[luqmaninbmore]

First Impressions:

As a student, I was able to download a gratis copy of Windows 8 Pro thanks to the Microsoft Dreamspark program. I have to say that I am very impressed. This operating is fast in three dimensions: booting, launching programs and performing tasks, and shutting down. I like the new user interface, Internet Explorer 10 actually looks to be a half-way decent web browser (CSS3 transitions actually work!), I like the inclusion of Powershell, and I dig that they baked in social media from the ground up. There were some hitch-ups, though. I had to hunt down drivers from shady places to get my laptop's trackpad to function properly (it works out of the box on most Linux distros). I also had to download the drivers for my built-in microphone from the manufacturer's site. Oh and ads. Why does an OS have advertisements baked into it? I don't need to see an advertisement for detergent as I check out the weather for today. Also, I noticed an annoying bug: when I was extracting the cab file that the aforementioned drivers came wrapped in, I had to manually confirm that I wanted to extract each and every file. All 200+ of them. That was annoying. Fortunately, this bug doesn't seem to affect zip files. My computer is pretty up to day- I bought it in the spring and it has a Sandy Bridge Corei3 with 4 gigs of ram and an Intel SSD that I installed. If my experience matches those of other people, I think Microsoft may have a hit on its hands.

Oh, and by fast booting, I mean it boots in ~7 seconds from pressing the power button to hitting the log in screen (about a second to get from there to the start screen). Even Arch Linux doesn't boot that fast on this laptop, though it comes close at 9 seconds. Fedora is about 16 seconds, with a plain vanilla install (no tweaking). Take that, MacBook Air!

After another day of using it:

I've set up my laptop as a dual-boot Windows 8/Fedora 17 machine, but I have to say that Windows 8 is really winning me over. It's fast, customizable, keyboard friendly, offers me about 30% better battery life, and makes good use of the gestural capabilities of my laptop's trackpad. I love Linux, I love open source, and I still trust Linux when it comes to secure computing (especially outside of my home network), but for chilling at home I think I am going to find myself using Windows. They may have even gotten around the issue of system rot with with the PC Refresh option (time will tell on that one). And vim, being open source, works on Windows, as do Libre Office, Chrome, Firefox, and Calibre. I have noticed another issue- the function buttons on my laptop (controlling volume, screen brightness, WiFi, etc.) do not work. I suspect another driver search is in order. I guess one of the advantages of having a massive monolithic kernel is only rarely having to look for drivers, so that's +1 (or +3, if you're keeping track at home) for Linux.

Conclusion: Four stars out of five for being a breath-taking yet functional experience out of the box. It loses a star for the time I had to spend hunting and installing drivers. If you have a computer that is at all modern, I say go for it. You can even dual-boot Windows 8 and Linux for the best of both worlds. If your computer is older or doesn't meet the stated specs for Windows 8, I'd recommend using a light Linux distribution, like Lubuntu or Puppy Linux.