It's true, Metro was made with Tablet PC and Phones in mind (touchscreen functionality), which is of course the market MS wants to conquer. But for Desktop PC Metro absolutely sucks. In Win7 they took out Classic Start Menu, which still existed in Vista -- huge mistake as now I have to use the Classic Shell app. I say 'huge mistake' because new methods should always be offered as an OPTION, not as a mandatory thing. And since Windows 8 has been built with the ability to detect both mouse/keyboard AND/OR touchscreen (unlike Apple's approach, which needs 2 OS's), the Metro thing should absolutely not be forced upon users. If anything let them make Metro only the default on touchscreen devices. Listen this time around MS: OPTIONS, NOT LIMITATIONS TO ESTABLISHED WAYS OF COMPUTING IS WHAT WE WANT AND NEED.
This metro style with tiles isn't bad, but it shouldn't replaced standard start menu.. And should be possible to easy switch (officially by MS) between it, and total disable, but keep all new features Task Manager, new dialogs etc. Personally I voted for old, good start menu, I switched to it by registry edit
I can see it working well in certain situations like tablets and phones maybe even touch screens. But on a standard desktop without touchscreen its a step back since it now requires more work just to get to the core elements of says control panel. Still this is a long way from done and iam certain they are going to offer the option to use both the standard desktop or metro. Be sort of hard to not remember that lesson from vista. As for the os itself its certainly going the right way. Its just works smoothly and the new boot feature is sort shocking in its speed.
that's all very nice. But I've notice the UI doesn't work all the time. I have minimum apps installed, and the Metro UI stopped working altogether. so for me, it's a sore spot and a big pain.
Of course it looks nice, but for now not so useful for non touch user PC.... With bigger LCD/LED tv maybe will be useful to working from long distance(instead making icons and fonts bigger.....) Until is really finished, we can really not say good or bad..... I voted for old start menu, but keep on notebook the new one just to test and play with.....
I'm finding the more I use the Metro stuff , the better I like it! I'm hoping further down the line the UI is going to be theme-able in some way though
The whole Startscreen is based on DirectUI (some XML Like layout to design the interface) But its less central, unlike a msstyle file
Maybe if they fixed it so it wouldn't activate when you accidently click the bottom left corner while playing a fullscreen game :/
Metro is just a shell, and not a very good one. Businesses are not going to want to adopt this, I don't want it for my main PC. However, from a parents point of view, for kids it has allot of potential. Thank goodness that windows 7 has some serious staying power.