Windows 8 stable enough to use as Main OS?

[PGHammer]

Exactly my thoughts, albeit I'll be installing on another partition. Unless there is a really annoying bug that prevents my daily use, which isn't a lot, hopefully I can work with it as my main OS. But if it proves too cumbersome, then I will just have to let it go until a more stable pre-beta build comes along over the next couple of months.

I hung it on a separate drive, so I can run it side-by-side with 7 x64 + SP1; the big reason I haven't taken the developer tools for a spin yet is that sometime this month I'll be doing a motherboard swap (going to i3). Right now, I'm throwing existing applications and tasks at it like DI's testing raw recruits - to see where they throw up.

The scary part is that it hasn't thrown up - even a little.

Mixing Immersive and Classic isn't as bad as I thought it would be, either. (And *yes*, you can Alt+Tab between Immersive and Classic apps; I do it routinely. I have the Weather app running in the background right now.)

Unless you are that ingrained over the XP/Vista/7 desktop-centric way of doing things, the Developer Preview is quite usable as a main OS - on darn near any hardware that can run XP or later.

[DarkyDan]

I installed the Dev Preview last night, and I am going to say it IS stable enough to use as a main OS.

Anything that you could install on Win7 seems to work in Win8 Dev Preview... sure its not pretty having to alt tab to your desktop application to use non 'metro' apps.. but they all seem to work :)

Flash and JRE work fine (tested with youtube, and minecraft) Got my Steam installation up and running and opened and games working after I installed the latest Win7 graphics driver fro my GTX 285.

It would be nice if a new immersive version of Media Player was there but it won't be until Beta or further along. Same goes with the Windows Live integration, that should be in there by beta but for now you will just have to use normal desktop applications in those instances.

One thing I'm interested in seeing what they do with is notifications between windows (like the flashing orange taskbar buttons of WIn7) how they will achieve this sort of notification in metro.

I'd also down the line love an immersive gmail app, or google apps in general.

[Andrmgic]

I installed it as primary OS on my main machine.. but only because I was planning on doing a fresh install of Windows 7 anyway.. so I backed up all of my data and installed Windows 8.

So far, I haven't had any problems and everything is working pretty well. If I don't encounter any serious problems, I may run it as main OS for a while.. I'll just keep playing with it until it becomes a problem for my enjoyment of the computer.

[Quillz]

I've had it installed to a virtual machine for about a day now, and haven't experienced any "showstopper" issues. That said, though, it's very unfinished and I certainly wouldn't recommend using it as your day-to-day OS, but it's not so unstable, either. If you like being on the bleeding edge, then go ahead and run it.

[Fluxii Media]

Replaced my copy of Win7 with it... no issues at all except at first, where all I had to do was restart and mess with the resolution to show the live tiles. :) Other than that, I've installed Photoshop, uTorrent, AIM, etc with ease... no issues. Oh and I use the Immersive UI version of IE10, sooo nice.

[remixedcat]

I always have several partitions and I have a hot recovery basic barebones 2008 install on it's own partition to be able to transfer files if the other install gets hosed. it's on a seperate physical drive as well. I recommend yall do this!

I will install 8 on vmware 8 when I clean my HDD (gotta get rid of some games I don't play and some anime eps I can just DL later, this will be a day project at least! I only for 6GB left on one partition and 8 on the other for now ;-( if only 8 was lean enough ;-(

If only I didn't have to put 800 bucks (300 from cash on hand [my skyrim money {new GPU and SSD} noooo] and 500 from emergency fund and now that's depleted) into fixing my car then i would have bought another HDD (filling up 1.5TB allready!!)

[neo158]

Replaced my copy of Win7 with it... no issues at all except at first, where all I had to do was restart and mess with the resolution to show the live tiles. :) Other than that, I've installed Photoshop, uTorrent, AIM, etc with ease... no issues. Oh and I use the Immersive UI version of IE10, sooo nice.

The only application that wouldn't run for me whether compatibility mode was set or not was Skype, other than that everything else worked. Hyper-V is included in this build as well but you have to go into Turn Windows components on or off to enable it.