I've been seeing up a handful of Windows 8 machines at work. The execs see it as neat and flashy and such a part of the future that they have to get on board. However myself and the other techs setting it up, have said "f-ing Windows 8" more times than you can possibly imagine. It's only half baked in my opinion.
How often do you see an OS fully cooked, they're in a continual process of cooking. The last couple of IOS upgrades on my iPads have been a real pain, with WiFi dropouts and crashes and slowdowns. Even the Jellybean upgrade on my HTC One X has caused it to slow down and yet it's supposed to be butter smooth.
I would say all OS are half baked.
Well, in the past, we haven't had situations where we had 2 different version of internet explorer to worry about. With having the immersive IE and the destkop IE and having them work and look differently is just a pain (especially for a trade show where you want to present consistency and make sure that employees who are demonstrating the products get consistent results).
But along comes Windows 8....and the execs really "want" to present the WOW factor using the touchscreens and immersive IE. But then they discover that we have "flash" based apps, which require the flash player and we are currently not on the Microsoft approved "whitelist". (We have applied, we are waiting for acceptance by Microsoft). So, turns out that I can create a registry key with a DebugDomain...but it only works for 1 domain....but we have products utilizing 3 different domains, so we cannot make them all work. Also, the fact that some apps use ActiveX controls, which don't work at all in the immersive IE. So, they have to settle for some apps in Immersive IE and some apps in Legacy IE. Then, we discover that the onscreen keyboard doesn't always fire in the classic desktop version of IE, but always pops up in the Metro version of IE. To get the onscreen keyboard up, we have to pull up charms, settings, click keyboard and then pick the Acer installed keyboard to get it to popup on screen when it doesn't automatically happen.
Then, we have apps which run and work best under Google Chrome. However, we cannot run Google Chrome in "metro app" mode without making it the default browser...which then eliminates our ability to use the Immersive IE..which now defaults back to legacy desktop mode. So, we cannot run both IE and Chrome as a Metro style app, it's either 1 or the other.
Then, we have a product which runs best if UAC is disabled, but at our tradeshow we really have to run the computer with a limited user account, but once we do that, we don't have the ability to turn off UAC for that user. And while we can make a registry key change to shut off UAC entirely, this totally breaks the Metro apps themselves from running.
Then, we want to customize the background images of the Start Screen to have corporate backgrounds for the tradeshow. The execs were kinda shocked that I had to resort to 3rd party apps (Decor8 from Stardock) in order to be able to change that background. They too thought that Windows 8 was designed to be very customizable and just the way you want it.
Some of the changes to the system happen in the metro versions of the Settings menu's, while other things throw you back into the classic control panel.
It's just apparent that it's 2 systems, blended together and it really only feels like it's half complete. I've never had a Windows OS feel so disconnected before.
