It is forced. You can't disable it, it's where you start off when you reboot the computer, and it's either spam my desktop with my app icons so I can get to them quickly or I have to search for them through Metro UI which is annoying as heck. Some programs don't show up with the search option so when you get into the habit of using it a lot then you forget that certain things like services.msc don't show up so then you back out of the menus to control panel to open it wasting some time. And also why does the quick search function open the metro UI? It shouldn't have to back out of desktop mode.

Microsoft thinks adding more menus is what people want. Look at what Steam does. They have a separate completely not in your face option to use a menu more designed for controllers if you want to. Windows 8 has an interface designed for tablets and instead of being set on the side for those that actually want it they try to make people use it. Why when I launch music it by default opens up metro UI for a crappy music player? I'm in desktop mode. I don't need to be taken out of desktop mode. No one plays music on a computer and just stares at the screen. We play it so we can resume activity on the desktop.

Sure there are apps that help fix some things but they take down your performance. I have a great laptop, it plays games awesome but the processor is still a little slow. 5-10% usage for a start menu program from a third party is not ideal for that and sometimes they get buggy from my experience and I end up having to go through task manager to exit its entire process and then many of them take a little bit of time to get settled. It's just not ideal. Microsoft has no vision or perspective. Even if they do it's not with the focus on the consumers experience.

Hey! I resent that as vista user. lol But yeah... it was pretty rough till the second service pack & a multitude of updates ironed most of the notable (to me) kinks away.

Gateway MT6706 2008

You can set it up so your PC will boot up straight to desktop. The search is just one bar on the side and works just as good as before, maybe better..

And windows 8.1 is faster, maybe very slightly but it is..

The illusion of a fresh install.

Hah, no. I've been running Windows 8 since release, which is pretty much the longest I've ever gone without formating. It is a much faster OS than Win7 is. The boot times are greatly improved, it is more stable, as has been proven by many studies. It is certainly a great OS under the hood. People's complaints are mainly about the interface. The OS itself is amazing. The best Windows has ever been.