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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I agree with that it doesn't have to be different and that PCs are not tablet, at least on the preview version you could set it to be just like Win7. So I was reading through the article to see if the OP had actually run it in old school mode and still found it unusable. I can't tell. Maybe they will post here.

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"The Metro interface is Windows 8. The desktop that you’re used to is also there, but it’s built as a separate app. Think of it this way: Metro is the shell. The desktop is an app within that shell. If you want to start Steam, you’ll want to launch the Desktop app, and then launch Steam.

This is insanity. This is Windows 8."

He then goes on to mention how the desktop is a second-class citizen, most programs default to the metro version, and core OS features are metro-only.

That's not actually true BTW - desktop apps like Steam or whatever get pinned to the Start screen just like other apps, so you can just click on their tiles to open them directly.

There's not an "old school mode" in that the Start screen will always replace the Start menu and there's no way to reverse that without installing third-party software for it. You can choose to only run desktop apps (and set the file associations to desktop apps) and the experience will be 95% the same, though.

There is no "old school mode" left. There are third party utilities to bring back things like the classic start menu, to disable booting into Metro, etc., but it cannot simply be disabled.

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