What Windows 8 Haters Don’t Understand About Windows 8

I think they are genuinely emotionally engaging. Many of us spend 50% or more of our waking lives in front of computers and smartphones. If you are used to a PC or Mac, and you sit down at the other one, it can be infuriating trying to do what you think should be a simple task.

I also think that the reasons for people loving or hating particular brands/products are many and varied. But there is clearly a bandwagon effect with some people - and this happens with everything. You can see it in these comments very clearly - people attacking Windows 8 who clearly haven't even used it, or even taken the time to understand how it works.

Half of what you are saying is exactly what I said myself: Gnome and XFCE indeed follow almost the exact same desktop paradigm as Windows, so obviously they share many of the same problems. Most notably the problems of having a start menu to do things or a taskbar that quickly gets cluttered if you have many applications open at the same time. The other half of your statement doesn't make any sense to me. What exactly is more 'consistent' or 'well thought out' in Windows 9x/XP/2000, compared to Gnome 2.x/XFCE?

> Yes there is a reason. OS X might be more beginner-friendly but as soon as you actually start to use it you realize it isn't user-friendly. As on most/all simple systems (including OS X) doing stuff that wasn't intended is extremely cumbersome.

I guess one of us must live in some kind of bizarro world, because what you are saying is completely the opposite of my experience.

OS X = easy out of the box, consistent, great window management, powerful CLI for power users. Yes, it has 'hidden settings', but so does every other OS, and for almost all of them you have nice GUI tools to control them

Windows = cumbersome to use and many non-discoverable functions out of the box, inconsistent in almost everything, very basic window management (basically min/maximize/close plus a taskbar), a CLI that is almost an insult to the user. Yes it is also full of 'hidden settings' which are all stuffed in some kind of binary blob called the registry, indexed by cryptic keys.

Care to give some examples of things that are easy in Windows and hard in OS X? I'd love to hear them.

> Doing things on Windows is comparatively both easy and logical, which enables you to do what you want (and not what the designer thought you wanted) way faster than OS X allows you to.

You can't be serious about this, if you are, you have never used OS X (or any modern Linux desktop environment, for that matter). I've been using all 3 platforms extensively over the last decade, and Windows is decidedly the worst when it comes to doing things faster. OS X is hands-down the best in that respect. Just count the number of clicks or key presses required to do anything. In OS X most if not everything I regularly do takes at most one keypress and/or 3 clicks. In Windows I often have to click through 5 or 6 windows, dialogs, dropdowns, tabs and whatnot. Just launching applications in a 3-level deep start menu already takes 5 clicks.

You really come off as a lifetime Windows user who got so comfortable with the desktop environment that you simply don't notice how backwards and inconvenient it is.

I can offer no better explanation than Man's tribal nature - his tendency to form In- and Out-groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups). Before we had tech we did it about red vs blue football/etc teams (and of course still do), which is equally if not more arbitrary.

I'd like to think we'll grow out of it, but that's probably a vain hope, and even if we do it'll be a loooooooong way in the future.