should we upgrade, or wait for the initial reaction from the public? So far, its only the tech crowd that has commented on Win 8, and it seems that people either hate it, or love it
I've been using it 100% for a few weeks and spend 90% of my time in desktop mode (due to using Chrome, AIM, and Media Player Classic). Most of the time I forget I'm in Windows 8, it feels just like Windows 7. The only time I see Metro is when I hit the windows key, type "chro" and hit enter to launch Chrome. In this use case, Metro isn't anything more than a bigger start menu.
$UI = [Metro|Ubuntu Unity|DWM/dmenu]
So that is all three main end user desktop/laptop OSes using type and go interfaces.
Windows 7 is likely my last version of Windows. All I use it for now is occasional gaming and I can't see developers dropping W7 support for a long time unless they're heavily incentivised for some reason by MS. Even at $40 for W8, I'd personally be throwing that money away.
When I go from W7/W8 at home and Ubuntu on my PC at work to my XP work laptop, it's just an incredibly frustrating experience. I hear people say the only thing that's changed is the looks, but there are a lot of usability upgrades in the newer OSes.
In all the modern OSes I don't need to know what this app is named or what that setting is called. I can just start typing what I think it is and fuzzy matching figures out when I type "resolution", what I really want is what they call "display".
I did try some of the metro apps. It was a little weird--it wasn't immediately obvious how to close the metro app--but fairly nice over all. The preference for scrolling sideways is a little odd, but not difficult to get used to. The problem is that the app store doesn't have anything I actually need at the moment--the only moderately useful app I've found was the Wikipedia one, and I usually just use my browser for that. Of course, I basically live in Chrome and Emacs, so I'm not very representative :).
So, as far as design and usability goes, I'm content. However, I've had a major over-arching problem that eclipses everything else--stability. After any extended use, the computer just freezes up and most things stop working, forcing me to restart. It's probably a driver issue, but it's very annoying nonetheless.
I've had some other similar problems (for example, regedit did not work until a couple of reboots), but they do not recur often, so I can forgive them in a beta product.
In short: it's very pretty and entirely useable, but also somewhat unstable. And still not as good as Linux :).