupid service "ATi Hot Key Poller" that has issues on some motherboards (coincidentally AMD based).

Disabled the service and everything works.

Not being at all an expert on video cards, I instinctly always got (when not using the motherboard integrated one), Nvidia ones, evidently my instinct has helped keeping me out of troubles for several years :).

Anyway once upon a time you had a diskette (or directory on cd, or local directory created from a download) with a simple .inf file, you pointed the NT system to read the .inf file and the driver was installed, at the most a reboot was needed.

Now the "legacy" set of drivers ran on me a program to register at ATi site, besides a temporary free acceess to play "lord of the rings" and even without the stupid ccc panel, forced on me a stupid service that switched off video after 20 minutes or so.

There is no way you can convince me that this is "the right way" to do things, as opposed to the nonsensical complexity of Linux drivers, as I see it BOTH "models" suck big.

jaclaz

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I learned that to have the lousy ccc catalyst control panel you need .Net 2.0 :w00t:.

You might be happy to learn that CCC is entirely optional :) I never install it.

I instinctly always got (when not using the motherboard integrated one), Nvidia ones, evidently my instinct has helped keeping me out of troubles for several years :)

But this is true also in the othe other half of the world ;)

Every nvidia card I've bought in the last decade has been nothing but trouble: BSODs, games crashing, video decoding acceleration not working due to driver issues, tons of "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" errors (i.e. Windows restarted it), millions of bad G86/G86 cards having been sold (thermal issues leading to failure), their drivers being so awful that it was causing 30% of all BSODs when Vista came out and now the pink screen of death with the last one I bought. So many problems and time wasted.

I almost always get (when not using the motherboard integrated one), ATI ones, evidently my instinct has helped keeping me out of troubles for several years ;)

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CoffeeFiend,

Thanks for the gory details on using Linux. I just bought a new Vista box on clearance from Staples (amazing that was still possible in 2012) and it just occurred to me I could put it next to my main PC and multiboot it with Linux to see if I can replicate my day-to-day work on it.

I've heard it said that Linux is for people who'd rather put their own cars together out of parts...

Or people who don't mind having to disassemble and reassemble their car rotated to turn corners ;)

LOL :D

the occasional but still important need to edit PDF files or extract specific pages from a PDF

That's pretty basic usage as far as PDFs go. I commonly deal with PDFs that contain 3D content (that you can rotate on any axis and hide parts of) and layers, or running preflight checks on PDF/X files to send out for printing (and do some proofing with them), or to de-skew & OCR scanned documents (from our copier than scans in PDF format directly to a network share), making extensive use of the annotation tools on translated documents (commenting/pointing out errors), using the "edit object" tool to make some changes to PDFs (and even edit parts with Adobe Illustrator because Acrobat just can't do some changes by itself), using digital signatures in engineering documents passed around via email, and I even open them in Photoshop sometimes. That kind of stuff. If you got needs like that then Acrobat's the only game in town and that means Windows or Macs only.

That could be a problem. My requirements are simpler than yours, but in my line of work I do often have to annotate PDFs for typesetters/designers (those yellow stickies are so much easier than creating an e-mail or word processing file saying, "OK, in the third paragraph on the left on page 129..."). Not having that feature would be a significant drawback. Don't PDF readers for Linux have that capability? I suppose I'll find out...

CPU speed, RAM, and storage. In that spec box, these were, respectively, 1GHz, 1GB, and 16GB (up to 64GB)

I understand that. Just "1GHz" by itself means nothing at all. They're completely different processor architectures (x86 vs ARM), with different numbers of cores, etc. Of course it's no i7 but it's not like a P3 either. 1GB isn't much at all for a desktop but it's not like you'll be doing a lot of heavy multitasking on a tablet (it's enough and it's also more than any other tablet as far as I know). Storage space wise you can't expect too much from a device that uses flash memory -- just look at flash-based MP3 players. You won't mind too many with more than 64GB -- probably none (unless you want a hard drive in it). I mean, it's enough for things like 1080p video chat or playing nice 3D games like Mass Effect or Dead Space on it. It's definitely not the same as a powerful desktop but other tablets are far worse.

Yeah, I guess we simply don't have any particular reason to own a tablet. If we want to watch a YouTube video or stream something, we can just do it on the HTPC and view it on a 55" screen. (Sorry, Metro team!)

--JorgeA

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If you're interested in just giving Linux a whirl, there are options to create LiveUSB sticks of certain distros. Essentially you create a bootable USB stick which contains a Linux distro and you can then boot from the stick and try it out without installing it.

So that in the case you decide against it, you can just turn it off and nothing will have changed.

