Their argument is this; tablet and phone markets/usages are skyrocketing while desktop/laptops are slowly receding. They're convinced that in the future the average (read: majority) "computer" user won't have any use for a traditional desktop or laptop (remember that MS has stake in the console gaming industry, so they are completely fine with the (false) idea that PC gaming has no solid future, plus they make no money off of PC gaming - that's NVidia and ATI's cash cow) because what they predict is that people will pretty much entirely be using "computers" for accessing social media and as content delivery devices (think kindle/netflix/hulu/etc).
I just wish Microsoft wouldn't forget that tablets, etc. have really taken off mostly because they're just a new device people buy for mostly entertainment purposes. The PC will not die, it'll only evolve, usually by becoming smaller and more useful.
The problem for Microsoft, and for desktops/laptops manufacturers in general, is that computers and their OSes are
so good now that there are no compelling reasons to upgrade. It used to be that I'd upgrade every two (2) or so years, but after having built an i7-920 machine, I've felt no compelling reason to upgrade the hardware except to buy more SSDs and a refresher video card every few years or so. The Core i5 and i7 line are now "8-year-build" type products, and that just kills PC sales. Even my 7-year-old laptop is still very workable with a Core 2 Duo.
As for Microsoft, what are they going to sell that people want? Metro is only different, not necessarily must-have. After Windows 7 finally came out with hardware acceleration on the desktop, there really wasn't anything more they could really offer besides maybe an "app" subsystem. Ironically, they actually had something like that with their "gadgets" but never capitalized on it.
I just wish Microsoft would get back to basics and not try to make their OS do everything. A desktop/laptop really can't really sell the whole real-time "connected" experience with Metro because people don't want to be tied to their desktops. At the same time, people can't do "real work" on their phones or tablets. Why not just ensure that people can do both things really well, and have close integration between the two? It's like Apple's close integration between their computers and devices without feeling the need to merge the two into a big annoying conglomeration.
The only reason I want Win10 is because my win8.1 is so plagued with bugs and instabilities. I'd go back to windows 7 but support for it is going to end (if it hasn't already, I think I saw a notice that official support has ended already) and it has a hard time working with >16GB of ram. Win10 should be fully capable of working with up to 64GB of ram from what I hear, leaving plenty of headroom.
Really? I've never had any problems with Windows 7 properly using RAM, and I've had 24GB on this machine for ages. WinXP didn't do very well, even the 64-bit version, and some apps like Firefox are still 32-bit, but otherwise, I've been able to make use of as much as 18GB dedicated to single programs without a hiccup. No swap disk is just awesome too.
I really want to like Linux, but I absolutely despise how so many things you do on it are through command line. Call me lazy if you want, but I love being able to just download a program, and then click the icon to install it. No downloading packages and resources and refreshing libraries and digging through directories just to install a bit of software.
I dunno, I think of Linux's OSes as simply wrappers around the shells. The GUIs are so poorly integrated, and there are so many different GUIs that do different things in different ways, that it's hard for me to rely on the GUIs to do things right. Then again, I don't use Linux for a desktop OS all that much except for development.
What I do miss is a more robust way of installing and uninstalling things that aren't in repositories. In Windows I can grab an update from a website and install it, or uninstall it, and it won't get "lost" in the bowels of my file system. In Linux, if something isn't already in the repository, to "install" the new version I have to rely on the installation scripts (like those in Makefiles) to install or uninstall stuff into the system, potentially affecting things in ways I don't want. So every time I install something like that I worry that now my system has been tainted.
