The Windows 8 interface will be the much talked about Metro design, and like it or not it will be the default when you start up your Windows 8 box. Applications started in Windows 8 will keep on running after you have “closed” them until they are needed again. This is quite different from Linux where the close button on the menu bar actually does what you expect it to do, but the Windows formula is quite different in the future apparently, they are aiming to make Windows an operating system with a toy interface even worse than the abominably horrid Unity example that the Canonical team shat out in Ubuntu 11.04. I can not believe for the moment that this is a reality that has befallen us, but the eldritch horror from the beyond has risen and smote the computer interface world with a curse that no mortal being can face. Rather like that weiderlich movie Jack & Jill with Adam Sandler. The score on Rotten Tomatoes does not lie, that movie is shit. And the Metro interface will be judged the same. I wonder how much GPU power will be sucked out by it, but it is Internet Explorer running full-screen and drawing HTML5 widgets so maybe not much. But will the Windows Classic interface make a showing in this new OS or will it just be the new Metro interface every time you log-in? Microsoft want developers to code applications for the Windows 8 platform in HTML/CSS/Javascript to enable better portability for their applications. A Metro application is full-screen, it does not use the standard title bar and window borders that conventional Windows applications use at the moment.
Internet Explorer 10 runs full-screen by default, it is the core of the Metro interface and runs the show. The Gnome 3 desktop on the other hand is actually nice to use and is not rendered with a web browser, this makes it more attractive and usable. And the plugin infrastructure is in place to enable adding plugins and applets to Gnome 3 just by visiting a website and clicking the one you wish to add. This is about time, I wish my version of Gnome 3 was the required version so that I could use this myself. Time to upgrade I guess. https://extensions.gnome.org/. The website for the Gnome Shell extensions. Rather like the Mozilla addons website. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell. More information about the Gnome Shell interface may be found at this website. The only thing I can say about Windows 8 is the fast boot time reported in the December 2011 issue of PC Authority of 8 seconds which is pretty good for a Windows operating system, but if you use suspend to disk with Fedora Core 15, the system can start back up faster than that. And that is nice when you are wanting to get something done and the boot time is annoying you. I switched from Debian Stable to Fedora to be able to use suspend to disk, as well as HDMI sound. the HDMI sound output is crystal clear and well worth setting up if you have the hardware. I hope with the release of Windows 8 they can do something to tackle all the spyware and viruses that Windows is famous for. In conclusion, I prefer the Gnome 3 interface over the Windows 8 Metro design anyday, and Linux is more secure than Windows ever will be.