>> I actually prefer the tiles to having a bunch of clutter on my desktop.

That's funny.

The METRO screen provides NO use of sub-menus as does the old start menu. Hence no good way to control "CLUTTER." Show all will result in hundreds of tiles for what an average user wil be using a computer for: office, games, "apps",.....


I have been providing support for Windows for about 20 years.

My observation: most owners of computers do no remove the showroom logo tags. They do not remove the installed crap, and ALL the desktop icons.

And many fill the desktop screen with documents and undeleted download files. And the start menu is completely filled with all of the installed junk.

This all happens because most people learn nothing about computer maintenance: how to find and use the interface's brooms, and dusters.


My perspcetive: Clutter is the result of user head-space. My installation of 8.5.3 is not cluttered. What I need is most often 1 click away. X1 requires more work for me because the designers were interested in de-cluttering more so than quck power use.

Windows 8 has a bunch of these same stupidities: getting to the power-off button,.. no easy way to shutdown remotely,...  MOVING the location for entering/changing a user password,...

X1: The FILTER is an example of increasing user attention to the UI, while reducing power.
No matter how easy it is to change filters, it requires attention to change from transients, to clips, to automation. In 8.5.3 all is available and therefore is much quicker. The only reason I can think of for the filters is it allows a change in the smart tools' functions. So the filters change to different smart tools.

And so on.

Win 8 "metro" is much the same with respect to making the user do more, especially us support dudes, while attempting to prohibit general user screw-ups.

j

Beepster


With Vista they may lose a couple of sales but the extra programming and maintenance will likely cost more than those losses. 

That is most likely the case, so many went from XP straight to 7, most of us Vista users were the early adopters of 64 bit.
 
I use three PC, my work laptop, a general purpose PC at home and my DAW. The DAW is Vista and the other two Win 7. Personally I don't see an awful lot of difference, certainly nothing that makes me want to upgrade the O/S on the DAW, too much time and disruption for what I see as too little gain. I almost subscribe to the idea that Win 7 is a rebranded Vista Service pack 3. My tentative plan is to skip Win 7 altogether and, get a new DAW next year with Windows 8 (assuming its not a turkey)
 
I did not change to Vista until late in the life or the product (SP2 was already released) so I did not encounter the issues that put a lot of people off.