Re: Thing is, I've been using Windows 10 for over a year, and I still absolutely hate it.
Out of the box, 8.1 is admittedly pretty awful compared to 7... but I didn't even run Windows 7 without aftermarket tweaks like Classic Shell, 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, and a custom theme. If you do the same kind of thing with 8.1, it turns into a really decent OS... all the extra crap they hung off of it can be bypassed, blocked, removed, or otherwise circumvented, and what remains is an OS where everything is just where it was in Windows 7.
Once you get the start menu replaced with something decent, kill the File Explorer ribbon, and eliminate the hot corners and the Charms, 8.1 is quite good in its own right... which is more than you can say for 10 even with the same tweaks applied. 8.1 has a fully-functioning Control Panel (I don't even have the Settings app linked to the Start Menu or anywhere else), the same update system as 7 (meaning the control belongs to the user, not Microsoft), the same telemetry (or lack thereof) as 7, no ads, no unwanted app installations, no unwanted uninstallations of things it wants to remove, no changing your settings on its own, no Cortana, no nagging to use Edge if you start another browser, and no permanent beta quality because of the frenetic rate of updates and a lack of professional beta testers (that's your job now, non-enterprise users!)... it's much like 7, only with 3 extra years of support and a handful of things that are nice to have but not world changers (faster boot, better task manager, better file copy/filename collision dialogs, etc.).
There are a few areas where 7 has it better, though. The networking options have been pared down in 8.1, and they oversimplified a lot of it (ie no easy way to change an existing network's type or name). The Windows 8.1 wireless network selection dialog takes up a lot of screen space, but contains nearly no information... only SSID and signal strength. That's it.
Windows 7's system restore allows the user to recover older versions of files easily, and 8.1's doesn't do that. Instead, you get file history, which I don't find as handy or useful (but I make a lot of backups, so I never relied on system restore anyway; it's just handy sometimes).
The bottom line for me is six years of security support without Windows 10. I'm already set dual-booting Linux and Windows... I could move to Linux full-time overnight if I absolutely had to (which I would if 10 was the only other choice), but this way, I have all kinds of time... and the Linux devs have a lot of time to keep making Linux better even as MS keeps working to make Windows worse. Or perhaps it will dawn on someone in Redmond that treating its customers like enemies to be conquered and subdued is not a great plan. Whatever it is, I'm set for what is sure to be an interesting six years.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
