Am I the only one who thinks this new UI style looks unappealing and annoying?

Not only that but they have fully integrated it into VS2012, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (wtf?). When I saw the new VS2012 UI I was like "Hmm this is alright I guess" but when I compare it to VS2010, VS2010 just looks so much better.

In my opinion, the metro UI just looks like colored squares and rectangles.

Does anyone else agree?

Edit: the most votes in the Visual Studio microsoft connect program is, you guess it, about the style of visual studio 2012
And the tool to change the theme has a whopping 130,000 downloads

I hope Microsoft kills the metro style, especially for desktop and goes back to aero.

I actually like it, VS2010 was good as well but I can't say I'm bothered by the new look.

When it's good it's very very good, but when it's bad it's horrid.

It actually works quite well in Office 2013 - the Ribbon interface really suits it well (even all-caps looks good there), and although it shares the same bland flat monochrome look as what most of us have seen to date, it's very well laid out and easy and clear to use. The VS guys could certainly learn a thing or two from looking at what the Office guys have done.

There are 3 threads about various aspects of this already o.O

IMO the concept of having a back-to-basics sleek and modern UI is great, but it just wasn't really executed all too well.
This is what it should have been in my opinion: http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/the-re-imagined-windows-8-metro-concept-that-you-wish-was-real/

IMO VS2012's UI doesn't look good unless it's in the dark theme. Maybe that's just me.

Yeah, Microsoft's Modern UI is a bunch of coloured boxes. It's supposed to be. They thought it through, and designed it to be a bunch of coloured boxes.

Where I work, we decided the existing UIs weren't good enough and had many flaws. We spent a few years designing a better UI from the ground up, with interaction research and usability studies and field testing. We had several interim prereleases. Then we made it the default, and there was a lot lot of loud vituperative hate from a small segment of the usual crowd who vowed loudly in public that the new UI suxxord teh big one and they would never try it and why did "they" force a change on people. A lot of other people turned on their computers and got to work, barely aware there was a change because other than where they had to click at startup, the browser was the browser and email was email and the world didn't end after all.

Fact is, haters gonna hate. There's going to be people who hate the new Microsoft UI and will be very loud about the fact. The vast majority of folks will just use whatever their computer came bundled with, emailing jokes to their friends and browsing pictures of kittens, and life will go on.

If you use the new UI for a reasonable while (a couple of days is not a while) and go back to your old UI, you'll probably find it clunky and weirdly layed out. Try it. Give it a reasonable chance.

I like the UI but I do agree that its strange that the metro ui came with windows server 2012, maybe thats MS way of telling us the desktop model is dying.

Transitions are never easy, remember the UI complaints vista or ms office got (among other things), I dont actually use windows 8 yet, but from what I have seen in windows server, things are criticised far too much

Yeah, Microsoft's Modern UI is a bunch of coloured boxes. It's supposed to be. They thought it through, and designed it to be a bunch of coloured boxes.

They thought it through? They looked at the interfaces on smart phones and tablets and, in their infinite wisdom, deemed that all PCs would use touch screen interfaces within a few years. What they neglected to do was to understand that the interface is based on the available input tools and those tools are designed with the user's intent in mind. It is kinda hard to hook up a mouse to a smart phone or a tablet and keyboards take up too much space. Touch screens are the perfect choice for those devices and these devices are not intended to replace PCs.

Has anyone at Microsoft ever actually used a touch screen with a PC? If they had, their frustration level would have had them chucking the screen through a window. Just try to select a single character out of a block of text with your finger. Want to draw a line in a graphics program with pixel-perfect accuracy? Good luck! But, hey, at least we'll be able to touch the square to open the graphics program, right?

They thought it through? They looked at the interfaces on smart phones and tablets and, in their infinite wisdom, deemed that all PCs would use touch screen interfaces within a few years. What they neglected to do was to understand that the interface is based on the available input tools and those tools are designed with the user's intent in mind. It is kinda hard to hook up a mouse to a smart phone or a tablet and keyboards take up too much space. Touch screens are the perfect choice for those devices and these devices are not intended to replace PCs.

Has anyone at Microsoft ever actually used a touch screen with a PC? If they had, their frustration level would have had them chucking the screen through a window. Just try to select a single character out of a block of text with your finger. Want to draw a line in a graphics program with pixel-perfect accuracy? Good luck! But, hey, at least we'll be able to touch the square to open the graphics program, right?

I think you severely underestimate the amount of testing MS does on their UI changes.