W9 Cloud Based or Subscription only ?

Just some thoughts.
Companies look at cost, sales, income and market share.
What we know about Windows 8 is.
1. We don't know the cost because Microsoft won't say.
2. Sales are very poor by anybodies standard.
3. Income of Windows 8 is unknown to us. All the sales they are having with Windows 8 products indicates they want more sales and market share than income with Windows 8 at this time.
4. # 3 will only last for so long when the income from a product will come to the top of the list of things wanted and needed.
5. Making products and services the market wants and at a fair market price improves sales, market share, and income.
6. Trying to force the market into using products and services the market doesn't want has never worked for long.

Now this looks like, to me and millions, a welcome Win 8 update. Hopefully carried on to Win 9.


Source

If the ability of picking and choosing what is in the Start Menu and displayed on the Desktop I think it will work.

Yeah, I think so too Jack. Actually it will be an update to Win 8.1 from Windows Update later in the year.

Not to throw cold water, but I don't see what distinguishes this UI from KDE or Gnome of over a decade ago. 2D with no transparency. Aero Glass was a pita to program but at least the result stood out.

I forget the last time I seriously used Linux. Maybe the early 2000s. The XWindow Managers looked a lot like this except for the labels being of things Windows.

I have spent the last two days fooling with Linux. About 16 hours and I'm not impressed. If it worked properly I think it has a chance.

I certainly don't have the skills, but as I understand it Linux is open source and a wizard can make his own version adding bells and whistles.

I haven't played around with the newer distros designed to feel familiar to Windows users. But in the early 2000s I messed around with several releases of Slackware, Red Hat and a few of the Debian based distros.

Esp. with Slackware I used to tell people the main difference was, with Linux it may take me a day, a week, or more to correctly set up a new application. With Windows I double click the installer. With Linux once the application is correctly configured, it's nearly bullet proof. With Windows you keep tweaking it and fixing it forever. :)

But the Debian based distros using apt-get, the setup is much quicker now. Also most distros boot to an X window manager at the end of install. With early Slackware I had to download the X libraries and configure them using a book and example config files, to get it to load.

Yes you can compile custom kernels and load different modules on startup etc..

But the thing that made me uncomfortable, coming from Dos/Windows, were the text editors. The key bindings and usage paradigms are radically different. I used to type text files using kylix compiler IDE just because it had the same key bindings as the Window Delphi IDE.

But Linux editors are very powerful. I'm convinced the way to get people accustomed to Linux is to teach them computer text editing on vi and Emacs as their first text editors. Then they won't miss the old Dos/Windows key bindings.

I think what may give the impression that Linux is flaky are Window Managers that try to recreate the Control Panel Applets. Many I tried were flaky. They are just front ends that make changes to the /etc startup files that are still there. If you learn to configure Linux with the shell scripts many distros are rock solid. But there is learning curve coming from Windows.

I would have to try several of the new distros before forming any solid opinion. But often I get the impression Windows users expect things to be the same except maybe for the color scheme, once they are in the Linux Window Manager. But on other forums I know people who say there are solid distros of the new variety.

In any case my best advice would be use a Debian based distro. The package tool is nearly flawless compared to others I've tried. Red Hat had a package tool,rpm, but it seemed like people didn't agree what directories should be "standard" requiring environment variables to override the application's defaults. It seems like with Debian based everyone is in agreement on the directory structure. Installs don't require tweaking. Much less frustrating to add applications.