OK, well maybe not the world, just software. (You know, that stuff I 
spend my whole day thinking about.)



First, GNOME 3. As far as I can tell, this is designed for a netbook, 
not a real PC. There's no task bar, all the buttons are huge, everything 
starts fullscreen, and you have to go into a stupid little menu to start 
any programs or to switch windows. They removed all the window buttons 
except "close"... Basically, this thing is designed for something with a 
touchscreen and a tiny display.

(The irony is that if you go to the GNOME addons page, 98% of all addons 
are things to make GNOME 3 work like how GNOME 2 used to work. Add back 
the taskbar, put minimise and maximise buttons back, add a program 
launcher bar, etc. To some extent ANY time a program changes people want 
it to work the way it did before. But I think the sheer volume of 
identical addons to do the same three tasks is significant...)

I particularly like how the entire GNOME 3 desktop is written in CSS and 
JavaScript, and you write "addons" by monkey-patching the live 
JavaScript (which is entirely undocumented; you just have to *guess* 
what things you need to change - or read the 20,000 lines of code that 
it comprises). I especially like the way the addon is responsible for 
manually reverting all its changes when the user selects "disable addon".

And by "like", I of course mean "hate".



Then we come to Windows 8. This product is *clearly* designed to be run 
on a phone. This is not a desktop operating system for technically 
skilled users to operate their computer with. This is a toy OS for a 
touchscreen device with a tiny display. Consequently, the graphics look 
HORRID, with garish flat rectangles of colour (they didn't even bother 
to round the corners off), capital letters only, and a maximum of three 
items on screen at once. It's like I'm back in the 1980s all over again.

Even the latest version of Visual Studio copies this unspeakably ugly 
style, with all the menu names in capital letters. The entire UI is 
devoid of colour, all of it being a monochrome grey. It's like somebody 
sucked the life out of it. No doubt the next iteration of Office will 
have the some awful paint job.

A lot of people said Vista was awful. I can hardly believe I'm saying 
this, but... I actually don't have a problem with it. It seems fine. 
Sure, it's got a whole bunch of stuff I don't want, but MS products 
always do. Windows 7 seems identical to Vista, apart from a few tiny 
cosmetic differences. The minimum specs are a bit high, but then the 
primary way MS make their money is by forcing people to buy new 

not like it can't handle it.

Whenever anybody asks me "should I get Windows 7 or Windows 8?", the 
answer is pretty clear. Get Windows 7 if you want to use a PC. Get 
Windows 8 if you're too stupid to operate anything more complicated than 
a washing machine.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a simplified UI existing. If 
there's a product specifically for people who just want to surf the 
Internet and send a few emails, then that's great! What I object to is 
*me* being forced to use that same product. In my opinion, there should 
be a separate product for people who *are* technically skilled - and 
let's face it, it's not like such people are a minority...

But hey, MS makes a metric tonne of money per hour, why would they even 
care what I think?

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