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[hops]

Wait what? Steam is working fine on Windows 8 for me.

[Starver]

Wait what? Steam is working fine on Windows 8 for me.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who.... wait, no... wrong aphorism.

It seems to me that there are those for whom Steam is the be-all-and-end-all solution, very handy games management/download engine and those that for whom Steam is a nightmare, never worked, basically they avoid all games (store-bought) that say "Requires Steam" on the DVD case (I mean... why even bother with the DVD?  ...as far as I can tell you don't actually get anything useful on the physical media).

And now it seems there may be a third catagory, those that found Steam worked (at least sufficiently to not put them off) pre-Win8, but something (whether caused by Win8 or by Steam) means that they're now in the 'problem' camp.


(Me, I don't use Steam and am still on XP on most of my (MS OSed) machines that I use.  Pro version.  And legitimate, lest you wonder.  And I've got until 8th April next year (last I heard) to decide whether to migrate to something else (Win7, if MS; probably the latest Fedora if Linux, that being my current favourite distro 'brand') or let my machines become obscure and unsupported.  I've used Win8 (not my own machines, but extensively even so) and hate it (and still prefer XP to 7, and of course to Vista).  As neither I nor those owners of Win8 that I've been helping have been interested in using Steam this has not been one of the bug-bears I have with it.  Plenty of others exist, though.  I'm wondering whether the eventual Win9 (by whatever name it shall have) will be the 'Seven'-type improvement/correction for all of Win8's Vista-like mistakes in UI development.  Although obviously Eight's changes are vastly more visually challenging and function-obscuring.)

[Szkeptik]

Steam works fine on Win8 for me as well. My problem with Windows 8 is that it thinks I'm an idiot.

[Leatra]

The UI seems incredibly different and... iPad-ish. I mean, I want a fast and efficient UI, not a good-looking shiny one. I may skip Windows 8 and go with Linux just because of the UI.

Can you make Windows 8 look like WinXP or Win7? I made Win7 look almost like WinXP and that's how I managed to get used to it.

[Starver]

The UI seems incredibly different and... iPad-ish. I mean, I want a fast and efficient UI, not a good-looking shiny one. I may skip Windows 8 and go with Linux just because of the UI.

Can you make Windows 8 look like WinXP or Win7? I made Win7 look almost like WinXP and that's how I managed to get used to it.

There's the other screen (the iPad-ish one being the "Start Screen", often called "Metro"), which is very much XP-like... or as XP-like as you're going to get and you can probably even theme it back to 2K-ish looks (like you could XP[1]). by choosing the "Windows Classic" theme for the more Desktop-like half of the interface.  Putting the Start button back on the taskbar, rather than on that "Charms" thing (Charms seems useless, IMO, but maybe I just haven't used it enough).

Hey, knock yourself out and mess about a bit more to make it look Win98SE-ish (or 95 if you want to be truly retro[2]...)

I've found that launching Internet Explorer from the Metro Interface is... ridiculous... Not the ease of launching (it#s a click of the smartphone-like button, of course), but the whole combo-address/search-bar thing once it's started up (unless they've changed it, as I would hope they have), but you can get an icon on the non-Metro desktop (or through re-activated Start button) which gives you IE more or less as you always used it.  I suspect that you'll have less problems with such differences if you're using Firefox/Chrome/Opera/whatever, of course.



Amazing, you know, how MS seems to want to add more "intuitive and efficient interfaces" (e.g. the MSOffice 'Ribbon' toolbar, the floaty Vista (then eight) Desktop-docking thing, and now Metro) in various iterations of its software... often emulating someone else's ideas of what to do with a UI but...  Making it worse.  I can use a modern Mac easily enough (though most of my serious Mac experience was actually always one of those classic Mac-in-a-box, often it being monochrome!) but when Windows add in something similar (or when misguided laptop manufacturers add into their Windows build one of those "hover around a screen edge and you get a scroll of icons" whatsisnames) it just gets in the way, and demands uninstalling or disabling for more (pro?)user-friendly operation.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe, in fact, I should just calm down now.  I started off trying to help and appear to have started ranting.


[1] Although I'm used to them now, I never really liked the "curved-and-shaded green start button"-type thing about XP.  Somewhat dishonest, I always felt when all it was was a pretty standard rectangular button with "on-press"-type change in border appearance much as you can get in any Tk implementation, and many WM-type things well before that.  And the processing power (a couple of kiloflops, surely!) needed to maintain the curved corners of an unmaximised window... when moving it around over the background of a desktop or other less-foregrounded windows...  Makes an old-school programmer want to weep, at least until he realises that Moore's Law has at least been kind to us in allowing such useless but (to some at least) aesthetic bloatware visual features.

[2] But I bet there's absolutely no native support for Win3x looks any more

[Leatra]

I managed to make my Win7 look more like Win98. I really can't get used to Win7's UI and I don't think I can get used to Win8's UI.

