OMG, what are you guys thinking?!?!?
Well, what was I thinking as well. I decided to give 8.1 a shot on my new AMD A-series build. Dear God, what a disaster Win8 is! Now I remember why I hated it so much before, plus a bunch of new hatred that's developed. The "desktop" integration feels like a panicked attempt to solve a much larger problem. The fact that the start menu reverts back to the tiles for selection is just horrible.
It's pretty fast though on my SSD, but I'm afraid that the blood oosing from my bloodied head wound is going to contaminate the drive from booting again. I can really see how Microsoft has nearly single-handedly killed off the PC market.
I dual-booted with Fedora 20, and I'm probably going to live inside that OS using Mate. Linux has it's own problems with Gnome 3 (slightly more usable than Windows 8.1). Thank goodness for the Mate project for Linux!
I only need windows because I wanted to have access to my SiliconDust HomeRun Prime 3-tuner CableCard and it requires Media Center to decrypt the copy-once channels (thanks for nothing Cox Communications!)
So Windows 8.1 is still horrible.