I disagree; I think the biggest problem with Windows 8 has always been its poor usability: specifically, its discoverability. It was really bad back in the tim

I disagree; I think the biggest problem with Windows 8 has always been its poor usability: specifically, its discoverability. It was really bad back in the times of the developer preview. You booted into the lockscreen, and all you saw was a clock and a picture. No "continue" button, no clue of any sort for how you were supposed to get past it - back then you could only get past it by clicking it and dragging it up, which a lot of people could not figure out. This sort of design, the idea of "remove affordances to make things look less cluttered, even though it makes it harder to learn to use" is all over Windows 8. Say you double-click an image file. By default, this opens the image in the Metro app. Which means now you have the image full-screen, with nothing else on the screen. What do you do? There are no buttons on-screen to hint at all for how to go back. Esc doesn't leave the app. The biggest reason a tablet-optimized OS is so unusable on desktop is that tablets have a big obvious "Home" button. On mouse+keyboard, the Windows Logo Key is the analogous button, but that's not clear to most users. If you ask a user what button they'd expect to use to leave an app, they'd say Esc (which doesn't leave Metro apps). The way Windows 8 is now, it completely eliminates one of the biggest advantages of a GUIs: the ability to use a computer without reading a manual or being taught in some way. http://xkcd.com/627/ http://xkcd.com/627/ GUIs were an amazing invention because they made possible the workflow of: "If you want to do X, look for a button with 'X' written on it, or look through menus for 'X', or look for buttons with labels related to 'X'." OS X works like this, Windows earlier than 7 works like this, even most Linux distros are set up to work like this by default. But Windows 8, you just get a bunch of nothing. Critical functionality is hidden away and can only be used by obscure mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts. I've seen someone described it as "user-hostile" - he opened the Charms bar by accident from moving the mouse, finally being able to shut down, but could not figure out how to get it back. Usability has slowly gotten better between the first Windows 8 developer preview and Windows 8.1, but it's still incomplete, and a Windows 8.1 Update 1 is yet another a step in the right direction.