7 ms·

> Windows is still worse overall Ugh, no it isn't. That myth from Windows ME era must die. For as much as the Windows 8 / Metro thing is an annoyance, under th

> Windows is still worse overall Ugh, no it isn't. That myth from Windows ME era must die. For as much as the Windows 8 / Metro thing is an annoyance, under the hood it is a solid OS - I am running it heavily loaded - 4/5 HyperV VMs, IDEs, SQL Server etc and it is thoroughly reliable even counting suspend / resume. Edit: Elaborating a bit - I got a Win 8 Pro license for $39 when it initially went on sale. I run it on my HP Z series Workstation that I got refurbished for $1199+$(Disks+ 16G ECC RAM). It allows me to run with 5 disks, a 8 Core Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM. The OS came with a very good hypervisor that allows me to run older version of Windows in cheap memory footprint, RHEL 7 and Server 2012 - all decently supported. If I tried doing that on Mac hardware, even ignoring the considerable cost increase, getting a reliable hypervisor on a Mac is itself a challenge. Last time I tried Fusion and Parallels they were complete toys compared to HyperV. So no, for techies Windows is still a darn attractive ecosystem - if you are just browsing and emailing any OS from 2013 onwards works fine, including Linux if you find the right hardware.

walterbell 12y ago
Is that with client hyper-v? How does it compare to vmware workstation?
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Yes, the version that ships with Win 8 Pro. It is hands down better in most aspects compared to VMWare workstation. The integration is better, the footprint is smaller, performance and reliability is great and you get it for free. VMWare might have an edge in the OS Support department - it supports more host and guest OSes than HyperV. But I have had very good experience running DragonFly BSD, Various Linux distros (RHEL7, Centos 6.x, Ubuntu LTS etc.) and Windows 7 of course. Sure you don't get as many bells and whistles compared to VMWare but if you don't need them then HyperV is great.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Glad to hear it's working well. Have you tried storage features like reverting to snapshots/checkpoints (e.g. reset a disk to known state on each reboot), or shrinking of unused space in thin-provisioned disks?
    - blinkingled 12y ago
      Snapshots/Checkpoints yes. I have even tried the differencing disks feature and liked it quite a bit. Haven't tried the shrinking unused space part as I never needed it up until now. The only one issue I had relating to saved VM state was that after a BIOS upgrade restore of VM State failed due to may be the Microcode update I think. But other than that, all good.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Really? Last I checked, HyperV couldn't do video acceleration nor did it have UI integration (drag from one VM to another, or unity). It didn't seem to have a way to flip from one full screen VM to another. I'm not sure if it can completely redirect USB, either. Nor shared folders, without exposing a network share. The video thing is probably the killer part though. If I could get essentially penalty free GPU inside multiple VMs at a time and easily flip, then I'd have reason to dump VMware Workstation, which is essentially in basic maintenance mode - v11 literally has no improvements, just s few bug fixes. What did you mean by better integration?
    - blinkingled 12y ago
      The GPU acceleration ends up not mattering for Windows guests which you can RDP to. RDP to localhost with all effects turned on is more than good enough for non-gaming, developer type of work. For Linux too it isn't a problem where most work happens in ssh - for the occassional X11 program you can either use the local console (which sucks agreed) or install Xming and run via SSH X forwarding. Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 supports GPU acceleration (need certified GPU), Full RDP-Over-VMBus, USB-Passthrough etc. though. By better integration I meant my VMs are saved and auto restored between shutdown/reboot cycles without me even noticing, dynamic memory assignment works great and keeps total memory foot print down, I can mount VHDx files outside of the VMs etc. They may be small things but for my workload it feels pleasantly seamless. Workstation always felt heavy and in-your-way and besides as you noted the last few updates have been money for bug fixes essentially.
      - MichaelGG 12y ago
        Thanks for the response. I basically want to run a Linux desktop (XMonad... How'd I live before it?) but also have Windows available for VS/Office, an occasional game, and some hobbyist pro audio stuff. With the security of everything as a guest OS. If Windows had any sort of real containerization it'd be a lot less of an issue. Unlikely, but if MS ever got serious about making the client great, I'm sure they'd leave Workstation behind right quick. But it's still pretty much a server oriented with a few bones tossed to client use.
droopyEyelids 12y ago
Where did you get the refurb HP workstation?
- blinkingled 12y ago
  Straight from HP. Many people don't know it but the HP Business outlet has really good quality hardware (Laptops, Desktops, Workstations and Options) for a really good price. You can browse the list of available hardware and prices here - https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php - it's updated daily and if you keep an eye you will find what you need one day or the other.
  - mightybyte 12y ago
    I second this. I'm still running an HP Workstation that I got as a refurb in 2008. Yes, it's really old, but it has been solid as a rock this whole time. I got that computer because I had really good experiences using HP workstations at work before that. The cases are (or at least were) really well engineered and very quiet. I haven't kept up with their latest models because this one has been so solid, but I would expect that the new ones would be similar quality.
    - blinkingled 12y ago
      >I would expect that the new ones would be similar quality. I can say that in my case they've only gotten better - went from a XW6600 to Z series and couldn't be happier!
  - vt240 12y ago
    Yep we have about 10 xw8600/8400 with HP P400 SAS controllers. Disks come in and out as they fail but the machines just never seem to die. I have never seen one crash either.
_almosnow 12y ago
To add something, I actually like Windows 8 and their Metro stuff. I have a 55' LED screen hooked to a PC that I use as my 'media center'. Metro looks gorgeous on it, most of the time I use it for playing music but it had proven useful for other things like opening the allrecipes app and having the recipe displayed while I'm cooking [1]. Aside from that, that PC is always on and being used for days at a time and it never becomes snappy, never drops out of the internet, not anything. And it does it all while using ~2GB ram, I know it's not little, but come on, OS X barely makes it with 4GB. [1] http://imgur.com/lKYss9D http://imgur.com/lKYss9D - Check it out, notice the smile on my face.
- twright 12y ago
  That sounds cool, and I can really see that working well. But I'd argue that you're not really using Windows 8 strenuously in the way that people who complain about it do. It's like claiming Windows XP is stable because Solitaire never crashes. I completely agree with your final OSX comment, it takes up way too much memory.
