At the Build Windows in Anaheim, California, excitement, eagerness, and trepidation fill the air in equal measures. Developers are overjoyed that Microsoft’s best-in-class development tools can now target tablets, a slew of new, low-level features will usher in entirely new species of always-on, omnipresent devices, and few can deny the awesome money-making potential of the Windows Store.

Once you see past the emphatically strident Steven Sinofsky and the repeated reassurance that you will like Windows 8, however, a handful of flaws begin to rear their ugly heads. As awesome as Metro might be, and as fresh and invigorated the re-imagined Windows team is, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Windows 8 will break the user experience paradigm that two or three billion people have grown accustomed to. Almost every computer user alive today cut their teeth on Windows — on icons, on Alt-Tab, and on the Start menu — and as of Windows 8, that body of experience, that muscle memory, and those expectations, will all be for nought.

Windows 8 re-imagines Windows, and Metro — the primary interface that you have to use — is completely different from what users expect. Metro might not be a separate OS, but beyond low-level features like the kernel and drivers, Metro is about as disparate as it gets. It’s like iOS and Mac OS X, or Android and Ubuntu — they’re built on much the same architecture, but you interact with them in very, very different ways.

Five flaws

Now, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if Metro and Explorer/Desktop were separate, but Windows 8 machines will run both interfaces interchangeably — as Sinofsky says, you can switch between Metro and standard Win32 “like tabs in a browser” — but don’t be fooled into thinking that Desktop is a first-class citizen in Windows 8. Many affordances are made to ensure that Windows 8 is tablet- and touch-first, and as a result the desktop and laptop experience will suffer.

There are five big potholes that, unless they are rectified, will create a seriously jarring experience for most of Earth’s inhabitants.

1. Multi-tasking

The most obvious omission from Windows 8 is proper multi-tasking and task/app switching. Unless you are in Desktop and you have a keyboard attached, there is no way to switch between currently-running apps; all you can do is flick cyclicly through open apps — in just one direction. If you want to alternate between two apps — to copy and paste something, for example — it’s simply not possible. If you have 10 apps open (an activity that is encouraged because Windows 8 has received a bevy of power management tweaks) you need to flick left 10 times to arrive back at the beginning.

2. You can’t close apps

As a corollary, if you want to close a handful of those 10 apps — if you want to make task switching easier, or free up some memory — then… well… you can’t. The only way to close apps in Windows 8 is through Task Manager, which exists solely within Desktop. Needless to say, toying with Task Manager with a fat finger isn’t the best experience in the world. We would expect that a Close button might appear in the right-side menu at a later date, though.

Read on for flaws three, four, and five