It looks like it has been made by someone who has just learnt how to make a GUI application in Visual Basic and has made a little launcher to access their favorite applications.

Like most "launcher" projects, they should keep that stuff to themselves ;)

Additionally, I find the metro stuff claustrophobic and awkward but my biggest issue is the fact that they are spending time and effort on the GUI. That stuff is always superficial and gimmicky and really doesn't interest me. Next release it will be removed (like Aero was) and they will probably start from scratch again with their next little theme.

Luckily the command prompt and everything else has remained the same and other than some improvements in virtualization (Useless for 3D still), I cant really find any new features which have been added.

The stupid shortsighted (already crackable) DRM is still there however

Kind of like it, but I miss the 3D feature(alt tab function from win 7), also installed the start button in the lower left corner and do find that the metro is kind of weird so I have disabled it. All in all I will not install win 8 on my desktop(currently installed on my laptop).

For the upgrade price it really was a no brainer imo... that said, I do wish the 'enter' key would work in these forums in IE10 *sigh*

You could also follow this link.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, the poll displays just about 50/50 likes/dislikes. based on that ill probably try to get a win7 laptop but if I cant I guess ill just try win8.

the boot time is INSANELY fast, faster than a fresh Win7 on the same hardware I find

OK, but one needs to be real about that one too. In reality it is both insignificant and not true. Win8 appears to boot insanely fast, because it doesn't boot. What it does is much closer to "reading a memory dump from disk" than actually booting. It's not surprising that this is faster.

Then again, how often do you really need to (and should need to!) boot? There is no operating system that requires such an insane amount of needless reboots as Windows. This is what should be tuned, not the boot time. This, and the fact that still almost every installer and every program pops up UAC for administrative rights. I don't get it why every program needs administrative rights. This suggests that the security model isn't very well thought through.

I've recently installed the new Visual Studio on my Win7 box for laughs. It needed to reboot 3 times for installing a version of .NET that was already installed and some SQL server stuff that isn't needed (and that gave a "user aborted" error after reboot, which is a lie). On any other operating system, boot times aren't significant, because you don't need to reboot for something as trivial as installing a normal program.
An IDE is a somewhat better text editor that can launch some utility programs. Who would expect that you need to reboot your computer (even more so several times) to copy such a thing to your harddisk?

If I could install Visual Studio <insert any other product> without rebooting, why would I care how long it takes to boot?

Booting is the time between hitting the "On" button in the morning and coming back from the coffee machine. Or, it should be like that. On some operating systems, it's perfectly OK to let a system run for a year or two without rebooting.

I'm not a big Linux fanboy because of the everlasting driver story (though it seems nVidia is working hard on that now) and due to leaving the graphical user interface to Gnome/X11 or KDE/X11, it still gives a "doesn't work" experience after so many years, but hey... you really have to acknowledge that you only need to reboot your Linux box when you installed a new kernel. Or maybe twice in your life otherwise.

Booting is the time between hitting the "On" button in the morning and coming back from the coffee machine. Or, it should be like that. On some operating systems, it's perfectly OK to let a system run for a year or two without rebooting.

Well, for starters I don't drink coffee... This is a home PC as such it doesn't run 24/7 given that for about 16 of those 24 hours I'm not in the flat 5 days a week, which means it gets at least 1 boot a day, maybe 2 if I need to do something quickly first thing before leaving for the bus (which is a very tight bit of timing so a slow boot of my Win7 install was becoming a problem), at which point the faster it can get from off to 'login' the better.

In fact I'd argue that given the rising costs of power the ability to run your home PC for months at a time without rebooting is a redundant 'feature' which most have no use for.

It's funny but I think we're observing the classic "youtube video has equal likes/dislikes" psychological phenomenon. People will tend to equalize the poll, so the 50/50 we are observing right now might actually be somewhat biased

I voted "I like." If you would have asked me a month or so ago I would have said the opposite. Though after using it more and more (Every since the Pro version became available on my Universities DreamSpark Premium account) I like it.

Desktop: I believe their are more changes to the desktop than what meets the eye. The UI is different but I feel the way things are operating that even internally things are different on the desktop. I had Windows 7 on this computer before I installed Windows 8. I at first just did a dual boot to test it out. Even though I at first hated the new UI (Metro, Modern UI, whatever MS wants to call it) and the start screen, I noticed one thing for me: Windows 8 is crazy fast. Very rarely did I find myself going back to Windows 7. I really only did when I was having problems with the Metro UI and I would get upset and just go back to Windows 7. lol. Such a kiddy thing to do. Though their was something about Windows 7 that was starting to bug me. I honestly felt like with each update I did to Windows 7 the more bugs I kept finding. Windows 7 started out excellent. Then IMO it has had a lot of bugs all of a sudden pop their head out at me. That was bothering me.

So I used Windows 8 for a little longer one night while using it I noticed something. I noticed that I absolutely loved the OS so I did a complete reformat and clean install, with Windows 8 being my sole OS on this computer. The Desktop seemed so much more responsive The Start Screen isn't the greatest and does need work but the Modern/Metro UI has a lot of potential (still needs some work though if they really want this to even catch on on the desktop). I find the UI to be absolutely gorgeous in most applications. Though using the Charms Bar and searching or settings in an App is excellent. I love how the settings and searching in the Charms Bar changes by what application you are in.

The biggest thing that I kept mentioning earlier was performance. Windows 8 has been a screamer for me. Windows 7 was fast too though with Windows 8 things just seem to be a little bit faster. Loading up programs on the desktop or Applications in the Modern/Metro UI. In my tests also Windows 8 is using up just a little bit less RAM than Windows 7 was. I like it when an OS gives me a little more to fill up my RAM with the stuff I want it filled up with.

So it looks like I'm going to stick with Windows 8. I haven't installed or even looked into a way to get the Start button back and right now I don't need it. The Start Screen is my start button and I mostly seem to find apps there just as fast as I would have with the Start button. If I don't someone on the Start Screen I just delete it off of it just like you have to do when an installer places a shortcut to your desktop. I have it organized the way I want and have a way to get to the Applications I use the most really fast.

I follow the rule that every other MS OS is the test instead of the product so I won't be changing my 7 anytime soon.

From videos I saw of that annoying layout with blocks, I don't like it.

Just from a gotomeeting standpoint, I already have to blank out what my search history is for clients, I can't imagine if all my favorite sites had applications and showed off where I go online. It's really not something I can let be known especially because we have contracts that say two of the competing companies we work with shouldn't be allowed. Someone already got fired once it was known they were doing deals under the table.

For a computer where you work and play on it, I don't like that UI at all.

I also dump everything on my desktop, that looked tedious to go back and forth in a video I saw. I'll keep my plain old, non-updating, non-blocky, non-big, desktop.

Another thing I saw in videos was that applications no longer had windows, they were full screen - I want windows, I want the borders, to drag it out of the way, to put things side by side etc. The whole browser upgrade to surfing was tabs and doing more than one thing. Single minded applications sound like reversing time.

As for boot times uh... I turn off my computer maybe once every 2 months... the re-boot time is the most dangerous for data loss. That's when the arm could hit the platter on the HDD last I heard. Maybe it's an old wives nerd tale but I don't turn computers off all the time.

Another thing I saw in videos was that applications no longer had windows, they were full screen - I want windows, I want the borders, to drag it out of the way, to put things side by side etc.

This is what I completely agree on. Opening a image on the Win8 Laptop i just got makes some metro fullscreen "Pictures" app show up, completely hiding the desktop. I changed the default application for images almost instantaneously.