REVIEW WINDOWS 8 PRO Desktop Enhancements, Dual Interfaces Desktop Mode

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To underscore its commitment to the new apps and UI, Microsoft has made sure that the desktop environment itself is actually an app that you have to launch from the Modern UI Start screen, either by clicking its tile or the tile of a desktop app. You cannot run desktop apps in the Modern UI environment nor can you run Windows 8 apps on the desktop. There's also no way to boot directly to the desktop.
While it's impossible to avoid the Modern UI, it's also practically impossible to avoid visiting the desktop, because many of Microsoft's own built-in apps still run in a window, including Windows Paint, Notepad and Calculator. There are also actually two different control panels: a very scaled-down one for Modern UI and a full-featured Control panel that only runs on the desktop and lets you do everything you can do in Windows 7, from changing the screen resolution to partitioning disks. Adding to the confusion is that there are two different versions of Internet Explorer 10, one for desktop and one for Modern UI.
The look and feel of the desktop environment is practically identical to that of Windows 7 interface, with one big exception; there's no Start menu. Instead, Microsoft has put a shortcut to the Start screen that appears when you hover your mouse over the lower left-hand corner of the desktop.
Because of the missing Start menu, we found ourselves often forced to leave the desktop, just to launch an application from the Start screen that took us right back to the desktop again. For example, if we were using File explorer on the desktop and then wanted to launch Windows Paint, we had to go to the Start screen, find the shortcut for Paint and then click it, only to be returned back to the desktop again. While it's true that users can pin shortcuts to the taskbar, leave shortcut icons laying around on the desktop or create keyboard shortcuts, most users will likely find themselves using the Start screen a lot of the time, whether they like it or not.
In addition to the lack of a Start button, users will notice that the desktop environment's aesthetic is much blander than in Windows 7. Where Windows 7 used an Aero glass effect that made window title bars and the taskbar transparent, Windows 8's desktop is made of boring flat surfaces with no gradients and few special effects. We suspect Microsoft made this move to improve performance.