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    > I completely agree with your final OSX comment, it takes up way too much memory To be fair it got bit better with 10.10 - the compressed memory stuff seems to do well under memory load. But still not close to Win 8 which by the way also has same page merging.
rertrree 12y ago
Windows are getting better and better. 95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried. Windows 7 hasn't crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ), and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it recovers.
- jeena 12y ago
  I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux. I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy. A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.
wyager 12y ago
>under the hood it is a solid OS As someone who used to get paid to find bugs in low-level windows software, I must emphatically disagree. At least on the hardware side of things (USB stack, included hardware drivers, etc.), the quality is really quite poor compared to the Linux equivalents. I can't speak to the quality of the OS X equivalents.
- et1337 12y ago
  Did you just espouse Linux hardware support as a paragon of quality? ...wow.
  - mkonecny 12y ago
    Perhaps you haven't used Linux in a while? It runs on almost any hardware I can throw at it. Just upgraded to a brand new laptop, and just swapped in my old SSD, and everything just worked.
    - et1337 12y ago
      I'm running it right now. It's great when it just works, but that's rare in my experience, especially when it comes to video drivers. I'm praying for the light of gaben to descend upon the driver ecosystem and make *nix gaming a thing.
  - wyager 12y ago
    >Did you just espouse Linux hardware support as a paragon of quality? Please re-read my comment. I simply said that Linux drivers tend to be better constructed than Windows drivers. That doesn't imply that Linux drivers are particularly good. I'll say without too much conviction that the best drivers I've seen have come from the BSD family, but I don't have a lot of experience there.
    - et1337 12y ago
      Sorry, my snarky comment was more aimed at the linux problem of driver installation and configuration complexity, and lack of drivers entirely. I'm way unqualified to comment on the quality of individual drivers.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- amorphid 12y ago
  Are there less support calls per capita for Mac & Linux users because the *nix users are more tech savvy? For example, I'd expect developers who manage their own machines to ask for help less often.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  > MS has weird issues where you have to re-install the entire OS just to fix things. That's a) too vague and b) I know my org runs a 100,000+ install base of Win 7 and unless people do something stupid no one reinstalls their OS ever. The reason you might not see much Mac and Linux calls is people aren't doing the same things they do with Windows in a business environment. Try installing a ton of 3rd party stuff, add a bunch of old software, expect it to work with any hardware you throw at it and you'll find Mac and Linux fail miserably beyond your normal browse/email/code/publish workflows. If you are talking Enterprise - there is nothing that even comes close to what Windows does - ton of hardware, ton of backwards compatible stuff, ton of manageability stuff and so on. Try doing all that with a Mac or Linux. I guarantee you won't get too far unless you run a startup with people doing just coding and deployment. Windows in Enterprise is an entirely different beast - that it works so well is in itself a miracle. Mac and Linux won't even compete beyond the basics.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    > Try installing a ton of 3rd party stuff, add a bunch of old software, expect it to work with any hardware you throw at it But that's the thing: one the biggest value-adds of the mac ecosystem is that the hardware combinations are all well tested (or, from the point of view of an app/driver developer, they are heavily constrained). While it's not Microsoft's fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of drivers and it's not 3rd party vendors fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of hardware configurations, it's still a problem that leads to instability in the Windows ecosystem, users still have to face the instability, and it's still an argument in favor of using the Mac ecosystem if you value stability (outside of enterprise contexts -- we're in complete agreement there, OSX server is a shitshow). My personal anecdata is in a sibling post to yours.
bane 12y ago
As an experiment, all of my daily work is done in a Virtualbox VM guest (Win 7) running on a Win 7 host. I'll spin up some CentOS VMs when I need something Linux-like and usually putty into them. I have a couple other machines one my network I RDP into (the lack of an RDP equivalent on OS X is one annoyance, VNC is just not as good). It works pretty well. There's some occasional performance issues, but that's mostly due to the amount of RAM and cores I have configured for the VM. But snapshots and full-system backups means that the next time I move machines all I'll really have to do is move my image over and install Virtualbox again to get up and running.
silverlake 12y ago
I switched from PC to Mac in 2014 and it has been shocking. In 20 years with Windows I've rarely had issues, but I've got a long list of problems with my new Mac. The MacPro hardware feels great, but the OS crashes every few days. I've already had the logic board replaced once. I'm seriously considering selling my mac and getting a new broadwell pc this year.
yellowapple 12y ago
I've had the opposite experience, typically. At an old job, I was trying to use a Windows 7 workstation for the same tasks as I'd use my GNU/Linux-based home workstations (and the Macbook I'm using at my current job): running VMs with VirtualBox, running local installations of PostgreSQL, etc. Windows was the more painful one, for me at least. Granted, I'm not a fan of OS X by any means; far from it. However, the one redeeming quality is the fact that it's Unix underneath all the buggy Aqua and Finder and Cocoa and such, so at least I'm able to set it up with MacPorts (and/or Homebrew) and get some proper work done with it just like I would on any other Unix-like OS. You can't do that with Windows, at least not easily (and certainly not as painlessly). That said, the presence of virtualization extensions in one's CPU would make a significant positive difference; if the Mac you used lacked VT-x (which could be checked by running "sysctl machdep.cpu.features" and seeing if there's a "VMX" entry somewhere in the output of that), it would certainly explain your difficulties with VMWare and Parallels. It's also worth mentioning that HyperV isn't exactly equivalent to VMWare Fusion or Parallels; it's more equivalent to VMWare ESXi, Xen, or KVM.
otis_inf 12y ago
Agreed, windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I hated it to death when I migrated to it due to the dreadful metro shit, but thankfully you don't have to deal with that if you spent some time making sure it's out of your way so booting to desktop and a quicklaunch bar is in place. the rest you get used to. I moved from XP to windows 8 and I missed the start menu a week or so, as I already used a quicklaunch bar for ages in XP. Now, windows server 2012 R2 on the other hand... aargg...

