Who's down for some good ol' fashion OS bashing? I know I sure am. This pertains to NT 6.3 shipped straight from Redmund, WA to a warehouse and then to my domicile. Yes, I'm using Windows 8. No, it isn't a fresh pile of dung, more like a rehashed and repacked pile with a fancy ribbin on. I can't really comment on the not-metro UI as shockingly, I've only used it a few times and two times was to pin the control panel to my task bar. As such we'll gloss over the elephant in the room for the most part.

The installer is still bleh. Click next a few times, format the C: drive and you're pretty much done. No options for designating certain drives to directories until you get to the full OS where you can software RAID/JBOD with Storage Spaces and take a performance hit for not using a hardware controller.

The Explorer UI is roughly the same but now uses drop down ribbins instead of a ribbin with commonly used tasks in conjunction with a menu bar. 3 clicks to shut down via GUI rather than 2 for Win7. Performance is roughly the same between 7 & 8. I can't help but get the feeling that not-metro UI being disabled would give a bit more performace. Task manager is a bit funky now. The Prcoess tab and Details tab do about the same thing but Details has a bit more meat on the bone with Set Priority and Set Affinity being in its context menu among other things.

And now to go office space on the dead horse. Windows 8 is the worst version of windows Microsoft has ever released. System Refresh is pointless as its essentially a fresh install that leaves old system files behind you can't delete wiithin the system. It also "deletes your old programs by moving them into Windows.old so you can presumably try to salvage something (IDK what but something dammit). You have to be able to boot into a full desktop in order to get into safe mode as it requires you to go into advanced settings in not-metro. Event Viewer gives you very little information on blue screens of death (though I don't think that's a new development). Not-metro UI is part of safe mode. I am not making this up. You cannot do a System Refresh or Reinstall if UAC is set to maximum for reasons I can't fathom. All windows 8 consists of is more abstration from actually being able to control your computer. That's all it is. It has no compelling features over Windows 7 to make it worth while. Sure, it does in fact boot faster, however A. I'm on a desktop that gets turned on once and turned off once and second, sleep mode doesn't suck anymore. And if you really want power saving in a portable you should be hibernating anyways. All of these are things that I have had experience with under Windows 8 and quite frankly, its shit from any angle.

TL:DR It's rubbish.