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Windows 8 & Metro with Mouse and Keyboard - Super User Blog

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64 pointsivoflipse55 comments

Metro is quite impressive as a tablet UI. Frankly, I think it's the only legitimate alternative to iPad. But on a mouse-driven desktop it's at best uncompelling, and at worst baffling and frustrating.

There's a risk Microsoft could pull another Vista, where an overwhelmingly negative public perception of Metro on the desktop overshadows some otherwise good features.

The other risk is that if they insist on coupling ARM Metro releases with Desktop Windows releases it may prevent them from moving as fast as they'll need to effectively compete with iOS. Development speed has been a problem for Microsoft these last 10 years or so.

Here's the thing though: it surprisingly also works with mouse and keyboard! You do lose some display density, mind you, but the upshot in size allocated more than makes up for it.

Works and works well are 2 different things. Usually you need a different UI that is optimized for the different form factor/device type, otherwise you might end up with an UI that works very well only on a certain type of device, and one that is mediocre at best on another type of device, because they are used differently, and that UI is forcing you to use it in a different way than you should.

Also it's not just the Metro UI itself and how it works with the mouse that you have to deal with. You also have to deal with switching between what most people will see as 2 separate OS's. I predict a lot of people will be frustrated with this.

I don't know that your first point is necessarily the case, though. I would argue that Metro works well on both small screen touch interfaces and larger screen point and click interfaces. The Metro buttons or boxes or whatever are actually very click friendly, and I think keyboard/touchpad/camera/mouse gestures will make it extremely usable. I might go as far to say that the Metro interface seems to transcend interaction type.

I do understand the 2 OS's concern. I do imagine that after a few years and maybe another iteration or two, people will move on from the need for the traditional windows desktop experience and appreciate the same look and feel across phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop. People will be initially frustrated, but even Facebook can't roll out a minor redesign without millions of people freaking out like FB stabbed them in the back.

Out of curiosity, have you tried it with a mouse and keyboard yet?

I have. Not the metro as such but Win 8 CP on my laptop. When I read initial reviews, I was not sure how much I'd like this metro UI but to be frank, I haven't seen much of it in last week or so.

Since I am using Windows 8 on a non-tablet laptop, all I see is familiar windows 7 UI plus some improvements. Apart from the occasional metro launcher, I have not encountered the metro coolness at all.

That makes me think if this duality of OS that everybody is talking about is much of an issue at all. Sure the transition to metro from old UI is a bit jarring. In the first day of use which is what most reporters/blogger based their impressions on, you tend to see it a lot, probably because you are just exploring and poking around, not really using the it as you'd use day to day. And that's why everyone seems to be making a big issue out of it. I think the OS deserves a continued real life usage to get a better feel.

I'm still baffled as to why Windows 8 is not a dedicated tablet OS. I think it would be a dream to use on a touch device and commend Microsoft for the Metro design, but they had to screw it up by shoehorning it onto the desktop too.

I've given Windows 8 an honest try on my dual monitor setup and it just isn't happening. Metro is out of place, consumes 100% screen real estate (meaning fast context switching between windows or monitoring multiple windows is impossible) and is constantly frustrating with its hidden controls and undiscoverable features.

The fact that they had to include Windows 7 in Windows 8 is proof enough that Metro is not suitable for the desktop. Windows 8 feels like a bizarre mashup OS that has no place on the desktop.

Well you could say the same thing about backwards compatibility with anything.

The inclusion of 16-bit mode, XP mode, or compatibility mode in Windows 7 just proves that 32-bit computers are not suitable for the desktop.

The inclusion of GCN compatibility on the Wii proves the Wii is not a good game console.

The inclusion of VGA ports on my new laptop proves HDMI is not suitable for video display.

This is Microsoft, not Apple. Microsoft cares that your old applications keep running. Microsoft (figuratively) never breaks backwards compatibility (and if they do, there's a huge fuss made about it). Microsoft even goes as far to include very specific lines of code in their OS to make sure just one popular application keeps working (as shown by the now-famous example of SimCity for DOS running on Windows).

How much bitching was there when DOS was shoved to the background? And who would return to DOS now? You'll get over it. The world will survive.

