So seeing as the developers preview is freely available to download - has anyone played with it yet?

Initial impressions of the new gui leave something to be desired. To me it just doesn't seem to work well for a tradition desktop/laptop setup, but would work perfectly for tablets. I think trying to force comonality between the different formats of desktops/laptop & tablets is a mistake. Switching to the 'traditional' shows that it has been cut down severly, i.e. hitting the windows button just takes you back to the tablet GUI.

Anyway it would be interesting to see what others think.

Being able to configure all 'control panel' settings from one GUI or the other would also be nice, rather than having to move between the two. Might be fixed before proper realease but the wording of when you get switched between the two leaves some doubt.

When is the planned release?

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ASVS('97)/SDN('03)

"Peppercorn Tomatoes slathered in broken guacamole sauce. Put it in the microwave and press puree. 5 seconds in the dumpster and it is ready to be cooked in the freezer at -350 degrees for twenty minutes. Apply pressure in various hamster spots and scream like a psychotic banshee." My reply when asked what was on my mind.

By the sacred crotch of Arkvoodle!

IIRC 3rd quarter 2012. Theres certainly time for them to fix the GUI, but from all the interviews I've read/heard they don't intend to.

I refuse to even call in Windows 8, I refer to it as Metro 1 since the fucking metro "apps" don't have windows.

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Anonymous facebooker on the "Snowmageddon" February 2010 DC snowstorm:

Well, that takes the cake for inanity

The development cycle for Windows OSs seem to be speeding up. I'm still running XP.

But if I have the money I'd buy Win7 over Win8 (when it comes out) mainly because Win8 falls under the "shitty OS release". Well at least to me. (Win95 = crap, Win98 = not crap, WinMe = crap, WinXP = not crap, Win Vista = crap, Win7 = not crap. )

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ASVS('97)/SDN('03)

"Peppercorn Tomatoes slathered in broken guacamole sauce. Put it in the microwave and press puree. 5 seconds in the dumpster and it is ready to be cooked in the freezer at -350 degrees for twenty minutes. Apply pressure in various hamster spots and scream like a psychotic banshee." My reply when asked what was on my mind.

By the sacred crotch of Arkvoodle!

I would say calling Win98 "not crap" is being very charitable, and you can only say that because it was sandwiched between 95 and ME. On its own, it was a shitty OS.

For the time it was a reasonable home operating system; NT4 wasn't really quite there for desktop use.

I had used NT4 and Win2k (NT5) extensively at the workplace, and were it not for games, I would've used it at home too. System Shock 2 would refuse to install on an NT based system without using an undocumented command switch, and I seem to recall having similar trouble with other games without the luxury of a workaround. So, barring such deliberate hamstringing, it's hard to say it wasn't good for desktop use.

Compared to Win7, all the other Win OSs are shitty. Win98, WinXP and Win7 were an improved and stabilized version of their immediate predecessor. Going by that logic, Win8 will suck and Win9 will be an improved version of Win8 with some more bells and whistles.

So we can look forward to 2015-2016 for the next decent Win OS?

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ASVS('97)/SDN('03)

"Peppercorn Tomatoes slathered in broken guacamole sauce. Put it in the microwave and press puree. 5 seconds in the dumpster and it is ready to be cooked in the freezer at -350 degrees for twenty minutes. Apply pressure in various hamster spots and scream like a psychotic banshee." My reply when asked what was on my mind.

By the sacred crotch of Arkvoodle!

I ran NT4 at home for a very long time, too. But it was resource-hungry (for its time) and had tricky compatibility issues with legacy software, as you mentioned. The home desktop world was not, by and large, ready for NT.

Apparently Metro annoyed the shit out of many people, since a day after the build was published, a way already was found within the confines of Windows (meaning no extra programs needed) to de-activate Metro completely legally with a simple edit. It also removes the annoying ribbon interface of the explorer. (If you still want to use the new task manager, use TM.exe).

Here the trick to make Windows 8 actually useful:
The Way to do it

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Vader: "Ja Admiral?!"
Piett: "Unsere Schiffe haben den Rasenden Falken gesichtet mein Lord! Aber er ist in ein Asteroidenfeld geflogen, und wir können es nicht riskieren..."
Vader: "Asteroiden interessieren mich nicht, Admiral! Ich will dieses Schiff haben! Und keine weiteren Ausflüchte..."
Piett: "Ja Lord Vader!"

Metro is for touch screen use only, and switching it off and using the Desktop is a relatively simple matter.

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Member of the Unremarkables
Just because you're god, it doesn't mean you can treat people that way : - My girlfriend
Evil Brit Conspiracy - Insignificant guy

I read an in-depth review from the german website golem.de about Windows 8 the other day. And i had the impression: Not bad.
True, if you're used to the old interface, you tend to rant about any new interface. But i'd give it a chance, at least if i had a touchscreen device. And what the article said about the changes, they did under the hood, maybe that's not bad either (i never thought that i would write stuff like that about a Mircosoft operating system ).
But i'll take a second look if the first reviews of the release are out, and then another look as soon as some friends of mine actually install the system.

Well, since I had some free time of nothing this weekend, I thought that I would try to use Windows 8 on my older laptop... (which I was going to reformat very soon, anyway) My initial impressions are, well, mixed...

I've been a fangirl of tablets for a little while now, and I'm nervously excited about Metro and its full screen interface. I liked how Apple implemented full screen apps in Lion, and I was really curious as to how Microsoft would accomplish that with the Metro UI. It feels OK for now -- rather clunky and with a learning curve, but that is to be expected of a developer preview. I do hope that Microsoft takes most people's suggestions about it seriously, and that this really does not become another "Vista" in its execution.

One thing that I am pretty annoyed with now, however, is that I cannot fully close Metro apps without ending their processes in Task Manager. They are apparently "suspended" until you next run them, which would be fine if Start+Tab did not switch back to suspended apps whenever I wanted to switch to another app that I was actually using. This would mean that if I had launched 10 Metro apps in a single Windows session -- but stopped using 7 in order to pay attention to 3 -- I would still need to switch between those other seven that I had suspended, in order to return focus to those three. Blah... Adding to this complaint is that both Alt+Tab and Start+Tab now only switch between Metro screens; I don't see a way of switching between desktop windows now with Metro enabled, but I might have missed something somewhere.

On the other hand, I do like the new Ribbon interface in Explorer. I could definitely see how it would benefit tablet users, since right-clicking probably wouldn't be easy to do on a touchscreen with fingers. Unless Microsoft implements their touchscreen controls similar to how Apple does with their magic trackpad, but that is another thing entirely. Right now, however... I just don't see any reason to enable Metro in Windows 8. I'm not sure if many developers would be willing to design (or redesign) their whole programs to fit the Metro UI guidelines, which may be limiting in some cases depending on how Microsoft actually defines a Metro app (and it would then feel rather extraneous).