Unfortunately Microsoft won't sell the straight download version to Canadians. We have to buy the DVD for another $20, but we can also download the ISO. Go figure. Got it downloaded and onto a flash drive for installation. Installation was surprisingly fast. Windows never asks many questions, and always assumes it is the only game in town, so installation is pretty swift, especially on USB 3.0. About 15 minutes later, it's booting into Windows off the hard drive to do first-run setup. After configuring some basic privacy settings, it then asks for a Microsoft account (on-line service) login. I didn't know that if you click on the I don't have an account yet link you can then click on another link that says, I don't want to log into Windows with a Microsoft Account. So I created a blasted account which it then wanted to verify via text message. Sigh. Too bad I didn't read this link first. After finally getting things set up, I logged in and was presented with the wonderful "Start" screen, which was wonderful. Useless waste of screen space. The only useful part of it is the Search field that I used to call up control panel so I could add some "local" users.
The next item of business was to install Firefox. By now I was looking at my traditional desktop (with the new, shiny, but now useless start button on it), and IE is pinned to the task bar. So I brought it up and typed "www.google.com" in the address bar. And it loaded up the MS IE start page again. Okay, how about "mozilla.com." Same thing. I guess IE is broken. I finally had to use the bing search field to get to Mozilla's download page, and then things seemed to work. Got Firefox installed (I'm not a Google Chrome guy), and then proceeded to download everything I need to make Windows, particularly Windows 8, usable. That means first, ClassicShell. Much better! Then VLC, WinSCP, LibreOffice, Putty, Cygwin, TigerVNC. A couple of hours later and it was as useful as Windows 7! Yay! Good job, Microsoft.
Oh and then HDMI sound output didn't work. Windows kept saying it wasn't connected. Downgraded the driver to one from Intel's web site and that sort of fixed it. Might still be a problem.
Anyway, here are the reasons we didn't go with a more sane OS:
Windows 7
- Hard to find these days, and the retail box is super expensive
- OEM activation means you can never move the license to another computer
OS X
- Apparently, resolution independence means something different to Apple than it does to me. OS X provides no way to scale the UI (not even the fonts!) without using a lower screen resolution (leaving lots of things blurry), or the so-called HiDPI mode where every logical pixel is actually 4 physical pixels--which leads to a lot of blurry bitmaps though the fonts stay sharp. Apparently making the UI vector-based like GTK 3 on Linux is now is too slow. So the end result is on a big screen a few feet away you can't read the menus.
- Even with TonyMac's help, we couldn't get OS X to run well on this machine, even though it's spec'ed out exactly to specifications listed as 100% compatible on TonyMac's site. Neither Mountain Lion or Mavericks worked out for us.
Linux
- Adobe Flash is horrible on Linux. Since BYU TV and General Conference are #1 requirements for my parents, this wouldn't work well
- Finding a good distro that has up-to-date media packages while being somewhat long-lived is hard too. Fedora works well, but it needs to be wiped every year. Linux Mint might be a good choice.
- Just didn't have time to do it properly.
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