The core OS underneath the glitzy pixels is a fine OS. Really, more than fine -- it's a /great/ OS, fantastic at asynchronicity and driver support. It has warts, but on the whole it was well thought out. (I've been working with OSes for 30+ years, starting with TOPS-10 and Unix in the late 70s. I have a little pedigree here).
The stuff they put on top, not so much. I will probably wait years until I install anything past Win7, and if MS hasn't cleaned up its act for power users by then, the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux are the apps I use, and games.
(I do wish MS had some up with a better text shell. PowerShell doesn't cut it).
Steam on Linux may take care of the games part of my needs. The apps? Visual Studio is hard to beat, and there are some others that I can't live without that don't have competent Linux equivalents. Time may erode my dependency on these.
[I left MS about a month ago. It's interesting to experience the perspective shift]
Well, there are a host of tools used by "creatives" that would need to move. The driver scene would have to get a lot better. And sound on Linux is a disaster on rollerskates (it used to be very bad on Windows as well, until Microsoft started throwing its weight around).
I don't dispute what you are saying about the core OS at all. The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, nobody is doing anything with it. In sharp contrast to that you can do tons on unix/linux without a GUI and there are tons of tools out there that you can use from command line.
I guess we agree on the greater point which is that the MS Windows product looks like it has been savagely distorted into something that people like us want to stay as far away from as possible. The fact that these discussions are not about exalting the qualities of W8 is evidence enough.
The stuff they put on top, not so much. I will probably wait years until I install anything past Win7, and if MS hasn't cleaned up its act for power users by then, the only thing holding me back from switching to Linux are the apps I use, and games.
(I do wish MS had some up with a better text shell. PowerShell doesn't cut it).
Steam on Linux may take care of the games part of my needs. The apps? Visual Studio is hard to beat, and there are some others that I can't live without that don't have competent Linux equivalents. Time may erode my dependency on these.
[I left MS about a month ago. It's interesting to experience the perspective shift]