I find it hard to imagine someone in the hacker news crowd rating 8 over 7 on developer hardware. From my limited experience, the only major improvement I noticed was the improved task manager (which is really nifty). What other substantial improvements over 7 do you think Win8 provides?
* improved file copy dialog, including pausing
* much faster boot
* improved task manager (as you said)
* better multi-monitor support (I have 2 monitors)
It's not much but was worth the $30 upgrade. I don't mind the new start screen but I understand that is subjective.
I think Win8 is a downgrade in almost every aspect, but it does boot faster. Granted, I think that it's doing something akin to hibernating in Windows 7 and not actually shutting down.
I wonder if people are comparing the boot time of year-old Windows 7 installations to brand new Windows 8 installations.
I know my SSD-based Windows 7 system could boot to the desktop in less than 10 seconds when it was new, but now that it's over a year old with dozens of additional installed programs and drivers, I'm lucky to see the desktop in less than 30 seconds.
As a developer, I care about some of the under the hood changes, new features and improvements:
- lighter memory usage
- better power management
- address space randomization (forcible)
- full hardware (direct-x) rendered UI
- storage spaces
- hyper-v
- incremental file histories
- mandatory DEP
- system refresh
Of course, at the UI level, there are various changes that are a mix of good and bad IMHO, but overall, I would say more parts of the UI suck a little less than before.