I had to use an Ubuntu LiveUSB (explained here) to to re-organize my Ubuntu/Windows partitions. While Ubuntu itself still suffers from the many problems all Linux distros suffer from (Missing functionality/terrible fragmentation/still too much reliance on terminal once it gets complicated/QA of apps can be so-and-so/...) I quite like the fact that they at least try to get to a common ground upon which a uniform platform can grow, without forking into a bazillion different flavours which all have exactly one user who actually uses it. It's no Windows, but it's user friendly for a Linux ;).

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That could be a problem. My requirements are simpler than yours, but in my line of work I do often have to annotate PDFs for typesetters/designers (those yellow stickies are so much easier than creating an e-mail or word processing file saying, "OK, in the third paragraph on the left on page 129..."). Not having that feature would be a significant drawback. Don't PDF readers for Linux have that capability? I suppose I'll find out...

I can't tell you for sure that no PDF app on Linux can do this specific task as I haven't tried all of them, but even "alternative" PDF apps for Windows are extremely limited when it comes to supporting things like I had listed (some of them even struggle with very basic tasks like printing documents). For us it would be impossible to live without Adobe's Creative Suite (and *so* many other things that Linux just doesn't have). It's pretty common for designers to use InDesign (with content from Illustrator and Photoshop, managed using Bridge) and typesetters to fill in their part with InCopy, then doing PDF/X output via Acrobat (and preflighting with Acrobat and addons for it like PitStop Pro or pdfToolbox).

Just today again I had a small request for a company logo in a specific format (Illustrator CS3, with fonts converted to outlines, using Pantone spot colors for accuracy -- instead of a PDF/X file). It was a 10 minute job but I have absolutely no idea how I'd even try to do this on Linux. Nor would I know if the file would be accepted for output (delays, wasted time and iterations costs us money), or what the end result would look like (that's clearly not an option when you print lots of something). I'm not what you'd call a huge Apple fan, but at least I could accomplish this kind of task on a Mac (you got the entire Creative Suite, an OS with proper color calibration, Outlook 2011 to use my Exchange accounts for the relevant emails, etc) as well as pretty much every basic task Linux can accomplish (browsing, playing mp3's, etc). It's still mostly useless for programming (doesn't run most of the tools we need) and CAD work though (two things we do a lot of).

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I can't tell you for sure that no PDF app on Linux can do this specific task as I haven't tried all of them, but even "alternative" PDF apps for Windows are extremely limited when it comes to supporting things like I had listed (some of them even struggle with very basic tasks like printing documents).

CoffeeFiend,

Thanks once again for the real-life scenario. Sounds like the range of useful things that can be done in Linux is comparatively narrow.

Anyway, here's an interesting take by Paul Thurrott that builds on what we said the other day about "the war on general purpose computing":

In Windows 8, Metro-styled apps are those simpleton apps that run in a new Fisher Price-like environment that power users are already disavowing.

And the coming Windows 8 ultrabooks are already under pressure from both ends (price and cost).

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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If you're interested in just giving Linux a whirl, there are options to create LiveUSB sticks of certain distros. Essentially you create a bootable USB stick which contains a Linux distro and you can then boot from the stick and try it out without installing it.

So that in the case you decide against it, you can just turn it off and nothing will have changed.

I had to use an Ubuntu LiveUSB (explained here) to to re-organize my Ubuntu/Windows partitions. While Ubuntu itself still suffers from the many problems all Linux distros suffer from (Missing functionality/terrible fragmentation/still too much reliance on terminal once it gets complicated/QA of apps can be so-and-so/...) I quite like the fact that they at least try to get to a common ground upon which a uniform platform can grow, without forking into a bazillion different flavours which all have exactly one user who actually uses it. It's no Windows, but it's user friendly for a Linux ;).

Thank you for the tip, belgianguy -- I just went and created a LiveUSB for Zorin OS! It's supposed to be based on Ubuntu, but with a Windows look-and-feel to lessen the culture shock.

We'll see how well the operating system works.

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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WIndows 8 will be a double failure for Microsft. Since the mobile phones war is lost, 2 battles remain. The Tablets battle and the Desktop battle. The first one is already lost. I don't beleive that Windows 8 is capable of punching Android or iOS Tablets. No way. Secondly. Windows users will stick to Windows XP and WIndows 7. WIndows 8 will be the black sheep of Microsoft like Windows Millenium and Vista were. Microsoft wanted to put all devices under one roof. Tablets, mobile phones, XBOX, Desktops/Laptops. The result of this target is an OS which is not even as user friendly as Vista. The Linux community and Apple will be so happy when WIndows 8 will be released....

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In Windows 8, Metro-styled apps are those simpleton apps that run in a new Fisher Price-like environment that power users are already disavowing.