Metro isn't even supposed to be used on a workstation. It is as simple as that. Of course "windows 7" is better for real work on a desktop, noone will ever claim otherwise (for other than marketing purposes or for bashing windows 8).

So I don't know what your beef is, just don't use Metro for stuff it isn't good for.

And use it for what it is good for, on your laptop in "tablet-mode" for instance. Don't use it on your workstation, that's just insane.

Exactly. I used the OS for past week or so and haven't used much of metro at all. Because I am using it on my old laptop and haven't used metro as much.

I am planning to get a touch laptop in next couple of months and we will see how it works then.

The fact is that it is on workstations, I'm simply judging what Microsoft has put before me. Telling me to ignore Metro if I don't like it is like selling me a muffin filled with chunks of pickle and suggesting I eat around them.

I would assume if Microsoft didn't intend for Metro to be used on the desktop then there would be no Windows 8 for PCs and it would be a dedicated tablet OS (like I suggested).

Media Center is in your windows 7, do you use it on your workstation?

An OS is full of stuff you never use and, unlike a muffin filled with chunks of pickle, not using the stuff you don't want is often as easy as breathing air.

I think the comparison with Grub is a little unfair--if you look at a distro like OpenSUSE[1], the grub screen actually looks very good. You still can't use the mouse, but I would happily trade speed for that, especially since using the keyboard to select the right system is easier and faster anyhow.

[1]: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/openSUSE-grub.jpg

That said, I'm really happy that people are moving towards prettier interfaces everywhere. Why don't distros like Ubunutu or Fedora do the same?

Actually that's a comparison I meant Grub to win.

To reiterate and clarify: if the price to have all the bells and whistles of the Win8 bootloader is to have it take as much time to load as the entire damn operative system you're loading in the first place I'll prefer the very basic and functional interface of Grub immediately.

I agree - this comparison is not exactly fair. The labels on Grub are defined in the grub config file - it's perfectly possible to make them less cryptic. Also, good luck trying to make the Windows bootloader load anything other than Windows.

My two cents after using Win8 for a week on a laptop:

- Hot corners: fail. MS needs to extend hot zones. Finding the exact point with the touchpad is sometimes tricky. I can imagine the horror on multimonitor configuration.

- I actually like the start screen. It's clean, and it responds to typing even faster than Win7 start button. Two minor problems: 1) you need to clean up icons after every installation and 2) it doesn't shows everything when I'm typing - I need to explicitly select "settings" after I type "mouse", for example (it's tab - down - enter, not a big deal, but still). Windows 7 start screen displays all find results at once.

- Keyboard is your friend: Win + c for charms, Win + q for programs search, Win + w for settings search. Learn these three shortcuts and you'll have less angry fist shaking.

- Metro: I really hope that the next year will bring us laptops with touch screens. Until then, metro applications aren't very useful when you have only mouse and keyboard.

The rest is, more or less, the same as in Windows 7.

Laptops with touch screens FTW! I wonder what the whole computer industry is waiting for? Are they again waiting for Apple to come and do and make what everyone else should have done long time ago instead?

They have laptops with touchscreens. You can stop waiting for Apple to do what's already been done.

The Dell Inspiron Duo is one such machine. It came out in 2010.

Given previous comments, I am pretty sure we won't see an Apple laptop with a touch screen.

They might be waiting for the prices for quality touch-screen components to come down. Tacking a capacitive touch-screen to every laptop will probably add at least 100 dollars to the cost of the product. I saw the Dell laptop in CompUSA recently and it was 500 plus dollars with essentially netbook class hardware sans the touch screen.

Strangely enough, it was reported today that Microsoft is developing quality touch-screen components: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/microsoft-demos-super-fast-...

That isn't a touch screen. They are using a projector as is evidenced by the objects being displayed on the "screen" are from time to time superimposed on the persons fingers.

Why would you want a touchscreen when you have a complete keyboard and touchpad? Touchscreen is just a workaround to make small devices actually usable. For any other scenario kb/touchpad is 100x faster and more comfortable. Unless you are lying down in a sofa just reading but then you don't have a laptop, then you have a tablet and we are back in the small-device-category.

