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On 02/01/13 10:48, Julian Hall wrote: > Scuse me butting in, but you mention a lot of improvements 'under the > hood' that are in Windows 8; my question, which I believe will be the > main question of the *average* punter is, not what file system does it > use, but 'Where the hell is X?' X being anything from Windows > Explorer to Device Manager. To be honest when I tried out a > pre-release version in a VM I even had trouble figuring out how to > close anything, eventually finding the 'mouse to bottom left corner to > pop up the close icon'. Totally alien to all users of Windows used to > the X in the top right. I don't think the average user will either > care about, or even be aware of, the improvements you've listed, but > what they *will* be aware of is the fact that pretty much every single > one of their favourite/most used functions have been moved around into > totally alien places. I was chatting to two such users yesterday on > Twitter one of whom has had Windows 8 for six weeks and hates it, > another who had a Windows 8 laptop for Christmas and cannot get on > with it at all, and they are typical of the average users I am > referring to. > > I will be having a look for 'Classic Shell' which was mentioned > previously in this thread to see if that will ameliorate their woes. > > Kind regards, > > Julian > Let's save you a little effort: http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/ For everyone complaining about the Windows 8 interface, this is the answer. It will restore the classic interface and reskin 8 so it looks and behaves exactly like every other version since Win95 - no hot corners, no charms bar and the good old Windows start orb returned to bottom left complete with standard menu. The following isn't aimed at you Julian, just at the haters in general. This is partly what is confusing me - I mean, what kind of idiot, when faced with a confusing interface on their new laptop, can't google for five seconds and discover this for themselves? This isn't registry hacking, scripting or advanced in any way. Complaining about the new interface in any way on google will pretty much inevitably lead you to the mention of classic shell or some other similar alternative fixes and it's then a 20 second job to find the free download and install it. I have multiple users who are barely computer literate and have already found and applied this fix for themselves with no help from me at all. One of them is 72. What's worse, Microsoft include a "how to use the new interface" video/tutorial that runs on first login that shows you how to use Metro. There are countless other video tutorials all over the internet. If a user is too thick to be able to manage the very basics of navigating an interface, and using google for help, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to use a computer in the first place? For the love of god, how difficult is it to press the damn windows key (which like every other version of windows, is the complete answer to navigating the system)? There's also some serious hypocrisy going on here. Has everyone already forgotten that in the last couple of years, we've had in the Linux world: The rushed release of the unfinished, buggy and hopeless KDE 4.0 DE. Sure, it's much better now, but it was basically unusable despite being the default DE for several distros for a while (SuSE, etc) Gnome3. Seriously, we're all complaining about the Win8 shell after that pile of crap was unexpectedly inflicted on basically everyone who had dodged the KDE 4 bullet? And then there's Unity, which rounds of the half-arsed, myopic stupidity that ruined the DE for 99% of all Linux users in a short space of time. The only Linux users who didn't get bitten by one of these catastrophic blunders were the hardcore using FVWM, Awesome or some other minimalistic system. Or maybe E17. And yet here we all are bitching about the Win8 interface, which unlike all of the above, can be fixed in 10 seconds with a simple download. You can't fix Gnome Shell or Unity with a 10 second bandaid can you? Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq