Do we need to use Windows Metro?

I have been doing lots of reading up on Windows 8 over the past week, but something I don't understand is Windows Metro. Is this something that we will all have to use? The preview versions seem to have it on out of the box and then people have manually disabled it.

Are we going to be forced to use that horrible layout every time we click the start menu?

 

All indications and comments are that, whilst it will remain the main feature, selection of the non-touch desktop that we are familiar with, will be an available default option.

 

So no need for me to panic? I can't imagine using Metro on a desktop. Plain old Windows for me please!

 

I agree you. Metro for Windows Phone, yes, for Windows 8 on tablet, hum ya but on PC, I don't like and horrible with the mouse.

 

I agree, Metro is pure RUBBISH. If that is the route MS is heading Windows 7 will be my last MS OS and this Lenovo will be my last PC. Windows 7 may be my last MS OS anyway. Seriously tired of having to do a clean install every 6 months because my system slows down. Doesn't matter if I use a registery cleaner or not, Windows ALWAYS slows down after a few months of use.

I have a i7 with 8GB RAM and an SSD drive and no matter what, after a few months Windows slows down. This is due to the stupid continued use of the Registery. That thing should have been aborted years ago. But no instead MS gives us Metro, ugh!

 

vijer - I'm inclined to agree with you. This Metro thing will certainly help decide my future as a Windows user, grim as it already is.

 

Well, Been testing the developer preview and microsoft is betting a lot on this OS, which is focused ON TABLETS. Have they forgotten that 80% of the world pc's are PC's??

The "Metro" thing is not for the common user. I guess Microsoft will be releasing a Windows 8 for desktops, to recover from this future crash against the wall....

 

I guess Metro is NOT focusing on tablets. It is focusing on a simplified and highly uniform UI. Such UI is automatically good for tablets, but it is also good for any simple task as well. I played with the weather app yesterday and noticed that it requires exactly zero thinking. I was astonished by the difference between easy and the exact zero. This is due to Metro, and I start to believe it is a good UI since the number of simple apps one uses is much greater than the number of advanced apps. I also see MS moving in the exactly opposite direction with the ribbon.

Thus, I guess eventually every app will have a Metro UI and some more advanced apps will also have a classic desktop UI. Something like that is already happening. For example, a good media player (cannot call it by name here since that will be advertising) provides 2 highly different interfaces, one classical and another one for a remote control, and it is sometimes easier to do simple things with the latter using the keyboard.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that "Are we going to be forced to use that horrible layout every time we click the start menu?" is completely misguiding. The Start Screen is not Metro, it is yet another app done Metro style. That is, it may be bad, but this does not necessarily mean Metro is bad. The Start Screen was unusable in the developer preview, but has improved and now it is almost usable. The only show stopper I see is that when a desktop app installer adds shortcuts to the Start menu, they all appear in the last Start Screen group. This makes the process of repositioning them tricky. If they appeared in a separate group, that would be fine.

Another potentially critical flaw that may surface later is that the Start Screen has limited capacity. There should be some way to fold and unfold groups in it.

Even as is, it may be nice. For example, I installed my favorite player and the player installed a bunch of necessary codecs. Thus many icons were added to the last Start Screen group. I had to move them all to a separate group, but finally I got a better layout than the classical start menu - all the player related stuff is in one place.

I could achieve the same effect with the start menu and more effort, but that would prevent uninstallers to delete the shortcuts.

 

Could you enlarge on that? My understanding is that the Start screen is exactly that - Metro style, and any of the items clicked there will open that particular application?
How did you find it unuseable, previously. I dumped it quickly, but don't recall any problems.

 

Yes, Start Screen is a Metro style app and yes, we are doomed to see it whenever we want to launch anything from scratch. Naturally, if you have another launcher in the desktop, from the Explorer to Total Commander, you do not need to go to the Start Screen. However, in the context of "do we need to use Metro" the Start Screen is a minor detail since it is a simple launcher and does not represent Metro ideas well enough.

The Developer Preview did not provide visual hints for rearranging tiles into groups. I installed a couple of Delphis, VS 2010, Virtual Box, a couple of players and the Start Screen was cluttered beyond repair. Thus I just left W8 to sit in its partition without any attention.

 

While I like experimental things and fresh ideas, I guess Microsoft's developers have forgotten the first rules: "easy is right" and "don't make me think".
I had to google 'shut down Windows 8' in order to do so. Insane. I hope they put some 'users' in front of their OS and understand that normal people will not understand that thing.