Windows 8 Release Preview Now Available To Download

MrSeb writes "Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. Unfortunately there isn't a Consumer Preview > Release Preview upgrade path — you'll have to format and perform a clean installation. After downloading the ISO, simply burn Windows 8 RP onto a USB stick or DVD, reboot, and follow the (exceedingly quick and easy) installer. Alternatively, if you don't want to format a partition, ExtremeTech has a guide on virtualizing Windows 8 with VirtualBox. After a lot of fluster on the Building Windows 8 blog, the Release Preview is actually surprisingly similar to the Consumer Preview. Despite being promised a new, flat, Desktop/Explorer UI, Aero is still the default theme in Windows 8 RP. The tutorial that will introduce new users to the brave new Start buttonless Windows 8 world is also missing. Major features that did make the cut are improved multi-monitor support — it's now easier to hit the hot corners on a multi-monitor setup, and Metro apps can be moved between displays — and the Metro version of IE10 now has a built-in Flash plug-in. There will be no further pre-releases of Windows 8: the next build will be the RTM."

Comments

Why are they still releasing Windows?

[HansKloss]

It is such a ugly primitive OS. I moved to OS X and Linux and sometimes have to reboot to Windows 7.
Polished on the outside, ugly on the inside. Still the same widgets from Windows 95 era.

Windows 7 it's like walking into dirty toilet.

For God sake stop wasting people's time and fix first what we paid for. Not another half-baked release.

Re:Ok, Sherlock, your mystery is not a, uh, myster

[cynyr]

wtf is the difference between an arm tablet and an x86 tablet (other than CPU arch)? will I notice much on gentoo or fedora?

Anyways, yes the issue is that to have the win8 client sticker you must ship with MS's key (and optionally more) and Secureboot must be enabled by default.

Sure you can allow users to turn off secure boot, but because UEFI doesn't specify the UI to do this, how does the linux community document the steps so that ma and pa normalperson can do that? "go into UEFI by pressing the correct button for your system, once there navigate the screens and turn of secure boot. Next boot and install linux.