You can't dual boot with windows 8. It has special technology that stops it from happening.

I hate windows 8 on my pc. Well, not hate, more don't see the point in it as it adds nothing other than a stupid front end.

I disabled secure boot on my friends, and installed Mint. She claims that Win8 won't boot... maybe I should look into this seriously. This is not good from a usability standpoint.

EDIT:

She's not overly concerned about me killing the Win8 boot... because Win8 is confusing for her. Its only a loss because she wanted to install iTunes and sync her music.

I could try giving her a warez version of 7, but its retarded that I'd have to do that when she has a perfectly legal install of 8.

^This.

The only 'improvements' I saw was the tiled interface, which kinda gets in the way. Its really confusing, and you can definitely live without.

On top of that you'll probably be spending a lot of time in an IDE, which has to run in the desktop mode (which is an afterthought in 8). Imagine having to switch the way your computer works just to run your IDE and compiler... ick...

Actually, windows 8 does have some performance and stability improvements.

The problem is they haven't been compelling enough (to overcome the horrible "modern" ui) to get most people to willingly switch. Pretty much every single review I've read to date says that same thing.

That sounds odd. I dual boot with Windows 8. GRUB menu pops up and I choose either Linux or Windows 8...

That makes more sense. This computer is a few years old.

Hm, I don't get that. Windows 8 has a desktop that's exactly the same as Windows 7's. So it's only true if clicking "desktop" takes you a lot of time.

I never use any of the tiled apps myself, I'm always at the desktop. Except on a rare occassion.. like when I was just trying the camera app. It doesn't really bother me because I never do it.

Windows 8 is better optimized (ie. faster) than 7, but other than tweaks and minor speed improvements there's nothing really groundbreaking in there. The system loads faster too, not that I would notice with my SSD.

And oem box should just reinstall just fine. Especially if you use the restore partition. It shouldn't ever ask for a key that way.

If you bought your own OEM copy, then it can be reinstalled, but it may or may not lock you out till you call ms to reset your install count.

I absolutely do not support Windows 8. If you plan to program using open source, you should avoid it as well. Just run your Allegro game compiled using a GNU compiler to see why...

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That is what I seen when I went to install my game on it. When I looked into how to get my game approved for the Microsoft store and remove this warning, some of the rules involved only using APIs approved my Microsoft and available from their store (IE: Microsoft only, no open source).

Plus a bunch of other strict requirements involving supporting that horrible interface.

If I can find a way to detect Windows 8 in my games, I will program my games so they refuse to run on it.

As for boot up times, I use Windows 7 and I don't shut my computer down, I put it into SLEEP mode, so this way when I get up, I press ENTER and it is on instantly. I have a sticky power button (need a new case) so I hate to shut it down, now that I am used to this SLEEP mode, I may never go back.

But how many people will know how to or bother? Meaning a bunch of people won't even be able to run your stuff.