Ugh. It's official- at least half of the tech world has completely lost their freakin' minds.
Installed it today on an ancient AMD 939-based spare PC I have at work with dual 24" monitors. The good news: it ran very fast and was snappy even on such old hardware. (But then again, so does Windows 7). Install was very quick.
But then the bad news.
The whole 'metro' UI baloney is nothing more than the equivalent of a popup ad in place of a logical start menu, with fugly blocks of color showcasing crapware-level garbage of the sort most people uninstall off their PC on day one.
On a real system, and given the option, I'd uninstall half of this garbage- including metro- and just keep the traditional tried and true desktop interface.
And by the way, no I don't buy the BULLCRAP that average non-techy computer users are going to just fall over themselves in love with this crap. I asked people in my office today- perfect examples of the average non-tech users- to take a look and see what they thought. Most laughed at the sheer silliness of Metro. In fact, that was the first reaction of just about everyone who saw it, laughter. Because the whole concept is embarrassingly silly. It instantly insinuates that the user MUST be a total retard, and therefore needs a 10-foot brightly colored toddler interface in order to interact with their PC.
NO, sorry, I don't believe even novice users are really interested in having their computer interface make them seem like infantile retards. Now granted, many people don't know what they want in a computer- they just want to surf the web, write emails, etc, and don't think much about user interfaces. But that's half the problem- the interface itself is now IN YOUR FACE with the message "YOU MUST BE A SIMPLETON!" Even if people don't know exactly what they want in a computer interface, I'm pretty certain many know what they DON'T want.
The next common reaction I got was total confusion. (Yes, the wave of the future! Confusing the hell out of the user who is clearly too stupid to want anything other than to be confused.) Click the start menu- and you're greeted with the aforementioned 10-foot toddler interface pop up ad. Great. So there's a big block of wasted space that says 'START'. CLick there. Nothing, of course. So scan through a bunch of odd-sized tiles in what has to be one of the dumbest concepts for application launching/organization ever devised, until finally (maybe, maybe not) finding what you actually want. Click and you're greeted to yet another full-screen 'pop-up ad' equivalent that again wastes your screen real estate.
Then what? I watched several people click around all over the screen trying to find ANYTHING to interact with. How to turn the damn stupid full screen pop-up 'app' off? Who knows? After much clicking and dicking around, a few people actually found the 'hidden' start menu (another BRILLIANT INNOVATION!) and got back to the original full screen pop-up ad (IE: metro or what-ever-the-hell.)
My first thought, and the same of several other people I witnessed, was "Why the hell do I have to click all over the screen- this corner, that place, this area over here, this over there, under here, over there..." to do what I'd normally do from just ONE AREA??
Sorry, even on a tablet I'd hate that.
Click desktop, and suddenly sanity is restored. The computer works like an adult's computer again. As long as the pop-up ad 'metro' nonsense stays out of the picture, things are pretty nice. More confusion: click on IE from the sane interface and suddenly IE opens the way you'd expect it to. So now we have IE for sane computer users AND an IE for the 10-foot toddler interface crowd? Eh, something for everyone I guess.
I thought I was going to hate the ribbon-windows, but since you can collapse them, I actually like the idea. That feature certainly shows promise for being very useful.
Then the real fun- after it took me several minutes of trying, I had to see how long it would take Joe or Jane 'Average' to figure this mind-teaser out: TURN THE COMPUTER OFF.
Let's see: Start? Nope. Back to pop-up ad land. The big 'START'? Nope? Click around all over the screen-- nope, nope. nope. nope. Opps- open up some full screen crapware. Figure out once more how to turn that off again. Back to desktop. Click around- we know it isn't start... nope. nope. nope. nope. nope.
Okay, back to start: finally find the place where you can click 'Log out'- do that. Log out. Click around... something starts to open on the logoff screen- click- nope, it's closed again. Click again- opens- click- closed. Click- wait for it to open- FINALLY you can find yet another area of the screen where you can click to SHUT DOWN.
<sarcasm>WOW! Innovative! My mother simply can't wait for this amazing level of intuitiveness!</sarcasm>
Now, maybe there's some other way to find shut-down, but I didn't bother looking, and no one else found it. A few people didn't even find the above 'major innovative!' way.
And yeah, I realize it's an early preview. A lot will change in the final. But come on. The whole metro direction is pure crap. It's just taking the start menu and making it into full-screen bloat- taking what used to take the flick of your wrist (scrolling up the start menu) and bloating it into having to dick around all over the screen.) At best, it will be a little like using Windows Media Center to launch all applications. Now, WMC in current form makes sense because it's a 10-foot interface. You're supposed to use it from halfway across the room on a huge HDTV screen. But using it for the main Windows launcher on a desktop you're seated right in front of is silly.
I hope the focus on the stuff that is actually cool- faster speed, improvements to explorer, etc. and tone down the metro crap. I've heard it said that we'll be able to turn it off- I sure as hell hope so!
I think most people will turn it off the instant they first fire up their PC- EVEN ON TABLETS! I really don't think people need to revert to being a toddler that needs a gigantic pop-up ad to launch their apps just because they use a touch or pen-enabled interface.