Slashdot loves to get inaccurate and inflammatory.

Is that if you do renounce your citizenship, the US gets all spiteful and will blacklist you from coming back.

Obviously you have to evaluate your situation, but just make sure you factor that in. You wouldn't want to say "Ya, don't really need that citizenship anymore," only to find you can't come back and visit family because the government got pissey about it.

The issue with Metro is that the "Only full screen mode," is a deal breaker on desktops. I do not have a 30" screen to run one program at a time, thanks (barring a few exceptions). However they become perfectly usable when they are in a window. Modern Mix for Stardock does that, and apparently Windows 9 will do it natively. Ok well at that point, Metro is just another API you can use alongside Win32 and .NET and maybe there's some interest. If a Metro program works just like any other then perhaps more people will be interested in writing them.

Of course that remains to be seen, but a new API that is cross desktop/tablet/phone isn't a horrible idea, forced fullscreen on a desktop is.

Visual people seem to like it often. Mom loves the new start screen because of that (she's an artist/ex-art teacher). However it does have some issues for normal desktop use. Not the OMGWTFBBQ whine fest geeks make it out to be (which is largely MS bashing) but still.

The big issue is that it is clunky to use in a professional setting. Like on my desktop I have a whole lot of applications, and I often run and use many of them. The start menu is good because it doesn't occlude much of the screen. Also everything is nice and hierarchical, making it easy to find things. The start screen becomes a pretty big mess. It goes on for ever, even on my 30" monitor, because I have so much installed and it shows all icons. Yes, I can set up tiles with the most used stuff, but that really doesn't solve the issue since I already have task bar shortcuts for that, I go to the start menu/screen when it is a less used program.

Hence I run a start menu replacer (Start 8 in my case). It isn't that I can't use the start screen, I just find it inferior to what it replaced. It's perfectly usable, the 2012R2 servers at work all use it and that's fine, however a start menu is better/faster for what I do.

On a tablet, it works nicely. You need bigger icons to do finger navigation. However my desktop isn't a tablet, my screen is not and will never be touch (no finger prints please and thanks). So it is sub optimal.

Hence MS really is right to bring back the menu for desktops, and have the screen for tablets. However you are also right that the whiners need to STFU because it is not the dire disaster they like to pretend.

And how about Aero Glass? Do we get that back too?

I don't want spartan overly minimalist buttons, windows and dropdowns that hinder more than they help. I want delineated areas that indicate boundaries with beveled widgets that say "click me". I also don't want white-washed backgrounds that strain the eyes when I'm trying to work productively - I want various shades so I can see that the menu, taskbar or URL bar is not part of the main page.

Anti-aliasing is a hack that complicates things for a few reasons:

1: Anti-aliasing may look smoother but it also looks more blurred than non-antialiasing. That's why I based my test on no anti-aliasing.

2: If Apple isn't do it, then it must be at least somewhat inherently tricky to get right. And at the least it breeds bugs. Kludges usually breed bugs somewhere down the line as a rule of thumb.

3: Anti-aliasing complicates the OS (such as using Cleartype which has to be adjusted for every monitor it comes across etc.). Taking a screenshot and zooming in on the anti-aliased bits produces colour fringing.

4: Anti-aliasing complicates paint and word-processing software which has to take into account the techniques necessary for smooth line and curve drawing. Additionally, try filling in an area in paint software; anti-aliasing is not your friend.

5: Certain pictures with anti-aliasing use more colours, and eat up more memory as a result, especially when compressed in PNG format. A black and white picture uses 256 colours when it should use two. A colour picture..... well, the sky is the limit.

6: Scaling is much faster/simpler when you can do it the easy, and not to have worry about averaging neighbour pixels. Need I go on?