Windows 8

[Jessterw]

The Ribbon in Office (pre-customizability) was a productivity killer for me. I just ended-up throwing everything I needed quick access to in the shortcut bar thing and collapsing the Ribbon. Maybe someday our office will upgrade to a version of Office where we can customize it.

Back to Windows 8, it in many ways feels like a lot of *nix style window managers that only allow for full-screen or docked window frames, though they still allowed for more flexibility in where and how you were able to dock the windows. It's also a bit amusing to see Windows move to a primarily full-screen application interface while Android (for instance) is starting to see the introduction of windowing functionality when running on tablets (or other larger screen devices/displays).

If nothing else, Windows 8 is making the traditional desktop interface of OS X feel a little antiquated. As a developer, Windows 8 isn't quite there yet in terms of allowing me to be productive for most of the reasons Jamm mentioned. For the average consumer though... MS may have a big win if it can follow through and get the developer support (i.e. applications) that it needs (and that are sadly absent on Windows Phone).

[Umfriend]

Even with customisation, the Ribbon is Evil. If only because it takes up more desktop real-estate. I dislike key shortcuts being applied to the ribbon instead of old-fashioned menus.

I am a conservative user, i.e., I prefer to keep the same user-interface unless there is a real good reason to change. I fear W8 on my desktop. I still use office 2003 as much as I can (Excel's my thing really) and only go up to 07/10 when I need more columns.

I'm getting older and changes become harder to get around to. No start button in W*? I should probably find out myself but how do I start Excel then?

[VJ]

The problem with the ribbon for me is that it shows different things if the window is sized differently. And this makes it more complicated to find things. In the old menus, you could quickly roll over all the menus (I turned off the option to hide the less frequently used items, as this makes them even harder to find when you need them) and quickly find out where it was. With the ribbon, if the window is quite small, it is much more difficult to quickly find things.

[Jammrock]

You can hide the Ribbon so it uses no real estate at all. With customization you can even make it look like the old taskbar. Put everything you want in a single Ribbon and make it the default.

You can even change or add your own shortcut keys nows, including the defaults. You could make Ctrl+B print and Alt+P be bold if you really wanted to.

I have a Ribbon I use when I'm writing that has all the tools I need. I have the custom ribbon exported so I can add it to new installation and never need to rebuild it.

And if you really, really need the old menus, there are tools like this out there that will do it for you.

http://www.addintools.com/office2010/menutoolbar/index.html

http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

[dZeus]

follow up to my iSCSI test:

when trying to boot the iSCSI installation from my workstation (Intel Pentium 4 + 875 chipset) I get a blue smiley of death (successor to the BSOD?) with inaccessible root device.

Either there's no CSA LAN driver in windows 8 or it cannot load the driver after having installed it from my Thinkpad with Broadcom LAN chipset. hmmmmm

About the Metro Bluetooth 'add device' wizard: all phones look the same. How do you know which phone to add when you live in an apartment building where other people's phones are showing up too?

[Jammrock]

The BSOD was replaced with the frowny of doom.

I haven't played with iSCSI or Bluetooth yet, but if figure anything out I'll let you know.

I played StarCraft 2 on Win8 last night and it worked like a champ. Just need to fix the dpi issue on my mouse and I think I can go Win8 full time.

[UtwigMU]

Version 6.2

I'm busy this month - server fell down, teaching, have to file reports for company taxes. But will install it next monthish.