The only reason I keep a windows machine around is because of Word/Powerpoint. I can get ork done with these. Open/libreOffice are pale copies.

I also played some games like TF2 or Age of Empire, but the former is now playable on Ubuntu. Steam is doing an impressive work.

For programming, I prefer QtCreator to Visual Studio. I regret QtCreator can't be used with other languages like D, Go, Java.

I don't think I'll make the switch to windows 8. My father 82 bought a new computer and Dell only sell Windows 8 on these. This costed him a lot of time to adapt for no justified benefit.