I started toying around with the
developer preview of Windows 8 a wee bit and...well, I'm kind of torn.
On one hand, I'd love to use it on a tablet. I dare say it'd be about the best thing since sliced bread on that platform. However, with the way that things are going, I almost dread the thought of using it on a desktop computer. While you can certainly use it as you would any other version of Windows, for the most part, the second you tap the start button you get thrust into the reimagined start menu. That wouldn't be a problem if my computer had a touch screen but, alas, it does not. Navigating through it with a mouse really isn't too terrible, as the system appears to intelligently detect touch screens. It doesn't allow you to do some gestures that wouldn't make sense with a mouse while you use a mouse (example: you can't swipe through menus, but you have the option of using a mouse wheel or scroll bar).
The ribbon took over the UI in the non-touch sections of the OS, which I welcome. The ribbon takes the guesswork out of the old icon views, taking up slightly more space but conveying significantly more information without dealing with unintuitive tooltips. The new task manager is simply fantastic, allowing the user to monitor not only the CPU and memory usage of the tasks, but also the disk and network bandwidth that each program is using in a much cleaner fashion than the task manager of old. At the same time, it's also significantly more simple. The default view is a simple box with a list of the currently running applications, not at all dissimilar to the well-designed Force Quit box from Mac OS X. If you want the juicy details, it's just a click away.
As with any other Windows preview release, the OS contains elements from the old and the new. In some windows, scroll bars are thin and long to facilitate touch control. In other windows, like even the new task manager, things look Windows 7-esque.
Aero has been significantly tweaked, the glass becoming considerably more opaque (by default -- you can't make it as clear as Vista/7, though) and the rounded edges becoming very square. This is no doubt an effort to make Windows more Metro-esque, giving the full OS and the phone (and, by extension, the recently deceased Zune) a bit more of a consistent look. One thing that is immediately noticeable after booting the system is that Microsoft finally gave us the ability to have a taskbar on each display, with the option of having each taskbar monitor only the windows on the given monitor. The only real caveat with the "unique" taskbars (as opposed to the one that displays all icons open on any screen) is that you can only pin applications on the main taskbar.
I've had relatively few stability issues so far. I had the OS slow to a crawl (as in, totally unusable) once, but I have a feeling that was the VHD disk driver (I have the OS booting natively on my computer from a VHD image), and I had the graphics driver reset once. All in all, not bad considering how much I've used it so far. It'll all get ironed out by the time the actual beta makes its way out. It always does. I used the Windows 7 beta as the primary OS on my laptop for a while, after all.
All in all, I'm excited to see where this goes, but am little worried about people, like myself, who are content with a keyboard and mouse. I'm hoping that the touch screen elements were simply the primary focus of the preview and don't wind up overshadowing everything else in the final release.
More as I discover it!
Edit: One last thing to note: Windows 8 appears to have a built-in, autocorrecting spellchecker, no doubt intended for the touchscreen keyboard. I only discovered it while I was typing this post (I transposed two letters and it corrected it for me). Strangely enough, it only auto-corrected me once and did the traditional red underline on all of my further misspellings, so it might have just been a bug. The rest of the OS seems to intelligently react to whether you are using a keyboard and mouse or touch screen, so I'd imagine that this is yet another one of those things.
Regardless, I don't doubt that it can be turned off, I just haven't bothered to look for the option yet, since it seemed to have only been a one-time glitch.
Edit 2: Intriguing feature in the new control panel:
Well, dang. Considering the most user-visible part of Windows 8 is essentially going to be a restricted and, if I recall correctly, a well-sandboxed tablet interface, Windows might finally be able to shed its reputation for "having tons of viruses" (though I tend to consider that more "having tons of ignorant users," but that's why I'm an elitist prick).
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Here's the linky: