I tried Windows 8, standalone boot. Let's just say that I had quite some frustrations with it. That Metro UI is ticking me off. It wouldn't have been that bad, but these guys don't seem to understand what CLOSE means on their metro apps. The games are like as if someone was on crack, and there's one in particular, Copper, that the music really doesn't fit well.
I don't have a touchscreen here, so the mouse does the job. I can send the "Start panel" to my other screen. IE10 on the Metro UI is a pain in the rear end. Can't get Flash player to work, in fact, it doesn't seem to grab any plug-ins. It's supposed to work out of the box. The Desktop version of IE10 does work. When on Facebook, my keyboard lags a lot, so I end up typing with a lot of missing letters, and it's definetly slower than IE9 when scrolling. To get to any apps, like a normal start menu, you'd think here would be an option to simply click and get them right? NOOO, you have to hit the Windows Key+F in order to get to them and, on top of that, they're sorted alphabetically.
There's a little start menu option when I scroll to the bottom left of my right screen but if I hover too much to the right, it disappears.
I had the taskbar completely transparent, which I thought was nice, but when I changed a wallpaper, it went away, and never came back no matter what I've done. I was testing it until Opensuse 12.1 came out, but ended up with Sabayon 7 because it was that bad. Installing drivers opens up in a window. Works, but it's a little weird...I don't trust it too much.
Although, the nicer aspects that I found to like is the Metro UI itself. It seems promising, but they better iron out the flaws and shove in a damn close button. The task manager is WAY better, more friendlier to a non-savvy, and more technical, for the techies. The lock screen's pretty neat too. There's an option to disable Metro UI, but that defeats thew purpose of testing Windows 8 (WDC). Even though they said not to use it regularly, it actually is stable, so I don't think using it standalone would affect much.