It doesn't work the way that I thought it would? (Instead of learning how it actually works.)
Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
31–40 of 104 posts
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll save you the effort. Shock horror, he has to download a wifi driver.
The issue is not about the WiFi driver, i can live with that but when my wp8 phone is getting in my way of downloading the driver, its just wrong, really wrong. Its like it is saying to me "You don't know what you are doing, let me fix this for you".
But this guy (you, whoever) didn't actually know what they were doing...otherwise he wouldn't have blown away the restore partition without saving the stuff that they needed to do a vanilla install.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#33Impressed by the writer's dedication to putting spaces both before and after punctuation. Also nice to start to read from Linux natives being confused with Windows. Oh how the worm has turned! I've a foot in both camps, but any serious computing happens on Linux. With the exceptions of Excel and some niche Win-only software I work with.
Yeah, the serious business applications that I have supported for years aren't really serious enough.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#34I sadly had the same experience as this guy. I guess when you are a standard user browsing the web, everything works fine on windows, but if you are a web developer it's just a nightmare. There is always something to install which is not there, I have to install tons of drivers, Putty, WinCSP, a decent terminal (cmd.exe is just unusable), WAMP, python, various python libraries, perl, node.js (lots of front-end tools…
The thing is...you're trying to make it act like linux. That will be a fight. If you take the time to learn how things are done on windows...or any platform for that matter...it wouldn't be that hard.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#35I'll agree with the statement about the advances of Linux in the past 5+ years. I must admit though, I learned almost everything I know in the terminal through wrestling RedHat and Mandrake into shape. It was extremely disheartening as a kid to finally get Linux dual-booted with Windows and then take 3 days to get Broadcom to work. - This isn't quit the same thing, but it's interesting to see how the community has taken shape to a point where Linux is a viable replacement for Windows for almost everyone.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is not about the WiFi driver, i can live with that but when my wp8 phone is getting in my way of downloading the driver, its just wrong, really wrong. Its like it is saying to me "You don't know what you are doing, let me fix this for you".
While I agree it's ridiculous, Apple imposes a limit of 100MB for cellular downloads - http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/18/apple-increases-over-the... - so even though it's a more reasonable figure, still a showstopper for obtaining your 230MB wi-fi driver.
This is for app downloads; you can't install an app larger than 100MB over cellular. You can download generic files of any size in the browser, or from within apps.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#37My Dad recently got malware on his Windows desktop computer, and wanted me to fix it for him. He's reasonably tech-savvy but malware can happen to the best of us. I tried searching and removing suspicious looking files, but it kept coming back, so I decided to reformat the computer and reinstall windows.
The first part was to get an image to install from. Windows offers .iso downloads on their website[0], but you need to enter the product key for the computer to access it. I used a third-party tool to dig this out of the registry, but attempting to use this key on the website gave a non-descript error-code. After googling around, I found that it wasn't giving me the download because it was an OEM-license (or something), since it came installed on the DELL computer.
Luckily my Dad had kept the disc that came with the computer, and I used this to reinstall windows. However, like the OP, I was missing drivers for a handful of things, including the built-in wireless and wired network adapters. Luckily, before reinstalling I'd found a folder on the C drive called "Drivers" which looked important, and had backed this onto a USB drive.
The point is, the whole process took much longer than expected due it being...Windows. The DRM and driver issues would likely be totally absent if I were installing linux. And the whole reason I was doing this in the first place was to remove adware, which is barely ever if at all a problem on linux!
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#38I got a brand-new laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed from a local manufacturer in Turkey (Actually it says "Grundig" but it's assembled by Arçelik[1]), as a present. It had an i5 and an SSD so I decided to give it a go as a mobile workstation (I'm the kind of developer who likes his large monitors a bit too much). The installation was single-language and I wanted it to be English, so I re-installed from the dedicate…
As a Windows developer and somebody who actually likes using Windows, I'm still shocked by how pathetic Windows Update is.
I'm often reinstalling because as a developer I want to try out the newer platforms. I gave Windows 8.1 a try recently. Fresh install and Windows Update says there's nothing to update. Knowing that's BS, I force it to refresh -- after a significant wait suddenly there's 1GB of updates. Really? Why did I just download a 3.5GB ISO that is 1GB out of date? I press on and force the downloads to start because a safe system is a priority to me.
The downloads take forever to start. When they eventually do start, they randomly stop (no ethernet activity) for random periods of time. All this time I'm twiddling my thumbs wondering if there's some kind of "intelligent" downloader that is slowing down because I'm trying to do something else on the system. Eventually they finish downloading and installing and the system reboots. After the reboot... I have more hundreds of MBs more of updates waiting for me. WTF?
I go through this process 2 or 3 more times, and now I'm just left with "optional" updates. Curious, I click on the 'more information' link to hit the Microsoft website (because for some reason the Windows Update UI just shows the most completely useless generic text for each update). Apparently the 'optional' updates are "rollups"... surely that's important?! Who knows, because Windows Update packages are opaque blobs.
So I go ahead and install the optional updates. Reboot. Now everything is good, right? Nope, go take a look at the Windows Update History - it turns out a bunch of updates actually failed to install at some point? It looks like they might have successfully installed later... or did they? At this point I don't even care.
Compare with the Linux (Ubuntu, but I'm sure others qualify too) experience: apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. If there's an issue I get informed immediately and because the updates are per-package it's clear whether or not I should care -- no opaque blobs here. When it's done, I know it's done and there won't be any more magical updates mysteriously appearing. I know I can run the update/upgrade in the background while I use the machine for other things. I just don't understand why Microsoft can't get the update experience right!
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#39I recently switched from a 15" macbook to a lenovo windows 8.1 laptop after 10 years of mac/linux for my daily driver. I live with Windows as the base install and virtualbox linux (arch + ubuntu). I am so glad to be free of the Mac... My hardware is upgradeable again, the touchscreen is a real innovation, Excel opens instantaneously and when I want Unix, I use the linux vm, I am not tempted to use the strange halfway…
You do know that the "unix cli/packaging system" thing is actual UNIX, right? Like, bona fide, certified UNIX for a while now. Homebrew is just a different package manager than you're used to, but not so different from things like apt or yum once you get to know your way around it.
Re: Installing Windows 8 after 8 years of Linux
#40I sadly had the same experience as this guy. I guess when you are a standard user browsing the web, everything works fine on windows, but if you are a web developer it's just a nightmare. There is always something to install which is not there, I have to install tons of drivers, Putty, WinCSP, a decent terminal (cmd.exe is just unusable), WAMP, python, various python libraries, perl, node.js (lots of front-end tools…
Makes me wonder. Microsoft are open-sourcing things in an obvious attempt to win back the developer crowd. Is there more they can do in enabling default (where appropriate) or quick installs of typical developer tools?