/thread. This says it all. And since it's almost the only new feature Win8 has and that it can't be disabled...

Since the mobile phones war is lost, 2 battles remain. The Tablets battle and the Desktop battle. The first one is already lost. I don't beleive that Windows 8 is capable of punching Android or iOS Tablets. No way.

Agreed (they also lost for other mobile devices like the Zune). The tablet battle is already lost as far as I'm concerned. Most OEMs have zero experience with ARM tablets, they're used to make cheap and heavy laptops instead (mostly being incapable of competing in the ultrabook format, let alone tablets). Now they have to make a portable device instead, with an expensive touch screen, and using an OS that a lot of people are already showing strong aversion to (and isn't custom tailored for tablets), and without all the apps iDevices have, etc. I don't see them making a dent in iPad or Android tablet sales.

WIndows 8 will be the black sheep of Microsoft like Windows Millenium and Vista were.

If anything, I'd say it's going to be worse than both PR-wise.

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WIndows 8 will be a double failure for Microsft. Since the mobile phones war is lost, 2 battles remain. The Tablets battle and the Desktop battle. The first one is already lost. I don't beleive that Windows 8 is capable of punching Android or iOS Tablets. No way. Secondly. Windows users will stick to Windows XP and WIndows 7. WIndows 8 will be the black sheep of Microsoft like Windows Millenium and Vista were. Microsoft wanted to put all devices under one roof. Tablets, mobile phones, XBOX, Desktops/Laptops. The result of this target is an OS which is not even as user friendly as Vista. The Linux community and Apple will be so happy when WIndows 8 will be released....

tsampikos,

Interesting analysis. Following your lead, we could say that Microsoft have lost the phone battle, will lose the tablet battle, and -- are shooting themselves on the desktop battle!

--JorgeA

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we could say that Microsoft have lost the phone battle, will lose the tablet battle, and -- are shooting themselves on the desktop battle!

They've lost at the mp3 player battle, they lost the smartphone battle, they're losing the tablet battle, and to do so they're turning their desktop OS and developer tools into something nobody wants of (and killing the Live brand as well). It's going to be a spectacular failure like we'll probably never see again.

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Want to play a DVD in Windows 8? That's going to cost you an extra upgrade according to this article.

I knew WMC would become a for-pay upgrade, but DVD playback, really? So if a customer doesn't buy their media pack, he could find himself "upgrading" a Windows 7 pc that plays DVDs just fine into a machine that won't even play them without an extra purchase?

What about people who downgrade from any version of Win8 without DVD support to any version of Windows 7, will they magically regain those features?

I could understand that they would be trying to cut corners to get the price down, but to remove DVD functionality? That might be a bit too much. In Europe there's no Hulu or Netflix to speak of, so DVDs are far from legacy items.

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belgianguy,

Thanks for the link. Looks like MS has given its customer base even more reasons to give the thumbs-down to Windows 8.

I've noticed that if I have a CD/DVD in the ODD when I boot into Win8, then Windows Explorer finds it; but if Win8 is already loaded and then I put a disc in the drive, nothing happens -- it's as if I hadn't put anything in the ODD. This is not supposed to be intentional, but still I have to wonder if this was a "preview" of Win8's new "feature set."

--JorgeA

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I would have hoped for built-in Blu-Ray support if anything. Instead, we get:

-No support for Blu-Ray built-in

-No support for DVDs built-in

-No support for MPEG2 files or streams built-in

-No WMC built-in, you have to pay extra for the addon (Zero day DLC, if you will), on top of having to pay extra for Win8 Pro (or Pro Pack, still paying both both but as one item)

-Seemingly even if you have Win8 Pro and the WMC pack, then WMP still can't play DVDs!

-WMC in Win8 gets *zero* new features (is it being abandoned?)

-Still laughable support for common formats such as FLAC or MKV (or subtitles for that matter)

-No syncing WMP with the most popular mp3 players (iPods)

-WMP smart playlists are still kinda dumb compared to many other players

-Intentionally crippled TV recording for some countries, and also recording in a non-standard format with DRM

-Playing mp3's with the awful Metro player by default

...

Sounds like it's going to be a fantastic OS for audio and video content! :rolleyes: When you offer that kind of experience to your users (don't forget Metro), you can't be surprised Apple's eating your lunch and that most of your users won't upgrade.

Meanwhile, everywhere on the internet, people are voicing their opinions about it, and it's not praise.

FAQ - DVD playback and Windows Media Center in Windows 8 has some nice comments.

PCWorld has a couple related articles:Like Windows Media Center? Don't Upgrade to Windows 8 and Windows 8 Dumps Default DVD Playback.

Edit: more nice comments on anandtech's article.

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