Microsoft Windows 8: Mostly A Crap Wreck

[steveriley]

But: some boards (and more fun: laptops) are out there that can stop booting with just playing around with UEFI boot options. A cmos clear does not help at all now, as everything is stored in the eeprom now. I got a replacement bios chip for my asus z68 board recently as it stopped booting after changeing the boot order, but thats another story

Yeah, UEFI is cool, but surprisingly easy to "accidentally" hork. See my chronicle of UEFI manipulations on Kubuntu Forums for an example.

[Kano]

Interesting way, but needs 2 systems I would have used another approach, but really interesting what you have done. My board has got an easy accessable eeprom so replacing that was the first choice for me. I wrote several mails to asus support then rma that i will NOT send the board but that i want a chip. Lucky flashrom is possible with that board (it got a few comments on the flashrom site but basically it works fine). As flashrom has got absolutely no check you can flash anything. Therefore i flashed an unmodified rom from the asus webpage to fix my weird nic (with 3 possible different pci ids with the replacement rom). That of course killed the correct mac adress, but as the mac adress is just stored in the first 6 bytes of the used nvram i only needed 6 ethtool commands to write the correct one. I dont know if i would recommend using flashrom on a laptop, but it can be at least handy to create a backup.rom - thats something i did not do before and which i really hate that i missed that as i know have got a weird issue that i dont get a vga bios init for the ivb vga - i got that with a bios updated from 0501 to 0651 to 3203 however. I am currently investing one different approach to reset just the raw data of my old bios dump (which is unbootable), but need to figure out how to combine that correctly... Of course you dont need flashrom to create a backup, you can use the vendors bios tool as well.

[V!NCENT]

No way that I'm installing Win8 on my desktop, because it's not made for it?

It's great for putting it on a tablet and set up shop in a cafe with WiFi, plug in bluetooh keyboard and mouse and switch to Aero. But laptop? No fscking way!

[daedaluz]

What a horrible review. 2? pages exclaiming how Windows is supriour to Linux in many aspects from user perspective and how Windows 8 has improved on all techical aspects from 7. Then conclude review by judging the system as a crap wreck. Seriously Michael, get a grip.

[steveriley]

Interesting way, but needs 2 systems I would have used another approach, but really interesting what you have done. My board has got an easy accessable eeprom so replacing that was the first choice for me.

Thanks. Since laptops generally tend to be more difficult to tinker with, I consider myself lucky for having two such similar pieces of kit handy. To spare myself from future sips of the flinger, I've backed up each machine's NVRAM variables onto a USB. Never know when I might need them again...

BTW, I finally got something useful to boot on that tablet! Behold, Kubuntu Active Two:

http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthread.php?58630

[V!NCENT]

What a horrible review. 2? pages exclaiming how Windows is supriour to Linux in many aspects from user perspective and how Windows 8 has improved on all techical aspects from 7. Then conclude review by judging the system as a crap wreck. Seriously Michael, get a grip.

Isn't it blatenty obvious how this system is a train wreck from a desktop and laptop perctive? Two different use case interfaces that have to be used simultaniously with two different distribution models? Don't you also know that on classic interface mode, you can only run IE as your browser? And if you want Firefox and Chrome, you have to switch to Metro on a desktop computer? And then have office software on Classic and can't multitask propperly?

If that's not a trainwrecked crapfest, what is?

[daedaluz]

Isn't it blatenty obvious how this system is a train wreck from a desktop and laptop perctive? Two different use case interfaces that have to be used simultaniously with two different distribution models? Don't you also know that on classic interface mode, you can only run IE as your browser? And if you want Firefox and Chrome, you have to switch to Metro on a desktop computer? And then have office software on Classic and can't multitask propperly?

If that's not a trainwrecked crapfest, what is?

Every single question in your post is more or less false, except for the number of software distribution models. Nice going. Besides it's still beta, and according to Michael beats every Linux distro out there on technical and usability terms. Most likely consumers will agree on that, and there won't be a big newbie rush to Arch any time soon.

[siride]

This is not strictly true; for example, on my amd64 machine running the main userspace in native 64bit and a 3.3 64bit kernel, I can still run a Mosaic binary from 1998. I have a few legacy applications I still run. This is possible by installing and correctly setting up the required libraries. The kernel does not have a driver ABI, but it *does* try very hard not to break its userspace interface backward compatability (syscalls). This is why even an ancient version of libc5 is still happy to talk to a brand new kernel. Of course, other than supporting 32bit stuff on 64bit machines, distributions do not try to bother with something like this, as their users generally arent interested in retro-computing, and attempting any sort of generic solution would be difficult and involve unknown gobs of archaic libraries.

Yes, that's the key...installing the right libraries. For a techie, that might not be a super hard task, but for an average user, that's beyond their comprehension. They don't even know what libraries are, let alone where to find them and how to install them. I can run programs from the late 90s on Windows without having to go and download special libraries. Microsoft, for better or worse, has even bent Windows over backwards to make sure that it can run the old setup programs without having UAC get in the way.

[Kano]

Not that i laugh, did you try to run a 16 bit installer which have been used that time on w7 64 bit? 16 bit support was completely removed. even dos support was better with xp compared to w7 32 bit. Now you have to use dosbox - well nothing better than on Linux. Also apps written for xp and older often stored things in their program folder. This is not allowed anymore (when you dont run the app as admin) but only virtualized in a transparent way. If you run old apps there are always drawbacks, some do even run better with Wine.

[siride]

Not that i laugh, did you try to run a 16 bit installer which have been used that time on w7 64 bit? 16 bit support was completely removed. even dos support was better with xp compared to w7 32 bit. Now you have to use dosbox - well nothing better than on Linux. Also apps written for xp and older often stored things in their program folder. This is not allowed anymore (when you dont run the app as admin) but only virtualized in a transparent way. If you run old apps there are always drawbacks, some do even run better with Wine.

Given that the processor itself doesn't support 16-bit apps in 64-bit Windows, I think you should cut Windows some slack here.