People mostly hate change, and metro gnome shell and unity all represent that. Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7? They had gotten used to it and microsoft gave them a good excuse to change their minds. While gnome shell was a bit rougher around the edges as most dot oh open source projects tend to be, you'll emd up seeing the same behavior in n years when people will be screaming bloody murder about giving up gnome 3... or win8/9.
> Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7?
Because the last polishing step for an OS, like for every other software, is the most important ? Vista was filled with things that were one little short step from being great, or said another way vista was filled with things that were not great.
"Why did people like Engadget go from hating Vista to loving Vista SP1 aka Win7?"
If I'm not mistaken, the main reason for the Vista-hate was the too frequent UAC-prompt, buggy drivers and extreme slowness. This was generally resolved by Windows 7, and that's why I think they started praising it.
I don't think I heard many complaints about the "new" UI. Rather, if anything, people was saying it looked like XP with a new theme. That's not much to get used to over time as a previous XP-user.
There was a lot of small and discrete but very effective ui changes in windows seven. The kind that transformed "why is it asking me to add tags and rating to my dll" into "what i need is right there under my mouse already".
And as you said the completely broken uac in vista didn't help, they had managed to make limited accounts worse to use than in xp somehow.
How were limited accounts worse? Previously, a limited user couldn't perform action X at all. After UAC, they could perform it if they had an administrative account (or could get an administrator to approve).
Vista did add some prompts for things that an admin could do that really shouldn't have resulted in prompts. What actions that a limited user could previously perform resulted in the new prompts?
The first thing that comes to mind is running regedit. Despite the elaborate ACL system in the registry windows won't run it without admin rights. You can still use any other program including reg.exe to access the registry, but not the convenient one.
Did it work pre-vista? If so, I agree that's kind of a lame change. It seems like a pretty minor issue in the grand scheme, since generally users shouldn't be mucking around in the registry, but it's lame nonetheless. I assume that if it worked previously, it was decided that the effort to implement key-specific UAC was just too high, so they implemented whole-app elevation.
