Windows X ⇥ theverge.com

With so many of these newfangled smartphone OSes and lawsuits about who’s ripping off who, it can make one long for the good ol’ days of making fun of Windows for copying various features from the Mac. You know, “Redmond: start your photocopiers”, and all that jazz. And what a day to do it with the launch of Windows X.

*scrunches brows; checks old timey newspaper print*

Wait, it’s Windows 10? Not X?

Could have fooled me. Tom Warren covered Microsoft’s launch event for the Verge:

There’s a new universal search in the start menu that pulls in results from the web, and Microsoft is also talking up its “task view,” which helps users master Windows’ multitasking features. It looks fairly similar to Expose in OS X and allows users to set up different desktops for work, home, and other usage scenarios, switching apps between them at will.

Neat.

“It illustrates for Windows we have to address a breadth of users,” Belfiore said, moving on to show a big improvement to the command prompt: it now supports paste.

Paste on the command line? Sweet.

But Microsoft isn’t abandoning touch input. Belfiore said the Charms bar from Windows 8 has been carried over to Windows 10 with improvements of its own. “We want to support those Windows 8 users who have touch machines and getting a lot of benefit out of them.” For convertible devices like the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, Microsoft is adding a new Continuum mode that aims to make the frequent switch between tablet mode and laptop mode more seamless.

Continuity, erm, Continuum sounds swell.

For real, though, I’m just teasing. Windows 10 sounds like a smart turnaround from the disaster that is Windows 8. Too bad it’s not going to ship until “late 2015”, a full three years after the release of Windows 8.