walterbell 12y ago

Is that with client hyper-v? How does it compare to vmware workstation?

blinkingled 12y ago
Yes, the version that ships with Win 8 Pro. It is hands down better in most aspects compared to VMWare workstation. The integration is better, the footprint is smaller, performance and reliability is great and you get it for free. VMWare might have an edge in the OS Support department - it supports more host and guest OSes than HyperV. But I have had very good experience running DragonFly BSD, Various Linux distros (RHEL7, Centos 6.x, Ubuntu LTS etc.) and Windows 7 of course. Sure you don't get as many bells and whistles compared to VMWare but if you don't need them then HyperV is great.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Glad to hear it's working well. Have you tried storage features like reverting to snapshots/checkpoints (e.g. reset a disk to known state on each reboot), or shrinking of unused space in thin-provisioned disks?
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    Snapshots/Checkpoints yes. I have even tried the differencing disks feature and liked it quite a bit. Haven't tried the shrinking unused space part as I never needed it up until now. The only one issue I had relating to saved VM state was that after a BIOS upgrade restore of VM State failed due to may be the Microcode update I think. But other than that, all good.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Really? Last I checked, HyperV couldn't do video acceleration nor did it have UI integration (drag from one VM to another, or unity). It didn't seem to have a way to flip from one full screen VM to another. I'm not sure if it can completely redirect USB, either. Nor shared folders, without exposing a network share. The video thing is probably the killer part though. If I could get essentially penalty free GPU inside multiple VMs at a time and easily flip, then I'd have reason to dump VMware Workstation, which is essentially in basic maintenance mode - v11 literally has no improvements, just s few bug fixes. What did you mean by better integration?
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    The GPU acceleration ends up not mattering for Windows guests which you can RDP to. RDP to localhost with all effects turned on is more than good enough for non-gaming, developer type of work. For Linux too it isn't a problem where most work happens in ssh - for the occassional X11 program you can either use the local console (which sucks agreed) or install Xming and run via SSH X forwarding. Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 supports GPU acceleration (need certified GPU), Full RDP-Over-VMBus, USB-Passthrough etc. though. By better integration I meant my VMs are saved and auto restored between shutdown/reboot cycles without me even noticing, dynamic memory assignment works great and keeps total memory foot print down, I can mount VHDx files outside of the VMs etc. They may be small things but for my workload it feels pleasantly seamless. Workstation always felt heavy and in-your-way and besides as you noted the last few updates have been money for bug fixes essentially.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Thanks for the response. I basically want to run a Linux desktop (XMonad... How'd I live before it?) but also have Windows available for VS/Office, an occasional game, and some hobbyist pro audio stuff. With the security of everything as a guest OS. If Windows had any sort of real containerization it'd be a lot less of an issue. Unlikely, but if MS ever got serious about making the client great, I'm sure they'd leave Workstation behind right quick. But it's still pretty much a server oriented with a few bones tossed to client use.

