Metro-only Windows 8 Means the Desktop Won’t Be Loaded at All

Windows 8 sports two very different user interfaces  cohabitating in harmony and complementing each other, each one designed for a specific scenario. But the world needs to think of Windows 8’s next generation UI as “more equal” than the older interface.

Offering users both the Metro UI designed for emerging form factors, and a more traditional UI set up to still allow users to leverage more traditional PCs which put GUI and not NUI at the center of the user experience, is the software giant’s way of not compromising.

Customers can have the best of both worlds, instead of just needing to opt for one.

The duality of Windows 8’s user interface is the result of the reimagining of the operating system, revealed Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, earlier this week.

Metro will be the UI of choice on NUI capable devices, supporting natural touch and gestures commands. But at the same time, Metro can also push the old UI completely to the background.

How much so? Well, according to Sinofsky, the old desktop won’t even load if customers prefer Metro and want to use nothing else.

“You get a beautiful, fast and fluid, Metro style interface and a huge variety of new apps to use. These applications have new attributes (a platform) that go well beyond the graphical styling (much to come on this at Build). As we showed, you get an amazing touch experience, and also one that works with mouse, trackpad, and keyboard,” the windows boss said.

“And if you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop—we won’t even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there! This is Windows reimagined.”

BUILD is just two weeks away, and it sounds like Microsoft has some very juicy Windows 8 details in store for those attending, as well as for the rest of the world.