Re: We just
"Oh and if win10 is anything like win 8, we're going Linux throughout."
Win8.1 is a free upgrade from Win8.0 and well worth trying if the 8.0 interface drives you nuts. (It isn't massively better, but at least you get a sort-of Start menu (perversely via right-click) and you can stay on the desktop and pretend that Metro never happened.)
Win10 Tech Preview is *a lot* like Win8.1. The Start menu (left-click this time) is quite astonishingly ugly and uses a scrolling alphabetical list rather than a cascading menu, but is just about functional. My impression so far is that the free upgrade is a no-brainer for anyone on 8.x.
I installed a clean Win7 the other day. There were over two hundred patches (over and above the "latest" service pack). It's now out of mainstream support and vanishingly unlikely that MS will ever issue a service pack to roll-up that lot. Increasingly you will find that hardware vendors won't have a Win7 driver. MS aren't going to retro-fit SHA-256 support for kernel-mode drivers and so after 2016 it will actually get quite hard to properly sign a Win7 driver.
Win7 users ought to be considering their options at this stage and Win10 is a free upgrade that will probably run all their existing code.