W8 makes a lot more sense, to me, if you think of Metro applications as each running fullscreen in their own ephemeral virtual desktops. You don't "minimize" a virtual desktop; you switch away from it. You don't "close" a virtual desktop; you quit the program running on it, and it ceases to exist. (In other words, the solution in W8.0 is either "press Alt+F4 to quit the application", or "throw-your-mouse-toward/swipe-away-from at the top-left corner to open the virtual-desktop switcher.")

It's exactly the same as fullscreen app behavior in OSX, or Gnome; the only difference is that your "native" windowed apps are all limited to living on a single virtual desktop, rather than the user being able to spread them out across several.

In the upcoming 8.1.1 update (or whatever it's called), there'll be an additional UX: throw-your-mouse-toward/swipe-away-from the top of a virtual desktop, and you'll get a sort of title-bar with caption buttons for the virtual desktop itself. That's actually kind of brilliantly-obvious, once you see it, and I hope that idea spreads to every OS.

The problem I have is that it feels like Microsoft is forcing me into that virtual desktop environment when I just want a regular desktop environment; and it's that aspect that I feel will turn people to Win7.

It's an interface clearly designed for a multi-touch trackpad, and it's a joy to use. It makes a 13" laptop screen feel a lot less cramped. Contrast to Win8 which is an overcomplicated mess, filled with interface decisions that are suboptimal for a mouse or trackpad interface.

I think the animations on Mac OS make full screen mode great. Slide some fingers on the trackpad and you switch to the next full screen app or virtual desktop. On Win8 it's a jarring zoom in zoom out animation, without any ability to 'peek', at least using a mouse/keyboard interface on a desktop.

But until Mavericks, it was horribly horribly broken and useless on multi-monitor setups and even now isn't all that great.

Why use Win8, then? Well, it has some nice small core OS improvements over Win7, licenses were cheap, and it will be supported for longer going forward.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard, all you have to remember is to hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard until you get to the Metro home screen. From there, Desktop Mode is one click away. Also, Alt+Tab works in Metro, and can take you to any process- metro or desktop.

This is all true. But the fact that it's even possible to get so lost, and the fact that we don't feel feckless and asinine in sharing hints for how to get out of that situation on a forum for hackers. . . it still betrays a serious, disastrous user experience failure.

Having the user get stuck in situations where they don't know how to accomplish some specific task is probably always going to be an unavoidable risk. But to take the "I have no idea where I am and I have no idea how to get out" level of lost-ness experience that was previously only possible in command-line interfaces, and figure out how to re-create it in a windowed GUI. . . It's really a pretty impressive feat, when you think about it.

Perhaps that's also something to do with what happened in Redmond. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Windows 8's UI mess is at least partially a product of letting a bunch of technology people get too far inside their own heads.

1. be able to be "restored" from fullscreen to become regular windows, and

2. obey a preference in the Control Panel to always start them as windows rather than fullscreen.

I expect people will forget almost all of their objections to W8 after that.

I've got no real complaint with Metro apps, as such. What I've got a complaint with is that they don't behave like every Windows application I've used since approximately 1990. Not because there's anything broken about the existing desktop PC interaction model that Microsoft had been incrementally refining for decades, mind you. No, it's really just that Microsoft : Captain Ahab :: iDevices : white whale.

Anecdotal, but in every place I've worked or been with people running Windows, most people run everything maximized and switch between applications. MS probably just took the hint that people don't like fiddling with lots of half expanded windows and designed the OS around it. Unfortunately, they did it all wrong for the Desktop.

It's never really been a good experience in OS X so it's just never become part of the cultural workflow. Full-screen mode in OS X (and well, also Windows) is also not the same as maximize on Windows and until pretty recently (Mavericks) was quite broken anyways.

Were their monitors small? That could be a contributing factor.

Maybe it is a personal preference, but I never liked fullscreen applications for anything - I'd only maximise if I was focused on one application's content, and it was large enough that scrolling would be reduced significantly if I did so. At any given time I probably have several other things running, and I like to see what the other apps are doing and/or refer to them. I'm also not really a fan of tabbed browsing, since I often compare and look at several pages simultaneously, and with only tabs, I would otherwise have to remember the previous page's contents as I switched between them.

What Windows 8 doesn't give you while full screen is the task bar, which used to show the user what is behind the active program.

Users don't like not knowing what's going on.

Which brings me to one of my everlasting questions, although somehow unrelated to the topic. Why aren't screens square?

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=298

You don't need a large screen if you're going to leave all that space unused.

16x[9/10] sort-of matches the field of view we have.

There's also a difference in terms of the keyboard shortcuts: in OS X, Cmd+W is "close tab/window" and Cmd+Q is "quit application", and they're relatively commonly used (and easy to use). In Windows, Alt+F4 is much less user-friendly (most laptop keyboards these days don't even let you use F4 without Fn), as evidenced by the fact that users keep on trying to use Esc and being frustrated when it doesn't work.

Sure, we're often fullscreen, but for many tasks being able to have multiple windows (hint!) on the screen is really helpful.

W8 takes this away and doesn't give anything in return.

It's not quite full-screening, and Microsoft made a mistake with that, but it is a notable different in the two environments.

I continue to be surprised that HN consistently upvotes comments with this criticism of Windows 8. The start button has been present since Windows 8.1 was released last October. The analogy would be criticizing Ubunto for a feater missing from 12.04.

Having largely transitioned from Windows to Linux in the past few months, I'd never have made it if I abandoned Linux every time I encountered fifteen minutes of configuration WTF? and compared to figuring out how to remove the installation media from yum's list of repositories learning the charms bar [before the start button and Windows 8.1] was a piece of cake.

Then again, I watched the Windows 8 tutorials.

The missing start menu may not be a current issue, but it's a fair example of what's wrong with Windows 8 from a UX perspective. That is to say - abandoning almost everything that is familiar about the Windows UX in favor of a new and largely unproven desktop interface.

On top of it all, it's a touch-centric interface that feels (to many people, at least) out of place in a desktop. I personally can't imagine jabbing at my desktop monitor with my finger. What works on a tablet in my lap becomes really awkward when the screen is a full arms length from my face.

If the monitor in question isn't a touchscreen, then what's left is a really unfortunate mess that most less tech-savvy users are going to have a tough time getting rid of.

I think the improvements to the core os and the desktop are worth the upgrade, but jesus, metro is stupid on anything but a tablet.

(Scroll down a bit for the numbers)

The boot time is definitely faster. I think removing aeroglass also helped a bit with energy consumption and window rendering speed, although I have to admit I miss it. They also updated a few small things that aren't a big deal but are kind of nice (the file copy dialog is WAY better).

I really like the way KDE does things: favourites list with search box above, with an applications list a click away.