droopyEyelids 12y ago

Where did you get the refurb HP workstation?

blinkingled 12y ago
Straight from HP. Many people don't know it but the HP Business outlet has really good quality hardware (Laptops, Desktops, Workstations and Options) for a really good price. You can browse the list of available hardware and prices here - https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php https://h41183.www4.hp.com/pps-offers.php - it's updated daily and if you keep an eye you will find what you need one day or the other.
- mightybyte 12y ago
  I second this. I'm still running an HP Workstation that I got as a refurb in 2008. Yes, it's really old, but it has been solid as a rock this whole time. I got that computer because I had really good experiences using HP workstations at work before that. The cases are (or at least were) really well engineered and very quiet. I haven't kept up with their latest models because this one has been so solid, but I would expect that the new ones would be similar quality.
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    >I would expect that the new ones would be similar quality. I can say that in my case they've only gotten better - went from a XW6600 to Z series and couldn't be happier!
- vt240 12y ago
  Yep we have about 10 xw8600/8400 with HP P400 SAS controllers. Disks come in and out as they fail but the machines just never seem to die. I have never seen one crash either.

_almosnow 12y ago

To add something, I actually like Windows 8 and their Metro stuff. I have a 55' LED screen hooked to a PC that I use as my 'media center'. Metro looks gorgeous on it, most of the time I use it for playing music but it had proven useful for other things like opening the allrecipes app and having the recipe displayed while I'm cooking [1]. Aside from that, that PC is always on and being used for days at a time and it never becomes snappy, never drops out of the internet, not anything. And it does it all while using ~2GB ram, I know it's not little, but come on, OS X barely makes it with 4GB. [1] http://imgur.com/lKYss9D http://imgur.com/lKYss9D - Check it out, notice the smile on my face.

twright 12y ago
That sounds cool, and I can really see that working well. But I'd argue that you're not really using Windows 8 strenuously in the way that people who complain about it do. It's like claiming Windows XP is stable because Solitaire never crashes. I completely agree with your final OSX comment, it takes up way too much memory.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  > I completely agree with your final OSX comment, it takes up way too much memory To be fair it got bit better with 10.10 - the compressed memory stuff seems to do well under memory load. But still not close to Win 8 which by the way also has same page merging.

rertrree 12y ago

Windows are getting better and better. 95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried. Windows 7 hasn't crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ), and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it recovers.

jeena 12y ago
I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux. I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy. A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.

wyager 12y ago

>under the hood it is a solid OS As someone who used to get paid to find bugs in low-level windows software, I must emphatically disagree. At least on the hardware side of things (USB stack, included hardware drivers, etc.), the quality is really quite poor compared to the Linux equivalents. I can't speak to the quality of the OS X equivalents.

