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| Windows 8 desktop mode, Office 2013: touch-unfriendly |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-09-01 21:15:21 |
| The Verge published a video demonstrating how desktop mode and Office 2013 - a desktop application - work on Windows RT, the ARM version of Windows 8. The video showed a desktop mode that clearly didn't work well for touch, and even Office 2013, which has a rudimentary touch mode built-in, didn't work properly either. It looked and felt clunky, often didn't respond properly, and even showed touch lag. |
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| RE[3]: What if I want desktop office? |
| By brion on 2012-09-02 21:45:36 |
|
You can, but Office and Explorer will be all you can run in desktop mode. Feel like running LibreOffice instead? Then you bought the wrong device. :( [Of course in theory LibreOffice could devise a Metro version; they're working on Android support so compiling to ARM isn't the intractable part. Being enough touch-friendly to pass Microsoft's store rules while still being friendly to mouse & keyboard "docked" usage might be tricky!] |
 - Score: 1 |
| RE[6]: Window opportuniry |
| By foregam on 2012-09-02 21:52:39 |
|
> Hmm, where to begin? First, the home user doesn't care one bit if their os has enterprise features. What they se is this: graphics crashed, all my programs went down with it. They do not care if it's because of unstable half-implemented video drivers, nor that some enterprise-level feature is present. They want it to work and do so relatively reliably. X, due to a combination of age and driver instability, is not reliable enough on an unpredictable home user situation. Yes, you can do amazing things with it on the corporate desktop but, to 99% of users, those features will never see the light of day. The other 1%… well, they're already using X.org aren't they? [...] In my experience it has only happened with the (pre-AMD) ATI *cringe* and Nvidia binary drivers. The Mobile Radeon chipset in particular is such a crock that it can make a strong man weep. I don't remember X.org crashing on any other hardware. > That doesn't matter if distro x (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you) decides to patch glibc and break binary compatibility. It does happen. Add to that, drivers are not stable in Linux, by which I mean that I cannot simply download a driver and load it. No, it has to match the kernel version and compilation that I have in whichever distribution I'm running. That's ridiculous. I can run drivers, 32-bit ones at least, on Windows 7 now that were created when XP was released. It's not recommended of course, but there are times when it just has to be done. I don't care, and neither does the average user, about what happens to the internal kernel APIs. That's not what I'm talking about. If you are going to change those internal APIs though, you need to keep the external interfaces the same (a userland for drivers if you will). This is what Windows and OS X do, and guess what, it works. All the user has to do is download a driver for their version of the os (or the closest available if there isn't one), install it, and go. It's not that simple in Linux and, until it is, no one except developers and corporate IT departments will adopt it. It will never be that simple because maintaining such a stable external API isn't fun. It's that 20% that no one in the Linux community ever want to do because it doesn't have the shiny factor. Good point, but I still have to see a desktop Linux user download drivers from the Net. Most of them, third-party drivers included, can be found in the distribution repositories. > You've just said it yourself. Most people don't want to be constantly updating, and they're quite content to have a few years between versions. The bleeding edge is called that for a reason, you know. > Come back when you've actually tech supported normal users on Linux as I have. Every problem I've listed is a recurring theme and has been for the last ten years, with the exception of Pulseaudio which is newer. It works for you. It can work for me. We both have the technical knowledge to fix it when something unexpected happens. Most people do not and, while both Windows and OS X can and do break, overall they break far less often. The breakage needs to keep to a minimum for a home desktop and, though programmers don't like to hear it, that means giving up new feature X and fixing old bugs in their programs. It's not fun. It's not rewarding. You'll never get recognized for fixing bugs and keeping stability. It is necessary, however, and this concept is fundamental to the desktop experience. For some reason these features are promoted as enterprise stuff, so that's where you get them. Debian and Scientific Linux in my experience are great desktops but don't get as much attention as Ubuntu and Fedora. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: It's like watching a great whale die |
| By mistersoft on 2012-09-02 21:55:28 |
|
