The default desktop background/log in image is the ugly 8-betta. Thanks to the GIMP and general orneryness for the flip.
This, even more than the DP, is a media-consumption OS – either we are watching the end of general purpose computers, or it will be holding the “Every other Windows release is a miserable failure” pattern. Touchscreens are horrible interface devices where other options are available, and optimizing for them makes horrible interfaces.
Edited to switch to a deader version (old version) and add source XCF with the background edges fixed and all the objects on separate layers for other’s editing pleasure.
A friend shared this comparison on The Verge between an iPad and a tablet running Windows 8, and that’s been the extent that I’ve seen Windows 8. It looks pretty snazzy as a tablet OS, though the parts where the reviewer ends up on what looks like a regular Windows PC desktop are scary, and I agree with him that I never want to see that on my tablet. So I’m intrigued by it as a tablet OS because it seems all gesture-y and touch-friendly, but I don’t believe that will translate well to a PC. We’ll see how it goes; I’m sure I’ll move to Windows 8 on my work laptop eventually. I still find myself much more frustrated in daily use in Windows 7 than in OS X Lion. I wonder if Windows 8 will be more OS X-like than 7.
I’m more concerned that I never want to see Metro on anything other than a tablet. It does look pretty slick as a gesture-based tablet interface (although they are going to have to hack some kind of hierarchical organization on to the launcher the way Android and iOS did – people install too much crap for flat launchers). Windows7 is actually one of the better window manager/display manager/launchers I’ve used, but a crippled combination of the two is ill-suited to tablets OR desktops. They should have bifurcated and made a tablet OS and a desktop OS with common components – like Apple did, although they too are slowly and stupidly converging to the same bad-for-everything compromise OS (I’m in the 10.5 was pretty nice, it’s all downhill from there camp wrt OS X).
The Consumer Preview is a 3.3Gb free ISO download that plays reasonably nice with virtual machines … I fiddled with it in VirtualBox for a while before determining it was the next step in the “every other Windows release is terrible” pattern. Just listen to the warning about not installing VirtualBox D3D drivers because they will destroy the VM. I still need to see if I can get a free remote desktop thing to let me use the Touchpad as a touchscreen to play with Windows – it might not seem as terrible on a sub-general-purpose computer.