I'm willing to concede that searching without a keyword is somewhat questionable (probably useful for most people, bad for power users)

Maybe I should upgrade that to neutral for power users. The main reason it's bad IMO is the interference with DNS, which is covered by my following statement.

Effectively making the "stuff" a different part of the UI based on the context of the "ls"|"cat" command that preceded it

Why the focus on the "stuff" part of the line? What about if I just type "emacs" or "ls", no arguments to either?

There is nothing you can do to distinctly tell it to search or navigate

Sure there is. If you enter http:/// and it won't search, and if you enter a search keyword it won't try to navigate.

Elsewhere in the thread I said the main thing I like about the combined box is not so much the fact that you can just type search terms but the fact that you can set up keyworded searches. I'm willing to concede that searching without a keyword is somewhat questionable (probably useful for most people, bad for power users) and not going to DNS first for things which could be a URL is definitely bad. (That's probably true for everyone: power users won't like it for obvious reasons, and normal people will have a harder time figuring out how to go to a weird URL if the browser searches than they will figuring out how to search if it goes to the page.) So I'd agree there's room for improvement with current design.

However, I stand by the idea of having just the single address bar. And the difference is such that if you offered me the choice of (1) a Firefox or Chrome-like address bar which does searches or (2) a really old style address bar which only accepts real URLs, I'd take the former one in a heartbeat and never regret it.

ls and cat are not entered from the same ui element, not really. once you enter the ls or cat command the following data is distinct for its intended purpose.

What? I type both in the same place, and it shows the results in the same place. Works the same in a browser.

With a combo search/url bar, "stuff" can be a valid domain under your local DNS, but your shit-tastic box will search for it instead of navigating there.

That's an implementation problem with the search, not a conceptual problem with the combined address bar. If it tried single words as addresses first, it'd pretty much work the same as the command line.

"'ls' and 'cat' are two very different things and should never ever be entered from the same UI element."

I don't think they're as different as you do. Entering a URL means "go to this URL exactly"; search means "go to a URL which I am abbreviating a bit."

How different the tasks are depends greatly on what level of abstraction you view them at.

Oh good... this should have said, for example "g <blah<" and "g <zip>", etc.

I don't like the "type in something and it will search" much, but what I do really like is the named searches you can do from it. For me, "g " will search Google, "w " wikipedia, "nws " will bring up the weather forecast, etc.

It's almost like a command line for common searches, and the space means it basically can't be confused with a URL.

Read your keystrokes, and thus get passwords without decryption

I'm not sure, but this may already be possible (for the current user) now, without root.

Even if it's not in general, you could still do something like install a browser extension for the user that does it while they're in the browser. (At least for Firefox; not sure if Chrome extensions are powerful enough to do that.)

Read directly from memory, therefore also bypassing the need for decryption, and accessing even more sensitive information unaided (GPG/SSH/SSL/etc unencrypted, etc)

On most Linux systems, this is also possible without root. (I did recently discover that you can't use GDB under the default configuration on Ubuntu as non-root users can't ptrace by default, so on that system it'd likely be protected.)

I don't want to discount the threat of a priviledge escalation bug, but if I had to say the relative threats for a single-user system, I'd guess that probably 90% of the danger of a vulnerability doesn't need root.

I think the bigger question is more game support. The list now of Linux-supported games is relatively small, and there are almost no big AAA titles on it. Even Valve hasn't ported either any of the HL2 games nor Portal 2 yet*.

If publishers start to say "hey, if we write more generically then we can pick up Mac and Linux, and Valve is supporting both platforms with Steam so there must be something to it" and then start publishing games, then it'll happen. But without that, even a dedicated console-like gaming PC won't do much.

* They run on Wine, but that's different.

It also has no visual indication that users can just start typing after hitting the start menu to find programs. As it is inferior to both 95/NT4 and 7, one can argue that Metro is a 30-year backward slide in interface design.

Just because there's no indication that you can't just start typing (which I'll agree is a problem) doesn't mean that you can't. And as such, no way in hell is Win8 inferior to 95/NT4 from the "starting programs" point of view; it's superior to XP, Gnome 2, and any other similar system where you can't do that. (And it matches Vista and Win7. Well, pretty much matches; I don't like the split programs/settings/other crap scopes in Win8.)

(And even on the "click the program you want" front, if you're comparing the Win8 tile screen to the desktop, I'd still put Win8 ahead by quite a bit: it's scrollable and you don't have to minimize stuff to get to it.)

