That's horrific.

It looks the same. I the blurring/transparency that important?

Eh, it looks to me like win7 with less transparency. I'd say it's more on the order of "minor theme adjustment" than anything.

I just can't make myself get worked up about it one way or another like it's a huge deal.

If these screenshots are to be believed, it feels like every fancier looking OS from the late 90s, back before most of the fancier stuff was really feasible.

Shadows have a role (helps to establish depth and layers). Gloss has a role (draws the eye to interactive elements). Translucency has a role (establishes that something is over something else and gives it a sense of impermanence). Gradients have a role (draws the eye along the gradient towards something). Windows Vista and 7 overdid it by quite a bit, but cutting them out entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You sacrifice usability when you do so. You can take a minimalist approach while still having those elements.

How odd - it looks like any of a dozen Linux window managers from the late 90's. Back then I used to think how the flat/square look was just the first simple thing a developer would come up with, and how Linux would need a little more graphical refinement if they ever hoped to go mainstream. In the end it doesn't matter much for usability, but it sure looks like a toy/baby window manager to me.

All I have to do is set the window border color to a nice light blue, drag the task bar to the top of the screen, and I'll feel like I'm back using my Amiga from 20 years ago. Which isn't a bad thing, really.

What I find funny is that everyone bashed XP's big rounded edges and colorful themes as being cartoonish. Then Vista came around, and everyone railed against Aero for being a pointless resource hog, adding eye candy without functionality. With 7, everyone complained it was just a service pack for Vista, because there wasn't a big huge interface change. Now, they decide to overhaul it to be a simpler, cleaner interface, without the frivolous flair, and everyone hates against that too.

Why would you want your CPU doing the Window compositing? Computers have these massive GPUs sitting around doing nothing - might as well use them for something like, I dunno, graphics processing.

This theme seems to already be present in the Consumer Preview that was released a few weeks ago. The only difference is that the RTM is going to use this theme by default. Did I miss something here?

After having used Windows 8 and started developing apps for it using VS 2012 (11 beta) for several months now, I have to say Metro is about the laziest UI design that has come out of any OS developer in the history of operating systems.

What they have done is removed ALL borders, all color variations and rounded corners, along with any chrome and created blobs of white/grey boxes with text on it.

Its almost like Microsoft has given up on traditional desktop applications and want to encourage more "web-like" app designs exclusively for the Metro overlay.

I could almost be claimed to be a Windows fanboy, but Windows 8 is the first time since Windows ME that I am greatly disappointed in the direction Microsoft is taking for UI/UX. It is horrid on almost every level of UI and UX and I have been a UI/UX developer for 15+ years.

Windows 8 may be the biggest disaster they have ever created.

You do realize, of course, that roughly 30 years ago, computer geeks were running complaining about these new-fangled GUIs and how they just wanted a good ol' command line interface without the pretty graphics. I think we're long past those arguments at this point. IOW, you are squarely in the minority. People want computer interfaces they can relate to and that feel "human" and that means pretty effects and cool graphics.

There is that start key on your keyboard that 99% of keyboards not produced by Apple Inc. in the last 15 years have. Tablets will also have a physical start button, much like the home button on iOS devices.

You mean the key that 90% of gamers disabled or removed because accidentally touching it just as you were about to cap/frag/score/win/pwn/save the princess is the leading cause of keyboards being snapped in half over a knee in a fit of hysterical rage? That key us gamers haven't used, ever?
Great.

What kind of crap games are you playing that don't disable that key for you? Seriously. That key is 17 years old.

Funny you mention that. I had told a colleague the other day that I predict this will be the same as Active Desktop. People will just want to turn it off / get it the hell out of the way so they can get some actual work done with their PCs. Unfortunately, it's going to be another set of APIs in Windows that will have to be maintained forever, and will turn the OS a bit schizophrenic in terms of it's presentation.

I'm actually really happy with Windows 7 - I really like the way it looks and performs. So, I don't think it's a matter of me simply not liking change, I think. I just can't see any use for this Metro stuff on a desktop. Sure, it makes perfect sense on tablets, but why try to pretend it's useful in situations where it obviously won't be?

Meh. I just don't get this at all.

Agreed. Basically, they've gone from just lines ("flat"), to beveled, to Luna (the "Fisher Price" default XP theme) to Aero Glass, and back to lines again. I wonder how much Aero cost to develop, now that they're basically tossing it.