The people screaming the loudest, I get the feeling they're the ones who have most actively resisted ANY exposure to *any* of the touch-enabled digital devices that have been on the market for the last 3+ years.

Am I right? You and HAL and Slayer and DE and the others speaking the loudest here about how horrible/pontless Windows 8 is (or is going to be, or seems)...

Haven't actually ever sat down with ANY touch screen device or touch-screen oriented OS for any meaningful length of time, let alone Windows 8.

Right? I mean, you might have played with a friend's unit for a few minutes or browsed at Best Buy but you haven't ever spent anything like a whole two weeks with a touch screen device learning how it works? I could be wrong, but I've got the feeling I'm not. (Edit - I've read elsewhere in this thread that I am wrong about Hal - he has clearly used Windows 8, but it sounds like he wasn't figuring it out from his problems with Corel adding tiles that he didn't just simply *remove*...)

So... as someone who has been using a Laptop Hybrid touch-screen device for the last few years on a daily basis - there are alternate ways to do ANYTHING with Touch-screen that you can do with a mouse, including a right click (long-press is the touch-centric term you're talking about above, by the way). Sometimes those are a compromise, but frequently, they work just as well or better than a mouse and pointer oriented interface *provided that you've got a touch-optimized OS interface*. Once you get used to Touch-Screen, you often find yourself on non-touch enabled devices doing something with a mouse and pointer and wistfully thinking, "I wish I could do this the way it works on Android/iOS"...

So bear with me here.

The CLASSIC desktop is *not* a touch-centric interface, and *never* will be. I love classic emulation. Playing an Atari 2600 game in emulation with an 8 way D-pad or an analog PC joystick or a mouse and keyboard is aggravation - because the games were designed for 8 way digital joysticks. In emulation, if you want to enjoy it, you get yourself the right I/O device for the interface you're emulating. So in an Atari 8 bit, MAME or other very classic game, you want an 8 way digital joystick. If you're playing a NES emulator, you want an 8 way d-pad with the same button layout as the original NES. It is a forum follows function design consideration. I'll give you another example. I recently read a review of the 8-Bitty bluetooth gaming d-pad for Android and iOS. The reviewer noted that the problem was that mobile games on these devices have a difficulty level tailored for touch-input. Adding the 8-Bitty erases that difficulty factor completely in some cases - taking away the challenge and making fun games *boring*. Matching your user interface to your goal is important.

The inclusion of Classic desktop is a compromise - and you're NOT going to be using it as a touch-screen interface. It is there so you can drop into that mode and run familiar legacy apps that are best suited to that kind of user interaction *using* a mouse, trackball, trackpad or other classic user interface. If you're going into Classic mode in Windows 8 and you're trying to use your finger, you're trying to saw down a tree with a claw hammer. So the real answer to "how do you right click in Classic mode," really is...

By *right clicking*!

So the question, "how do you right click in classic with a touch screen device," itself illustrates that the person asking doesn't quite *get* it. You *can* do that, but why would you want to? Use a pointing device. Likewise, you can navigate the Modern UI, (and really this works even better than the other way around,) using a mouse, but it works *best* with a touch oriented input. That doesn't necessarily mean the *screen*. A multi-input large touch-input enabled mouse or pad works better than just a mouse here, too. The right device for the right input.

Why have two different methods?

Because sometimes a mouse and pointer is superior, sometimes a touch-screen input is superior. Disagree? Why have joysticks, trackballs, Wacom digitizer tablets, keyboards?

Everyone felt this way about the mouse when it first arrived. "That will NEVER catch on. Keyboard shortcuts in the CLI are far superior to this silly GUI and mouse deal". I mean, the EXACT same arguments.

Some of those people are still around to this day. We call them Linux advocates.