Dual boot: Dump Windows 8? Or keep it

[lile001]

Windows 8 is cruel punishment for a past life, I believe. I'm really sorry to have supported it by buying a computer that came with it. What was Microsoft smoking when they came up with it?

So with a great amount of help from a very knowledgable friend (I am a freaking n00b) we have Win 8 dual booting with Ubuntu 13.04. Worked great for a week or two, but now Windows has started to take over. At one point, Ubuntu was the default boot OS, but now Windows has crept back in, and now it has made itself the default. Grrr...

My friend can fix it, until it grows back again like a rampaging lab experiment ...

Now my question is not how to fix this, but whether? One option we are considering is to nuke Win 8 altogether and install a legal copy of Windows 7, never looking back. Win 7, as you may know, plays nice with dual boot OSs. This isn't free, as I'd end up paying upwards of a C-note to get rid of MS's Win 8 garbage. What would you, Kind Reader, do?

Would you recommend dumping Win 8 altogether in favor of Win 7, or would you argue that it would be better to put up with the annoyances, in the few instances I absolutely have to use windows, keeping Win 8? Leave well enough alone? Hell I could buy a second monitor for the price of Win 7? Discuss.

[oldfred]

It seems with UEFI, systems can go into UEFI settings and change some things. So on a Windows update, it does go inot UEFI and make sure Windows is the default boot.
Or if you have to use Boot-Repair to rename boot files to make it work as it only booted the Windows efi file the you have to rerun the renaming function to make it work again. That a system only boots Windows is against the UEFI standard. You should be able to dual boot both systems with either secure boot on or off.

It took me about 5 years to wean myself off XP. I had one application that the equivalent was not as good in Linux. But after a while it just decided that the bit of a hassle of the equivalent being not as good was less of a hassle than booting XP.

You may want to see what Windows does with Blue. You may get the upgrade inexpensively, probably not free, but it supposedly will undo some of the worst new features of Windows 8.

[2F4U]

As a Linux-only user I would obviously suggest to get rid of Windows 8 and use only Ubuntu. However, such a decision depends on your personal requirements. For example, it may be sufficient to keep Windows 8 in a virtual machine to suffice your needs. If, however, you are into Windows gaming, this won't work. What I am trying to say is that you should provide more information about what exactly Windows is needed for.

[Mark Phelps]

LOTS of the complaints about the difficulties of using Win8 are really just frustrations with the new "tiles" desktop.

You can, instead, return to the "desktop" of the Win7 days, complete with the previous Start menu -- and then, you get the benefits of new hardware without the frustrations of struggling with a new desktop.

For more information, you should visit the Win8 forums (eightforums.com) and look through their Customization section for suggestions regarding Start menu alternatives.

[lile001]

As a Linux-only user I would obviously suggest to get rid of Windows 8 and use only Ubuntu. However, such a decision depends on your personal requirements. For example, it may be sufficient to keep Windows 8 in a virtual machine to suffice your needs. If, however, you are into Windows gaming, this won't work. What I am trying to say is that you should provide more information about what exactly Windows is needed for.


Of course I use Linux unless I am dragged kicking and screaming back int o the Windows world by some of the engineering software I have to run. Have never been able to get anything running under Wine, especially engineering software which often has very exacting graphics or calculation requirements. So far we've gone back to Win 7 with some difficulty but it is working OK.