8 felt like they were trying to force something on me.
10 felt like they were pushing bloatware like a cell phone. At least l could remove some of that?
11 feels like they decided it's their computer, I'm just renting time in it by watching ads. You could remove half the programs by default and I would not miss any of them. Do I need a version of minesweeper with micro transactions? No!
I remember that marketing campaign. Windows Vista had a shaky launch, because the hardware manufacturers hadn't polished the Vista-compatible drivers yet. 6 months later, they had caught up, but people still had a bad taste from it.
So when service pack 1 came out, Microsoft made a reskinned version of it and started an ad campaign with "customers" claiming "Windows 7 was my idea!" and the public ate it up.
As I remember Vista had some areas that were hard or unintuitive to configure, Win7 cleaned up those parts.
Win7 also made the disk hungry background processes play nice, Vista would occasionally lock up with 100% CPU and disk usage while the os scanned something.
I imagine, you guys might be measuring with two different scales. Early Windows versions were fine, but even back then, a switch to Linux would give you so much more customizability to actually make it yours.
This is a dumb anecdote, but I switched to Linux from Windows 8, and pretty much the first thing I did, was to figure out how to hide the window titlebars. Mostly because I realized, I could, but they also just took screen space away on my laptop.
And a shortcut to open Microsoft® LinkedIn® at OS level, and what surprises me the most is that uses your default browser instead of always opening it in Edge.