Windows 8 now up to 3.31% market share as Vista finally falls below the 5% mark

Many of us are hesitant to join in discussions like this, because the narrative is dominated by people who have clearly either never used Win8 or had decided that they would hate it based on ideological grounds (ZOMG MS TURNING MAH PC INTO A TABLET) before they ever tried it. On other forums, even suggesting that you like Win8 is a sure-fire way to get accused of being an "M$ shill".

Anyways, I like it, so I'll try to explain why. First off, most of my interaction with it is identical to Windows 7. I live in my desktop, just like always. All of my most frequently-used apps are pinned to my taskbar, just like always. The window borders and decorations look a bit different, but the reaction to them is so completely over-the-top that it's hard to believe. The rumors that it's a little snappier than Win7 seem to be true, at least on my machines.

Yes, all the built-in apps have ribbon toolbars. No, this really isn't some kind of existential threat to your ability to use your computer. I hated the shit out of ribbons when they were introduced in Office. They work really well in Explorer, though. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but they manage to keep common actions more accessible than the old menu/toolbar combination did. There are also some small things that I really appreciate, like having a toggle for hidden items on the View ribbon and having both Command Prompt Here and Powershell Here accessible easily via menu and shortcut.

Next, the dreaded Start screen, target of much derision and hatred. My experience with Start menus over the years was that they turned into garbage dumps. Multiple columns of crap in a hierarchical menu where most of the entries were completely useless. MS introduced pinning in XP, and "type to search" in Vista (I think?) to solve that. If you use those, Win8's Start screen is a huge upgrade. If you prefer to hunt through your menus to find apps, you'll be disappointed. I personally don't miss the start menu at all - I have programs pinned on the start screen, sorted left to right by how often I think I'll need them. I can run anything else by typing a few letters of its name, and I honestly don't end up doing that very often.

Metro apps are a mixed bag in terms of usefulness. Part of that is that I have a tablet for the kinds of things that Metro apps are good at, and part is that they just aren't there yet in terms of polish. There are several that I really do like, though. The Netflix app, for some reason, works MUCH better on my laptop than the website. Games are generally a good experience as well - I've played a shameful amount of Jetpack Joyride. The stock Calendar app isn't bad, and it syncs with Google Calendar and pops up notifications for that, which is really cool. I use the stock News, Sports and Weather apps occasionally as well. Metro as a whole needs some more work, but I think it'll get it over the next few years.

Lastly, I'd like to mention that Win8 is probably the most keyboard-friendly OS I've used. My most frequently-used PC is a laptop, and I've always been a heavy keyboard shortcut user to avoid having to use the touchpad. There's keyboard shortcuts for almost everything in Win8. That includes things like managing/resizing Metro apps, moving around the UI on the Start screen, activating buttons on ribbons. If you press Alt in Explorer, the ribbon lights up with hotkeys. They've also added the somewhat famous Win-X shortcut, which pops up a menu with direct access to a lot of tweaking/admin tools. I miss it whenever I'm on an XP/Vista/7 box.

In short, the people who say that it's "unusable" or "crippled" are full of shit. It's a solid evolutionary step up from Win7, with a bunch of superficial changes that are being blown way out of proportion.

Having to use Windows 7 at work is getting to be more and more painful to me the more I use Windows 8 at home. There are many improvements that Windows 8 brings, but all anyone talks about is the incredibly minor point of the start screen, which you're hardly forced to use. I forget it's even there. The only times I'm forced back to Windows 7 is when I'm doing hardware hacking (many custom drivers don't exist for Windows 8, and installing unsigned drivers is a pain) or in the case where a certain older game won't run in Windows 8. 99.9% of my computing time at home is spent in Windows 8 desktop mode, the other 1% split between Metro and my Windows 7 desktop.

The problem is there's a very vocal minority of unfortunately influential people who rail against the start screen and convince others that it's a bigger problem than it really is.

I think the hubbub will die down. It takes about ten minutes to make a Windows 8 machine usable - putting the things you want on the start screen and setting the program defaults so nothing runs with the slow pastel apps.

Sure, doing so is rejecting many of the new 'features' of the OS. But once set up it is no less usable than Windows 7.

I am _very_ happy with Windows 8 on my tablet (Surface). Does that count?

