In hindsight, Windows 8 wasn't that bad overall. The real disaster was the Metro UI, but the underlying OS was relatively unobtrusive and a bit more performant than Win7.
Once something like Classic Shell was installed, it was pretty slick and reliable.
My last Windows machine now runs 10 begrudgingly, and compared to my daily drivers MacOS and Ubuntu, it's a shockingly inconsistent operating system. I don't rely on it for "real work" thankfully.
Classic Shell was great. Looking back, going from XP to 7 to 8 to 10, I can't think of any improvement, but the user experience got consistently worse.
This might be the Second Law of Thermodynamics at work, but seriously, I don't understand how these things got shipped.
FWIW, I think the multiple desktops feature in 10 is a good quality of life change. Past that I’d probably agree. Give me any other modern OS before Windows.
Once something like Classic Shell was installed, it was pretty slick and reliable.
My last Windows machine now runs 10 begrudgingly, and compared to my daily drivers MacOS and Ubuntu, it's a shockingly inconsistent operating system. I don't rely on it for "real work" thankfully.