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Mary Jo Foley reports at ZDNet that according to sources who've had good track records on Windows information, Microsoft won't be delivering a new Start Menu for Windows 8 with its coming Windows 8.1 Update 2, after all. "Up until recently, Microsoft was hoping to make a new "Mini" Start Menu part of a second update to Windows 8.1," says Foley. "Windows 8.1 Update 2 was and still is, last I heard slated to arrive in August of this year." Microsoft's operating systems group has decided to hold off on delivering a Microsoft-developed Start Menu until Threshold, the next "major" release of Windows. Threshold, which may or may not ultimately be called Windows 9, is expected to be released in April 2015.
The original Windows 8 interface lacked the Start Menu, a familiar component of previous versions of the operating system, replacing it with the live tile-driven Start screen. Many users didn't like the change, and some PC manufacturers and developers offered ways to bring back versions of the old Start Menu. Microsoft appeared to relent at Build when it unveiled the revised Start Menu, enhanced with Windows Modern UI improvements.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 06 2014, @12:46AM
Just want to note -- if he wants to try Arch, he should probably start with Antergos.
Standard Arch not only has no GUI when you first boot up...it doesn't even have an installer anymore. The "installer" disk is just a command-line live CD and the only kind of "installer" provided is a shell script to create the initial filesystem. Which is great when you want to REALLY know all the details of your system...but a pain in the ass otherwise. Antergos is basically JUST a nice installer for Arch. It'll get you up to speed immediately with sane defaults, a GUI, the absolute latest packages, but once it's installed it's really just standard Arch.
I'm a die-hard Arch user myself...but even I ended up going with Antergos on my latest install. The reason being that I like keeping my hard drives encrypted, and I had a somewhat more complicated setup with two drives, one being an SSD, and Arch revised their wiki pretty heavily on how to set that up. So I'm sitting there digging through the wiki to figure out what tweaks I'll need with this new setup, and the full page on encrypted disks is *huge*...I forget exactly what problem I was having, but as some point I realized that it was all pretty fuckin' moronic and had the full install done in about thirty minutes once I decided to go download Antergos.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Friday June 06 2014, @10:40AM
Good to know, I've never installed Arch. I used it briefly on someone else's machine so I wasn't aware of the installer requirements. It seemed like a great OS for doing a lot of heavy computational work. He was using it for data crunching for ocean models.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe