I'm divided about it, since I don't have as much freedom to move and group things as I used to. Specifically shoving things into corners, they still like to stand out.Unfortunately, no. But if this is the case, you must feel right at home in the metro start screen!
Then why the desktop icons?
Desktop icons are things I use on an everyday (or nearly every day) basis, the start menu's search function is for everything else. Any Video Converter? "Any" and hit enter. Audacity? "Au", enter. IcoFX, Speccy, Stepmania, etc.
When I move to 8 or above I'll likely just need a new shortcut key for it.
DirectWrite came out with 7, and an update gave it to Vista too, but I'm glad to see they focused on improving the APIs most commonly-used now.While I am not familiar enough with Windows Vista or 7 to comment on what is or isn't hardware accelerated in the GUI, I can definitely assure you that not all of it is. Specifically, rendering the text and the images is not. To see what I mean, try opening a large image in some of the default apps, or scrolling through a very text- and image-heavy document in Office 2010. The guys at Microsoft explain it better than I, though: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...celerating-everything-windows-8-graphics.aspx
No, turning it off was used if the GPU was shitty, or if an old program that doesn't support compositing (like BGB, the emulator) needs to run.In regards to Aero, I would hazard that being able to turn it on and off was more to conserve memory that processing power (it eats on the order of 100MB of RAM).