First, to note; As alot of you may know, I am VERY critical of stuff and not afraid to speak my mind and only tend to comment on things I actually have experience with, not what some youtube video or blog tells me... so you'll know what I say here isn't buttered up or sugar coated. I bought Win8 Pro (Not to be confused with Win8 RT which is just for the tablets) on release last Friday (It's only £25 as digital download). I upgraded from Win7. It went very smoothly. The only (single) eyebrow raising moment was when it told me that MS Security Essentials wasn't compatible and needed to be un-installed. Bit weird that I had to google to find out that it has Defender built in. It installed... everything worked. PC boots quicker, everything feels snappier. Things I found and my thought process and feelings towards it; * It starts in Metro. Ok, I like messing about with the colours and arranging the panels how I like them. (They're not random at all) * Noticed I can get to ANY installed program (application as opposed to 'app' which when referenced are two different things) by just typing the name or part of the name. This is no problem as I have a keyboard, which it sort of like a little typewriter with all the letters I need on it... they're dying out. * Realised that there's pretty much no difference in a start menu and an App list on things like android. Same thing, presented slightly differently. * Found out all the keyboard commands that are essential. Win+D, Win+X, Win+i, Win+Tab, etc... This isn't exactly rocket surgery and became fluid and instinctive after as little as 10 mins playing with it. * Win+D got to and from my desktop (Windows 7) instantly. Win+X when in the desktop brought a whole bunch of controlpanel access items (Love this!), Win+Tab switched between Metro apps (Not normal windows applications as these are different), Win+I offers settings for individual Metro apps, etc. * Noticed that Metro is an add-on to Win7, not a replacement (Except on Win8 RT for tablets). It's important to know that Metro doesn't break or take anything away. It allows you to run all those nice looking Metro apps and Xbox SmartGlass etc. * Dual screen works... finally. Natively span wallpapers across both monitors or different on each and can have Metro apps take small parts of a screen whilst the rest taken up with Desktop etc. Easy as drag-dropping. * Started to explore metro apps. There's not kajillions like on Android market, but very easy to browse and some of them, like MetroTweet (I bought the pro version) seems to work very nicely, enough for me to replace TweetDeck on the desktop! * Everything works as it should. No drivers stopped working, no incompatibly issues with anything pre-installed, nothing. I did however play with the re-install options. There's an option to re-install win8 and keep all your settings and programs etc or a simple clean install wiping everything... I wiped everything at this point (just to see). It was INCREDIBLY PAIN LESS. WOW!!! This is how windows should have been YEARS ago!. It just got on and installed it fresh. Quicker than I remember any windows installs I remember. No disc required, no input needed... I didn't need to tell it what keyboard layout and other tedious nonsense. It just worked. That along with the enhancements to the portions that resemble Win7... Microsoft has done good. Again, Metro isn't Windows 8. It's an addition. All your Win7 stuff's still there and still very easily accessible. You don't have to use Metro at all. But it's nice arranging your metro stuff and information feeds how you want them! If you're running a tablet with Windows 8, it's Windows 8 RT, not the full thing. To note, as a former Ubuntu user myself, Moving to Win8 from Win7 was NOTHING like moving from Gnome to Unity. The Ubuntu transition was so drasticly different in experience I stopped using it, not wanting to bother installing gnome manually. Comparing Metro to Unity is a very bad comparison. Metro also doesn't replace the 'windows experience'. It's an addition. (unless you're running RT).