The whole start menu thing is a piece of shit. At first observation, it looks like Windows 7 and Gnome had a love child. Except both 7 and Gnome are a breeze to use and figure out. W8 makes it more complicated than it has to be. Even if I had a touch screen, this OS would piss me off.

I like how smooth it is, though. Once Classic Shell is installed, there is no need to use the start menu. Opening pictures and PDF's are a pain. I haven't had too much time to tweak it nor do I really care to. It plays the games I want, all of my peripherals and hardware has Windows 8 drivers (not bad for a 4 y/o setup), and I still need XP for work so there's a VM of that when I need it.