My Opinion of Windows 8 - Too Early to Adopt?

I have previously installed Windows 8 DP and CP on my laptop before the RTM came out and tested purely for the fun of it. Being an early adopter of Windows 7, I have decided to install Windows 8 Pro onto my desktop which is my main workstation to see how it fares with all the positive reviews from various hardware and technology websites.

What I liked about it was the speed that the new Microsoft operating system packed, it provided a decent out of the box experience. The installation of the operating system took me around 20 minutes. After it was done, the latest stable driver for my NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti have been installed and running without requiring me to interact with any kind of driver installation setup wizard. Do note that the driver installed is NVIDIA's driver and not some generic Microsoft display driver. This means that you can proceed to install your games straight away instead of spending your time downloading and installing the latest graphic driver. Also, the new Windows came with native USB 3.0 drivers. This saved me the trouble of download and installing the driver. In summary, I did not bother spending time to download and install my hardware drivers. Instead, the essential drivers came installed together with the installation of the operating system. The installation of software application felt a lot faster on the new operating system, I suppose this is where Microsoft's under the hood optimization comes in play. I was pleased with the native ability to mount ISO and  the new File History feature.

Being an early adopter of an operating system has its price, majority of the software applications were not ready for Windows 8. For example, iTunes 10.7 does not work well, it gave me error when I tried to synchronize my iPhone to iTunes. Other utilities that I require have their own share of problems as well. The free version of Revo Uninstaller did not support nor work in Windows 8 at all; I was not able to clean up the leftover files of an software uninstall automatically. My favorite MPC-HC did not have their file association working either, supposedly due to the new file association API implemented on the new operating system. I had to turn to VLC and MPC-BE. uTorrent and CCleaner worked flawlessly though, an indication that the mentioned problem should be ironed out over time.

Personally, I am not fond of the Modern UI. It made every single task that could be so easily accomplished felt like a treasure hunt. I appreciate the privilege of not having to meddle with applications designed for touch screen with keyboard and mouse to get the job done. With all the application shortcuts appearing on my Windows 8 start page, I have decided to sort them out. After I have sorted them out manually, I realized I have to manually sort out the shortcuts in a group again if I want them to be positioned in a alphabetical order. The installation of Adobe Master Collection and Microsoft Office alone created more than 30 shortcuts on the start page; that is the number of times I have to move the icons to make it look less cluttered. I am probably better of unpinning every single shortcut on the start page since it serves no meaning accessing the shortcuts from the start page. It is probably a lot faster to search for the application by typing in the start page than to search it manually by using my eyes. The whole user experience made me felt that I was using a Linux distribution; I had to relearn how to get things done and hunt for applications that are made for the operating system.

I do not recall having so much trouble when I adopt to using Windows 7 in its early days, the most I had to do was to install drivers meant for Vista onto the system. Could it be that it is simply too early to adopt Windows 8?