10/31/2012 14:39:00

Well for what it's worth here is my own personal Windows 8 experience. I finally took the time to install Windows 8 on my System76 panp9 (Core I7, HD4000, Ivy Bridge) laptop. I have an MS Action Pack subscription so I've had access to the RTM bits for awhile, but just couldn't be bothered until now. I installed Windows 8 (after using Clonezilla to backup my Arch Linux install of course).

The good: The installation was quick and easy. It required very few driver installs in order to get everything setup as most of the hardware worked great out of the box. I was especially impressed at the quick startup, hibernation and resume times of Windows 8. This mirrors my experience with it in the previews. This is the first time in which I believe any version of Windows can boot and resume faster than Linux seems to be able to. That was most impressive to me.

I spent the next 36 hours devising ways to avoid using the new disaster of the start screen. Say what you will but that screen is so overbearing I don't even know where to start in my rant on it. In addition I was constantly annoyed by all the metro hot corners everywhere. I really had to be careful when going to click something in a corner because otherwise I would end up back in the "claw my eyes out" Metro environment. After moving on from that, I decided to pair my bluetooth Sony headphones up with my Windows 8 install. This is when I realized that even though Windows 8 has A2DP built into the OS bluetooth stack (which is great by the way as this required a third party stack in previous versions of Windows), the UI for dealing with these devices is absolutely terrible. Basically managing bluetooth devices forces you into some poorly designed simplistic Metro screen. The only way I was able to get around this was by using the sound control panel to connect/disconnect my headphones after initially pairing them thereby allowing me to avoid dealing with Metro for this activity.

Then I got to thinking, "well I will just find the configuration options to turn all of this nonsense off". Well when it comes to the start screen, there is no turning it off. Then I thought "perhaps there are some third party tools that will allow me to replace the start screen with a start menu and keep me from booting into metro hell". But then it finally hit me: Why not just use a OS where I am able to configure it to work exactly how I want it to? What the frak am I doing here?

After that I promptly used Clonezilla to get Arch back (that took 25 minutes and it took me another 20 to get my bootloader working as Clonezilla couldn't deal with Arch's patched grub version correctly). I hugged Cinnamon and promised never to stray again and she accepted me with open and waiting arms. The Prodigal Penguin has returned.