I'd rather click a few hard keys or move my thumb 2cm than wave my whole hand in front of the screen.

“If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last few months, you probably know all of the following:”

Whenever I see articles starting in this manner, I suppose that:

1. The writer does not know how to write; or

2. The writer is so far immersed in their topic that they have lost sight of what is important and relevant to the rest of the population.

In either case, I stop reading.

Am I wrong? (Genuine question, not rhetorical!)

I apologize for sounding condescending.

However... the blog is for superuser.com, this is hacker news and I'd say the audience probably does know that Windows 8 and Metro do, indeed, exist :)

Maybe, but a lot of us never touched Windows Vista, 7 or 8 and a lot of those really don't care about desktop OSs. You must also be aware that there are people who never used Windows. Ever.

Also, "super user" is a term normally associated with Unix systems. It's odd to expect people to associate it with Windows.

We are "stuck" in 2001.

Since the ServicePack2-update XP has been doing what an OS is supposed to do: doing its job and being invisible at it.

We skipped all the Windows versions since XP and we think we are going to like Windows 8 ;)

My issue with the active corners is that they are impossible to use with multiple monitors. Fitt's Law actively works against it; instead of being able to slam your mouse, you have to gingerly move it to the right spot.

There's an overshoot buffer. Move past the corner and then slide back to invoke the tip in the bottom left. For the charms, move past and then swing your mouse up into the middle. Kind of like a U shape.

There are a lot of new shortcut keys alleviate that problem a lot.

How many people who use Windows on a regular basis know anything but using their mouse to interact with the OS? How many normal users do you know that know the current Windows shortcut keys? Expecting people to learn new ones is a bit silly in my opinion.

How many normal users have multiple monitors? There might be a lot, but we're going up a notch above normal users and towards power users here.

Where I work many of the Photoshop users have multiple monitors and aren't power users by any stretch. It is very unlikely they would be familiar with any shortcuts in windows beyond ctrl-c/v/x and the "Windows" key.

Nevermind the fact that there are no visual cues for the user to know that the corners actually do something. Same with closing a program, it's a hidden gesture. Those sentences deserve many exclamation points and expletives.

If this is supposed to be easy to use then it should be intuitive.

On KDE, the corners just move to the most extreme screen. So any action set to a left corner will work from that corner of the left screen, while any actions set to a right corner will work from that corner on the right screen. This still isn't perfect, but works fairly well in practice. I'm not sure it's directly applicable to Windows 8 because I haven't tried it yet, but it's something to think about.

Don't know about KDE but I have the same problem with Unity. I wound up physically moving my monitors around because Unity really, really likes to be on the extreme left.

I have had no issues with having my main monitor to the left or to the right. I have a laptop and at home my external monitor is to the right while at work it's to the left; KDE handles either version perfectly. The "hot" corners move to the extremes, as appropriate, and everything else works well too. In fact, over all, KDE has been the best system for multiple monitors I've used (choosing from several versions of Windows, OS X, Unity and Gnome 2).

The only thing that is annoying me with Windows 8 so far are the contextual menus where you need to move your mouse to the bottom right-hand side. The delay is too long and it makes the experience less fluid IMO.

I'm liking the Start Metro screen and getting used to the dynamic tiles.

Have you tried right clicking the whitespace? or are you talking about the charms bar, which does indeed take too long to come up?

A shortcut you can use is Windows key + C.

More here:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/getting-starte...

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/03/windows-8-tricks-tips-and-s...

Looking at the comments, it's like people can't even spend 5 or 10 mins getting to know a new UI in a redesigned OS. And then some complain about the dumbification of everything. Maybe they're wrong and everything must be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator in order to be successful.

But, But, ...

Is it not at least a tad reasonable for people to be a bit upset about MS strong-arming a fix into the not-broken UI they've been using for a while now?

Why should Bob at home with his five year old Dell care that this MS' salvo in the Tablet Wars? Why?

Bob at home is probably not upgrading his 5-year-old computer to Windows 8. Upgrades are something like 10% of all Windows PC's. It's common in the tech world to upgrade, but for most people, a PC is a PC and it comes with software for its lifetime.

