A week ago I put Windows 8 on my primary computer at home. I've acclimated to it a good deal since then, although there are still annoyances.
By way of for instance, today, I turned on a Windows 8 virtual machine that had been dormant for a while, and so the network settings needed to be adjusted. As is the Windows convention, the network icon in the system tray indicated a problem. I inadvertently clicked instead of right-clicked the icon. A big grey panel slid out from the right side of the screen - and this seems to be standard behavior and not just what happens when there's a network problem. This big grey panel is titled "Networks" and has a heading called "Connections" and then lists your network connections. The thing is: it's totally useless. Clicking or right-clicking on anything listed in the panel does absolutely NOTHING. Now, this isn't a big deal, but it speaks to an occasionally encountered issue with Windows 8: pointless things.
I'm getting quite used to the Start Screen. Turning off live tiles is an absolute necessity for me, as I find them extremely distracting; also, Microsoft puts up 20 tiles initially and I clear away all but 2 of them - Desktop and Calendar - and then I add some basic necessities: tiles for Computer, Control Panel, Task Manager, and Command Prompt. I've found the Start Screen is less antagonistic to dual-monitors than I initially thought. I think the Start Screen isn't quite as efficient as the good old Start Menu for some things but is more efficient for others, and in the end I actually can't decide which is better - the Start Screen or the Start Menu.
I find that most of the new interfaces that Microsoft has provided for configuration (those that are accessed through the Charms) are vastly inferior to the good old Control Panel, which - thank Deus - is still available. I can see that these new interfaces would certainly be easier for touch input, but not for keyboard and mouse, and things feel either hidden or very, er, spread out.
Accessing the "hot corners" (or whatever you want to call them) to bring up the Charms or the App Switcher (does the left-side pane have a name) isn't much of a problem for me, though for children or disabled persons using dual-monitor setups it still possibly could be.
OK, about backup: well, I think it's stupidly stupid. Windows 8 "backup" is called "File History" and details can be found here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/123713/how-win ... indows-7s/The way it's set up is so inconceivably dumb to me that I can't find adequately disapproving words. The big problem with it is this: it ONLY BACKS UP FILES THAT ARE ADDED TO LIBRARIES. That is level 10 ridiculous. It's not a deal breaker, but it's just so dumb that I have to rant about it because I'm the ranting type. See, I personally hate Libraries. I hate the feature. I've disabled the feature on Windows 7 from day one. Unfortunately, Microsoft has inserted the "feature" even deeper into the core of Windows 8 such that in Windows 8 the feature cannot be disabled, as far as I can tell, and seeing how the "File History" system works that makes sense. But the whole affair - File History and Libraries - is so stupid. Thankfully, "Windows 7 Backup" is still an available feature and is what I'm using to backup all of my files, which I happen to keep on a second disk (and everything - boot disk and file disk - gets backup up to a 3rd disk; this arrangement has proved useful to me).
My printer doesn't have a compatible driver but somehow the OS sees the printer and prints to it well enough.
I love the Task Manager. I love it. It's great. The coolness of the Task Manager alone can nearly balance out the other nit-picks that I've been mentioning.
Stability is all the way there so far, although a week isn't much of a test duration.
I haven't run into any application incompatibilities.
I quite like the new features in the File Explorer and it's general look and feel.
Right-clicking in the lower-left corner of the screen (the Start Screen corner) brings up and extremely useful menu with shortcuts to the Control Panel and ten other very useful things.
Overall, while being really irritated by the backup situation and by the inability to turn of Libraries, Windows 8 is definitely serviceable. None the less, I think that it has a rough road ahead of it:
http://allthingsd.com/20121228/fujitsu- ... nd-either/Fujitsu, Acer, and Asus are all quite unimpressed with Windows 8 sales, even while Microsoft shamelessly claims that sales are stronger than expected, by whatever warped means Microsoft is counting sales.