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On 02/01/14 22:53, alex mclennan wrote: > sorry to stick my two penny worth in,but why in gods name would any one > use windows 8 its complete and utter "£$%,i have had so many people > paying me to convert there laptops back to 7. > still plugging away at getting them to try zorin,ive had a couple of > successes which always leaves a nice glowing feeling. > rant over :) Hey, no problem, but I would have thought the answer is pretty obvious: 99%+ of all new non-Mac computers sold worldwide for the foreseeable future will continue to be shipped with nothing but Windows and nobody but a handful of technical specialists and geeks even know what an alternative operating system is. It's really that simple! Additionally, Win8/8.1 is a superior OS to Win7 in almost every way. Sure, I'll grant that the disastrous TIFKAM rollout was stupid, but that's been largely fixed in 8.1 (which is a free upgrade too) - flick a simple switch and you boot straight into the traditional desktop, just as you always have since Windows 3. Alternatively, simply installing a free util such as Classic Shell will also fix it permanently, complete with bringing back the old fashioned Start button. There are yet more reasons, but the final and most important one is the availability of programs: sysadmins and geeks can rock almost anything on their Linux or BSD installs, but just watch a non-computer types' face fall when you tell them that the fancy new (and to them, utterly alien, clunky and vaguely terrifying) Linux install you've slapped on their new laptop can't run $IMPORTANT_PROGRAM. That variable might even just be as simple as a non-crippled Skype, Adobe's cheap Photoshop alternative Lightroom or (more real examples I have seen) an automatic sewing machine control utility, a venerable but perfectly functional genealogy program suite or an astronomical tool for controlling their 6" telescope. And that's before you even get to the professionals who actually use their machines 24/7 to make $MONEY. This includes pro photography/video/audio specialists (many of whom use Apple anyway), CAD/CAM experts and about a trillion other things, many of which are hardly niche examples. Do you have any idea how many professional and hobbyist Windows programmers are out there, whom need Visual Studio? Have you ever tried to get a MS Access DB or an Excel spreadsheet with advanced logic running on LibreOffice? And then there are the millions of gamers... If you additionally account for the fact that a modern new PC is almost definitely going to be capable of either dual-booting or running a VM with Linux alongside Win8 - so the user can try the system out slowly at their own pace and see what they think of it first - and a gentleman as skilled as yourself should be able to reconfigure and tweak a Win8 install to be cosmetically identical and functionally superior to Win7 in literally five damn minutes I think you've got all the answers to your question :] I like easy questions like this. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq