Looks changed, but a lot of actions worked the same in Windows 8 from what I remember. The start screen obviously
looks different from the old start menu, but in both 7 and 8, you could hit your super key and start typing something to search, which for me was often how I launched applications or found settings. You could still open the run box with super-r, they added that new menu with lots of options like shutting down (super-x IIRC). A lot of people didn't actually try to use Windows 8 like power users. I often defended it early on, and was of the opinion that the visual changes barely mattered. I stopped using Windows entirely before Windows 10 came out. More because I always thought GNU/Linux was better and I'd finally gotten brave enough to go all in than because of a Windows change.
I also tend to advocate for a minimal tiling window manager over the major desktop environments in the GNU/Linux world, but something I noticed is that Windows has some really specific keyboard shortcuts that not even GNOME and KDE had. Using Windows without a mouse is surprisingly doable. You can even hit super-b to move the cursor to your tray icons, and from there use space/enter to "click", your menu key for right click equivalent, etc. I think having good keyboard shortcuts in a GUI is really underrated. I use a lot of command line stuff, but a GUI with good keyboard shortcuts is sort of the best of both worlds.