At one point I tried it and dumped it forthwith, almost as though it had hurt me or was threatening to infect me with some nameless and dread disease. Windows 8: the operating system that people love to hate, a strange conglomeration of interfaces that would appear to strive to make itself as inscrutable as possible.
I should hasten to point out that while I’m mostly an Apple Mac guy, I’m thoroughly familiar with Windows and have been in my past a full-on Windows guru, complete with management skills. I’m not an anti-Windows guy, although I vastly prefer life on the sunny Apple side of the street.
But I was absolutely, resolutely, and determinedly anti-Windows 8. It impressed me as a snake pit of writhing solutions seeking non-existent problems. There was nothing wrong with Windows 7, other than Microsoft’s craven habit of releasing its operating systems in a welter of differing versions that always seemed to require the coughing up of more money to acquire the features I needed, such as networking comfortably with Mac OS X.
Recently I’ve helped several friends upgrade their computers. Given that these particular friends haven’t the slightest enthusiasm for paying the Apple tax, we’ve gone with PCs running the latest Windows 8.1. In the interest of maintaining my magisterial aura of computer guru-dom, I helped myself to a solid Lenovo desktop ‘puter that can share my 30” Dell monitor with my mainstay Mac Pro and can output audio via optical TosLink to my audiophile-approved office stereo system. After several days of rooting about, experimenting and exploring, I can say that Windows 8.1 isn’t half bad.
I learned to escape that hellish Tile interface; you can now set the OS to boot into the Desktop, which looks more or less like Windows 7 without the pretty transparency and shadows. Flat is ‘in’ these days. I don’t like it. I’m not going to like it when it shows up on the next Mac OS X, either. I’m not particularly taken with it on the current iPhone OS. But flat is flat and there it is.
Something nice about Windows 8.1: the regular old Home edition now connects just fine to a Mac OS computer and lets you share files with a minimum of bother. That’s a definite improvement over Windows 7, which refused to play ball unless you upgraded to the Professional Edition (or figured out the cute little Registry hack.) It starts up without a major production and recovers from Sleep without going psychotic. These are all good things. One could opine that these are things that any operating system ought to be able to do, but this is Windows, a digital realm where the obvious isn’t the obvious and the easy is often hard.
Certain minor advantages accrue to the Windows side of things, beyond the dramatically lower cost and expanded software availability. There isn’t a CD-ripping program on the Mac that’s quite in dbPowerAmp’s league, for example, although the freeware XLD tries very hard. My audio player of choice, JRiver Media Center, is much more full-featured on the PC than on the Mac, although I understand that the Mac version is sprinting along in catch-up mode. On the whole I am finding the Lenovo graceful enough, certainly nice and quiet (finally PC makers are beginning to realize that’s important!) and well built for what it is. One doesn’t expect Apple fit-and-finish or design beauty in a PC desktop; there’s a reason for the Apple tax, and it’s not to line investors’ pockets. You pay for all that Apple coolness – the brushed aluminum, the gorgeous displays, the great keyboards, the plethora of built-in features.
So while I stand by my unrelenting condemnation of Windows 8, I will say that Microsoft, acting true to form, needed a major revision to get the silly thing into workable condition, and that major revision was 8.1. Now it’s OK.
Especially if you ix-nay on those stupid iles-tay.