I have 1920 x 1200 pixels of screen estate on a 28'' monitor. I _want_ visible controls. One of the things I like least about UIs is if they try to hide controls away from me. (Example: Morrowind with its customizable UI vs Oblivion with its separated, tabbed UI in favor of showing a huge character render, or Civ4 with its extremely control-rich UI vs. Civ5 where you need to dig through several screens just to get the info or perform the action you want). I tried using gestures on my Netbook's touchpad and found them fickle, error-prone, and much less convenient than window controls (after two months of trying, I just bought myself a mouse for the netbook, now it's fine). Even for software like Media Player or Winamp, I _always_ switch off any "fancy" designs or skins at the first opportunity, and switch to a classic "boxy" design which shows me all controls at a glance. You know this Media Player skin which hides the window borders from the user? One of the first things I do, every time I install Windows, is to get these borders back so that I have visible, easily discernible controls in the standard places, because this improves the program's usability a lot for me.

I'm not saying that Windows 8 is evil, however - at least for me - it seems to severely reduce the usability of my machine. My impression is that Microsoft tries to force me to use controls that are inefficient and inconvenient for the way I'm using my computers. Hence I'd probably use my Linux more often (I tend to have multi-boot machines) before I'd switch to Windows 8.

Precisely. For some of us the limitations of Metro mean that it ends up being nothing more than cruft that gets in the way. Thus the criticism of it.

There's not much point in "directly exposing the content" if the user can't easily do what they want with the content. Dragging also requires a fair bit more effort than clicking, and I can actually see this causing some ergonomic and repetitive stress problems if someone is having to do it on a fairly regular basis. As for screen real estate, this may be a legitimate reason on mobile devices and tablets where screen real estate is much more limited, it's an absolutely silly concern for any decent-sized computer monitor. Additionally, visible controls have the advantage of letting the user easily know what commands are available, rather than requiring them to dig around in a help file just to figure out what they can tell the program to do. Visible commands are also unambiguous (a user either clicked a button or they didn't), while gesture-based commands can add some serious frustration due to a user trying to gesture to tell the program to do one thing, but it being interpreted as a different command (think of how frustrating the spell-casting in Arx Fatalis could be).

If you're using home premium you don't have access to gpedit.msc, but this registry edit worked for me.

The little windowing controls are what people are used to but as a UI design it's actually complete ass. I won't be sorry to see it go. It's not at all intuitive and it's actually hard to do on many machines, even old machines. You get an older or younger user to sit down on a fast or a slow mouse, or just about any laptop track pad, and they will have trouble hitting these buttons, not to mention there's no reason at all to know what they do as they're not standard anywhere really (seriously even UIs that copy them, like Gnome and KDE, often have different looking skins).

Technology is supposed to be enabling for all people, not reserved for people who put a deep amount of time into learning it. Sure that was necessary years ago, but it hasn't been for years, and frankly it's a bit embarrassing it's taken us this long to try and fix it.

You keep going on about keeping programs open. The way these are designed there's literally no difference from bringing one back up from suspend or bringing it up fresh, you lose no work, the old state was saved. It literally is a non-issue and I don't understand why you think it is, other than to add an extra bone to pick. If you have a program relegated to the background and it's not actively pursuing a task then by definition you aren't using it. There's literally no reason to care unless you like to use apps by people who actually don't know how to properly write them.

As for closing apps, this is a rather silly nitpick. You're basically going on about one little button not being there. Again, shifting an app to the background (provided it hasn't crashed or hung) is functionally exactly the same as closing it. You're basically complaining that there's a stopped thread that an OS daemon can wake up if it needs to. The only reason you perceive it as a problem is because you're stuck on an old model of thinking: having a process list, as one example. The "process list" is nearly meaningless in this design. It's like worrying about not being able to control the fuel injection on your battery powered car. There is no fuel injection, there is no spoon, there is no old paradigm of a process list.

People bitched for over a year that they could manage Android application state better than Android OS and each and every one of them was wrong. Beyond that, nearly all of them had a fundamental misunderstanding of what the OS was trying to do, so they basically had no hope of doing a better job, even by accident.
Ahem, Windows 7 isn't designed in such a manner, that's sort of the point...

