I tried windows 8 then and I must say it felt very fast! Although the new interface is a horrible blend of a tablet OS and windows 7 and its very awkward to use. Another thing that bugged me is that there were multiple versions of the same app, for example there was two of IE 10, two different control panels. It all felt very unintuitive and I know its still in early alpha but they need to make a lot of design changes to get this to work right.
Also I recently tried the beta of Ubuntu 11.10 and I really like the new version of unity, the UI is very pretty and simplistic although I do feel the distro had deviated from its existing audience and is focused more on casual or new users to linux. I feel as though the new distro is more of a design overhaul than anything else but one thing that really bugged me is that they changed the universal menu bar so that it doesn't display any options until you hover over it, I have absolutely no idea why they would make such a silly design choice and the lack of customisation in the unity desktop environment doesn't help that, there are ways to install gnome again but by default it has been totally removed.
