[Ashanmaril]

I don't buy that "good-bad-good-bad" pattern that everyone references. It's a mildly funny observation, but it's hard to say that Windows 10 is really that good. It's more usable than Windows 8, but the bar was so low, that's not a very useful metric.

[vxNsr]

It added a lot more stability over win8 and removed a bunch of terrible UX. Additionally it added to a lot of the great ideas of windows 7. I can’t recall any off the top of my head, but I remember trying to do things in 7 and being surprised they weren’t possible.

I agree that win8 set a low bar, but so did vista, fact is 7 was much better and 10 follows that same progression.

[deelowe]

Still tries to force cortana on me despite my computer not even having a mic. It places ads in the start menu. Heck, the start menu is basically completely useless. I've resorted to relying exclusively on search now, which means my start menu is a mess and if I can't remember the name of the app, I have to resort to using file explorer to attempt to locate it. I still can't for the life of me figure out how to change any of the system settings without fishing around. Every single time I have a bluetooth issue, it's 5+ minutes of poking around different menus to sort out where the issue is.

Case in point. Click start, settings, and look at the window that pops up. Where are the settings to add a new wifi AP? This is something you will do quite often if you have a laptop or tablet. Ohh wait, did you get the menu that actually has all the settings in it? Because there are two. Windows decides somewhat randomly which one to present you with. What sense does that make?

[WorldMaker]

> Still tries to force cortana on me despite my computer not even having a mic.

For what it is worth, Cortana has been basically entirely turned off in either 20H1 or 20H2 on new installs.

> It places ads in the start menu.

It's less annoying about that if you pay the $99 for the upgrade from Home to Pro.

> Case in point. Click start, settings, and look at the window that pops up. Where are the settings to add a new wifi AP?

Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Show all available networks

Though that just opens the window for you that you'd get if you clicked the Network Indicator button directly on the Taskbar which is the fastest/direct path. (It wouldn't have occurred to me to try to path to it from the Settings app, though it is interesting that you can.)

[deelowe]

> It's less annoying about that if you pay the $99 for the upgrade from Home to Pro.

I'm on pro. Have been since the start. It still shoves bing results and app suggestions and all sorts of other stuff into the start menu by default. I've long since turned all that stuff off, so maybe it's improved...

[WorldMaker]

I haven't noticed anything of those sorts of suggestions on the Start Menu in a long while. Though I probably did turn things off once long ago. I also use a Microsoft Account to login to Windows and I've also heard that makes a difference sometimes in the number of "suggestions" that you see (in that it shows more for Local only accounts for some reason possibly as dumb as "has no way to remember what suggestions it has already shown to you").

[Ashanmaril]

> I've resorted to relying exclusively on search now

I'm surprised you're even able to make use of the search because that's also horrible and loves to swap out the result you wanted last second so you open up something else random. It's also incredibly slow and tries to hamfist bing search results and stupid suggestions to install apps instead of just searching your computer.

Now I use Everything (voidtools). And I put it as the first pinned item in my taskbar so I can do Win+1 to access it quickly.

[emptyparadise]

>It added a lot more stability over win8

Did we use the same OS? I didn't really like the full screen app stuff but Windows 8 was fast and stable for me while Windows 10 to this day feels slower.