It may be a south-of-the-equator mentality, but it's not going to be summer in all of the 190 countries when Windows 10 is launched. differing calendars aside could USA-centric press releases just mention the month rather than the season?
They haven't announced a month, and there may be good reasons for that. They may have a target goal in mind, but still want wiggle-room if unexpected issues come up, and 'summer' sounds a heck of a lot better than 'At some point in the months of x and y'
I don't think any other (non-verbose) options encapsulate what summer means with the same specificity. Q2/Q3 includes a far longer span of time, mid-2015 covers a 4 month period that covers a significant portion of spring and doesn't cover the entirety of summer, and I fear that all other simple options would suffer the same fate.
Considering the vast majority of computer users and potential Microsoft customers reside in the northern hemisphere, I don't think there's any problem with using summer as a timeframe.
> I don't think any other (non-verbose) options encapsulate what summer means with the same specificity.
You mean lack of specificity?
From what I gather, it's at some point during the middle of my winter.
Of course, nobody actually remembers when the seasons start and end (though we just check wikipedia), while most people definitely know the order of the months. And even after checking, "this summer", is really a 3.5 month period, which is still as vague (if not more) as "mid 2015".
That's really soon, which fills me with dread. The UI as seen in the most recent pre-release builds is atrocious and it seems to be getting worse, not better, with each build.
Perhaps they're pulling another 'Watercolor' (the pre-release decoy Windows XP theme that was replaced by Luna at the last minute), but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Fixed relative to what's in build 10036, undoubtedly, but I'm struggling to see how it will end up being an improvement over the Windows Vista/7-era version as far as desktop users are concerned. That said, it is an improvement over the Windows 8/8.1 Start Screen.
You must have a lot of faith in Microsoft when you consider giving up your stable Windows7 in favor a dot zero release of an Operating System that in a lot of way still looks like Windows8.
Unless I can see any kind of track record that it is indeed stable, all the cloud crap can be disabled and they actually put back Themes so I can get rid of everything "modern" or metro or whatever they call this nonsense, I am very happy sticking with 7 for at least the next 5 years.
I think this is as excited as I've been for a Windows release since '95. Which isn't saying a whole lot, but still, this will be the first time I've felt any desire to try upgrading to a new release as soon as it becomes available in 20 years.
Windows 8 works quite well on both of my touch capable laptops, my gaming rig, and old 4-5 year development machine.
With 8.1 the Start button is back, but pressing the Windows key on the keyboard and selecting one of the pinned applications, or typing for search, works perfectly.
It took a while for me to put aside my feeling that things had to stay how they were, but once I did (touch capable device helped) I liked it. A lot.
I hope 10 refines things further. With the cost of touch capable Windows machines so low, the installed OS needs to work.
Edit: and if they can improve startup times even further with 10? Wow. Windows 8 was already faster than 7 on the same machines, even older machines and on non-SSD drives.
I can't wait. I can't use Win8 because the interface sucks so much on a real laptop. What was MS thinking? And I also hope they speed up the startup time, because it's definitely not faster than win7. In fact, all it does is show the "desktop" quicker, but you can't do anything until the little circle stops spinning, and that takes just as long as win7.
Don't get your hopes up, by all accounts 'Windows 10' on the Pi 2 is a special version just for running GUI-less embedded applications. Look at what they have already for the Galileo/Edison (C++ only apps, no GUI) and extrapolate a little bit from there.
The terrible media circus that said Windows 8/10 would run on a Raspberry Pi forgot to mention that it would be the embedded editions of Windows, specifically designed to run IoT-type apps. Not the desktop version.