The irony is strong with you. Bullshit, and then you just seriously said 80% of users don't have 10 apps. Please give me your omniscient source, because I'd love to see it. My mother, who can barely turn on a computer, has more than 10.

"Yes, that's right. Pinning completely solves this problem. When I launch an app it rarely takes me more than two clicks, and if it does, I generally use the keyboard, and press the win key, then type a couple letters and find what I need in the list. Probably 99/100 times I launch an app it takes me no more than two clicks, and at least 1/10 times it takes only one click. So, this is total nonsense."

How is using a mouse, then typing letters on a keyboard, easier than two clicks? And as I told the other one, the pinned items in the start menu only holds 5 or so items, the start screen holds 40-60. Must be a new definition of nonsense I've never seen.

"Says who? I want to be able to create shortcuts anywhere. Many people keep stuff on their actual desk, like a phone, or a rolodex. There's valid reasons to have launchers on the desktop."

"Says who?" Just my ideas on UIs, I mean I didn't cite anyone did I? And Windows 8 allows you to pin items to the desktop, I just don't like it personally. There's a valid reason to have things on the desktop, unless there's a better alternative, which I think the start screen is. I gave reasons, unzipping files, or creating work files, and trying to work around short cuts, well, I can imagine a lot of newb-ish users would be better not doing so. But nothing stops you from doing that in Windows 8.

"Windows 8 has a lot of performance increases in it"

"Yes, that is the only good reason to run it. If they can fix the UI, maybe it will make sense"

Is the debate on the UI over then? Doesn't look like it to me.

You can have 5 or so programs pinned in the start menu in Windows 7, you can have 40-60 in Windows 8, with room for more if you scroll sideways, which is still better than the start menu imo. Basically, all of your apps get the benefit of the pinned start menu. Your conclusion seems less than well founded, in that and other light.

Most of you will hate this, so fair warning.

I love Windows 8. Let me tell you why. The start menu is supposed to be an efficient program launcher. Ok, so to launch programs with the start menu, you have to click the start button, click "all programs", click your app folder, then click the application to start it. That's 4 clicks. To start a program in Windows 8, I click the start screen area, then click the application, that's two clicks. That's a quantifiable efficiency gain. People have argued against this by referring to pinning apps to the task bar and desk top and the start menu pinned item lists.

First, Windows 8 has the task bar and desk top, so it doesn't make sense to argue with those, if they're so good, use them in Windows 8 instead of the start screen. Two, I like the desktop and task bar clear of every thing, I never liked pinning items to the task bar because it makes it less efficient to determine what's running, I like to glance at the task bar and know everything there is running, where as in the past I have at times, in a rush, mistakenly thought something pinned was running and something running was pinned, which caused problems. The Desktop is a workspace that ideally should be clear of short cuts, as a user will do things like unzip folders there, and create many temp work files there, that need to be moved or deleted, which short cuts will get in the way of, and accidently removed. The start menu's pinned item list can only contain a few items (5 or so), so while they can be launched in two clicks you are severely limited in numbers vs. the start screen which can launch 40-60 apps in two clicks. What I like to do is unpin everything except my main apps/games, and a few metro apps I use, then group them and name the groups (minus button in the lower right.) A small action that makes things much better than the default.

Visual recognition of large distinct icons is a much nicer way to launch programs, rather than reading folder names where often a folder name is not related to the name of the app you are trying to launch, if you have many apps it can be difficult to remember which app is in which folder causing quite a bit of digging.

With the start screen, in addition to saving clicks versus the start menu, and being easier to find the program, you can have live tiles that give you a lot of useful information. I have an email counter, several news sites, calendar, upcoming events, and other things one click away. So why not stick with gadgets and other widgets and system tray notifications you are probably asking at this point? Well, several. Security, stability, and Power. Metro apps are run in a strict sandbox, they install and uninstall in isolated, clean fashion, so no installation or uninstallation of a metro app can corrupt the system, user data, or other metro apps, and they have strict requirements such that they can not use any CPU when not being used by the user, and very minimum system resource usage for notifications.
Contrast this with some desktop apps I was running before to accomplish these tasks, my email program was using about .5% cpu at all times, randomly accessed the disk, and increased DPC Latency, and it was a relatively well behaved email tray notifier as I tried a few others. A small amount, but it adds up for many such items. And programs like that that you (or the average user) gets from the web, have free reign over your user account, even if you don't run as admin (and you almost always have to give them admin at least once to install), they can still steal any user account data and credentials from your browser. Metro apps, being tightly sandboxed, can't read or touch any other data in the user account. I find this to be pretty important, and imagine a huge boon to productivity if users get a lot of their system/productivity utilities from metro apps instead of downloading random programs on the web, where the security risk is much higher.

