You only really get to know an OS by living with it. After using Windows 8 for over a year, I've seen it evolve, and found that - on the desktop at least - some fears are exaggerated.
It's been over a year since I first installed a build of Windows 8 on a test machine. Since then, I've run it on a wide range of hardware, including slate-format tablets, hybrid touch/pen/keyboard tablet PCs, traditional laptops and multi-monitor desktop PCs – hardware that mixes the old (with Vista and XP-era devices) and the new (a recently upgraded Core i5 desktop system). It's been on Intel processors, on AMD, on physical, on virtual: on pretty much every machine I could find in the office.
Testing and benchmarking is all very well, but you only really get to know an OS by living with it, using it every day to do everyday tasks on your everyday PC. For me, that means the good old-fashioned desktop PC.
Most of my time is spent in front of a multi-monitor desktop machine, exactly the configuration that many people have worried about in comments to various Windows 8 posts. While desktop users may soon be in the minority, there are still plenty of us around. I rely on tools like Office and Adobe Lightroom and they rely on the desktop – and that’s unlikely to change until the tools change. So for my desktop PC, there’s very little change between 7 and 8 in the way I work.
Read more at source:
Living with Windows 8: On the desktop, it's just a better Windows 7 | ZDNet