Windows 10 has some great improvements over 7. The new task manager looks great. There are some great changes under the hood to make it faster than 7. If Windows 10 runs bad on your machine with all "options" turned off, then I'm sure Windows 7 runs crap as well. Get a SSD and a decent amount of RAM. An i3 processor should be quick enough for basic computing and even moderate productivity.
The thing is.. although Windows 10 has some great things, it also has many (unnecessary) features that really throw tech-savvy people off:
- Telemetry programs are opt out instead of opt in. Even though you opted out, some update comes along and it opts in again.
Also you will never have a clue what they send to MS. Have you ever looked up the size of Windows? Cited sources say Windows XP to 10 average around 40-60 million lines of code. Say that it only takes 1000 lines to write an excellent backdoor, that's a minuscule portion. Also when it's completely hidden and buried, away from any interaction, it probably makes it really hard to track down where it resides. Then have it obscured by the pillars and foundations of obfuscation by Windows. Pour some sweet encryption and undocumented protocols over it. Good luck figuring out what is going on.
- Forced reboots for updates. Great, so you lost unsaved work, possibly hours of computing time for a project your PC was working at (like a video render), complete lack of information about what the machine is installing, and all your browser tabs are likely gone. How is this acceptable to anyone? The user should be in control. Microsoft knows this, has had this critique for months, but couldn't be arsed to change it.
- Nagging popups about "Edge is faster than Chrome". Or I also heard something about the Super-bowl event.. even to non-americans. WTF? Piss off. I use my computer for productivity and games, if I want to see ads I will turn on the commercial television.
- The MS Store decides it's smarter than me. I wanted to install the free Forza game on my machine a little while back. While this machine got a DX12 FL11 compatible Quadro GPU with 2GB of VRAM; the store decided against me and I couldn't install it. Why? What artificial limitation is this? Or even more; why can't you recognize my hardware correctly in the first place?
- Aside from a few new features, honestly what has actually changed that makes me think: yes that's worth another 100$ of my hard earned money? Isn't the new UI just the old one but now a dumbed down version with more whitespace in it? Isn't it all a bit too fragmented so far? Aren't some updates like the Store, Cortana and DirectX12 shoved down your throat like it was necessary to add that?
Some of the nice features I just listed can be survived without. We have so with Windows 7 for years. Computers haven't changed fundamentally since then. So pragmatically there is no reason to absolutely run Windows 10, unless you really want to use a specific new feature. It's just that we're forced to eventually by dropping hardware support (like Intel Kaby Lake does) and stop making security patches. I'm sure if Microsoft added the "killer" features to Windows 7 , it would have been received very well. But I guess security patches and geek features is not what sells - after all MS is a commercial company.
It has recently been leaked that a Windows 10 Cloud edition is coming soon. It supposedly doesn't run applications outside the store. All applications you use must come from the store. I suspect they probably want to get the point where they started off with Windows 8 - strip out the desktop experience for consumers, completely dumb down the computing experience, and cash on purchases through the store. If they can get force a decent revenue through the store and then cash a couple ten % of that, sounds like how other companies got big as well.
What benefit does this have to the user? Well they say this cloud version could be cheaper for low end devices. OK great for them, but most passionate people will not buy a crap machine. Why would I buy a version of Windows with these artificial and this time very striking limitations? I have honestly no clue - but given that MS has a monopoly position in the computer market and many people are infected by the 'Stockholm Syndrome', I'm sure they get away with it.
I think it's unfortunate MS is projecting all this commercial noise onto their desktop OS also used by professionals. For folks like us stuff like this is never going to work. I suppose it's not the only option going forward long term - but who knows.. MS was also crazy enough to think Windows 8 was a good idea.
Now this is my way of filling in the blanks. I think people intuitively form an opinion, and then enjoy reading and citing sources that enforces that opinion. Unfortunately it's a human thing to do - even though most of us are paid not to be like that.