<story><title>Windows 8.1 now available</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-now-available.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkolb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m using 8 on my primary desktop right now, haven&amp;#x27;t upgraded to 8.1 yet. Typing this comment on my Macbook Pro.&lt;p&gt;After using 8 for a while, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t see why people hate it so much. I don&amp;#x27;t use the Metro stuff, and the traditional Windows desktop experience is much faster. As a development environment I quite like it, and prefer it mightily over OSX as Apple tries to shoehorn that OS into an iOS-like frankenstein&amp;#x27;s monster.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll be upgrading to 8.1 as soon as I feel like it, but I just came here to chime in that I really don&amp;#x27;t get why people abhor 8 so much in the first place. It kind of feels like piling-on to me with no real substance behind. As a developer anyway--I can&amp;#x27;t speak to a non-technical user&amp;#x27;s experience with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kstrauser</author><text>We bought my junior high-aged son a laptop for Christmas last year, and it came with Windows 8. He hates it. I promise you I didn&amp;#x27;t say anything bad about it (because who wants to convince someone not to like the gift you just gave them?), but he came to me a few days later asking if I could &amp;quot;upgrade it to Mac OS&amp;quot;. His words, not mine.&lt;p&gt;I think the reason he doesn&amp;#x27;t like it is that it&amp;#x27;s different from any computer he&amp;#x27;d ever used at home or school before, and without any real benefit. He loves the Windows 7 gaming desktop we have in the living room but sees 8 as &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; without a good reason for being so.&lt;p&gt;I personally didn&amp;#x27;t have an opinion on it until I tried to install a network printer and ended up bouncing between the Win 7-style control panel and the Win 8-style wizard thingy because neither one held all of the settings required to make it work. After a few minutes of that, I was about ready to pitch it out the living room window.&lt;p&gt;TL;DR it radically changed the UI without offering any noticeable advantages for having done so. That&amp;#x27;s why we came to not like it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows 8.1 now available</title><url>http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/10/17/windows-8-1-now-available.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonkolb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m using 8 on my primary desktop right now, haven&amp;#x27;t upgraded to 8.1 yet. Typing this comment on my Macbook Pro.&lt;p&gt;After using 8 for a while, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t see why people hate it so much. I don&amp;#x27;t use the Metro stuff, and the traditional Windows desktop experience is much faster. As a development environment I quite like it, and prefer it mightily over OSX as Apple tries to shoehorn that OS into an iOS-like frankenstein&amp;#x27;s monster.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll be upgrading to 8.1 as soon as I feel like it, but I just came here to chime in that I really don&amp;#x27;t get why people abhor 8 so much in the first place. It kind of feels like piling-on to me with no real substance behind. As a developer anyway--I can&amp;#x27;t speak to a non-technical user&amp;#x27;s experience with it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zobzu</author><text>Probably because it&amp;#x27;s the cool thing to do.
I know quite a few people, even some Linux devs that use Windows as their workstation (and a VM for linux).&lt;p&gt;Why? Because it works. its fast. and the UI ain&amp;#x27;t bad, in fact (of the classic desktop that is).&lt;p&gt;Basically, the polar opposite of what the &amp;quot;cool comment against windows&amp;quot; says.</text></comment>