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Comment by _mayo | Hacker News Reader

On the lock screen you can hit any key and the image will slide up and reveal the log in dialog. I do agree though, the issue that Windows 8 seems to suffer from is it's not that intuitive on a desktop. My biggest issue is there seems to be no indication of the hot corners when you first begin to use it, and even when they are activated, they feel finicky (especially the 'recent apps' pane on the left).

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Any key on the keyboard but you have to slide up (swipe, basically) with a mouse instead of just clicking? I get it that it makes sense on tablets as a lock screen, but on desktops? Ok, I’m going to call that a bug and ignore it. It’s easy to fix and no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Even with that changed and the hotcorners indicated, the hodgepodge stays, though. The hotcorners are only the tip of the iceberg, what you notice immediately. (Or, rather, not at all, like me, who figured out to use the Windows key pretty quickly – but still after some confusion – but didn’t find the hotcorners for a long time after that. I can totally identify with the guy in the video. I wasn’t quite as helpless, but close and I’m young and grew up with that stuff.)

> Any key on the keyboard but you have to slide up (swipe, basically) with a mouse instead of just clicking?

You can also scroll the mousewheel.

When testing with a friend, we had to Google up a video after spending like half an hour trying to find a way to shut down the system. Looks nice, but definitely not intuitive on desktop :(.

I agree - shutting down and quitting a Metro app were the first two things that annoyed me. I shouldn't have to go through 5-6 clicks just to shut down the computer. I thought we had that issue already with Vista, where the default "shut down" option was set to Sleep or something, rather than Shut Down? Microsoft should learn from their mistakes.

Ever hear the "stateful UI is bad; on/off is a state" UI design principle? My Macbook-using friends tell me there's no way to close the lid without suspending it.

There was an influential blog post years ago documenting the 11 or so ways to shutdown Vista. More than likely someone is reciting the "multiple ways bad" mantra.

I'm surprised UI designers let us shut down our computers at all.

> My Macbook-using friends tell me there's no way to close the lid without suspending it.

95% of the time for 99% of users, this is perfectly reasonable behavior - unlike wanting to shut off your computer which is a far more useful use-case. For the small remainder (power users), there's InsomniaX [1].

[1] http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/2389/is-there-any-w...

What even worse: there're tons of tutorials on "how to create a shortcut for shutdown on Windows 8 desktop". It shouldn't be like that in the system that tries to be familiar for users of earlier version.

Did you try pushing the power button on the machine itself?

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