On my PC it's ok... I uninstalled all metro-apps and installed normal software instead. I just see the start screen as a new kind of start menu. To me it looks just like Windows 7 because I don't spend any time in the new UI environment.

I've been using Windows 8 as my primary OS since the new year. It was actually a no-brainer for me; I find more functionality with it overall.

It's strange to most that I admit this, but I really like the Start screen! It gives me a way to have the visual organization I appreciate while I can keep the desktop itself relatively clean for a workflow environment.

On top of all that it's blazing fast and has a ton of features that are great for power-users. So, yeah, I beam happiness with my Windows 8 so you now know of at least one dedicated fan!

I love Windows 8 because of the regular desktop improvements and speed of the system. If you don't want to use metro you do not have to even deal with it at all. The people complaining probably don't notice how much better it is because of a video card issue, some oem "crapware" or some other hardware issue. Hyper-V client, installing to usb, the hardware acceleration improvements, low memory use, lighter install size, file history, security enhancements and overall snappiness make me not want to go back to 7.

I'm super happy with windows 8 and miss it when I'm at work using windows 7. It's much better than windows 7 in almost every way. Of course as power user I was willing to actually do some reading, and learn about it and tweak it to my liking. I can imagine someone like my mother, coming directly from XP and perhaps not that interested in learning a new OS would react differently.

WTF does anything going on outside of the computer industry have to with Windows? Lets setup some straw men and light them on fire.

The biggest issue with 8 is that there is enough interface change that people feel they have to relearn it. In business this takes time and money to teach the employees, or for them to learn themselves. Most people don't want to spend time learning something new when there is little to no benefit from doing so. Real computer users want to get a task done, not to spend half their life learning interface changes.

From the tone of your reply, I'm going to assume you are one of those designers that says "My interface is right, and you are too dumb to understand it's awesomeness", and then are shocked and amazed when no one uses it.

That's an interesting perspective. I honestly think it's Windows people desperately trying to make Microsoft seem relevant. Here's why:

Their tablet OS hardly runs on any tablets. Desktops are no longer the primary computer device and there Windows 8 isn't well loved.

Personally I use Windows 8 on my TV. The first time I set it up I looked for the screen resolution change thing in the Windows 8 style control panel equivalent. It wasn't there, and I ended up having to find it in the ancient and bloated Old School Windows Control Panel. I use Media Center, and that's not Windows 8-ized either. I also hear MS Office doesn't have a Windows 8 version. None of these things, to me, make Windows 8 seem like a massive success.

Microsoft made kick ass phones, desktop OS and tablets in the early 2000s. But that period is over. We have Google and Apple now, Windows is that crappy thing you use at work.

In my humble, XP (Pro) is the best OS MS have made. I was quite happy to see how many still use it. I still wish I could revert to it.

Did you just make up that number? I think there are a lot more than 100 million Windows users. Windows has 90% market share. I'd guess that there are 1 billion Windows PCs, so you'd be off by an order of magnitude.

Most OS X users are probably either dual-booting to Windows to play games, or have a dedicated Windows machine for games. Mac hardware really isn't orientated towards high-end gaming.

XP is perfectly fine for most games. The advantages of Windows 7 are pretty minor and you can still get current drivers for XP.

I'm sure there's a lot of people that run Boot Camp and boot into XP just for games and see no reason to pay for an upgrade to Windows 7.

I'm not all that surprised. Steam carries bleeding-edge games, sure, but it also has a large catalog of older and indie games that don't require much hardware horsepower. Newer indie games like Faster than Light or Dungeons of Dredmor could easily run on an old machine.

The number seems to be misreported as someone else mentioned here, but still, you'd be surprised how lazy people can be when it comes to (large) OS updates. There's an enormous amount of friction if what you use already works. This probably doesn't apply to gamers since you have to upgrade anyway if you want the lastest and greatest, but everybody else seems pretty happy to continue using XP; I see it everyday in ATMs, in medical equipment, in cash registers, in libraries, etc etc.

I honestly have no idea what's going to take for XP usage to drop substantially. I can only wonder whether this will lead to an IE6-like problem in the future.

It's not my primary gaming machine OS, but I have an older laptop with XP on it that also happens to have Steam installed. For what I use it for, I have no reason to upgrade the OS.