there is no need to hate anything. you can always use your favorite os until there is nothing working on it. i think that's a long time, considering some folks are still running wxp.

the way i see it is that it's better to spend some time to adapt. tbh i had a hard time converting to w8 from w7 initially. well, sort of. all i spent was one week to get rid of the typical start menu syndrome.

imo w8.1 update 3 onwards is much better.

I hate windows 8 too. but when I tried win8.1, i feel not bad with it.

and overall performance/smoothness is way better than win7. (I hate the metro style of win8/8.1 too, haha)

the only disappointed, some win7 software not able to run in win8

now I'm waiting for win10 consumer preview... hehe