I'm an 8.1 user. Well sort of. My desktop is on 8.1 on my workstation and I usually have a high bandwidth connection between whatever client device I'm using and the desktop and use RDP. Over the last few months I've been using a 2011MBP as a client device and occasionally the wife's iPad. On a daily basis, I deal with Windows, Linux and FreeBSD platforms from both a development and administration perspective.

What has become apparent to me is that the only thing I still use on my windows desktop is Visual Studio, the MS dev stack and HyperV. Past that, I've slowly moved to a neutral ecosystem with standard formats.

When I look at this update, all I see for me is more pain to be honest. The 8.1 RDP experience is awful compared to windows 7 because of the whole hot corners thing. And they're adding more!! You have to run your desktop full screen in case you get stuck in a metro app. This is a royal pain. More than an hour on an RDP session is stressful and counterproductive. I've managed to reconfigure everything back to windows 7 levels but its still nowhere near as usable for a power user.

So, for me, I'm dumping all this crap. I'm spending the weekend moving to VMware fusion and windows 2008 r2 as a desktop (our target platform) just to run Visual Studio and I'll can the rest. I'll use the cash from workstation sale to buy a Retina MBP and just use that as a workstation.

Microsoft are really hanging themselves with this drive to change the UI. There are an awful lot of non windows machines appearing in the last two Microsoft consultancies I've worked at and I can see why.

I wont even go into the amount of relearning and churn that you have to put up with either.