"... but do HATE the flat graphical style of win 10 ..."
"To be honest I use File Explorer just fine but do HATE the flat graphical style of win 10. Its annoying and boring. I really miss a proper title bar that actually changes colour when you deselect a window so you can tell if it has focus or not before you start typing."
I am down to just one program remaining which actually requires Windows, and I have its Linux alternative trained-in and ready for migration when MS ceases final support for W7. I use Linux for everything else so it'll be an easy transition.
But I am not transitioning yet, because W7 (if you're prepared to cope with its miserable security) was the best UI version. Better even than XP's interface. It is easy to use, ok to look at, pretty intuitive ... despise MS as I do, W7 is still arguably the best desktop interface. For those doing productivity stuff on a powerful desktop system, no touchscreen or daft mobile-centric stuff, it is still actually a damn good environment. Sure, I have a ton of cores and RAM to deal with MS bloat. And yes, Linux is technically superior in every respect. But I am actually in no hurry to make this final move.
So it is passing odd that W10 is so nasty, and such a massive backward step, that I am to be driven from MS. Even if I could turn off all the spyware, and even if I could laboriously re-skin the ludicrously inappropriate UI, I'd still have to cater for all the other backward steps, and really, what's the point when I can just leave?
But it seems to me truly, very strange that from its best desktop UI, MS has regressed to something worse and significantly unpleasant to use. One might consider that unpseakable pile of shit, Vista, as a kind of wild aberration, and at least rapidly fixed; but there's no sign MS will ever fix its desktop UI now. We are stuck not only with the junkpile of ugly and unnecessary compromises for mobile, touch and crummy little apps, but with MS's strategic decision no longer to treat Windows users as paying customers, with rights and dignity, but as exploitable assets, like Face-addicts, Twit-zombies and Instag-cretins, to be forever stuck within its OS web, and eternally wrung dry for private data and perpetually nagged to become ever more dependent upon the shonky "cloud", where your private data become ransom-worthy hostages.
Are there any other examples, in say the last 30 years, of a product being replaced with something in almost every way worse?