Re: I have a Win10 laptop
Actually, I'd take 8 or Vista over 10.
Vista is very much like Windows 7, which is held by many as the high water mark of Microsoft operating systems. It had a rough start, but it has for years been a very stable and usable product. If you like 7, there is not much to dislike about Vista anymore, and there hasn't been for years.
Windows 8 (including 8.1) doesn't have non-removable telemetry you can't turn all the way off, Cortana, updates you can't control, apps that get installed even if you don't want them, and it doesn't take it upon itself to change your settings back to those that serve Microsoft whenever it feels like it. Win 8 does not remove programs by itself, and it doesn't remove the driver you carefully selected and replace it with some crappy thing it found in the Windows Update repository one day. It also does not have ads; I understand that MS briefly tried some ads in it a while back, but that was before I'd tried it.
Windows 8 comes infected by apps and an identity crisis like 10 does. Neither one of them knows whether it is a PC or a phone... but 8 can be helped to understand it's (on) a PC much easier than can 10. Since the "app" mode and the "desktop" mode are separate in 8, it's a lot easier to wall off or rip out the Metro stuff and live completely in the desktop (and without harming the stability of the system). I've done this with both of my main PCs; both are running Windows 8.1 now (dual boot with Mint), and apps are nowhere to be seen. They're gone, including the Windows Store, and they've remained that way since I tore them out in the first place (updates don't put them back). Even with that done, it's perfectly stable; I quite literally could not ask for better.
Classic Shell (which includes Classic Start) brings back a usable start menu (I haven't found 10's tiled start menu to be any better than the Win 8 start screen) and dispatches the Charms bar, while Old New Explorer removes the ribbon and "folders on this PC" and restores the old Windows 7 UI to File Explorer. There are others (I find 7+ Taskbar Tweaker to be indispensable, with 7 as well as 8.1 or 10), but those listed above do the heavy lifting of making Windows 8 decent to use (along with the custom theme of your choice).
You might say that it should not be necessary to use aftermarket programs just to have a decent UI, and you'd be right-- but even the vaunted Windows 7 UI has flaws that I need Classic Shell and other such programs to fix. If I HAD to use Windows without aftermarket UI mods, 7 would certainly be more usable than 8 or 8.1, but I don't have to do that.
The last Windows version that had a UI that was usable (IMO) with only registry changes and not aftermarket programs was XP; ever since then, each successive version of Windows has needed more and more aftermarket intervention to get things straightened out. In Windows 10, it's no longer practical to even try; it takes too much work to do to have it all re-engineered and restored every time a new update comes along. Additionally, a lot of the "app" looking stuff can't be eradicated anymore, as there are no longer Win32 versions of a lot of things. There's no rhyme or reason; it looks like MS simply sprinkled UWP dialogs into the OS at random.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
