There’s a new article at Ars Technica talking about Windows 8. They interviewed Steven Sinofsky, who was the time president of Microsoft’s Windows Division. He oversaw the launch of Windows 7, then the launch of Windows 8 in 2012. He left shortly after the later’s launch.

My experience with Windows 8 started in 2013, when I purchased a Samsung 17 inch Series 7 Chronos notebook “monstrosity” with Windows 8 preinstalled. In short order I learned how to use and to like Windows 8. It became a powerful tool for my professional and personal life. The Samsung had a large (for the time) and accurate (for a Windows portable) touchpad at the front which made working with Windows 8’s UI quick and easy. I read the fine manual on Windows 8 and quickly organized the tiles on Windows 8 start screen. For example I moved had the desktop tile into the upper left so that as soon as my notebook booted into Windows 8, a simple enter opened up the notebook. From there everything was available. The whole system performed very well, and continued to do so as long as it was installed on my notebook.

From my perspective the best aspect of Windows 8 was the design language, Metro. Windows 8 ditched Windows 7’s Aero interface, which was an evolution of Windows XP’s Luna interface. I never cared for either, considering them Microsoft’s poor attempt to imitate Apple’s Mac OS X Aqua interface. Apple’s interface looked much better, but I wasn’t a total fan of that interface either. Unfortunately Microsoft took some considerable heat over Windows 8’s radical interface departure, primarily from old-school Windows stans who basically lied about the supposed problems with Windows 8. Microsoft tried to appease some of them with the release Windows 8.1, which returned the classic start menu that we’d been living with since Windows 95.. Microsoft would later release Windows 10 as a free update, and I would install that over my Windows 8. Windows 10 was an attempt, in part, to shut everybody up over Windows 8.

Windows 8 with its flat Metro interface was so much cleaner and uncluttered than Windows 7’s Aero interface. As I said I fell in love with it (if anyone could fall in love with a windowing desktop), preferring to work in it over anything else out there, including Mac OS X and any Linux desktop. The notebook was rugged enough that I traveled with it overseas on business trips. I still have that notebook, it still runs, only it has Windows 10 installed. It will never run Windows 11 because Microsoft’s requirements won’t allow it to run on that hardware.

These days I’ve migrated from Windows to macOS and Linux on all my systems. I only run Windows these days because I have to. For example, to support some development work on Windows I’ve now got a Windows 11 VM running under Parallels on my 2019 MacBook Pro. The little Minis Forum PC I do a lot of development on is now running Linux. It came with Windows 10 Pro installed, but as soon as it was practical, I swapped in another SSD and started down the long path of running nothing but Linux. As I get older I may migrate all my Mac systems over to Linux as well as Apple drops macOS support on my aging hardware. I only hope that nothing happens to Linux along the way, as it’s slowly becoming my only choice for an operating system.

Article link: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/too-much-and-too-soon-steven-sinofsky-looks-back-at-windows-8-10-years-later/