"Inexcusable"? "Apologists"? "Forgive"? Did you pick those words with consideration? Obviously you seem to target me (as part of a group you don't agree with)

"Inexcusable"? "Apologists"? "Forgive"? Did you pick those words with consideration? Obviously you seem to target me (as part of a group you don't agree with) here. Those words make no sense in this context? I'm a Linux guy at home/at night, but work as a C# developer in a "We love Microsoft" (tm) company where everything MS is hyped. I'm not part of that though.. Windows 8 (or 2012) works for me _exactly_ as Windows 7 did (Windows 7 workflow for launching stuff? Hit 'Windows' key, start typing. Windows 8 workflow for launching stuff? Hit 'Windows' key (or Win+W or Win+F), start typing. I certainly hate some of the design decisions, all of them related to Metro-only applications. Typing 'optional' (leading to 'Install optional updates', the ~sane~ version of Windows Update) annoys me. There are quite some cases like that, but really: That's minor. The start menu was useless on every machine I've ever seen. It got cluttered quickly with a mixture of documents, programs, shortcuts to websites or crazy 'uninstall' tools, became a messy hierarchy after 15min of using a machine and don't get me started on the sorting or auto-hiding features previous versions of Windows 'improved' the situation with. Worse, the _very specific_ complaint about ways to shut down the machine makes no sense at all (see my previous post. The change is that you have to add a 'i' key to the first press of the Windows button - yeah and the button to power down the machine is now on the right side of the screen). I don't claim that Windows 8 is perfect or anything close to that, but it is not that bad. People just like to complain. A lot. KDE 4 is crap. Gnome 3 is crap. Unity is stupidity cast into UX. Ah - and OS X removes really, really vital things on every release, it seems. Right.. What I'm asking for is some perspective and some nuanced criticism. That isn't happening so far and your 'easily the worst GUI shell' is exactly that broad stroke that I consider flat out wrong. We can argue about details, specific issues, but the way you state it you're just appearing as angry and ranting. Using superlatives and general criticism serves no point. On a slightly related side note: I have the feeling that IT professionals are the worst crowd to handle changes, actually. Where a user might accept a change and honestly give it a try, a more experienced so-called power-user might feel offended much more easily in my opinion.