The Windows 8 reviews are becoming more and and more unfavorable. The interface is being dumbed down and it will end up becoming a joke in the computing world. The Linux Mint 13 distribution has been released and the 64bit MATE release of this distribution is looking very good indeed. As the image to the left shows, this Windows operating system belongs in the rubbish bin. Better to switch to Linux Mint 13. If you want Windows for some reason, then you could easily install it in a virtualbox session and use it whilst running Linux. I used the consumer preview and nothing worked like it did in Windows 7, which is still the best version of Windows to date. Ubuntu and Linux Mint will be very popular very soon. Will Windows 8 be another Windows Millennium Edition or can they redeem this operating system at the last minute.
This posting of mine is a comparison of the Windows 8 explorer file manager versus the Ubuntu nautilus alternative. And this is a look at the new copy dialog in the Windows 8 consumer preview. It provides a nice amount of feedback on how much data is being copied to and fro. But with the amount of bugs in this Windows OS, this is a good time to switch to Linux and use Linux Mint 13. My video to the right shows the MATE desktop on the Live DVD. This included Firefox 12, VLC, and the Totem and Gnome Mplayer movie players. I downloaded the version with the video codecs included and I was able to use mplayer to watch TV. Linux is safer than Windows for surfing the Internet, being immune to a variety of viruses and malware infestations that affect Windows. I was able to install Microsoft Security Essentials on Windows 8 and get that working, but the Windows Media Center would not work, the digital TV required a codec that was not available.
The DVD functionality has been removed from Windows Media player, but you may install VLC on Windows and use that to play your DVD movies. The same is true of Linux though. You will need to type sudo apt-get install libdvdcss to install the DVD decryption library, then you may use your DVD discs. And the Linux Mint distribution has good support for MP3 codecs as well as support for the Adobe flash plugin. And it does not have a retarded Windows mobile interface shore-horned into a desktop operating system. Windows 2000 was actually worth using, it was a multi-user operating system with good support for networking, you could create a server forest and use it as a home server operating system. Why would Microsoft shoot themselves down with such a horrible desktop operating system that could be the concrete block fused to the feet of Redmond WA as they sink into New York harbor. I guess the mafia analogy is not a bad one, Fat Tony would love to put this Windows release into the ocean.
I have used Windows since the 3.0 release and Microsoft software since the MSDOS 5.0 days. DOS was originally coded by IBM, but Microsoft got it off them and named it MSDOS. Microsoft did not come up with the DOS idea themselves. And the idea of the Graphical User Interface comes from the Xerox Star system from 1981. So Microsoft have only borrowed ideas from others and adapted them to use for their own profit. That is what they have always done. If the Xerox Star system had continued to be developed to this day we would have incredible computer technology today, but that is not to be now. Sadly, computers went backwards when Microsoft came to be. The Xerox Star system was copied by Apple and this shows that the Macintosh GUI is not an original creation either.