I was using the release preview for about two weeks, and have been back on Win7 this last week and a half.
There is a lot to like about Windows 8:
+ It's fast, faster even than Windows 7. It feels almost XP-like on my little netbook and my atom-based tablet.
+ The new full-screen start menu is actually quite good. It's a little bit dumb about arranging your programs, but if you put a little effort into arranging things it works well. I normally use a program launcher (Launchy), but the new start menu's improved find feature has largely replaced that.
+ The window decorations are more sparse. Things still have a glass look, but gone is the weird shinyness and rounded corners. Ugly? Ugly in the same way a Model M is ugly - which is to say, beautifully functional.
+ Many basic dialogue boxes and basic OS functions are significantly improved. The file copy dialogue and process manager, in particular, are quite useful and powerful now. Since reinstalling Win7, I have missed these features the most.
+ The new file explorer ribbon. It hides itself by default, so it doesn't get in the way at all (so it looks exactly like the old explorer). It only pops down if you specifically want it to, and it offers a lot of handy options. A lot of people expressed fears about this feature, but I'm here to tell you: it's actually really nice!
+ Metro is great if you're using a tablet.
Things I hate:
- Metro is catastrophically awful if you're using a desktop. This is the only thing I hate, but I hate it so, so very much. Enough that I want to avoid this OS at all cost. If I could run Metro apps in a resizable window, that would be pretty neat. But you can't, you're forced to run them full screen. I have 24" 1920x1200 monitor, I NEVER run anything fullscreen - the text on webpages becomes incredibly wide, and difficult to read when your eyes move to the next line, things like Twitter become a sea of whitespace. The whole point of having a big screen is that I can just glance over to another window, then quickly mouse over an manipulate something within it. Metro throws away that paradigm, and for what? So that people feel more comfortable using their Windows phones? The intrusiveness of Metro, and it's incompatibility with the rest of computing environment transcends annoyance: it actually makes me less productive. And for an OS, that's a mortal sin. If only I could stick a metro app into a window, I would gladly incorporate them into my desktop environment. But I can't.
So there's Windows 8 for you: a great OS with a bizarre tablet environment bolted into it like some sort of nightmarish chimera. If you can put up with the baggage, you'll like it. I tried, and can't: I will continue using Windows 7 for the foreseeable future.
(The surface looks pretty cool, though)
