I’ve been following the media coverage on the release of the upcoming version of Windows, Windows 8. So far the news seems to be that it is really more of an OS for tablets than for desktop PC’s.

Even though I haven’t used Win8 in person yet, I’m not liking what I’m see being reported on the UI front:

Here’s a small list of my gripes so far:

1. It’s interface is optimised for touch. This is all right for tablets and perhaps even laptops in many situations, but my screen sits more than an arms length away from me. Even if I chose to start using a touch screen, I’ll have to completely reorder my desk to make full use of the new UI, something I’m not looking forward to, not in the least because I like my current multi monitor set-up. I hope they’ll introduce some kind of kinect interface to allow me to make gestures instead of touching the screen.
2. The start menu button is disappearing. To me this is horrible! I like to keep a clean desktop with only the icons of “My Computer”, “Network” and one or two apps which I use every day, or perhaps some files I’ve downloaded and will only use for a little while before archiving them or tossing them in the bin. Apparently the new way to do things is to go through the charms bar, which seems to be a dumbed down start bar with all it’s menus exposed. I sure hope we get to retain all the goodness that the run menu used to offer us.
3. you can’t boot straight to desktop anymore, you have to go through metro UI and run the desktop UI as an application. I wonder if that means that we can run alternative desktops as well. I sure hope this will be possible, but I doubt that microsoft will allow it, just as they officially won’t allow any RDP clients or servers other than their own to be run on Windows.
4. It’s rumored that the Metro UI will only be shown on one screen, leaving any other screens blank. This is ‘A bad thing’³ in my eyes. It would be great to have a second screen available to have a different category shown.
5. Metro looks really, really cluttered to me. It reminds me of the win95/98 mess on the desktop. It’s really awful to look at in that respect.

here are some positive things though:

1. The new desktop UI will support wallpapers for individual screens. Being a multi monitor user for almost 8 years, this seems to be a very welcome change, one which I really expected for Windows XP, but which Microsoft neglected to implement all these years even though Linux has been doing it for ages.
2. Hardware 3d sound acceleration will be back! Finally I can have pinpoint accuracy again when I’m gaming. I never really understood why MS canned the whole sound acceleration thing in the first place. They practically killed the 3rd party sound card market by doing so, and I reckon that it was a very bad thing.

One thing I haven’t read about, but I’m hoping to see is better joystick support. Currently the joysticks are limited to only a couple of axes and buttons. Something which has been annoying the hell out of me. As a flight sim enthusiast I’d really like to be able to use my HOTAS Cougar with all its axes and buttons enabled at the same time. Unfortunately in the last two releases of Windows, Microsoft seems to think that gaming support seems to be centred on making the PC a glorified XBox, and won’t support much more than what they’re willing to support on the XBox, which is very, very limited in terms of gaming peripherals in my eyes.

All in all windows 8 seems to be a bit of a hit and miss affair for desktop based power users like me. I really hope that they won’t dumb down the settings side of windows as much as they have done with the UI.