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You Can't Bypass the UI Formerly Known As Metro On Windows 8
colinneagle writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The final build of Windows 8 has already leaked to torrent sites, which is giving the propellerheads a chance to dig through the code. One revelation will probably not sit well with enterprise customers: you can't bypass the don't-call-it-Metro UI. Normally, you have to boot Windows 8 and when the tiled desktop UI (formerly known as Metro) came up, you had to click on one of the boxes to launch Explorer. Prior builds of Windows 8 allowed the user to create a shortcut so you bypass Metro and go straight to the Explorer desktop. Rafael Rivera, co-author of the forthcoming Windows 8 Secrets, confirmed to Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet that Microsoft does indeed block the boot bypass routine from prior builds. He also believes that Microsoft has blocked the ability for administrators to use Group Policy to allow users to bypass the tiled startup screen. There had been hope that Microsoft would at least relent and let corporate users have a bypass, if only for compatibility's sake."
...Windows 8.
Didnt we just cover this very thoroughly yesterday?
....Make people need you. - bill gates
And the way you make people need you is to not teach them to fish, but limit what they can do for themselves and make the rest so difficult that they have to need you.
As someone who actually has a copy of Windows 8, TFA and TFS are correct and the OP is wrong. Microsoft has removed the previous methods of booting straight to the desktop.
They want people to make what was formerly known as Metro apps to play in the new UI, because they'll also work on the tablet & phone version. The goal is to have a unified platform to boost the amount of applications on the tablet and help it sell.
Of course, making Metroized apps means they don't work in Windows 7, which now that XP is gradually going away will be the dominant enterprise OS. And of course Metro is so unpopular with desktop users that the tablets are going to get a bad name just due to bad name recognition. So it's a risky strategy at best.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I can understand why Microsoft decided to remove that option, though I disagree.
They want to the users to give Metro a fair try by living with it for a while. It is different enough where most people only see it once until they set an option to get rid of it. I've been using Windows since 3.0 and the first thing I do at a new job is get rid of the XP theme and set things up to look classic.
I think this is a mistake for Microsoft. Forced changes without easy options to go back angers users. Ubuntu and Unity are in a similar situation. Between Microsoft and Canonical trying to promote a tablet desktop on non-tablet PCs I think Apple and the KDE will be the winners.
On my formerly Ubuntu box at home the change motivated me to give the KDE and Kubuntu a look for the first time in years. Luckily I really like it and am now unlikely to go back to Ubuntu and Unity(or GNOME )
It's called Windows 7. You can expect it to be a lot more popular in the enterprise then 8.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It's not horrid
A sentiment I find often associated with various versions of Windows. Just yesterday I was speaking with a former Vietnam POW who'd had his fingernails pulled out with pliers, and he commented that the time he bought a mid-range laptop in the early days of Vista was 'pretty fucking awful but not the worst thing that has ever happened to me'.
So good job Microsoft!
While I admire the desire to be really creative and shit and try to come up with a cool "new" interface, functionality still remains one of the key desirable attributes for a user interface. We can thank Apple and all the Apple wannabe copycats for useless, ridiculous new ways of doing things that are less accurate and more time consuming by design. Who said that dragging page after page of stacked thumbnails as if they were pages from a book is an improvement over a plain old list? Especially when the constraints are so narrow that you often end up "dragging" two at a time. Want an example? Here, go look for a specific picture on this site. Have fun. Oh it looks cute. It's not functional. You will waste time waving your mouse back and forth trying to get the picture you wanted. A UI is supposed to be something that helps you, not something you have to fight with.
Now I'm not saying this is how (formerly known as) Metro is going to work, I haven't used the beta, and I've only seen a couple screen-shots. But I understand that Microsoft is going for the "smart phone" look and feel, and that means lots of big colorful buttons you have to drag everywhere, and crap like this. And considering what they've done with "Ribbons" when they obfuscated their "Office" suite - and I'm talking about the 2007 version, I refuse to "upgrade" and see what else they managed to fuck up, I can't imagine this UI will be better. I remember an argument in the late 80's about how computers hadn't really lived up to their promise of greater productivity in the office. Well Microsoft, I guess we'll have to congratulate you for lowering the bar even more...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yeah. After all, we were forced to go to Vista because support for XP was discontinued. Oh, wait. That's not what happened at all.
as Windows XP still holds half of the market.
I think you confuse "market" with "install base". The two are not the same - it's not like everyone with an XP machine will get a new XP machine when they upgrade, for example.
And even if looking at install base, it's likely not true. This chart shows W7 surging ahead of XP in October last year, and while granted, not all computers browse the net, or in a way that triggers statcounter, there's little doubt that W7 has overtaken XP. If nothing else because companies can't buy machines with XP anymore, so as they switch out their old machines in a typical 3-5 year cycle, the new ones will be W7.
But I doubt they will be W8, which seems to be a productivity killer, not meant for busy workers who multitask.
Where I work, the migration to W7 is almost complete - most of the remaining XP installations that can't easily be upgraded have been virtualized, like other legacy x86 operating systems.
Windows 8, I doubt will happen at all, except perhaps for marketing.
What makes you think that businesses buy PCs with an OS loaded. A large enterprise would just load their volume-key enabled image of their current Windows build for that hardware. If the current standard is XP - that's what users get.
Phil.
Windows Server 2012, aka Windows 8 sans Metro
Unless you specifically use Server Core mode, Windows 8 comes default with the Metro interface.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.