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Comment by Mahn | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the most important question is... why would a desktop user want to "upgrade" to windows 8? Seriously, to this day I still don't know.

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Windows 8 is a fantastic improvement to Windows 7. Not that I've taken measurements, but it feels much faster. The built-in tools like task manager and even the copying utility are much more informative and useful now. I was much more impressed with it than I thought I would be, and now it's running on two of my family's laptops and our desktop.

Are you saying a desktop user wouldn't want to use windows 8 because of the Metro UI? There's only really one place where I ever see Metro on Windows 8, and that's in the start screen (which replaced the start menu), which is easily navigable using just a keyboard. In fact, I prefer the start screen to the start menu in Windows 7, Vista etc. because it's just a lot faster.

Try Stardock's Start8 utility and you'll see just how useless the Start screen is on a desktop. Start8 is just like a curated Start screen Start menu hybrid. It's a far better implementation than Microsoft's.

Sorry, but I still think Microsoft screwed up by putting a tablet interface on a desktop OS. If they just had spent a little more time on how exactly they planned to get Metro on the desktop, things could have really been great.

This is what choice is about. Like the start screen? No problem. Don't like the start screen? Use one of the many start menu replacements.

Don't forget the (ugh) Charms bar, and also default apps for any file types for which you haven't changed the associated program yet. Couldn't say whether the start screen is faster than the start menu, for me search results always come up instantaneously, and it's hard to get a lag time below zero. But my computer was reasonably powerful; maybe it's a different story on lower-end hardware.

Anyway, I've upgraded one computer and this was a good reminder to go out and buy a copy so I can upgrade a second computer. I'm personally happy with Windows 8 in that for me the upsides outweigh the downsides. . . but for the sake of fairness I feel obligated to disclaim that I'm both more comfortable with adjusting my habits and more able to adjust the OS's behavior than many people out there.

Long story short, Windows 8 is both a impressive technical step forward and (for desktops) a stunning UI step backward. Which of those matters more is a choice for the individual.

Well, 8 seems better at managing memory and processor time... completely ignoring the awful Metro UI and the weird driver incompatibilities, that's about the only good change...

In addition to the (relatively freakish) second UI, there are a bunch of minor-but-welcome enhancements that I keep stumbling across. For instance, I right clicked an .iso, and the default OS can finally mount it. Double click a PDF file -- wow! I can see the contents without installing anything.

Several little things like this, that have previously made using Windows so much more painful than OS X, are addressed in Windows 8. I haven't really seen any major improvements over Windows 7, but minor improvements still can make life nicer.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the desktop pictures! For so many years MS exhibited horrible taste, by default slopping a huge, ugly Windows ad all over the user's desktop (Win 7). In XP, they had that crappy picture of a field near the Microsoft campus that some random employee shot. In Windows 8, I get a steady rotation of beautiful, professionally done photographs that rotate periodically, and really blow away the (previously bar-setting) default desktop pics that Apple ships. Not that desktop pics are a huge deal, but again it is one less thing I have to change about the default installation (can't stand looking at the ugly Windows ad from Win 7).

EDIT: oops, that wasn't actually an edit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_(image)

Crappy or not, this is surely one of the world most known photographs ever taken.

If only there was a Windows 7 Plus version or something, with all these minor improvements and no metro.

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