My feelings are mixed.
In terms of general performance, it seems to be very similar to Win 7, I didn't notice any significant differences. The great majority of games that run on Win 7 also run on Win 8. With a little tweaking here and there in some rare cases, I was able to get, like, 97% of my games to run flawlessly.
In terms of handling and ease-of-use, there are quite a few little things that bug me. Everything that's supposed to make Windows more user-friendly seems to end up making it more confusing and unintuitive. Instead of actually improving something, I get the feeling they just do everything differently, swap stuff around and hide useful functions so that you have to search for the things you knew from older versions. But that's no different from any other Windows version I've tried (although admittedly I never had XP). Switching to a new one always seems to come with these little drawbacks.
And then, I actually really like the concept of the GUI Formerly Known As Metro Screen, because if you're into that kind of thing, you can create much cooler looking shortcuts on that screen and there is much more space on it, too, since you can scroll to the sides, so you don't have to cram your desktop with those tiny little icons. But the actual execution of it leaves something to be desired. The way the tiles are sorted - in columns of two - is beyond silly for a desktop PC. Move a tile around and everything within those two columns moves with it, and in the most unintuitive way. The color scheme for the default tiles introduced with Win 8.1. (apparantly favoring orange) is terribly ugly and hurting my eyes. The customization of the Metro Screen offered by Windows is severely lacking. So if it wasn't for that neat little customization tool called OblyTiles that someone totally unrelated to Microsoft developed in their spare time and shared for free, I would loathe the Metro Screen, too. And even with that it's still somewhat roundabout and complicated to put great looking shortcut tiles on the screen. But if you 're willing to put that effort in it, I think the result is pretty cool. I don't miss the start menu either, since I thought it was a mess ever since Vista.
I don't care for the Microsoft account and app store and other tablet GUIs at all, and my thoughts toward that stuff aren't very friendly. Luckily the OS still allows me to partially opt out of it, just ignore it and use my desktop PC the way I did before. I set the PC to not log into my Microsoft account on startup, I haven't downloaded and run a single "app" from the store, I still download everything I need directly from websites on the internet. So it's just the GUI elements that's I have to deal with (e.g. the way how you manually update Windows is pretty roundabout now - it was one click before, now it's clicking through 2-3 menu screens).
Post edited March 19, 2014 by Leroux
