Windows 8 Developer Preview

[strollin]

Don't know if anyone here is interested but the Win 8 Developer Preview is now available for download.

I downloaded and installed it and I'm typing this post from IE 10 in Win 8.

[David M]

Cool...how do you like it?

[strollin]

It's different, that's for sure. The GUI is called Metro and uses "tiles" instead of icons on the Start screen. Metro is very much like a smartphone OS where apps are run full screen and you switch between them with no way to close them (other than to kill them from Task Manager).

As implemented, Win 8 seems like Windows 7 underneath with the Metro GUI running on top.

[glc]

The developer preview isn't even alpha, much less beta - it's not for ANY kind of production work.

[strollin]

Yeah, I wouldn't use any software for production work that hasn't been released.

[joaqs]

looks interesting and very different. it somehow reminds me of an Android interface for tablet (haven't seen the actual interface though since I don't have a tablet yet) and windows' interface for home media.

[Force Flow]

Anyone hear about the new secure boot and "certified hardware"? Those sure don't give me warm fuzzy feelings about the direction Windows is taking.

[jdeb]

Blog from
mjg59 | UEFI secure booting

"A system that ships with only OEM and Microsoft keys will not boot a generic copy of Linux.

Now, obviously, we could provide signed versions of Linux. This poses several problems. Firstly, we'd need a non-GPL bootloader. Grub 2 is released under the GPLv3, which explicitly requires that we provide the signing keys. Grub is under GPLv2 which lacks the explicit requirement for keys, but it could be argued that the requirement for the scripts used to control compilation includes that. It's a grey area, and exploiting it would be a pretty good show of bad faith. Secondly, in the near future the design of the kernel will mean that the kernel itself is part of the bootloader. This means that kernels will also have to be signed. Making it impossible for users or developers to build their own kernels is not practical. Finally, if we self-sign, it's still necessary to get our keys included by ever OEM.

There's no indication that Microsoft will prevent vendors from providing firmware support for disabling this feature and running unsigned code. However, experience indicates that many firmware vendors and OEMs are interested in providing only the minimum of firmware functionality required for their market. It's almost certainly the case that some systems will ship with the option of disabling this. Equally, it's almost certainly the case that some systems won't.

It's probably not worth panicking yet. But it is worth being concerned."