Windows 8 has a lot of performance increases in it, like for real time audio mixing (see: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/06/music-developer-on-windows-8-a-leap-forward-for-desktops-a-leap-backward-for-metro-winrt/ ), it's been really stable since the consumer preview for me, and runs basically every old game and program I have, in fact all of my old stuff works.

It's easy to hate because it's different, but I gave it a try with an open mind and an attempt to understand the philosophy behind it, and I've reached a different conclusion than others, so maybe some of you could too.

Depends on what is being helped/unhelped. They are certainly helpful enough not to spam off topic flame bait in this particular thread.

How did I misunderstand and twist what he said? He made a negative comment about something he presumably hates, instead of telling us the wonders of something he loves. Honestly, I can only surmise that what he loves is worse since he could have just told us the wonders of it. I did hit submit when I meant to hit preview so I left some editing errors in, but generally that's what I said and meant.

If I didn't know anything about the Tea party of their opposition, I would assume the Tea Party were the best from reading your post. Why? Because you did not dedicate that time and energy telling us the wonders of the other what you believe in, so must not be much to tell..

Great, now I'll need to find some matching sun glasses to go with my tin foil hat..

I answer this question so much I should just put it on my blog and link to it. System 7.5 - Mac OS 9 had NO SECURITY whatsoever and software was shared with write-able disks, and so, many people wrote malware for fun and fame in those days. Since around Mac OS X's release, software is distributed on read-only media (CDs, DVDs. blu-ray is still a bag of hurt I hear) and the threats come from exploiting programs over the network or social engineering to trick the user to download a trojan. Exploiting a program and social engineering mean selecting mac users on web sites when they are outnumbered 10:1 by Windows users typically, with malware being profit driven now-a-days because all of the mainstream OSes are basically secure against the trivial threats of 90's malware, it hardly ever makes sense to target 5% over 90%. In the same sense that most games are not available for macs, the profit incentive is not there. The argument that your logic leads to is that Macs are not infected because they can not be infected, but this and other malware prove that wrong. Mac malware thusfar does not do anything profound that Windows malware doesn't do, basically the user is tricked into downloading it and it does what it wants. It's not like mac malware so-far is some mission impossible type stuff and more difficult to deploy than windows malware..

As opposed to being mowed down like helpless sheep and cattle?

There was a smoke grenade thrown, but we do not know many pertinent details. Was visibility *totally* obscured for everyone? It's possible someone would have gotten a clear shot on the guy before he killed and injured most of the people he did. Of course, I guess it's possible it was about as much visibility as a moonless desert night, and everyone would of shot each and died too, but I find that extremely unlikely. Also, if everyone was armed, I doubt people such as the shooter would even attempt this, they'd usually be too scared they'd get shot too fast before causing lots of damage, and thus waste their one chance for fame and glory.

What, you mean like Mexico and other Latin American Countries? "Oh, wait.." as people here frequently like to say..

What are you talking about? You do not get 'checked' when a business has a sign that says no guns, it simply means if you are a law abiding citizen with a CCW and someone finds out you have a gun in there, you will get charged. Of course, anyone who goes to these places to shoot people, is not going to care about the sign or being charged for breaking the business' no-guns policy.

What? Exploiting a flaw in a vulnerable web browser on a mobile device has little to do with standard Unix/Linux permissions. The malware inserted into the browser will run with the privileges of the browser, which is more than enough to cause a lot of grief. Even if the browser is sand boxed, the malware can steal any data put into the browser such as credit card #s or email/banking logins. It's very useful to make this as hard as possible.

This is not the air-tight argument you imagine it is. 1. it makes it difficult for average users to run programs they need, thus presenting another reason they will avoid linux. 2. if your response is 'they can learn how to mark those programs executable' or even if it is not, the users will just mark malware executable, perhaps with instructions in the email/webpage/whatever they got the malware from. Typing a few commands in a command line is not going to slow down the average drooling computer user that wants to run jenniferlopez3some.pl, especially after they've done it a few times. I can't understand how you don't get this.