Windows 8 impressions

• can't be installed on a logical partition, gives “We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one”, must use a primary one (primary on second HDD is however fine)
  
• install procedure is a bit messy, doesn't have a back button, thus quiting and restarting is the only way to correct a wrong choice in a dialog, which means reentering the product key (had to do that three times before I got it right)
  
• start menu is gone, replaced with Metro stuff
• Metro is very tablety
• closing Metro apps is complicated and weird, top/left corner, hover, right click
  
• shutdown now hides in the Settings dialog, rather weird place for that
• VVVVVV, MeetBoy doesn't start (might be issue with lack of soundcard drivers, works fine on another computer)
• Windows 8 boot manager is weird, it gets configured automatically and can boot into my old Vista and Windows8, but it does so not by directly booting into Vista after selecting it from the list, but by rebooting after having made the selection and only then booting into them on the next startup, this makes things very confusing in combination with Grub, also the bootloader is started from the Vista partition (which is on the first HDD), not from the Windows8 partition
• the way that Metro apps are completely separate apps from regular apps instead of just a special mode is weird and it's not clear what, if anything is shared between regular and Metro apps (i.e. you have IE and you have Metro-IE)
  

Ubuntu 12.04 impressions

Some quick impressions of Ubuntu 12.04:

• dist-upgrade went smoothly, no issues
• xubuntu/xfce seems to have survived so far without noticeable changes
• bluetooth.h is broken, it's using GNU extension typeof which conflicts with -ansi switch
• libusb-1.0 stopped working in xboxdrv (might be xboxdrv bug)
  
• Emacs ignores things set in .Xdefaults, had to use (set-default-font "Inconsolata-10.5") to get my old font back
• have some anti-aliasing problems after playing around with Gnome3, KDE and Unity
• BGR font subpixel rendering is still broken, you get RGB instead (patch is available)
  
• volume control in XFCE4 is still broken, but fixable
• lots of crash dialogs pop up due to some background thing crashing
• default gtk3 theme under XFCE4 still looks like crap and there isn't a proper way to fix that via GUI, only via a workaround, haven't yet found a Gtk-3.0 theme that replicates the Clearlooks theme