You really think MS are going to die anytime soon!!? really? I don't think Win 8 or Win RT will be massively rip roaring successes, over and above Win 7 ; and I personally hate the idea of devices which on the surface of it are or might be good hardware devices, no pun intended, I mean all Win RT/arm tablet and notebooks not just the eponymous MS ones, being secureboot tied to the OS. Same goes for Apple tablets/phones, and both of them with their walled garden App stores .Yes MS might be slightly copying the Apple direction at the moment, but I won't be at all surprised when MS learn from Win 8/RT mistakes and remove or add features or functionality, maybe even open the whole platform back up a bit more if there's enough backlash, though I do think most of the backlash will probably be 'UI change' based, rather than owt to do with platform lockdown and bit by bit they'll (probably) turn it all and make a reasonable success out of it. they're not fools. MS and Apple will BOTH be around in 20, 30 probably 50 years time. They're the kind of companies who are big enough, amongst other things, that they can (pretty much) ignore stockmarket issues, at least for a long time. I think EVENTUALLY web apps(web technology based I mean obviously so including offline apps) will kill off most of the dregs of the OS wars (outside of specialist scientific, financial, and HPC and high end media stuff, NLE, animation, rendering software etc) therefore maybe eventually BOTH Apple and MS will "simply" be vendors of the 'shiniest, bestest, fanciest of all the hardware options out there!' rock on 50 years time. all the fanboys can then maybe begin to give it a bleeding rest and go make sweet love to each other instead or whatever else they're into |
| - Score: 4 |
| Office team lagging behind ? |
| By Lennie on 2012-09-02 22:01:12 |
| I don't believe Office is lagging behind, it's obviously not even Microsoft has figured out how to make a Metro version of a larger application instead of just some app with limited functionality. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: Window opportuniry |
| By AdrianoML on 2012-09-02 22:18:49 |
|
> Please consider using http://ompldr.org/ or http://imgur.com/ next time, ImageShack sucks and I can't see your image without registering to that site. Sorry, I didn't know about ompldr and imgur uses very aggressive compression. http://ompldr.org/vZmM3YQ |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Window opportuniry |
| By Anonymous Penguin on 2012-09-02 23:24:09 |
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I would add to your list: create/support a usable desktop (like Cinnamon or Mate) or go back to something like KDE 3.5. I will never stress that enough. The direction taken by the Linux Desktop has disgusted so many users. But they said that users didn't matter, didn't they? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[6]: Window opportuniry |
| By TechGeek on 2012-09-03 00:40:46 |
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> You've just said it yourself. Most people don't want to be constantly updating, and they're quite content to have a few years between versions. The bleeding edge is called that for a reason, you know. I never said Fedora was the choice to use for a desktop OS. My point was that even in Fedora, which is pretty much as far on the cutting edge as you can get, you don't see the problems you are listing. As for multi user, Windows is not multi user. Why would you claim the abilities of the NT base, but then complain about how certain features on Linux are enterprise based. The desktop version of Windows is not multi user. Never has been, probably never will be. As for OS X, it wasn't until Lion apparently. I admit, I don't use OS X very much. But still, for most of its life, OS X could only spawn one gui interface at a time. But I will give that it has now progressed to that point. I have NEVER had X crash and take all my programs with it. I have had it refuse to start. But once started, it has always been rock solid. I am going to go out on a limb and say that if professional film studios can use Blender and Autodesk on Linux to work on professional films, then the state of Linux audio must not be that bad really. You run 32 bit Windows XP on WIndows 7? Well good for you. But I guarantee that more drivers for Windows XP don't work on WIndows 7 than do. All three OS's break compatibility on different levels all the time. At least on Linux its not a bloody trade secret when it happens. It gets documented. Its funny you mention supporting Linux at work. Sounds like you hate your job. I would if I had to use a system that I felt like that about. Simple fact is that distros like RHEL and SUSE and a few others get 10 years of support. They don't get the bleeding edge stuff, they don't break compatibility, they don't have driver issues, they just work. I don't use them for my desktop, but then I like the bleeding edge. But you are complaining about a problem that only really exists in a small portion of the Linux community. A portion I might add, that frequently advertises that they are cutting edge development distros that will have issues.' I actually support only a few linux people, mostly I deal with Windows and OS X users. And I have to say that I have vastly more problem with WIndows and to a lesser extent OS X than I do with Linux. My sister runs a computer support company, and she has a business because Windows just doesn't work for most people. Between stupid user behavior and malware/virus laiden software, its a giant mess. Linux is immaculate compared to what is out their for Windows users. |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE[2]: Grognardism |
| By Shadowmane on 2012-09-03 01:24:24 |
| Um... Multi-Touch is desktop, not Tablet. Though Tablets do have multi-touch technology. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[7]: Window opportuniry |
| By edwdig on 2012-09-03 02:49:58 |
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> As for multi user, Windows is not multi user. Why would you claim the abilities of the NT base, but then complain about how certain features on Linux are enterprise based. The desktop version of Windows is not multi user. Never has been, probably never will be You do realize that the last version of Windows not to come from the NT base was Millenium Edition back in 2000, right? Home users have been on NT since the release of XP back in 2001. Home versions of Windows have been fully multi-user for over a decade now. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Tired warn out company... |
| By krreagan on 2012-09-03 03:00:04 |
| Irrelevant to the mass market. |
| - Score: 2 |
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