There was an article this morning that mentioned that Metro was replacing Aero as the overall theme in the next version of windows. I’ve been using both Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 since the BUILD conference, and I just don’t see how that is the case. In some of the recent posts by Steven Sinofsky there have been some screen shots of task manager and other desktop apps using a very basic theme.

This one illustrates the new flat basic theme.

I haven’t tried the Client OS on a non-3D accelerated system yet, but this is the default for the Server OS accelerated or not.

In fact on the Server OS it’s a feature “Server Graphical Shell”:

Aero came enabled by default on the client OS.

On the Server OS you can get Aero by installing the “Desktop Experience” feature with the PowerShell command “Add-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience”…This same feature is also available on Server 2008 R2 via the Server Manager interface.

While it may not be the most attractive interface ever, it is very consistent when using Remote Desktop Services. Using the default Server OS install gives you an experience that is the same locally and remotely. Since a large number of virtual desktop deployments end up not enabling Aero this might be an effort to start managing expectations about remote UI in general. VDI is a MASSIVE push by industry and MS in particular since it really does away with a lot of the headache of managing desktop systems. At BUILD they were really hyping the potential for device makers to build cheap RDP terminals that serve as thin VDI clients. There was at least one session on it, though I didn’t see it personally.

While you can enable Aero in VDI sessions with RemoteFX, starting in Server 2008 R2, that actually requires installing some fairly expensive co-processors that allow virtualized 3D acceleration.

@the_gadgeteur asked me to post some screen shots and build numbers…so, cheers.