What was wrong with 8? I found the UI a significant improvement, even better than 10. The only qualm I had was the removal of the power button, but that was resolved in the 8.1 update.
Invisible hotspots to bring up necessary dialogs, settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place, flat UI elements, two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh). Windows 7 fits in with my experience on Windows going back over 20 years. Windows 8 throws that away for something I think is a contradictory mish-mash. Windows 10 doesn't completely clean up the mess, and it adds other things that I don't like.
If Microsoft removed the metro UI style, the tile interface, the Windows Store, Cortana, and forced updates (or allowed the user to disable those things), I'd be running Windows 10 now.
Oh, I disabled that early on so I forgot about it. The only one of significance was the start menu corner, but that was also remedied in 8.1.
>settings split into multiple different places that used to be collected in one place
The settings panel is the same as Windows 10. I'd definitely argue against all settings being in one place on 7 though. There's dozens of different locations: control panel, the registry, local/group policy editor, folder options, the "advanced" system settings panel (contains completely unrelated settings such as environmental variables, performance toggles, DEP, and remote assistance). Then there's lots of weird quirky menus like the one you get by entering "control userpasswords2" into the run dialog.
I see the new settings panel as a cleaner frontend to the existing settings. Hopefully over time they'll be consolidated there.
>flat UI elements
I love it.
>two conflicting interfaces (tablet UI on a mouse-based device? bleh).
I don't see the conflict, but the start screen worked just fine on mouse for me. It took a week to relearn some muscle memory and then I was over it. In the end I found it much more efficient. The targets were larger and it didn't waste a ton of screen space like the current start menu does.
On my wife's, I remember something about the top-right corner, or along the edge there, and I think it had to do with wifi settings. Those are what I was thinking of. Oh, and swiping away from the lock screen.
> Settings
All the settings that I actually use are in the control panel. I end up in the registry less than annually, and I've never touched the policy editor, most of the things in the mmc, etc. Things like folder settings aren't what I'd consider OS-wide; it makes sense to have them in Explorer, because that's where they take effect.
>dual interfaces
Everyone's got their own opinion. It seems like change for the sake of change, to me, and better suited to a tablet UI than a PC one.