I'm not going to argue this further as I don't think anything useful will come of it- the arguments you make sound good in theory, but I just don't think those arguments are going to hold up once reality steps in. We'll just have to wait until Win8 actually gets released and see what the adoption rate on the desktop ends up being. I'm predicting a repeat of Vista (perhaps even a bit worse), but if things turn out differently I'll gladly admit I was wrong.

There's definitely an Apple mentality behind this, isn't there?

I think I may have stumbled upon a way to explain this. Here it goes...

Windows has always been kind of the same core concept, at the guts level of the OS for a long time. Some releases were nothing more than patches and refinements on an existing core with some UI work thrown on top. Some others were actually rewrites at the core, but the functionality was largely an iteration or reimplementation of the existing "way to do things."

Windows hasn't evolved, truly, in a very long time. At best we've had rewrites that implemented the same old methods of "making stuff work" in a improved and more fluid way, but at the core it was still the same idea.

Okay, here's why you shouldn't think that with Windows 8: it's not like that. The entire core idea, methodology, etc., in the very guts of the thing, has been replaced. We're not just getting a UI improvement this time, or a partial rewrite of the existing Windows concepts. It has all changed.

That's why it's so hard to communicate this. A lot of folks are looking at the UI changes and for the first time they aren't just arbitrary ideas to possibly improve usability. In this case they're driven, at least partially, by the core changes to the OS. It's arguable that we haven't had core changes to Windows OS on this scale since Win 95 came along.

So basically what I'm saying, when you're evaluating the concept of Windows feature being radically different, somehow discouraged by the UI, or even taken away, realize that this may be very well because you don't need it anymore or it doesn't make sense in the design.

Now, you may end up hating Windows 8, it might not be your thing, and that's okay. But the changes are at a fundamental level of the OS in addition to the UI this time, so it's not like what you're probably used to with iterated versions of the Windows OS.

Oh god remember the arguments when the start menu was unveiled??
"Why are you putting everything in a menu it should be on the desktop!!!!111one"

Which is why there's been plenty of cases of apps on Android (which uses a very similar system) causing a drain because of bad programming. I don't like apps that keep running even if they get killed sooner or later - some apps HAVE to be closed as well for security reasons. And if Windows can't even properly kill apps when you're shutting down, what are the chances they'll properly kill apps all the damn time? In theory it sounds well but I can see too many potential issues with this.

EDIT: and oh, is it just me who thinks the name "METRO" is about the worst name they could have picked? I can't think of anything positive about that word: crowded and dirty places filled with hobos, rude and/or demented people, stress, a place you want to leave as quickly as possible. Or metro men/metrosexual. Seriously, the marketing department at Microsoft needs to cut back on the coke.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/07/improving-power-efficiency-for-applications.aspx

Don't double click the border. :D Or if you're referring to snapping, only 1 or 2 pixels on the edges register that event, try to at least not move the mouse exactly on the edge of the screen.
Keyword, Android. :D

Sorry, I am not trying to troll, but the OS is terrible in terms of optimization compared to iOS and WP7, let alone full featured desktop OS. Oh, and I don't know whether it works perfectly with Win 8, still too early to say. But so far, I've not had major problems.

While I like Android for its good points this is not one of them. kavazov is correct, Android is a mess, partly due to the lack of verification on the apps you get. Certification is something Metro will have and that should greatly alleviate the "this app is a clusterfuck" occurrences. Obviously there will still be times you need to kill something and you still can in Windows 8. It should, however, be rare.

Android, what can I say about it? Google wrote a style guide for Android applications and breaks it pretty consistently with their own apps. Except for Intents (which are frankly an awesome idea) Android doesn't have much going for it aside from its pseudo-openness.

They are taking the whole certification process very seriously.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/02/13/submitting-your-windows-8-apps.aspx

Nevertheless, there will be applications that will simply be terrible. Windows Phone Marketplace is flooded (as I no doubt are other application stores for smartphone OSes), but I guess they are forced to release crap or developer will switch stores (it would be great if all stores agree to not release shitty applications).

love the "windows 8 media center edition" line in imgburn :> It really nailed the truth :D