I've been using my new Dell Venue Pro 8 (Windows 8.1) on the holiday break and although I've found technology boring for the past two years, I found myself quite enjoying this new little tablet.

Now, if only Windows 8.2 or 9 focused some needed attention on large form-factor ("desktop"), I'd be very happy.

I've been using Windows 8 on the desktop for over a year. It's better than Windows 7 - switching between start screen and desktop is just a left thumb keypress...and the start screen (or some Windows 8 app) only shows up on one of my monitors, and I can toss that screen back and forth between monitors depending on which part of the desktop I want to see.

And that's gotten better with Windows 8.1.

I have a Nexus 7 and iPad, but for a replacement to an older netbook, purchased an Asus Transformer t100. It's a <$400 10" convertible tablet (it includes a keyboard dock, and can function well in either tablet or laptop configuration.)

It's quickly become my favorite device, and I love the "full-desktop" power of Windows 8.1 combined with the dock for traditional apps. The only gripe I have is the dearth of Metro apps on the Windows App store. 1st party apps from Microsoft tend to be very usable, but the few 3rd party apps I've tried have clearly been a halfhearted port, and tend to be very buggy.

To echo an above poster, Modern IE is surprisingly great, with the exception of sometimes jaggedy text rendering at smaller sizes (anyone else experience this?) All in all, I've gotten far more value than I expected both from the price and Windows 8.1 itself.

I picked up the asus t100, and am finding myself using that instead of my ipad. It's nice that you can run everything, and view anything, while still having a couch-friendly tablet interface for browsing and reading. It frustrates me now to use my regular laptop and not have a touch screen.

Windows 8 makes a lot more sense when you use it on a device it was designed for. Even one of the staunch anti-8 coworkers at my office had to admit the t100 was nice to use. It's also amazing how fast the bay trail atom is, yesterday i was playing mirror's edge on it :)

I couldn't decide whether or not to get the DVP8 or the Nexus 7, so I got both. Finding myself grabbing the DVP8 most of the time for for IE metro...yea...It has flash support and a much better mobile browsing. Better than any browser on Android anyway.

I'm amazed at how good Modern IE is. Probably the best mobile browser experience I've ever had.

I've enjoyed my Surface Pro 2. Windows 8 is quite nice on proper hardware. It's nice to have a full blown computer in something that is heavier and bigger than an ipad, but not terribly so much heavier.

How is the sp2 on the lap? I like laying on the couch and surf and concerned with the stability of the sp2 in this position.

It's great, although I only ever use the kickstand on a desk. The most frustrating things with the Pro 2? The continuous oscillation between needing the keyboard attached and needing to take it off again, which is difficult with one hand. Also while the type keyboard is excellent in use, my two-year old managed to pry a key loose in seconds. Said key is lost in the meantime.

Other than that it's the best non-desktop device I've ever owned.

I've not really tried it much in that position.

I can't help but think that if there was a Venue Pro 8 with a decent dock so that you could use it as a desktop and take it to a meeting as a tablet would be just a no-brainer for corporate IT shops. I can't count the number of times I have seem someone running between meeting rooms balancing their laptop like a waitress running through a restaurant with a huge tray above her head. So, maybe a thunderbolt port for docking?

Being from the enterprise world I concur.

The short-term advancement I am looking forward is having my ipad mini and macbook air be a single core that can be docked a la Atrix and also become a full blown desktop on a dock a la surface 2 with gaming capabilities. Having it on a phone-size would be the next step but the 7 inch screen is so much better for reading.

There is the thinkpad Tablet 2 it has a docking station but I honestly find the build quality and functionality to be questionable at best. It also had issues connecting to my workplace wifi, I attributed it to Windows 8 but my colleagues surface pro did not have the same problems.

They have the Venue 11 pro for that: http://www.engadget.com/products/dell/venue/11-pro/

I like the Windows 8 UX pretty much. I feel very comfortable with the horizontal scroll which is, imho, totally natural and in some sense more effective than the vertical scroll we got used because of smartphones.

Perhaps we're crazy, but at Theneeds we believed in Windows 8 and we released our app [1] even before iOS and Android... let's see what happens ;)

[1] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/theneeds/9e1d48a...

Hey, that looks great. When I'm near my windows 8 computer I'll be sure to give it a spin!

Thanks. Let me have your feedback!

