Quote:
Originally Posted by BeccaPrice
Windows 8 doesn't let you have multiple windows open?
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It is a little bit more complicated. Windows 8 is a very strange beast. They want to force everybody to use the new UI system. The new tablet UI system can only display one application fullscreen. It can also divide the screen into two parts (30/70%) and display an application on each of those. You also can't close an application (well, on a system with keyboard you press Alt+F4, but on a touch-only system you are stuck). Just start another one. They tell you not to worry, windows will unload the excessive applications when it runs out of memory.
At the same time they can't simply throw away the entire ecosystem of existing legacy Windows applications. So they let you use desktop applications just the way you have been using windows for the last 18 years.
In order to achieve that there are two distinct and separate versions of applications such as Internet Explorer. When you start the explorer for the first time it starts in a fullscreen "Metro" mode. You can "switch" it the the desktop mode where it behaves like a normal window. But this another version of Internet Explorer.
Some new applications do not have two versions - Metro and Desktop, so you are stuck in Metro interface with one fullscreen application. At this moment there are very few of those.
I have purchased notebook with Windows 8. There was no choice if I wanted to buy a heavily discounted notebook with desired parameters during Black Friday when I was visiting USA. After three weeks I have updated it to Mint Linux Nadia KDE edition and I am happy ;-)
I consider myself pretty flexible and I have no problem using exotic user interfaces, but I ditched Windows 8. I was planning to install it to a virtual machine but they have made this very complicated - the version that came with the notebook needs UEFI boot, it came without installation disks (just recovery partition) and it has serial number burnt in BIOS somewhere.