Still not sure I want one, but interesting, to be sure.
We have a Surface at work to interact with a certain piece of gear. This device was purchased for about 80% off because of the massive writedown Microsoft took on the things, causing them to be blown out all over. Its one function is connecting to a web page served by the device. HTML, no CSS, nothing weird. It is, without a doubt, the worst chunk of shit I have ever been forced to interact with. I bailed on Microsoft back in '02 or so because I was sick of fucking with IRQs and shit. My patience grows thin with OSX, especially as it merges with IOS... but holy fuck, Windows has become the most uselessly vainglorious piece of bloatware I have ever encountered, at least when it comes to touch. "No, I wanted a desktop, not a camera." "No, I wanted an IP address, not a Bing search for that string of four numbers that look eerily like an IP address." "No, I want you to connect to the network, not make a network." "No, I want the network preferences, not to... how the fuck did you open a calendar?"
It's pretty crazy how bad Windows is. I switched to OSX about two years ago. I'm like "well maybe I'll need Windows at some point." So I partition my hard-drive to have Windows 8. What a mistaaaaake. I never switch to the Windows side. Last time I did was to play Transistor, and I actually tried to beat the game as fast as possible so I could stick to OSX again. It's that bad. There's a lot of "Apple users are elitists" that goes around but it's like...I mean people buy them for a reason, they're pretty damn good. Next thing I build is going to be Linux based, though.
I'm stuck with windows 8 and I get annoyed with it all the time. When i click near the corner or touch the touch pad in a certain way it decides to jump to the useless home screen that scrolls sideways or the camera or pictures and I just... Ugh. It sucks. And I think that, even though I'm one of those people who doesn't like apple and has almost exclusively used windows my whole life. It is that frickin bad. They made an OS for tablets and stuck it on everything.
I think Windows 8 is a damn good OS, and I've been using it on my HP machine (what I'm currently) on for 2 years now. Well more like 1 year and 11 months because there was a month long foray into Linux. Anyway W8 is a good OS (Well the update, 8.1 is good).
I mean, it works, it doesn't crash, it starts up fast but its the visuals and layout that annoy me and that is very subjective. it is certainly usable and while I do dislike it I have been using it for more than a year without doing anything active to switch to another OS so it's not "the worst thing ever" but I still want something more like 7.
Well there are ways to get seven, if I wasn't scared of the legality I'd give you the copy I have from a MSDN package. (School supplied me and others in the computer science field with ~10K USD MS software). Anyway I'm sure there are ways to get a copy, have any friends or family with a spare copy lying around?
Hmm, maybe. I'll definitely ask. Thanks for the idea!
Yeah, I completely understand not wanting to risk it.
Thank you for the recommendations. I've been thinking of jumping ship for Linux if all else fails but all the variations makes it kind of daunting and it's really helpful to have a place to start.
Well is suggest that you go with Ubuntu 14.04 since it's the most current distribution right now. I started with Ubuntu 8.04 i think it was back in 2008, and dabbled until i got windows 7 in 2009, after that i such with windows for the next four years, until about three months ago with my month long stint in Ubuntu 13.10/14.04
So newest Ubuntu is the thing I should go with?
I've chosen to stick to Win 7 and there's not a day I will regret it. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who isn't 'on a side' when it comes to devices. I just buy whatever suits my needs best, so I have a powerful self-built Windows PC that can do anything, a portable laptop that's great to use and has a decent screen (Macbook Pro Retina) and a phone that is simple and powerful (Google Nexus 5). Nonetheless, the Surface is an awful thing.It's pretty crazy how bad Windows is.
I'm trapped in OS X because of some of the applications I use. I had high hopes for Lightworks, since it's cross-platform Windows/Linux/OS X, but the OSX rendition at least is a straight-up toy. I still wanna know why I can't run audio on a Beowulf cluster.
My laptop is so old and bad. Ideally I'd like an ultrabook (Dualboot macbook air?) and a phablet.