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Originally Posted by Glorfindel
Yeah, I like the the start screen on tablets but not so much for desktops  |
The underlying issue is ongoing OS convergence. The goal is that you run the
same OS on everything you have. It's possible now because devices have gotten steadily more powerful. I've been predicting for a while, for instance, that
every phone will soon be a smartphone because it
can be one. The hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper, and the devices can run larger and more powerful OSes and applications.
With Windows 8, Window 8 RT, and Windows Phone, we have variants of Windows running on desktops, laptops, notebooks/netbooks, X86 and ARM based tablets, and ARM based phones, with the Metro interface designed to look and act the same on all of them.
Apple has OS/X for desktop/laptop, and iOS for phone and tablet, but I expect increasing convergence, and down the road I expect OS/X to be subsumed into iOS, and
everything Apple makes will run it.
Linux isn't there yet. There is too much fragmentation in the Linux market, and
way too many distros. Linux has been ported to just about everything, but the only thing in common will be a Linux kernel as the core of the OS. Everything else will vary
very widely.
I expect that sort of convergence will take place around Android. While originally written to power smartphones, it uses Linux, and there is no requirement that what it powers has to be a phone. The flood of Android tablets like the one I have came as no surprise.
There are alpha test ports of Android to X86, so a version of Android that runs on a desktop is likely, and down the road, everything you have will run Windows, iOS, or Android.
We are increasingly reaching the point where it may not
matter what OS you run, because an assortment of major apps, like Open Office/Libre Office are cross platform, and you get the computer to run apps. (I have a beta version of Open Office on my Android tablet.)
Meanwhile, the issue is that one UI
doesn't fit all. Lots of folks drag their feet about upgrading to a new Windows version. (Corporate users are especially foot draggers, because company wide upgrades are troublesome and expensive.) The Win8 Metro interface seems to be a major reason for foot dragging in moving to Win 8, so no particular surprise if the Start menu returns in Win 9.
As another foot dragger, I'll be curious to see what Win v9 brings to the table, but have no plans to switch from Win 7. Things like a Start Menu and virtual desktops are things I can get without a new version of Windows.
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I tried a desktop manager that sounds much like WindowsPager, but ended up not liking the gui
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There are
many virtual desktop programs for Windows. My requirements were simple: four virtual desktops, that would show in the taskbar and be selectable from it. (I have the taskbar set to auto-hide until moused over.)
There are larger and more complex products that allow you to specify what gets shown in other desktop windows, and which windows things appear in, but that's more than I require.
WindowsPager meets my needs and behaves fine.
Quote:
(I just remembered: you are the one who informed me about sysinternals   )
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You're welcome.
Sysinternals is Mark Russinovitch and Bryce Cogswell. I've been a fan of Mark's work and running his code for years. He's a noted lecturer on and writer about Windows programming, and I got the impression he knew more about Windows internals than Microsoft did. MS apparently agreed, since they bought his company and put Mark and Bryce to work in their Core Architecture group. Fortunately, Mark's code is still available through MSDN Technet.
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Dennis