Living with the Windows 8 Start screen

Perhaps I'm too resistant to change but I don't really see why the Start Menu had to be removed. The new Metro UI is great for touch based interaction but I can't believe it would have been that much work to retain the start menu as well and place the default option in a setting somewhere. If you're primarily a desktop user then you keep the familiar UI and can flip to Metro as desired. If you're a touch user then Metro is a no brainer as the default. In the scope of an operating system I can't imagine that would have been all that much more work?

User interfaces are necessarily shaped by the input devices we use to interact with them. I'd be interested in seeing some reviews of Metro from people who are using the MS Touch mouse rather than a standard mouse. Perhaps Metro is designed with them in mind, so complaining about metro sucking with a standard mouse might be a little bit like complaining that the earliest versions of Windows were hard to use with just a keyboard!

The move from DOS to Windows was very much one based on the addition of a mouse. Sure, some DOS applications could use a mouse, but it was not a necessary device for interacting with the operating system. Windows changed that. Yes, I know you could do almost anything in Windows with keyboard shortcuts, but it was painfully counter-intuitive to try doing so. Since then, the mouse and keyboard have remained more or less unchanged. The underlying technology has improved (e.g. optical vs ball mice) or deteriorated (most modern keyboards vs an IBM Model M), but their capabilities have remained almost frozen in time. The last major degree of freedom to be introduced and widely adopted was scroll-wheels. Some mice have other degrees of freedom, such as horizontal scrolling capabilities or zoom wheels, but none of these have become standards across all mice. Interfaces have gradually coaxed richer interactions out of those existing degrees of freedom, but that's it.

Touch mice offer new degrees of freedom that traditional mice do not have. e.g. Gestures. If MS is smart, they are planning to develop Metro along lines that will exploit those new degrees of freedom. It will likely take years or decades for touch mice to reach their full potential but, if the people at MS have done their job well, there should already be compelling advantages to using them with Windows 8.

Another way to deal with it is to merely hold down Enter when you login. If you hold down Enter as you login, you bypass the Start Screen and it dumps you straight to the desktop.

So it sounds like the best feature of the start screen is that it isn't too hard to avoid it?

Winkey +D

That's how i deal with it.

An entire article defending the Windows 8 start screen only to tell you how to disable it at the end? Win or fail? Saying you "only see the much-reviled start screen a handful of times so what's the big deal?" doesn't sound like much of a defense.

using the metro interface was totally annoying for me. i disabled it immediately and the rest of the experience was ok.

fortunately my iMac doesn't force me to use the same UI as my iPhone, or I would be disabling that too. but then again, apple !== microsoft.