Why would Microsoft remove the beautiful Aero Glass effect and replace it with flat colors and cheesy translucency?

Just how is metro futuristic?

This is an aero styled future city: http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk/media/2014/04/Future-City-1300x728-600x270.jpg

ie, Dubai is like that.

Metro, despite what Bill says, seems an awful lot like the 50's theme for little children... or a cartoon...

I'm not saying one is better than another truly, just stating facts. And no, one size does not fit all.

You found my comment "abusive" eh, Connell? :P

Or is it just that you're technically challenged and had no appropriate reply to defend yourself, and exploited a clause in the TOS to get my comment removed? I feel for you buddy :) Unfortunately the feeling is .... :D

Metro is WAYYYY better than the 7 desktop. Why do we even need the desktop? MS should kill the desktop completely, and make it "metro only". Aero sucks.  Flat, opaque, telemetry, and forced updates is so much better than 7 :)

Being a fan is good. Being an idiot is not.

Says who? You? Are you lord Jesus? Why on earth should I "tweak" my tastes according to your whims?

As far as I'm concerned, what you said is utter nonsense, and a desperate attempt to defend some pathetic/ controversial moves by Microsoft. In my personal opinion, Metro is a waste. Microsoft is so desperate to make money in the "mobile" and "app" market, they have screwed us long time loyal users.

Metro is like MS Bob. And Windows 10, forced updates, telemetry, etc, are just plain NASTY.

A very cheap modern Celeron laptop can run Aero Glass with no performance impact at all, 0% performance hit. Of course it's not very fast, but disabling Aero Glass DOES NOT SPEED IT UP at all. It's JUST AS SLOW WITH AERO GLASS, AS IT IS WITHOUT AERO GLASS. Windows XP was faster with the basic theme, because Windows XP did not use a compositing GUI. The GUI was rendered by the CPU, not the GPU. Using a basic theme reduced CPU load, and freed up RAM (512MB, even 256MB systems were pretty common in the XP era). Aero Glass USES THE GPU. If you don't have a GTX, Aero Glass still uses intel HD graphics or whatever AMD Rx sht. It NEVER uses the actual CPU. It uses the IGP on the CPU. IGP!=CPU. And when not playing games and stuff, the IGP idles anyway. Using something that's sitting idle does not cause a performance hit. And now that even Entry level computers are coming with 4GB of RAM, using 100MB extra for graphics will not cause any problem. If you cannot afford even 100MB for graphics (which is pretty much an impossibility on modern hardware), your system needs a RAM upgrade anyway.

Of course you can call me an idiot, and use the same argument I used against you. I'm NOT a prophet, neither am I the son of God, and there's nothing forcing you to support my point of view. To each his own. While you're perfectly happy with Metro, Flat, Opaque, Telemetry, and Forced updates, I absolutely despise every aspect of this so called"modern" approach. I also think this "unification" idea is destroying the PC. Like many others have pointed out- if I wanted a phone/tablet as my primary computing device, I'd have got one. Trying to make a PC behave like a phone, is like attaching wings to a volvo and expecting it to cruise at flight level 350. It sounds awesome- a flying car, yeaaaa- but it's highly impractical and a futile waste of precious engineering resources.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is this- "Choice" is a good thing. It's not a bad idea to let your customers decide the way they want to use your products. Someone out there might love what you find disgusting, and hate what you love.

It wouldn't hurt to let people use complete transparencies, update their computers on their own planned schedule, don't report telemetry/diagnostics information to MS (given that this is NOT a beta OS any more, and user has a right to privacy) if they decided that's what they want their computers to behave. I could keep using the nice glassy 7-like UI, and disable all the privacy invading "features" completely, while you would decide to support whatever MS is trying to do by giving MS full access to everything on your computer and using the severely restricted and super ugly(<<--personal opinion) metro "apps". We both would win. And so would Microsoft - 2 happy customers is better than 1.

"Tablet mode" gets used roughly half the time on my tower (full computer, not a tablet!). And the apps I run include remote desktop programs for support, hardly crappy games. The app version of Splashtop, my preferred remote software, in particular does a much better job of scaling the host system's display than the desktop version. I actually prefer to use the app, unless I need to transfer files, which for routine maintenance is a rarity.

It's perfectly fine to not like Modern - a lot of people didn't. But it is far from useless, or just for "crappy games." Frankly, I preferred the clean interface to the now decades-old desktop.

And you do realize you can still have slideshows and cool games in Windows 8? I have several nice galleries I cycle between, and have a bunch of classic games - Duke 3D, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, Freedom Force, Minecraft. Though most of my gaming is on consoles these days. The only things that were removed from 8 were the Menu and Aero transparency. That's it.

Better to have a futuristic laptop that can run two styles of program and supports both old and new, than a crappy laptop that only supports the old stuff.

Windows 8 takes roughly the same amount of storage as 7, because of the useless 'tablet mode thing.' Better to have a futuristic laptop that can play cool games and sexy slideshows rather than a crappy laptop with crappy games and... well fine, Jennifer Lawrence looks just as good.

But still, a useless tablet mode...

...for playing angry birds I suppose?