The bottom line is that Microsoft is looking at the sales of iPads, Tablets, and Smartphones, and is betting on the demise of the desktop within a year or two, except for business and a small niche of users.
With most chores (internet, email, etcetera) being done on a smart phone these days and most gaming taking place on consoles the demise of the desktop already started.
I always thought that a trim, efficient Linux distribution just for gaming would be the way to go in the future to cater to the very small niche of left over PC gamers.
Devices running Android or iOS or Blackberry, etc, are NOT a threat to the OS market - these devices will never replace actual computers with actual operating systems.
That’s just what smart phones are today, an actual computer running an actual operating system.
My concern right now is drivers. They say that Win8 can use Win7 drivers which sounds oh, so great, but the Win7 drivers I don't think are quite optimized for Win8 so there may be a performance issue. I'm going to wait for the Win8-specific drivers to come out first, along with a bunch o'patches, before upgrading my desktop.
John
We’ve had specific Windows 8 drivers for about year now already which have worked fine for me on about 4-5 different hardware setups. It’s really no different from what we saw with Windows 7 which was based on Vista.
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/49949
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/50294
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_win8-64.aspx
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sea...Z77SL-50K&ProdId=3439&LineId=3333&FamilyId=36
I too see either some hacks or the option to remove the new start screen, whatever it's called lately, to allow people to run what they want.
The hack to bring back the traditional start menu takes about 10 seconds.