In my experience, Impress's biggest problem is that their stock templates are pretty amateurish. Given a good professional template, it can do everything that really is necessary for presestation software to do. Excessive use of the bells and whistles in my mind takes away from a presentation rather than adds anything. Having to endure presentations where a speaker pauses to allow his bullshit aimation to finish is mind numbing.

I disagree with most of what you say. :-)

First, personally I don't care about the templates; I don't use them anyway. Almost to a T, my presentations use graphics and text on a plain black background. Makes things simple, but it has a couple nice properties like the fact that the edges of the screen aren't typically visible.

Second is the utility of animations. I'll be the first to agree that they can be used pretty ridiculously. However, they can also be used very well. For instance, I often find myself trying to illustrate a process, and often showing how things go around can be done with animations. I'd say most of the time an appear/disappear effect suffices (and I will sometimes "animate" that with separate slides), but not always. I've seen a couple of presentations that make fairly heavy use of animations and were rather well done, because they add rather than distract.

Third, there are a lot of other problems with Impress. I don't remember most of the annoyances I had with it, but I can give an example which is what ended my last attempt to use it to make a diagram not for a presentation: terrible block arrows. I consider that to be a basic shape, use it a lot, and it is just broken in Impress. The width of the body is proportional to the width of the entire arrow, which means that (1) two arrows that are different sizes will have different widths and (2) an arrow with a different width and height will look retarded. Compare to PowerPoint. PowerPoint will use the same width of line throughout, which solves (2), and gives you handles via which you can adjust properties like the width of the line and size of the arrowhead, which solves (1). When I was working on that diagram, I spent a few minutes playing around trying to figure out if there was a way to get what I want, and gave up and rebooted into Windows. (I'm sure that the approach is achievable in Impress -- e.g. draw the outline with a tool -- the point is that even something I consider an incredibly basic task is a PITA.)

Also, get rid of ALL the duality. Like the separate task list for Metro apps only: get rid of it. Use a single task bar and task switcher; the desktop task bar seems just fine for that.

This is actually probably my single biggest complaint about the Win8 UI from a "why did you do this?" perspective (as opposed to "affects my use and is annoying").

I don't mind if that start screen would have a couple versions to it (or tabs, etc.) such as one for settings / a redesigned control panel.

It sort of has that now, when you're searching. (That's one of my complaints from a "does affect my use" perspective. :-))

I don't mind the start screen in itself, it would indeed be nice if it just showed as an overlay with a dimmed/blurred background, I guess similar to what Ubuntu Unity does when you make the dash open full-screen.

My main complaint about it is that I can't tell what organization, if any, it has. It seems like the main thing you get when you click the start "button" in the lower left corner is basically completely disorganized except what you've done. I find it almost unusable. There's a separate "all programs" view that you can get which is a lot better; I'd rather see that be what you get, or perhaps some hybrid. Right now it's just a mess of icons.

(I pretty much start all programs by typing a substring of the name, so it's not a huge deal, but still.)

How about "any time you open a PDF, it kicks you into a full-screen Metro app"? No, Microsoft, of course I didn't want to be able to look at "walk.pdf" and "chew_gum.pdf" at the same time, please go into your dain-bramaged fullscreen mode.

Yeah, the full screen PDF reader sucks. It was way better in Windows 7 when any time you opened a PDF it would say "wtf is this I don't know how to show you that!"

Though I do wish there was a way to just say "move all audio and video associations that are with your crap-ass metro players to WMP". (Installing a 3rd party player missed some, so I'm occasionally still surprised by the Metro player.)

Also, the minimum requirements were 512 MB (home basic) or 1 GB (everything else). Windows 7 requires 1 GB.

The systems were loaded with an over abundance of RAM (6GB I recall) and needed every MB of it to run anywhere near as well as an XP machine with 2GB of RAM.

I ran Vista for some time with 2 GB of RAM. Ran fine.

Remember, Windows 8 isn't Windows as we know it on the desktop side of things, either.

That's not nearly as true as the Android/Linux comment. From what I can tell, I can't just take an arbitrary Linux program and run it on an Android tablet. That's not true of Windows 8, which is in some sense little more than a UI change -- Windows 8 basically works basically identically to Windows 7 about 99% of the time if you don't use Metro apps; the main meaningful change is launching programs from the start menu/metro screen that changes.

Of course, things are much different with WinRT, where your "WinRT isn't Windows as we know it" applies again.