Of all the...

...complaints about Windows 8, the one that least affects me is the loss of the "Start" button.

I have only just now realized that the only things I ever accessed through the Start button were the calculator, character map, and Paint. Everything else had a desktop icon or a taskbar button.

The idea of the Metro active tile interface is neat in concept, but its usefulness on a traditional desktop machine* is hampered by two things: Lack of a touchscreen, and the fact that Google and Facebook are now de facto competitors to Microsoft and Apple (and, increasingly, each other.)

I spend most of my time in Firefox, which runs in the "desktop" environment, anyway.


*A shrinking category, it seems. A thumbnail market survey shows that the traditional desktop market now largely consists of  high-end towers marketed to gamers and little "Grandma needs to do email" machines. The laptop section takes up more than half the computer department real estate at Fry's and half the laptop department is netbooks, ultrabooks, and tablets.