Amazing, you know, how MS seems to want to add more "intuitive and efficient interfaces" (e.g. the MSOffice 'Ribbon' toolbar, the floaty Vista (then eight) Desktop-docking thing, and now Metro) in various iterations of its software... often emulating someone else's ideas of what to do with a UI but...  Making it worse.  I can use a modern Mac easily enough (though most of my serious Mac experience was actually always one of those classic Mac-in-a-box, often it being monochrome!) but when Windows add in something similar (or when misguided laptop manufacturers add into their Windows build one of those "hover around a screen edge and you get a scroll of icons" whatsisnames) it just gets in the way, and demands uninstalling or disabling for more (pro?)user-friendly operation.

Agreed. Let smartphones and iPads have their own UI. I have no idea why everything has to look like a smartphone. This is similar to my rant about Skyrim's UI design. What kind of a mindset is this? Who is the brilliant mind that first decided to copy something (which is suited better for touchscreen) to PC. I want to live inside that mind because that decision can only be made while on drugs.

"Guys. I got it. We'll copy the UI of the most selling stuff on the market."

[AlleeCat]

"Guys. I got it. We'll copy the UI of the most selling stuff on the market."

I think this is the main reason behind it. They want to emulate the stuff that sells the most, because, obviously, it must be doing something right. Notice they're making laptops more like tablets?

[DrPoo]

They wont ever get me to use tablets purely, never going away from keyboard and mouse, i need that physical feel, seriously.

[Starver]

They wont ever get me to use tablets purely, never going away from keyboard and mouse, i need that physical feel, seriously.

It took me until several years after Win95 came out to realise that I actually quite liked a GUI, you know... (with first serious Windows experience being one of the 2.x-ish, and of course Mac experience).  In fact one of the first things I did with my original '95 machine was accidentally squish the Long File Names with my DOS 6.22 boot-disk's defragger[1]...  

Of course, I'm still as likely to have a command prompt window or three open on any given computer (ooh look, that's one there, right now, on my task-bar... and on the computer the other side of the room I have a couple more, but although vastly outnumbered by "notepad" windows), because of the better precision of keyboard commands over mouse clicking, dragging, etc...

And the fact that I'm often running console scripts for various profitless reasons.


But, anyway, what I'm saying is that you'll probably go there eventually.

Not that I've got the tablet bug, myself, yet (I've got an old tablet that never really was quite so useful, however handy it could be from a carrying POV).  And as for smartphones... No, not for me.  My phone makes and receives calls (and SMSes) but I've not yet joined that rat race...  Stick-in-the-mud, me...  A 'retrotechnophile'.


[1] That took some sorting out...  "C:\PROGRA~1\APPLIC~1\..."-type stuff all over the place...  I know better now.

[Leatra]

"Guys. I got it. We'll copy the UI of the most selling stuff on the market."

I think this is the main reason behind it. They want to emulate the stuff that sells the most, because, obviously, it must be doing something right. Notice they're making laptops more like tablets?

Yeah, the problem is, some people don't want a PC to seem like a smartphone. There is no way I'm gonna use a tablet. I like the feel of a mouse and a keyboard like DrPoo said.

It reminds me the UI of Skyrim. The skills section was screaming "I'M A FUCKIN' SMARTPHONE UI!". It was a pain in the ass to navigate through.

[DrPoo]

They wont ever get me to use tablets purely, never going away from keyboard and mouse, i need that physical feel, seriously.

It took me until several years after Win95 came out to realise that I actually quite liked a GUI, you know... (with first serious Windows experience being one of the 2.x-ish, and of course Mac experience).  In fact one of the first things I did with my original '95 machine was accidentally squish the Long File Names with my DOS 6.22 boot-disk's defragger[1]...  

Of course, I'm still as likely to have a command prompt window or three open on any given computer (ooh look, that's one there, right now, on my task-bar... and on the computer the other side of the room I have a couple more, but although vastly outnumbered by "notepad" windows), because of the better precision of keyboard commands over mouse clicking, dragging, etc...

And the fact that I'm often running console scripts for various profitless reasons.


But, anyway, what I'm saying is that you'll probably go there eventually.

Not that I've got the tablet bug, myself, yet (I've got an old tablet that never really was quite so useful, however handy it could be from a carrying POV).  And as for smartphones... No, not for me.  My phone makes and receives calls (and SMSes) but I've not yet joined that rat race...  Stick-in-the-mud, me...  A 'retrotechnophile'.


[1] That took some sorting out...  "C:\PROGRA~1\APPLIC~1\..."-type stuff all over the place...  I know better now.

I grew up with DOS and win 9x and 2000 systems, first upgraded to WinXP around 2006 or something, i remember marvelling at the awesome new features.
While i could be considered a millenial child, i have that stuck-in-the-past Retrotechnophile thing too. I remember installing CP/M and various Unix distros on
emulators and on rigs at my dads work. It was fun just sitting there dicking around with all sorts of commands.