i just got a new computer today. aside from the fact that i'm totally blown away by the specs that come with an $800 desktop, it came with windows 8. i asked the tech dude if going to 7 was an option and he said it's a huge, expensive pain in the ass and half the time it doesn't work, cuz of drivers conflicts or something. so i've been dicking around with windows 8 all day. it's interesting. it's weird. it's very clean. you can customize the sh*t out of it. no noticeable glitches so far. like sparky said, the desktop accessed by a button on the start screen, and it works
pretty much like a standard desktop, sans the start button. that being said, the start button is a pretty f*cking useful button. it's certainly possible to customize your way around that though.
i can't for the life of me figure out why they would go from having all that useful stuff appear from one convenient corner of the screen to making it so you can only access that list of stuff by putting your pointer in a corner to make a magic box appear within which is a button which will make what would normally show up in that one corner to take up your whole screen (got a 27 incher today
), and still make it so you have to right click to make another magic button appear, upon hitting which will bring the whole start menu up instead of just the initial half that comes from hitting the first magic button.
everything sounds so much worse when said in a giant run-on sentence. i'll get used to it out of laziness, but i would much prefer 7 to this bubble-gum show. it is fast though, i gotta give it that.