They were pretty separated. The taskbar was always shown, but switching from a metro app to a desktop app or vice-versa, the whole screen did a flip animation a

They were pretty separated. The taskbar was always shown, but switching from a metro app to a desktop app or vice-versa, the whole screen did a flip animation and you switched to the alternate UI. Another noticeable separation was in windows switching: Win+Tab or the corner hover action (top left corner,I think? I disabled it so not 100% sure) only showed metro apps, plus a "Desktop" app. I believe Alt+Tab only listed desktop apps (I may be remembering that wrong, pretty sure 8.1 added all apps to the Alt+Tab switcher). None of that would be so terrible, except that it felt so half-finished. You had to use Explorer (Desktop app) to browse folders, but if you loaded an image, it would "flip" and open the metro image viewer app. Same for PDF files, and a handful of others. Worse was Control Panel: parts of it were updated to use metro, but not all. It would do the "flip" animation as you navigated around. That was pretty jarring. I ended up disabling everything "metro" in Win8 and installing an alternate start menu, and after that, to me, it really just felt like an incremental improvement to Win7 with a beta optional full-screen UI on top that could be safely ignored.