On my main PC!

Exciting!

Easiest install ever. There's a little round of "Are you sure?" "Really?" "Are you REALLY sure?" but after that it's totally hands-off.

Everything works - it's even using my fancy-pants NVidia GeForce Experience Wossname graphics driver, all my software (Office 2013, PS, LR, etc) and games work fine.

It's obviously a bit choppier than Windows 8.1 - there's debug code all over the place, and the feedback doodad has been instrumented into everything (you'll do something and it'll pop up asking you how it went, which is cool). These things will obviously disappear for the RTM version.

Not massively sold on the new Start menu, but I can make it work like the Start screen, so that's good. I really do like the new icon set. Very fresh. It's not complete - there are still Windows 7-style icons everywhere, especially in toolbars, but again, this is a technical preview.

Off retail Windows?

Never have, never will. All that's changing is that MS aren't lying to themselves about it any more.

Windows licencing revenue is all from OEMs and enterprise.

Windows 8 works great. It's fast, reliable, light-weight (seriously; it runs well on dual-core machines with 2GB RAM) and secure.

Windows 10 is greaterer.

Don't look at screenshots. Grab the tech preview and throw it up on a VM and make up your own mind by using it. Screenshots tell you nothing.

There's little point crying over the spilt milk of buttons and icons that don't look like buttons and icons any more - the entire industry has moved in that direction (most egregious offenders are Apple in iOS >= 7 and OS X 10.10+, but Google's Material Design and Microsoft's Modern do the exact same thing, to varying degrees).

That said, can you give an example of this?

"it used to be clear what was a "button" that was clicked once, and what was an "icon" that needed to be clicked twice. These days, that distinction seems to be gone in too many places. Some things you click once, some you click twice, but the visual distinction has been lost"

What places?

It's very, very easy to conflate personal preference and habit with actually identifying broken UIs. The Ribbon is a classic example of this. There's actual science - collected from millions of users performing hundreds of millions of actions - that shows that it makes most user's lives better. But those people don't go on the internet to say "woo! I know how to put a section break in without hitting F1, now!". But the people who actually liked navigating six menu levels down to get to the thinger that adjusts multi-level lists - they're on the internet and they're LOUD.

Just because people got used to the way things were, does that mean that that's the way things should be for all of time? Of course not.

How would it be a "disaster"? A disaster would be an OS that literally didn't work, or that randomly formatted your disk, or which crashed at every available opportunity. This hyperbolic response to what are, in reality, relatively minor tweaks to the same old windows, icon, menu, pointer paradigm we've been stuck in for 30 years is, I think, unwarranted.

I just hooked up my work Dell E7470 to my own QNix 2710 monitor (1440p) via HDMI, and I got 1440p.

It's remarkable. Here's a couple of worked examples. You don't realise the diff until you see them together.

You at 100%:



You at 250%:



And here you are, scaled to the same size: