Windows XP offered the choice of "Start Menu" or Classic Start Menu". I would like a similar choice for Win7 & Win8.
You do have that choice. You can install Windows XP. The removal of the Classic Start Menu feature from Windows was a result of user testing paired with the support cost of keeping that feature, which is always non-zero.
Would also like the choice of Win8 starting with the classic desktop instead of the Metro.
Because pressing Escape is simply too much effort.
I also noticed that shutting down is many clicks away.
I wouldn't think extra keystrokes to shut down would be particularly troublesome. It's only one or two keystrokes: select a desktop icon (to make sure the focus is on the desktop window) and use Alt-F4. I believe pressing Windows Key+D will activate it, but you might need to use Windows Key+M. (Actually this works on all versions of windows back to at least windows 95, if memory serves).
Clicking the mouse on certain areas to do certain things is not all that obvious.
Luckily, that's not a feature, to my recollection. Closest I can think of would be the Charms Bar. But stemming from that there isn't really anything 'obvious' about the association between a taskbar button and an application; it's just something we learned; before that the association was Icons to Windows; now it's simply using the hotspots methodology that was rather popular for screensavers and has been since Windows 3.1.
I've been using my laptop with Win7 for over a year & only tried Classic Shell yesterday. I don't have a Win8 machine, was working on a neighbor's. They, too, are having difficulty adjusting to Metro.
They should be switched to something they will be more comfortable with.
If a computer comes with Win8, it makes no sense to downgrade to Win7; i.e., extra cost, no future support, drivers, etc.
Ahh. Yes, the extra cost of using the
free Windows 7 downgrade rights can definitely burn a hole in one's pocket...
There are still those that hold to Windows 98SE, and will use it no matter the cost. If Windows 8's UI annoyances that people experience (Just to clarify: It's not called Metro!) aren't enough for them to justify downgrading, than those annoyances cannot possibly be very bad. I can at least respect those that stick with Windows 98 because they have taken affirmative action, but a lazy stance of "I'll go with the flow, but I'm complaining the entire way" is not productive, especially when the majority of criticism boils down to "it's different".
You make feel that Win8 is the best ever, but there are probably more that don't. Classic Shell has more than 4 million downloads.
well, 4 million is certainly larger than 1. But it's not the majority of the 100 million that have Windows 8. This is nothing more than an ad populum fallacy; "A lot of people think it's not good, therefore it must be", which is not necessarily the case. Every windows version has had it's detractors and every Windows Previous-Version-feature advocate has pulled out the "but this utility that brings back feature X is popular, therefore MS should bring the feature back" sort of argument; (eg. when Windows briefcase was removed people made a similar fuss). A lot of functionality in any OS is not obvious. The start button showing a menu is only obvious because we've learned it. But from a pure perspective, there is nothing obvious about the Start Orb that tells me "pressing the button while the little arrow is over top of that shows me a menu that provides a lot of functionality". There isn't anything obvious about the system notification icons, or about the taskbar buttons. Some might argue this is reducing the argument to an absurd level, but what it boils down to is the argument that the only reason a feature wouldn't be obvious isn't because it's not obvious from a "pure" perspective but because it's not obvious based on the non-obvious functionality we've already memorized; Most of us, I imagine, have an understanding of drop-down menus and how they work. But they are only "obvious" because we've learned them. It's actually interesting because you can find a lot of Computer-Literate people making fun of or otherwise insulting people that don't understand completely non-obvious behaviours- and I'm not putting myself aside from those myself, I've certainly done my fair share of that too.
Anyway, what is obvious to one person is not going to be obvious to another; in some cases a person that is familiar with one system can actually be at a disadvantage compared to a person that has used no system at all, because they come into that new system with certain expectations about how it works; and if those behaviours are changed, in some ways, their world "stops making sense"; whereas for the person that hasn't used the system before, the world doesn't make sense either way and they have to figure it out; and once they do, now their future interactions with systems are going to be coloured by interaction.
Of course that isn't the say that Windows 8 is unilaterally better than previous versions, even in the UI department. But it's a good change because the model we had gotten so used to- and to which many of our experiences with Windows 8 are coloured- has become stagnant. Just as there is nothing "intuitive" or "obvious" about, say, Office 2003 Commandbar functionality, there is nothing obvious about Start Menus (or start screens, for that matter); at least not to people that have never used a machine, so it doesn't really matter.
Another good example would be comparing to Mac OSX. I had to use an OSX system for a moment, and I found myself frustrated by a rather simple mechanic: on OSX, you have to keep the mouse held down when selecting items from a menu, and then release to choose the desired item. With Windows, you can press and release on the menus or submenus, and then click the desired item. The number of times I released the mouse and selected the wrong item was infuriating. Nonetheless, this particular functionality is "obvious" to OSX users; for me, my experience was coloured by Windows so it wasn't obvious at all.
I think a good analogy would be the advent of Mice. A menu was not really "obvious" either; there wasn't any innate reason to think clicking on a word at the top of an application (or for the Mac, the screen) would cause a menu to appear. This is sort of the same with Touch gestures such as showing the charms bar or dragging applications. Like Mice, once you've used it for a while, it becomes almost second nature- those "non-obvious" features- such as the charms bar- become second nature.
