Magento is the eading e-commerce solution trusted by millions of shop owners. And here is a good news for them. Today, 17 Nov 2015, Magento 2.0 was officially released. Lets see how it behaves

1. Downloading and Unpacking

This file is huge 70 MB comressed. When uncompressed it is whole  223 MB. That is a big no no by itself only. Folders 17.000 - come on. Files 41.000 - this is the biggest joke I have ever seen.

Size	223 MB (234,020,733 bytes)
Size on Disk	289 MB (303,878,144 bytes)
Contains	41,237 Files, 17,063 Folders

2. Uploading to Server

40.000 files and 17.000 folders lets see how FileZilla will do: 1 hour and 20 minutes (7:35am to 8:48am)

3. Installation

Magento 2.0 comes with a prepackaged installer. However:

3.1. You get greeted by a blank screen. Olala.

You need to change permissions so that the files and folders are writable by the web user

3.2 You are greated by meaningless screen

You are supposed to show the terms and conditions, but they are not in this screen. They are on anothe screen. And you can proceed without even acnowledging you have read the terms. Useless.

3.3 You do not have XSL extension. is it for real.

Is XSL so needed for an e-commerce shop, that it is a REQUIRED extension?

3.4 Installation failed

Sorry, but we support MySQL version 5.6.0 or later. Its a joke. But its not a good one. Its a BAD joke.

Updating to MariaDB 10.1 did the trick

3.5 Unique Admin Endpoint

Magento will try to make you have a unique endpoint. Probably to improve security. This makes me think. From user perspective it is deffinitely not useful, as the user will have to remember the endpoint, write it down somewhere, save on the cloud, etc. Not nice in any way for everyday use. Second, this is known as "security through obscurity", which is denounced by experts. An also it meand, the Magento team does not trust how secure their product is. Which is why it resorts to this desparate means.

4. After Installation

OMG. This thing is slow. So slow, so slow. In comparison, the old 1.9 (which is slow itself) is like a racing car to a truck when compared with the 2.0. This is the reason why they need Varnish.

Ooops. Wait. May be this slowness was only on first load, as the site sped up a bit, after 2-3 minutes. Probably Magento was building the cache. During first run Magento 2.0 did fail to load the CSS files, which is why the frontend looked like nothing. But nce it loaded, it looked much better.

5. Graphical User Interface

The shop default interface definitely looks much better and responsive. The admin panel looks much better, and is deffinitely more understandable, than the old version. Menu items are definitely more meaningful.

Summary

To sum it all up. Magento 2.0 seems like a step back development wise. More than 17,000 directories and 40,000 files is definitely a big setback. Deffinitely, there is lots of bloatware there, which can be removed, and its a shame this was not done by the team, but is left to the end users. From customer point the default template looks better, however you will deffinitely want it to be changed, and restyled. Administration wise, I expect it to be easier to use and manage.