How is a full-screen start menu better than one which is not full-screen? The latter doesn't disrupt your work flow at least.

@orcishgamer:
They not only did themselves no favor by making it unstable, Unity itself is a POS, as it's damn near impossible to tell which apps you're running. Merging opened applications with other icons (with no real visual feedback to tell which is which) is an insane idea and I have no idea why they'd choose to downgrade the experience like that.

Last I checked, Win 8 Metro was also an unusable piece of crap that took longer to load than it should have and was more clunky to navigate than anything else. Has something changed recently that people have started to defend it?

I swear I'm not taking sides here, I'm not afraid of 'new stuff'. I genuinely find Metro a more clunky experience than the start menu and I *DID* take my time to look at all menus and available shortcuts.

I also find it ridiculous that it automatically takes up the whole damn screen just because you want to open the notepad or something.


EDIT:
Also: Win 8 apps are a f*cking failure. I despise anything which cannot be easily closed (as in closing the process).

I love internet petitions. While they aren't nearly as effective as my imagination, they are a lot more social.

And as always, this reminds me a lot of Calvin and Hobbes. Has Hobbes already signed?

You do know you can set your 360 to boot directly to the drive if a disc is present, right?

Have you actually tried the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, or are you judging the product based on the 360 and/or Developer Preview?

Drag from top to bottom or Alt+F4 or use top left corner.

You're lying about the XBox 360, I have 2. You always started out on a Spotlight channel. Now you actually have a link to games on that starting channel. You can switch channels, just like before, except now I can click or say "XBox Games". The "ads" on your Games channel are relegated to the bottom right hand panel, just like all channels. I don't like that panel, it could be better, but calling the huge panel in the middle to download the latest ME3 demo or whatever an "ad" is stretching it way too thin.

You can close Metro apps in any of the following ways:

* Swipe along the left-hand side of the screen or hold Win+Tab to make the app bar appear, then middle click (or right click and choose Close)
* Drag the app's top edge to the bottom of the screen
* Hit Alt+F4
* Open the Task Manager and hit Delete on the appropriate app

The easiest option? Switch to another app and forget about it. Unused apps are automatically killed after a certain length of time. If you check the Task Manager you'll see that background Metro apps have minimal resource use unless they are performing background tasks (e.g. Mail checking for new email). The memory they have assigned is not held by the app and will be freed up if a desktop app or foreground Metro app needs it.

I have a bit of experience in helping people to use computers - in some times of the year, I do that with about 100 people per week. These people aren't techies, but they aren't dumb either (many of them are students). A good deal of them has trouble recognizing anything that's even remotely different from the current Windows functionality. I regularly see people failing at the attempt of closing a window in OS X. I regularly see people staring at an OS X desktop where the icon of their USB stick has clearly appeared, and they still ask how they are supposed to access their files, because the the window doesn't open automatically. Again, these people aren't dumb, they are the regular and pretty normal people that you could meet every day at the street.

I haven't tried Windows 8 myself yet, but from the screenshots and videos I've seen, I can easily see it causing massive problems among the non-techie crowd. And the (imho very questionable) concept of forcing totally different types of machines, with totally different means of input and totally different constraints for output, into one unified design, won't help these people at all, because they simply don't have the pads or phones that use the same UI.

In my opinion, Microsoft has chosen an extremely risky and user-unfriendly strategy. They know that they lost the battle with smartphone OS's. They know that their market share with pads is way smaller than they wanted. They know that their dominance in desktop OS's is still unbroken. They also know that the standard Windows experience is too dependent on desktop configurations to be successfully transferred to much smaller devices (see Windows CE). So what are they doing? They are trying to unify the experience, so that they can grow their market share with pads and phones, hoping people will buy those because it's operated just like their PC. And they do so at the cost of the desktop experience; they don't need to care about that because they are dominating that market anyway. They aren't interested in keeping things like the Start menu in Windows because no matter how useful they are on a desktop, they can't be easily transferred to much smaller machines. Basically, Microsoft wants to force users to forego useful elements of a desktop UI just so that they can grow their market share with smaller devices due to people being already trained in the UI. This is not innovation for the sake of usability, it's the product plan of a monopolist who realized that he's overslept several important developments.

Needless to say, I'm not thrilled by what I'm seeing from Windows 8 so far. However, I don't see myself signing any "petitions", that's a bit silly imho. But I don't see myself buying Windows 8 either.

This seems to be what it boils down to.Its supposed to be a desktop OS first and foremost (there's millions more PC users than there are smartphone/tablet users), desktop usability/friendly should be first and foremost in their minds with the smaller devices 2nd. They seemed to have really done the reverse in this case.

Not lying, but thanks for thinking I am.

After I log-in my account, the dashboard starts up at a massive ad front and center that cycles between whatever is on sale or being pushed that day. The game in the drive is a much smaller panel to the upper left. The list of games themselves is after Social and two other things. Every section is advertising something.

I didn't buy a 360 to be ad-ed to, I bought it to play games.

Please, please just take a moment to re-read what you wrote and tell me you understand just how fucking insane it is to have to do any of those things just to close a program on a desktop environment. A desktop is not a tablet, a mouse is not a touchscreen, and a UI designed for a tablet with a touchscreen is an absolute clusterfuck when stuck on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. A one-size-fits-all UI is an absolutely horrible approach, and I expect the Windows 8 adoption rate on the desktop to reflect this.

Please, reread what you wrote, and ask yourself this... "Why would I need to close a particular application?"

Wow... just, wow. I'm not even sure how to respond to that.

You know, given your behavior in threads recently, if you hadn't been here for so long I'd call you out on being a shill. If you want to actually try to address people's concerns about Win8 you might want to try explaining why the way things are being done are a superior solution compared to how things are currently done (e.g. why the hoops one has to jump through to close an app are superior to just having a simple button that one can click on). It'll be much more effective than just rabidly attacking anyone who tries to bring up concerns about Win8.

I'm not sure if there will be a need for a petition, or that one would do any good, but this is a ß, and with 8 different sku's being considered for this product, it is likely that the old interface will be in one or more of them as an option.

Two of the sku's are enterprise, and the rest consumer.

Personally, I don't care for it, but easy enough to deal with. Business will see Metro like a turd in the punch bowl, and I'm sure MSFT is aware of this.

I'd say play with it, don't get excited, and expect money (business) to win out.

Edit to add: MSFT has Metro in their new Server 8 ß as well. Surprising.