from Hacker News

Why I use Windows 8

by namzo on 10/2/12, 8:43 AM with 55 comments

• by UnoriginalGuy on 10/2/12, 9:40 AM

  Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 (or disabling "Fast startup" on Windows 8).

  I'm also very surprised it took 20 second to boot in Windows 7 with an SSD. I have an SSD (an M4 specifically, on a SATA-3 connection) and Windows 7 never took 20 seconds to boot (with a UEFI "bios"). Closer to 10~12 seconds I would say.

  I've been running 8 now for weeks and my biggest complaints are, firstly that they removed tons of "desktop" software (e.g. Picture Viewer, Media Player, the Games, et al) and secondly that they removed DVD playback (and even if you purchase it, it still only works in Media Centre).

  Metro is something you can ignore. I will say that most Metro apps like the built-in Mail app are just horribly bad. So bad in fact that they're beyond use in some cases. Hopefully third parties can do useful things with Metro, because right now it doesn't have many use-cases.

• by eyko on 10/2/12, 9:11 AM

  Seems like he's apologising for using Windows 8, and that we don't really care.

• by eckyptang on 10/2/12, 9:17 AM

  He's pretty much spot on.

  My encounters with Windows 8 so far have lead to literally zero interaction with Metro other than for searching for stuff and starting programs for the first time which it's quite good at.

  Win+X is my start menu.

• by madprops on 10/2/12, 9:09 AM

  I've had those combined file operations on nautilus for quite some time, the pause button is nice though

• by scrrr on 10/2/12, 9:37 AM

  Yes, good points, and good for Microsoft. But a sleeping Mac wakes up in about 2 seconds. And OSX had the copy dialog nailed down before. Not sure about multi-monitor support. I really wish Microsoft would make a real competitor to OSX in terms of perceived quality.

• by quickie on 10/2/12, 9:34 AM

  the file copy/move/delete dialog combination was something that BeOS did 10 years ago. I always why Windows never picked that up...

• by m0skit0 on 10/2/12, 10:58 AM

  Oh and when is tab file browsing coming? Windows 10? Dude these features are available in other OSs since long time ago. I still don't see why I would go back to use Windows (be it 8 or any version) at all. There's no coming back, Microsoft is outdated.

• by barbs on 10/2/12, 9:00 AM

  I wonder if he's thought of using Classic Shell to get rid of the metro interface: http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

• by dschiptsov on 10/2/12, 10:31 AM

  What antivirus software you're using?)