[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Liam Proven]

On 11 August 2014 19:05, Raymond Wiker <rwiker at gmail.com> wrote:
> You realise that this amounts to throwing away and replacing all the stuff
> that people are actually complaining about?

You know, this is really so far from the truth that it amounts to
bare-faced FUD.

The *only* significant difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 is
that the Start menu has been replaced with the Start Screen, i.e. the
Modern interface.

Just the Start menu. Apart from that, it's Windows, same old bloody
Windows we've loved and hated for well over a quarter of a century
now.

Taskbar, system tray, Explorer, IE, Notepad, all that stuff. It's all
there. If you used Vista or later with the search tool -- as I often
did -- you launched apps by hitting the Windows key followed by a few
letters of the name and then pressing Enter. That still works in
exactly the same way, but it looks different on screen.

Instead of a hierarchical list, there's a big flat grid of icons.

And that is the. That is the entire difference. All this hype, all
this fear, all this loathing over a full-screen non-hierarchical Start
menu.

It is absolutely absurd.

If you use Windows 8 the same way you always did, it is the same as it
has been for just under a decade. Win7 is Vista with an iconic taskbar
& performance tweaks. W8 is Win7 with a flat start menu.

That's all.

No biggie, no cause for alarm. No need for sensationalism.

If you don't use the Start Screen -- and I quickly realised I
wouldn't, because the early-gen Modern apps were low-function toys, as
rudimentary as early smartphone apps -- then you can just ignore the
apps, or you can remove them. I chose to remove them -- which is
trivially easy -- because occasionally, I'd get a Metro app opening
something I wanted to happen in a desktop app -- e.g. MSN Messenger or
Skype. The old desktop versions work fine, but the Modern ones are
there and on by default. But you click 'em and click Uninstall at the
bottom and they're gone in a second.

And with them all gone, you can ignore the Modern Settings screen and
the Modern Windows Update tool, because there's nothing left to
update.

(Yes, there are 2 Control Panels and 2 Windows Update tools: desktop
and Modern. I said that they made some stupid mistakes already.)

> There is a fair amount of work needed to turn Windows 8 on a desktop
computer
> into something that is actually useable: you have to both configure the
> behaviour that you're used to, as well as hunt down and install "classic"
> equivalents of the Metro apps.

Oh come on. More FUD. You have to do that with /every/ version of
Windows there ever was! None of them come with much more than minimal
functionality out of the box. You need an office suite, an actual
usable safe browser, a chat client, a media player, a bunch of codecs,
antivirus, blah blah blah.

The first thing I do is head for www.ninite.com and tick all my
preferred tools, then click Go... and go and make a cup of tea while
it works.

--
Liam Proven b" Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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