I've read plenty and watched videos on Windows 8 but I haven't seen it personally yet so I'm currently downloading the consumer preview to try on virtualbox. I'll be posting my experience here. Anyone else is welcome to do the same.

I find the metro start screen to be blocky and unappealing. On non-touch systems it makes little sense to me.

The one touch system I have run Win8 on, I was not horribly impressed with the metro start screen thing. Of course, one of my problems is that few programs are compatible to run there yet. For all of those, you end up in desktop mode, which is basically Windows 7 without the start menu.

My own plans are to hold fast at Windows 7 on most of my work machines until at least January, in the hopes that software developers will fix up things before I make that switch. I'm waffling on my home machine, though, as it is touch sensitive... I think it will boil down to "how many of my games will break" more than anything else.

Overall I am unenthusiastic about upgrading, which is unusual for me. Normally I'm all about hopping on the newest Windows train; this time, not so much.

OK first impression isn't good but possibly not 8's fault. Downloaded 64bit and tried to run it but no go. It was a nice pic of a fish. 32 bit seems to be working but what's going on. I thought virtualbox could handle 64bit.

Ok something I've noted that doesn't seem right. You can open "apps" or you can open them on the desktop. The former dedicates the screen to the program opened. This seems to be the default way of opening things BTW. I'm trying to figure out how to open 2 things at once and have them both partial screen so you can use both without having shortcuts to them on the desktop.

OK I give up for now. opening start is a pain in the but. half the time I don't open anything and half the time I hit something I open IE.

An interesting thing Right click on a program in start to uninstall it with 2 clicks. Is that something you want to make easy to do by accident?

OK there's got to be a better way to turn windows 8 off. 7 positive actions is a bit excessive.

Drag mouse to edge of screen, open start, click username, click log out, drag screen out of the way, click IO, and finally click shutdown.

Edit:OK apparently there is another way. I just looked it up because I couldn't find it. drag the mouse to a corner, click settings>power>shutdown. Not as cumbersome as 7 steps but it feels like work to shut down the machine. Oh and I will note again I was looking for a way to turn off the computer for hours and had to watch a YouTube video to find that way of doing it,

Actually I believe making it difficult to shut down was a design criteria. Microsoft periodically makes efforts to discourage users from turning off their equipment - the first Xbox made the most prominent button Eject rather than Power, and several of the Windows operating systems show the log out function or switch user rather than Shut Down on the main menu. Admittedly having to open the sub-menu and choose Shut Down isn't as tedious as that.

Personally I'm taking to configuring the power options the way I want, then just hitting the power button when I want to shut the system down.

Can't you just hit the power button to shut down Windows 8?

sorry I can't test that. My power button won't work. That is my power button will shut down Linux and I won't know if it worked on 8.

I can't recall for certain, but I think the default "hit the power button" behavior is to sleep instead. Then again, I've seen that default behavior be different with Windows 7 on desktop vs. laptop machines, so perhaps I just got an unlucky physical configuration on my test machines. I still haven't installed on a real workstation, only on portable systems.