Re: Oh dear
I have Windows 8 on a laptop and yes in my opinion it is inferior, at least for mouse and keyboard behaviour.
This can be seen in some very straightforward ways.
1. I run the weather app which has about 3 screens arranged horizontally. Since I have a mouse I must wheel across to see the other screens and so *oops* the middle screen contains a large a vertical scroll panel and by wheeling over now my mouse is over it and Win8 is sending mouse wheels to the vertical scroll panel. So I was scrolling horizontally and now I'm not.
2. I want to pin several apps to the start menu. I must right mouse click, mouse down to click All apps, mousewheel over about 4 horizontal screens of apps to find the one I want to pin, right click on it, mouse down to the bottom strip and choose Pin to Start. But I said I wanted to pin several apps - do you suppose I can multi select apps with right clicks and pin them all at once? No of course not because that would be really useful. I must repeat this bloody process once for every app.
3. Wheeling over a multiple screen when I have large monitor is boring and makes no sense. Can Can I zoom out the start menu to spare me this effort? Of course not. I can get a 1000ft view, or close up, but zoom? No, too useful.
4. Another way to spare me the pain and suffering of wheeling is if I can organize tiles into groups. Naturally this is not supported either despite the fact that other touch based operating systems manage to do it pretty nicely.
5. I've just run the weather app and now I want to flip back to an app I have running in desktop mode. I mouse over to the left side of the screen were some new app picker comes up. Is it there? Of course not. I have a "Desktop" thumbnail but not for apps within the desktop. So I must click Desktop, and then do a second navigation from the task bar to find it. Extra mouse travel because clearly Weather apps need greater prominence in the UI than trivial apps like Eclipse, consoles, browsers etc.
6. Can I multiple select tiles with a rubber band or similar in the start menu. No I must manually right click on each and often discover the action I wish to do is not available for multiply selected icons.
7. I want to launch VirtualBox with an Ubuntu image. In Windows 7 I'd have an icon with a recent documents history so I could do it with a hover and a click. Now I have to manually do this in multiple steps in a different way for each app. More time.
8. Mousewheeling up and down to scroll side to side is counterintuitive anyway.
I could go on listing things like this. Basically Windows 8 involves a LOT more mouse travel and clicking that Windows 7 ever did. While I don't object to Metro per se it is half baked for "classic" machines and it is clear to me MS went straight for tablet land and filled out some perfunctory mouse and keyboard behaviour for everyone else.