W8 for desktop

It was a long needed upgrade, so we finally replaced my girlfriend's laptop: it has a 17" display, since is going to be used mostly for photo management and editing (her favorite for this task is a Windows app, ACDSee with the plan to move to Lightroom "at some point", in the rare case photo surgery is needed, I keep my line: "GIMP is what I know and what I can teach you") ant it is a n-SERIES Dell which I suggested as I wanted to play with different distros (my other computers are a 5years old desktop and a netbook), get outside my comfort area (GNOME 2/Xfce on Fedora), see what works for me and what don't: is Mint usable, what's the deal with Cinnamon, can I live with Debian, how KDE evolved and such.

I can't really say how it happened, but at some point I installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview - something I always avoided, as it comes from the same moronic design as GNOME Shell and Unity and... guess what? I kind of dig it, is not at horrifying as expected, I think I found my new desktop and will use it for a while. With Windows builds of GIMP, Inkscape, Pidgin, VLC, Thunderbird and Firefox on top, of course. Not sure what about video editing, but will cross that bridge when I will get there.