Well, after a day of use I can say: I like the part that looks and acts like Windows 7, but have little use for the Metro side. But then I don't have a tablet either, perhaps Metro works fine there (it better because it's terrible with a mouse/keyboard). I was going to largely ignore Windows 8 until the word came down from on high at work that I'd be responsible for putting a Metro UI on a 10+ year old Win32 application for our salespeople to use on their tablets. Oh joy. I don't think that will be quite as simple as the boss thinks it is.
Since I'm the "legacy" guy at work I had not really paid much attention to WinRT, but from my short perusal of the documentation today it looks like COM lives (but Win32 and WinRT don't mix so I dunno what happens to that application I'm supposed to slap a Metro UI on). Haha, and I used to get so much shit from the .NET guys at work about having to work on COM and C++, but it's still alive.
Anyway, aside from a terrible setup experience (maybe due to my hardware), Windows 8 is pleasant enough. I do have some complaints though:
1. Please give me back the Start menu.
2. Metro is fugly. Seriously, it is so damn ugly. It works okay (some guys at work have Windows Phone, and I've used it some there), but I really, really don't like the way it looks, especially the colors. It's like going back to a CGA display in the 80s.
3. The ribbon makes its way to the shell. Ugh, it was bad enough in Office.
4. Some clunkiness with multiple monitors and Metro.
But it's only been a day. Maybe I'll warm up to it. It took me a long time to transition to Windows 3.0 from DOS, Windows 95 from 3.1, classic Windows 2000 shell to Aero (I never ever got used to Luna on XP though), etc.
Finally, I had no problems getting CCCP installed and watching a few anime videos, so all is good.
