There was a few years where every laptop had a fucking touchscreen because everyone, retards in marketing mainly, thought tablets were the future and we'd all be using them as glorified terminals. I used the touchscreen on my laptop once, saw how dirty it made it, and never used it again. And who can forget the fucking, "wHaT's A cOmPuTeR?" commercial with that retarded goblina?
Maybe installing Slackware in 2005 was like that. Debian or Ubuntu mostly just worked on normal computers, it was when you had esoteric peripherals that it got "fun"
I have a laptop like that. I thought it was a great idea. I use the touch screen every couple months when I remember it has one, then remember I don't actually care.
For a time there might have been a point in using Windows 8.1: you can avoid Windows 10 but still use a version MS supports with (security) patches. Ever since official MS support for Windows 8.1 ended there's absolutely no good reason to use it.
I wonder how much of that was entirely artificial. I remember that, for example, some versions of Nvidia GPU drivers refuse to work with certain newer cards/chips on 8.1 that they do work with in 7, however if you hack the driver to bypass some OS version checks in it then everything seems to work fine. It might even have been that the professional Quadro variations of those same chips would have been officially supported in 8.1 by the driver.
windows 8 hate was always overblown, it really came down to the fullscreen start menu which was what people saw right at the start.
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It made my desktop computer have a tablet UI.
Ars: How has your opinion of Windows 8 evolved or changed over the past 10 years?
Sinofsky: First, so much of the feedback about Windows 8 focused on removal of the Start menu—the literal menu—which we knew at the time had reached its functional limits. So in many ways, I think the feedback overplayed the role of the Start menu much the same way the early Windows critics overplayed the removal of "C>" from the core experience. Yet, of course, like the early Windows, we had affordances to keep that around (the desktop in Windows
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Second, 90 percent (that's a rhetorical stat) of computing is now done via grids of apps, launched by touch, filling a screen. Mobile browsing dominates desktop browsing, and overall screen time on mobile vastly outpaces desktop. Desktop computing is on a decline. That assumes desktops are used at all, and for a few billion people, they will never see desktop computers as traditionally envisioned.
So in that way, I think we tried to bring Windows to the natural next step of computing. Our vision for doing that was just too much and too soon, and as a result Windows ended up not moving forward and today retains its secure position—though that is in a shrinking desktop world, one also challenged by Mac much more so in 2022 than it was in 2012.
1. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY USE TOUCH SCREENS ON WINDOWS ARE TEACHERS WHO ONLY USE IT WHEN USING CUSTOM NOTE TAKING SOFTWARE AND ARTISTS WHO USUALLY USE DRAWING TABLETS.
For once, no. Windows 8 was made because those retards really wanted IN on mobile (and touch the moment iPhone and iPad in particular really took off) based computing because they rightfully saw portable computing as being a very lucrative market and the dream of having their Windows operating system being used for both mobile computers and desktops without having the user experience and application development be so vastly different was probably a massive wet dream for them. This isn't to do with India, you're thinking of 2018 and beyond.
It's such a stupid way to think.
