They can polish it up, but if it's the same under the hood it won't do any better than 8. I'll stick with 7 thank you very much Microsoft.
I meant that Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 are all basically the same under the hood. They're all using versions of the NT 6 kernel. 7 really is Vista with another service pack and a new taskbar. Considering that 10 started life as 8.2, I imagine it will continue that trend.
Also, WinFS was actually going to be part of Vista, back when it was called Longhorn. I know it sounded like it was going to be part of 10 from my post.
Thanks for posting this Cabal, I hope you keep us updated on this. I am curious to see what becomes of it.
No problem. I actually thought it was a joke at first because they skipped 9 and was quite surprised to find out they were serious.
To be honest Win7 was the last decent Windows operating system, while it has it's issues they weren't anywhere near as bad as what Win8 had.
There are a few things in 10 that sound promising. For one, it will boot directly to the desktop if a keyboard is installed rather than taking you to the tiles. An upgrade of 7's start menu is also included so desktop users don't need to deal with Metro at all (aside from the live tiles in the start menu).
You also get web results when you search the start menu. This has also been an Ubuntu feature for a while and it got serious backlash until a couple unaffiliated groups deemed the connection secure and a setting to turn it off was added. The main controversy stemmed from sending every single thing you typed into the dash (Ubuntu start menu) to a server automatically. Even after letting the user disable it, it is considered controversial. If Microsoft decided to copy that feature and didn't come up with it independently then somebody obviously wasn't looking too closely at customer reaction.
They're also aiming for device convergence, which is a goal that Ubuntu has had for a while. Rather than tablets, laptops, and desktops all running the same OS like with 8, it will also extend to smart phones and the Windows Phone OS will be scrapped. While this doesn't sound very meaningful to the everyday user, system overhead and bloat should plummet if they consider this a serious goal.
The Windows Store from 8 is also being carried over and is also more or less identical to the Ubuntu Software Center but with things like a kill switch to remove apps from your system they've decided to pull from the Store.
Lastly, they're ditching the desktop versions of programs from 8 in favor of simply running the Metro versions in a window when you use the desktop mode. So now you won't, for instance, have IE installed twice with two unrelated sets of bookmarks.
On the whole, I'd classify this as being better than 8, but still not worth the time, effort, or money to upgrade from 7.
Here's the video I saw.
You'll also be able to download the preview build sometime later today from
here.