obobskivich wrote:

Every time Microsoft or Apple release a new OS it is "more bloated than ever" and "too slow to be useful" and "a royal mess"

Windows 8's strongest feature I've found is that it's FAST. Damn fast. Not as fast as 98 but substantially faster than XP, Vista and 7. I don't even have an SSD and I can go from cold boot to being able to properly run software in under a minute. My XP machine takes over two minutes to do that and even though the desktop shows up faster, software won't run until it's done loading everything which takes so much longer. The bloat is simply not there in terms of Windows 8. Even installing the OS itself took a surprisingly short period of time. :o

Something else I should point out: While I did get a BSoD the very first time I ran Windows 8 due to a failed driver installation, I've not had a single BSoD since... which I have to admit, is pretty ridiculous when I think about it. This isn't to say I haven't encountered system-crippling circumstances which required me to press the reset button on the front of my computer, but those circumstances have been extremely few (only twice now in 9 months).

Tetrium wrote:

But the Windows 8 UI really isn't for me. It really isn't. If I ever get my hands on 8, the very first thing I'll do is switch it back to the 7-style desktop and somehow hack a startbutton in there, preferably as fully functional as the one in 7 and earlier.

I spend 99.999999999999% of my time on the desktop or in full-screen games in Windows 8. ;)

Actually, I don't miss the start menu. At all. As I've mentioned in another thread lately, even before Windows 8, I would keep folders full of icons just a click away so that I wouldn't have to use the start menu because of how much I despised having to maintain it and find software in it. The Windows 8 start screen, while a bit finicky about positioning tiles within each individual group and only typically allowing shortcuts to executables, is a LOT easier to work with and you can add stuff to it simply by right clicking on an executable file anywhere on the system and selecting "Pin to Start". Even though it was originally intended to be a desktop replacement (seeing as how the desktop is technically an "app" now), treating it as a start menu replacement instead works even better. :B

The Windows 8 machines I've seen are only Windows 8, so I can't directly compare to Vista/7, but those machines do seem to be pretty snappy. The two Windows 7 machines I have at home aren't bad, but both have fairly powerful Core 2 processors and DirectX 10 graphics cards. I honestly have no idea what the start-up time is like for them - I usually boot the machine up and leave the room to finish whatever tasks I was doing before using the computer...