…and tried it out on my laptop, using a spare hard drive. It installed easily, but recognized relatively little of my hardware. The performance was very poor, despite a decent system; part of that may have been the video, which despite a terribly common video card (Radeon Mobility 7500) was not recognized and was running using the standard VGA driver (VESA, probably). Neither was the internal NIC, despite being a truly ubiquitous 3Com chip (3c920, compatible with the 3c905). The XP driver for the video card would not install; fortunately the NIC driver did.
I am highly undecided on the new UI elements, a lot of which seemed too great a departure from existing Windows UI – I mean, if I have to learn something entirely new, I’m going to just bite the bullet and start using Linux full time and just boot to Windows for video games, and it’s bordering on that big of a change. We’ll see how it looks in final release.