Yeah i totally get the use of it it's something i wanted with Windows 8 just the start screen with taskbar. But for things like gaming could be an issue? Like i do loads of video encoding and image processing so i like to have everything that i can stop running to well stop running It's effects would be very minor anyway i guess. Just social, news, weather, etc etc all running constant would feel wrong i dono? Maybe just the option to pin to desktop would be enough and still have start screen or something.
Not knowing much about info-hash's (magnet links) and such myself, would it be possible to use the hash from that image to create a working torrent (provided someone uploads the ISO and it has the same hash)?
Some decent coding could neuter it when totally covered, or minimize usage, whether you have a maximized or a Full Screen app running. A lot of games go Full Screen, and most AV detect this and tone themselves down. But if my desktop PC is sitting there idle with all my Windows minimized, why would I not want to get mail notifications in a way that doesn't involve popup spam that is bigger than the OSX stuff? That is much more useful than shoehorning them into the Start Menu on the side, which I'm going to ignore because if I opened the Start Menu I'm dead focused on opening something specific.
Magnet links theoretically support SHA-1 hashes, so in theory you could craft a magnet link with that hash and see if anything comes up, but in practice they rarely ever use SHA-1 hashes, so I don't know if this would work 100%