I tried it on my desktop for a few weeks but I just couldn't handle it. It was really a terrible experience for me. I could see how it would work on tablets though. I went back to Windows 7 and probably won't upgrade again.

I see. In fact I was mainly thinking to tablets and a "mostly-read" experience.

It's amazing to me that it is news that an OS which was released 13 years ago is now passing under 30% of market share.

And it is only 3 months away from out of support.

Ummm... no. The "news" is that it still has that 30% market share after 13 years ago and soon going to be unsupported.

> it still has that 30% market share

Yes, that is what I implied.

It still does what most people need.

If mostly all you do is fire up a browser to use the web then there's pretty much no reason to upgrade from XP, I'd expect there's a lot of machines out there which essentially fall into that use case, why spend money on something for no appreciable gain?

And post-XP a lot of things which used to be there and provided a "good experience" to some users are gone, so some things are more of a loss than a gain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

And you might be surprised how many are still using 2K or 98SE, whole communities have developed around providing further patches and improvements. OSs that are "dead" in the mainstream continue on as things approach more of the "retro" community...

(I'm still using XP, haven't needed more than that. Will likely still use it even after MS stops support. I also regularly used 98SE up until around '08, then I dual-booted with XP until '10.)

Yes, that's what a friend told me. I forgot when writing that comment that updating windows is not like updating a GNU/Linux distribution, it is a time-consuming process and it is not free. This alone explains it pretty well.

Well, a full PC would be overkill, that is what Chromebooks are for.

Were 30% of people really buying Windows XP machines last year? I think they meant "usage share" rather than "market share".

Thanks for that. I've just acquired a new pet peeve: not only is "market share" not "usage share", but usage share is not the same as web usage which is all web analytics can measure.

The movie Hard to Kill should be remade about Windows XP and IE6 :)

If you throw out China, IE6 looks like it's mostly gone.

http://www.modern.ie/ie6countdown#map

I'm sure there a few corporate holdouts (and South Korea), but I'm sure many people here can finally say goodbye. The link at the bottom discussed the current browser numbers.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/02/ie11-triples-market...

IE7 is pretty much gone too. Now it's IE8-IE11+ for the next 3-5 years.

Is there an IE 8 countdown?

Closest I could find. http://theie8countdown.com/

IE6 is pretty much dead. It's IE8 that won't die.

IE8 is hanging around because MS didn't make anything newer for XP. Which is still hanging around.

Do anyone know the percentages of the split between XP/Vista/7 in the IE8 population?

Here's what I have from about 6 months of Google Analytics. This is a line-of-business web application. GA is only on the login page.

Visits 5,645

% of Total: 4.25% (132,872)

XP: 62.37%

7: 35.57%

Vista: 1.52%

Server 2003: 0.53%

That Windows 7 number scares me a bit.

Very true, 8 has become the new 6.

In fact, I consider the difference between IE 8 and 9 bigger than the difference between IE 6 and 8.

As far as I know, IE9 is the first version of IE that does away with XP support so MS redid a lot of the rendering code to use Direct2D + DirectWrite which opened up hardware accelerated rendering.

Does "Linux" include Android and ChromeOS? One of my relatives got a Chrombook. two others got Android tablets. Other family got two new Android Moto G smartphones. Out of say 30 people I don't know anyone who got a new windows phone, tablet or desktop.

I got a surface pro 2 and am very surprised at how much I enjoy it. Playing games like Myst off of Steam blew me away. And this might sound crazy... but IE 11 is my default browser. Chrome is almost unusable on it but IE works great. Again, Very Surprised at how awesome it is.

It's a tablet size computer, NOT a tablet sized phone.

Yeah I've found that as well. Chrome does not play well in Metro Mode or Desktop mode from what I have found.

>It's a tablet size computer, NOT a tablet sized phone.

That is what I am really enjoying about it.

I think Firefox has been Metro optimized.

I haven't tried a Metro version but the latest FF in desktop mode doesn't have support for basic touch screen gestures, and doesn't support the stylus. Same with Chrome, but Chrome will outright freeze on pages that so far looks like some weird scroll configs (gmail after opening a few messages freezes)

IE 11 has at least basic gesture support, pinch-zoom, gravity scrolling (whatever its called). But what I really love is using the stylus, and IE treats that as mouse input, so you get hover, click, etc..

I'll be the guy who links to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

The Wikipedia page summarizes the data from Net Applications (the data source for the article), Stat Counter and other popular sources. They break out mobile separately, but as for Chromebook, the numbers I've seen are very low (< 1%), so it probably gets lumped in the "Others" category.