>Why should Bob at home with his five year old Dell care that this MS' salvo in the Tablet Wars? Why?

Maybe Bob should stay with Windows 7? Why should MS stop (what they think is) progress for people like Bob? Will anything ever get done with thinking like that?

Also, if you take a few mins to learn your way around, Windows 8 behaves substantially like a far better Windows 7 with a glorified start menu(remove all tiles you can and you're good to go).

And it will enable many devices like these that don't exist now:

Idea Pad Yoga: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz2R9y9ZvkA&hd=1

Samsung x86 Tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-K1ELv6DE&hd=1

Try doing that with an iPad.(There are iPad-like ARM Windows 8 tablets too that won't run x86 apps but which will have Office).

83inch displays: http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/29/2833173/windows-8-82-inch-...

All these form factors tied in the with the vast Win32 ecosystem(except ARM tablets) and a single Touch-first Metro ecosystem.

It's interesting how the comments on Apple/iPad/Post-PC articles, financials of Apple/Dell/HP etc. state that "MS is dying in the Post-PC" era, but now when they come out with a solution to make a OS run on different form factors and to have tablets that are not just consumption devices, the comments on here are skewed towards "Why change something that works?". If PCs are really dying, why not attempt to fix that instead of standing by with their head in the sand(like RIMM)?

There will always be people unhappy with anything you build or change. They should just go with their vision of what they think is right and that's what they did. They envision that with Windows 8, most new monitors will be touch enabled because of the demand so that for some functions(like clicking on links), people can use touch.

You may disagree with the vision, but you can't disagree that there is a method behind the madness.

>Why should Bob at home with his five year old Dell care that this MS' salvo in the Tablet Wars? Why?

Because according to Apple and articles, blogs and comments I read here, in the Post-PC world we are now living in, Bob is replacing that Dell with an iPad.

Bob and his 5 year old dell are still running XP and that won't change. but chances are, Bob's next computer purchase will be an iPad, not another dell desktop. He should care about microsoft's salvo into the tablet wars because it means a viable alternative to purchasing an iPad.

ordinary users don't upgrade their OS. they get their OS upgrades by purchasing a new computer.

Thanks for the links. :)

I like how they are still doing Passport, it is just renamed each year or so.

Something about that start screen feels like you're watching every TV in the TV store at the same time, with about the same inability to focus. Also seems ripe for abuse by 3rd parties, but we'll see.

Very interesting article. I am interested to see how the use of mouse and keyboard evolves as more OSs/UIs move towards a touch based interface.

There's very little in Windows 8 that requires multiple touch input - pretty much the only thing touch input can do and the mouse can't. This is what's ultimately allowing Win8 to keep mouse keyboard and touch on the same level.

Compare with Apple and some of the iOS gestures such as four-finger (!) swipes...

(I wrote the article)

> Compare with Apple and some of the iOS gestures such as four-finger (!) swipes...

Are you trying to imply the four-finger swipes in iOS are bad?

'' On the left, GRUB 2. On the right, the bootloader found in Windows 8 CP. I've got no doubts on which one I'd rather use. ''

--me either.

There is a certain amount of irony that Windows 8 works quite well is most (all?) virtualization software except Microsoft's VirtualPC.

Also, is anyone else feeling that they love Windows 8 on a tablet but are constantly frustrated trying to use it on a desktop? One of my first experiences that kind of sums of my experience was clicking on a 2-second mp3 (I wanted that gorgeous notification tone), only to find myself waiting 3 seconds to it to switch from Desktop/Explorer to Metro/Music Player, play my 2-second clip and then leaving me staring at a rather dumb, blank looking Metro media player. (It would be helped if there was a metro version of explorer, but still, I feel very limited without many windows open and expose mode, and of course windows 8 hasn't really improved the command prompt.)

It doesn't work on the free VMWare software, though it does work on VMWare Workstation 8 (not free).

Not that that disqualifies your statement in anyway, it is rather funny that it doesn't work on their own VM software. It even works on Oracle's open source VirtualBox.

Not true. It works on VMWare Player which is free

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