Should You Hop on Microsoft Metro

I've tried the developer preview yesterday, to see what they are cooking up on the other side of the fence. It left me feeling lost and dumb.

Metro is one big tablet interface and it feels completely out of place on a mouse/keyboard machine. The actions are so unintuitive, that I didn't even know how to close a program. It was the first time, in a long time, that I felt like an absolute beginner.

It's a bigger trainwreck than Unity and Gnome 3. That's is not supposed to be a compliment for Unity or Gnome. MS lost it.

Sorry? Win7 is stable? In which parallel universe is this? I've just been doing some development writing a Qt application to interrogate an oscilloscope and had two BSODs within two days. This is the firsst time I've used Windows since 2001 to do any software development and I see little sign of improvement. Quite aside from viruses, lock-down, terrible USB implementation and all the other guff that goes with Redmond's rubbish.

Thankfully I've got the libraries to talk to my scope working on a version of Mandriva that's just gone out of LTS, but as it'll never be connected to the Internet, I'm just going with that.

The day M$ make a stable OS is the day they go down the Unix route. *******s.

The whole "Metro" thing falls in line with Steve Balmer's "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!" dance. First they ram the Metro theme down the throat of anyone using Windows. Then all that corporate Visual Basic crud that's written will have at least the possibility of being mobile. Think about it: All those corporate drone developers (looks around and sees several) that can't do anything except Visual Basic are a perfect target audience. The vast majority of the stuff they develop has few enough lines of code that it will run just fine on a smart phone. Those developers will jump at the chance to write one app that runs on both a desktop and a smart phone without ever thinking about the further lock down they're letting themselves in for.

I swear, half the people I work with would behave toward Steve Balmer like the people in the beginning of The 10th Kingdom did toward Tony given half a chance.