I think it safe to say that your day to day observations won't line up with the general public.

That goes without saying, it was just personal example, but the question about where Android fits in on the chart still stands.

The Network Applications page from which TFA claims to have gotten its numbers is titled "desktop operating system market share", so I'm guessing Android is not covered (though Chromebooks might be).

Does anyone know what the correlation is between the rapidly decreasing WinXP market share and the size of the large botnet pools?

I think a bigger story from these statistics is the rise in Linux: "while Linux gained 0.17 percentage points (to 1.73 percent)"

Going from 1.56% to 1.73% is an ~11% increase, which is a pretty large rise (albeit from a smaller base)

Meanwhile, XP's "huge" drop was 7%. Which is a fair drop, but I wouldn't call it huge.

Seeing this rise in Linux is promising.

There is no rise in Linux adoption unless you count ChromeOS.

I use Linux on the desktop but it has been a while since I have seen or heard of anyone making the move to Ubuntu or anything else install-yourself on the desktop. However I do know of lots of happy Chromebook users.

There is no headline story here as far as Linux is concerned. As I see it there is a very slow replacement rate for regular PC's - 10% market share in over a year looks to me like only 11% of PC's have been replaced in the last year. Given PC's are supposed to have an average lifespan of 5-7 years that means Windows really is not selling very well.

PC's with 2-3 terabyte hard drives and 8+ GB of RAM are not that expensive, and download speeds are fast with broadband, which allows "excess" resources to be used to obtain and install a Linux iso within Windows using VirtualBox. So it's become a lot easier to experiment with Linux. I like Linux Mint.

To be fair Android is doing very well.

What's this, 2002? Is 2014 really going to be the Year Of Linux On The Desktop?

because of network effects that will kick in when Linux finally reaches market share that has to be respected (I expect that to be somewhere close to 10 %), this is much more important. And now when Steam came to linux, that can be kickstarted, thus never say never :)

Linux has something like 60% of the mobile market already.

I'm perfectly serious, the cognitive dissonance that fact causes in Linux desktop enthusiasts is very revealing. If 'Linux' ever gets anywhere on the desktop, it will be one 'distro' (I prefer to call them Operating Systems) running one desktop environment with one primary application development framework that does so. That's because that fact that Linux has anything to do with Android, or FirefoxOS, or Ubuntu Mobile is basically irrelevant.

What actually matters is the UI layer and the development framework. That's why the fragmentation in Linux distros has killed any chance of Linux taking over the desktop. It's because the things that actually matter - desktop frameworks and development environments - are where the main fragmentation lies. For desktop dominance it's that desktop layer that has to be as unified, robust and compatible as possible.

Here's what keeps Linux off the desktop for most users: the monopoly known as Microsoft Office.

Oh, and games. Definitely games.

Is it necessary to be snarky like this in every thread that mentions Linux?

Well I guess it depends on what threshold you set for 'necessary', but man I've been hearing this nonsense since 1999 - actually I preached it myself back then. And just like former smokers are the most obnoxious anti-smoking crusaders, every time I see a comment like the GP I roll my eyes and feel the need to warn others to not fall into the same cult-like thinking I did back then.

If you're a developer and use Windows for any reason then Windows 8.1 is a huge improvement over previous Microsoft operating systems. Only Windows 2000 compares. The built in type-1 hypervisor alone is worth the upgrade. Hyper-V is faster than virtual-box and other is becoming a real competitor to VMWare and Citrix products.

Maybe, but 8.1 killed all of our VS2005 projects. If you are a developer that doesn't want to do upgrades on potentially fragile build files it is not a god send.

Very interesting. I think that Win8 is much much better to use especially when you have a touch screen.

But this netstat thing is only taking into account those computers with Internet usage. Would the amount of corporate, administration, financial... computers limited to intranet usage be long enough to modify this graphic?

I wouldn't be surprised if XP's share increased. Most of the desktops at a large healthcare company we had as a client were still running IE6.

If that is the case, Windows XP share will drop rapidly over the next few months. When MS ends support for XP it will no longer be in compliance with HIPPA.

Not all have to fulfill the hippa. For instance I know one of the greatest stores chain in my country that is still using win2k. Good OS by the way XD...

No,but the parent mentioned healthcare.

I wonder where Chrome sits in this.