Now, as you may/may not be aware, windows 8 is now in its public infancy - early after windows 7 and there is a very good reason for that. Once you take a look at the base of the UI you find that it seems to have its roots sturdily sunk into Windows phone 7, the future as MS called it.

Now, I have an Acer Aspire 1425p, (and I might get the bitter truth out there early) with a capacitative multi touch screen on which to run this startmenu-less OS - but I doubt many others do . Further, its equipped with 3GB of RAM and the obscenely common 4500MHD GMA chip. WDDM drivers are not the issue - it 'looks' fluid, and I should darn well hope so, after all, when was your GPU lacking in so much oompf you couldn't open your start menu?

Now, those are my major complaints, the fact there is now a 'store', your desktop is no longer the primary workspace (yes, you heard that one right) as well as the start menu being replaced by.... Well, by everything. Yes, everything:

THAT was the start menu :|

Further, you need a monster internet connection if you live in any country like the UK - updating my profile takes up 600kbyte/s downstream for minutes on end... On the other hand, fans of boot camp, feel right at home: the bootloader now supports fading, touch and HD graphics, although I do not know of many people that like to view their bootloader for such extended periods of time HD would matter but there you are.

Yahoo and GMail address owners, horror: half of windows 8 is built around the Live system, thats @live and @hotmail. ALso, you must now SEARCH for your not-so well known apps such as MS Paint...


On the upside, KDE users and GNOME users whom have always had the luxurious ksysguard and gnome-system-monitor at their disposal, windows has caught up in their own way, and so has the aero theme from the nice glass curves to the old windows 95 box style bars with transparency enabled:


Overall, this feels like Windows Media Centre grown into a full UI. And when I said Unity was not bad (just bad ideology) and that GNOME 3 is a bit 'out there' - having the ability to snap windows like so: Can seem a bit like, napalm weed killer.


SO, in conclusion, its radical and new and shiny - speed is low for my liking, Ubuntu 10.10 with 8 months of garbage in it creams it on boot, as does Mint 11 and I sure as heck hope its stable since none of the apps have a close button and I find myself pressing some Ctrl + Alt + Escape all to often. Smartscreen WILL drive you insane if you try to run somehting published by Adobe instead of MS or compiled by you and the likes. I know its early to judge, and I'm sure it will develop loads, but for now its fun - feels like vista fun thats on the cutting edge

Next is the compiler and some opengl benchmarks, so stay tuned!

PS: If anyine feels like trolling etc, this is my very first impression, having Used OSX Snow Leopard, Ubuntu, SUSE, fedora, WIN2K, XP, VISTA and 7 (beta and release) this is how it strikes me. If anything, its a good radical change for MS however, being on the GNOME side of the unity camp - I feel it too much of a radical change for the time, maybe you do not etc... Bottom line, I am not claiming to be unbiased, I love linux and (to a slightly lesser extent) Mac and have had many bad experiences with Windows, but there is a lot of history there. Period. I find it a 50|50 case when dealing with windows 8...