So what happened to Windows 9?

[Jux]

Anyone know?

Think they wanted to just get away from the "car crash" that was Win 8 so decided they just jumped further than 1 away...

It got flushed, which is what usually happens to shite.

I think NetworkGuy is right. I also wonder if someone at Microsoft has a sense of humour. There was an April Fool's story last year that Windows 9 was too good to release and so Microsoft would skip straight to Windows 10. You can read it here. Perhaps someone thought it would be fun to make the story come true.

We have 2 desktops which run on Win 7, and a laptop which uses Win 8.1. I haven't really got used to 8, so don't actually like it much. Quite a few of our friends love it though. They tell me that 8 is much loved and a million times better than 7......

I heard that there was an issue with some third-party apps which, on checking what version of Windows was installed, only checked the first digit. Presumably that wouldn't have mattered if it was either 95 or 98, but would have been a major problem if it was Win 9.

Plausible?

Hmm, doesn't really add up since most versions have been letters, not digits. XP, Vista, NT, wasn't there a Millennium one or something? And the server versions.

Windows 8 was too stretched between tablet and desktop OS and hence doesn't work very well on a desktop. It's OK but you have to beat it into submission and the whole app store is a disaster.

Also funny that they were the innovator of windowed computing - previous to this everything had to be done on a full screen - and yet they went backwards with windows 8. Odd. I'm glad they've rethought it.

This was pretty interesting if you're interested in stuff like that.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/02/from-windows-1-to-windows-10-29-years-of-windows-evolution

The theories I've heard so far are

• that 3rd party code would check if you were using 95 or 98 by asking if windows=9* (Probably in the form of "if windows=95 or 98 then do x, if not then do y") The star is a wildcard, so would return both 95 and 98, but also windows 9. I believe that subsequent versions of windows probably handled code in a different way to those two, so lumping 9 in with them would cause issues.
• that they are distancing themselves from 8.
• that marrketing decided 10 sounded better.

No idea which is true though.

Windows 8 is horrendous , is there a way out soon then?

most versions have been letters, not digits

Those are only marketing names. From a programming point of view they have all been numbers. Win95 and Win98 were both version 4, XP was version 5 and Vista was version 6. Interestingly 7 is version 6.1 internally, 8 is 6.2 and 8.1 is 6.3.

OodneedsanOod - from what I heard on TWiT.TV (This Week in Technology website / audio and video podcasts on iTunes) the user interface on Win 10 will not be similar to Win 8, so it can work better in a VM among other things.

We're still over 6 months away, but there was some suggestion that if you want to test out version 10 (and have a backup of all your important photos, documents, etc) you can download it now.

Articles about it can be found here:
(1) Ars Technica (2) LifeHacker

There's also an article about dual booting, where you'd be able to keep your existing copy of Windows and add the Windows 10 Preview as an alternative. See LaptopMag blog (PS You're on your own!)

I've not yet tried it, but with a variety of laptops and desktops, think I may as well get 32-bit and 64-bit versions to try out, to see what I can spot has changed from Win 7. I've not touched Win 8 (except in passing, to help a client) and don't plan on getting any systems with Win 8 on now :)

Thanks. I just bought a new laptop (well july) and it came with Windows 8 and I keep avoiding using it it's that bad.
I was using 7 at work and XP at home.

It's alright once you get used to it and have it set up the way you like but I agree, we have it on our laptop and there were so many annoying and frustrating hiccups that I don't use it unless I have to. And it doesn't work at all well as a shared family computer, DH and I have different Skype accounts and i can't just sign into mine from his userwhich meanss setting up a whole new user on there for one tiny thing (and I don't like having to put my email password in there either). Mostly though the problems are with the laptop itself and crappy parts. It seems to take a lot more setting up and workarounds to get it usable whereas previous OS have been very usable right out of the box.

Yes I've hidden most of the apps and work from the other home page. Closing and minimising pages is a pain though. And every time I switch on /off it's updating

Yes we had to turn off updates completely because the updates were draining the processor so much that it was barely usable. And Lenovo laptops don't cope well with Windows 8.1 which is even more annoying, because that's much more usable.

My brother downloaded Win 10 and said it was alright. He likes Win 8, so his judgement is not to be trusted

I haven't tried to do much on my W8.1 laptop as I mainly use my iPad, so apart from finding it rather annoying the other day when I couldn't get the Cmd Prompt box up easily, I don't mind it. I can see from the brief foray I had that I would find it annoying if I were trying to actually use it properly.

"He likes Win 8, so his judgement is not to be trusted." Ha Ha - that really did have me laughing out loud... luckily nobody here to disturb by doing so!

The logical upgrade path from Windoze 8.1 is of course to Ubuntu Linux 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. I'll be amazed if Windoze 10 is even usable.

Now explain how one can run MS Access on Ubuntu Linux ?

Sorry, not going to get into an argument, I do use Linux too, but it's not the "be all and end all" of computing solutions for everyone.

"Windoze" - groan!

Why would anyone want to do that?

If you are forced by say your boss to use a Win app you are usually (not always) better off just running it in Windoze natively. You don't change from MS to Linux in order to run MS software any more than you would swap your iPhone for an Android and then complain that you can't use iTunes.

Try comparing Win apps running on Win with Linux apps running on Linux, in this case the database components of LibreOffice and OpenOffice. If you want a casual database on Linux you use one of those.

Some success has been had using Access with wine but the truth of the matter is that this is a pointless thing to want to do. The community would rather work on supporting in wine apps that don't have Linux equivalents.

The other thing to remember about wine is that it ports the Microsoft runtime to Linux and therefore has to copy much of what is wrong with the Microsoft runtime. You can say hello to the dreaded Registry again, for instance.

You can now easily enough compile and run C# .NET apps on Linux and Qt on Windoze so we should see more apps in future available across platforms.

Not everything by Microsoft is awful. MS SQL Server is pretty good and for some purposes free. The same goes for Visual Studio.