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It's such a shame that it won't become linuxish. Looking at the history of windows and my experiences says:

XP - What a pig! Run this on a P2 233mhz with 256 memory? Step one, turn everything visual off. Step two? Back to 98SE. XP wound up being lovely, once the hardware that my budget could support finally caught up. Start with a >1ghz chip and 768 or more memory. And then I found nlite, cut IE/WMP/OE out, and in the process realized that antivirus was unnecessary if I didn't do anything stupid. Huge performance boost all around.

Vista - Just like XP, but twice as big and half as fast. Pass.

7 - Vista with a little less suck. Unfortunately, it's only very recently that I learned about NTlite, and still haven't had an honest go at it to see if IE can be removed (and in the process, most of the vulnerabilities with it!) It's not great as an OS for a desktop, and horribly slow to boot on a laptop. (Yes, your SSD equipped laptop boots in 0.002s. It also isn't using hardware that was current at the time, eh?)

8, 8.1, 8.1update, 8.1 gold edition limited gold flashy foil whatever - Underneath, this is the best we've had in awhile. Boots fast, but because of the multi-thread boot, a marginal overclock is going to hand you a BSOD every time. Put classicshell on it, and it looks exactly like 7 in one of the high-contrast modes. On a surface tablet, it's really useable. On a desktop? Err... put classicshell on it before calling it crap. It's awful if you leave it at defaults, but we're techies, we can fix this!

10 - Classicshell requires some effort to install. There's a distinct feeling of this being an OS designed by committee. Control panel? Sure, you just can't get there without using the modern path, which happens to vanish once you've installed a start menu replacement. That's a big pain in the ass. Updates that run when they please instead of at your wishes? Ugly. Updates that decide to change your settings? Seriously? F'k off.

What would solve nearly everyone's complaints is fairly easy. Ready?

Dear Microsacks:

Give us the control back. We want the option to turn on flashy shiny crap like Aero. We'd like to choose a start menu that looks like XP, or 2000, or 7, or 8 (fullscreen), or 10 (with ads...this may not be popular). This isn't hard! Instead of trying to copy google's revenue stream, why not do something utterly incredible: Make a product people want to pay for. If I had the control over Windows that I want (win 2000-style start menu, remove IE6...er....edge...whatever, remove your "apps", remove the app store, remove OE, remove WMP, set the display to aero, 2000, or 8...even better, give us a tool to write mildly customized environment to fit our needs), and I'd actually pay $200 or so for it.

I don't want your idiot cloud crap. I understand that it can has good uses. What I want is very simple: The choice to use it or not. CONTROL. Set your defaults up to let granny directly send her pension check to your accounts, fine. But give us the choice to turn it off. And then the hard part: Respect that goddamned decision. If you don't let me make my choices, I will either find software that cheats you, or I will use another OS. And I'm the "tech guy", for better or worse, for a large number of people. So my words carry more weight than the average user. I'm a decently big demographic that you should keep happy.

As it is, I may have a few copies of windows on my computers. They're only used for gaming anymore, and that's getting to be less and less. I even paid for my copy of 98. I think I own a XP home lisence. It's a shame that it hasn't been a worthwhile product since then.

And god help you when linux gets good gaming support. Trying to use someone else's setup for revenue isn't going to work. In related news, dear firefox: Stop it. Google makes Chrome. You do not. Your produc was actually a lot better, back when you were making your own product.

Grrr.

Also, no one uses bing. It sucks. As do the alternatives. If you want decent results, you use google. If it's something that you don't trust google for, you use DDG, and bitch about it the whole time. I miss the days when altavista actually had their own engine. I had hair back then....well, more than these days. Bleah.