All this "discussion" and criticism of Microsoft and Windows is
90% conjecture or very personal (read biased) opinions.
These guys put 12 people in a room and recorded them interacting with Windows 8 machines, and noted the usability flaws encountered by the users. I don't know about you, but to me, that's as far from conjecture or personal opinion as you can get.
They were doing real usability testing with real people, not just spewing another uneducated opinion. And there's no particular anti-Microsoft agenda at work here either, if you look further on the site you'll find similar usability studies conducted on iPad apps with similar criticisms.
> I don't remember the last time we had this many articles on HN discussing an OS.
Perhaps it's because this is a change that people find worthy of discussion. The changes are significant and the desktop product Windows 8 replaces is well-entrenched. It's also a mobile operating system, so the total amount of devices potentially impacted by the change are huge. It's an interesting topic-- you may claim it's yawn inducing, but you were interested enough to click.
I do wonder if you actually read the article in between yawns, however, as the article made very specific arguments based on observation of third parties using the software. Yes, there's still plenty of room for bias, but I see no justification for labeling it "hater-noise."
You disagree with the article; that's great, but why? Can you refute what's been said or provide a counterargument?
I try not to be too confrontational here, but in this case I'm probably going to have to. I would dearly love for Microsoft to release a killer OS, but so far as of yet I can't see any real compelling feature that I would be particularly interested in.
Let's be honest here... if I have to do development work, then I'm not going to use Windows 8. I'll be using Windows 7.
Why not use windows 8? It has lots of small improvements to windows 7 (better task manager, better multi monitor support, new keyboard shortcuts, integrated cloud storage...etc) that's enough for me.
Plus the new Windows runtime APIs looks very nice, and most are usable in desktop or metro apps.
From an end user POV: task manager is fine in windows 7, for any deep system performance troubleshooting I use perfmon; multi monitor support is work brilliantly for me in Windows 7; I use Dropbox, works very well for me and is quite integrated enough!
As for Windows runtime APIs, it depends on whether I want to make he bet that Windows 8 is going to be successful enough to learn them. Jury is still our on that. Besides, I'm more of a Spring man...
I don't remember the last time we had this many articles on HN discussing an OS.
All this "discussion" and criticism of Microsoft and Windows is 90% conjecture or very personal (read biased) opinions.
I too have been using a Surface since launch and have been running Win8 Pro on my laptop since RTM, and guess what? I disagree with the OP.
I highly recommend you go to a store and give it a try yourself, if you can will yourself to cut through the hater-noise.