et1337 12y ago
Did you just espouse Linux hardware support as a paragon of quality? ...wow.
- mkonecny 12y ago
  Perhaps you haven't used Linux in a while? It runs on almost any hardware I can throw at it. Just upgraded to a brand new laptop, and just swapped in my old SSD, and everything just worked.
  - et1337 12y ago
    I'm running it right now. It's great when it just works, but that's rare in my experience, especially when it comes to video drivers. I'm praying for the light of gaben to descend upon the driver ecosystem and make *nix gaming a thing.
- wyager 12y ago
  >Did you just espouse Linux hardware support as a paragon of quality? Please re-read my comment. I simply said that Linux drivers tend to be better constructed than Windows drivers. That doesn't imply that Linux drivers are particularly good. I'll say without too much conviction that the best drivers I've seen have come from the BSD family, but I don't have a lot of experience there.
  - et1337 12y ago
    Sorry, my snarky comment was more aimed at the linux problem of driver installation and configuration complexity, and lack of drivers entirely. I'm way unqualified to comment on the quality of individual drivers.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

amorphid 12y ago
Are there less support calls per capita for Mac & Linux users because the *nix users are more tech savvy? For example, I'd expect developers who manage their own machines to ask for help less often.
blinkingled 12y ago
> MS has weird issues where you have to re-install the entire OS just to fix things. That's a) too vague and b) I know my org runs a 100,000+ install base of Win 7 and unless people do something stupid no one reinstalls their OS ever. The reason you might not see much Mac and Linux calls is people aren't doing the same things they do with Windows in a business environment. Try installing a ton of 3rd party stuff, add a bunch of old software, expect it to work with any hardware you throw at it and you'll find Mac and Linux fail miserably beyond your normal browse/email/code/publish workflows. If you are talking Enterprise - there is nothing that even comes close to what Windows does - ton of hardware, ton of backwards compatible stuff, ton of manageability stuff and so on. Try doing all that with a Mac or Linux. I guarantee you won't get too far unless you run a startup with people doing just coding and deployment. Windows in Enterprise is an entirely different beast - that it works so well is in itself a miracle. Mac and Linux won't even compete beyond the basics.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  > Try installing a ton of 3rd party stuff, add a bunch of old software, expect it to work with any hardware you throw at it But that's the thing: one the biggest value-adds of the mac ecosystem is that the hardware combinations are all well tested (or, from the point of view of an app/driver developer, they are heavily constrained). While it's not Microsoft's fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of drivers and it's not 3rd party vendors fault that they have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of hardware configurations, it's still a problem that leads to instability in the Windows ecosystem, users still have to face the instability, and it's still an argument in favor of using the Mac ecosystem if you value stability (outside of enterprise contexts -- we're in complete agreement there, OSX server is a shitshow). My personal anecdata is in a sibling post to yours.

bane 12y ago

As an experiment, all of my daily work is done in a Virtualbox VM guest (Win 7) running on a Win 7 host. I'll spin up some CentOS VMs when I need something Linux-like and usually putty into them. I have a couple other machines one my network I RDP into (the lack of an RDP equivalent on OS X is one annoyance, VNC is just not as good). It works pretty well. There's some occasional performance issues, but that's mostly due to the amount of RAM and cores I have configured for the VM. But snapshots and full-system backups means that the next time I move machines all I'll really have to do is move my image over and install Virtualbox again to get up and running.

silverlake 12y ago

I switched from PC to Mac in 2014 and it has been shocking. In 20 years with Windows I've rarely had issues, but I've got a long list of problems with my new Mac. The MacPro hardware feels great, but the OS crashes every few days. I've already had the logic board replaced once. I'm seriously considering selling my mac and getting a new broadwell pc this year.

yellowapple 12y ago

I've had the opposite experience, typically. At an old job, I was trying to use a Windows 7 workstation for the same tasks as I'd use my GNU/Linux-based home workstations (and the Macbook I'm using at my current job): running VMs with VirtualBox, running local installations of PostgreSQL, etc. Windows was the more painful one, for me at least. Granted, I'm not a fan of OS X by any means; far from it. However, the one redeeming quality is the fact that it's Unix underneath all the buggy Aqua and Finder and Cocoa and such, so at least I'm able to set it up with MacPorts (and/or Homebrew) and get some proper work done with it just like I would on any other Unix-like OS. You can't do that with Windows, at least not easily (and certainly not as painlessly). That said, the presence of virtualization extensions in one's CPU would make a significant positive difference; if the Mac you used lacked VT-x (which could be checked by running "sysctl machdep.cpu.features" and seeing if there's a "VMX" entry somewhere in the output of that), it would certainly explain your difficulties with VMWare and Parallels. It's also worth mentioning that HyperV isn't exactly equivalent to VMWare Fusion or Parallels; it's more equivalent to VMWare ESXi, Xen, or KVM.

otis_inf 12y ago

Agreed, windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I hated it to death when I migrated to it due to the dreadful metro shit, but thankfully you don't have to deal with that if you spent some time making sure it's out of your way so booting to desktop and a quicklaunch bar is in place. the rest you get used to. I moved from XP to windows 8 and I missed the start menu a week or so, as I already used a quicklaunch bar for ages in XP. Now, windows server 2012 R2 on the other hand... aargg...