I'm with you, and I'm happy that it seems like they are trying to become a good steward in the software industry. I am impressed by the quality of Windows 10, up to about a year ago I used Linux daily because it was a better experience than Windows 98 through 8.1, until recently. Lately, I find it's way easier to run Windows 10 with WSL rather than screw around with Linux trying to get things to work correctly that I just plug in to Windows.
I hope they start giving more control to us, though, because I'm tired of having to firewall block telemetry and forced to have Cortana installed or whatever other garbage. If Microsoft allowed me to install Windows like I do Debian, where I can pick my packages and leave out what I don't want, and they also allowed for replacement APIs, so I could swap explorer.exe for my own version for example, I'd never use Linux again. But that'll never happen, so I'll just use tools to block that stuff for now and hope the Linux experience catches up.
Even during the evil days Microsoft occasionally produced great software like Microsoft Money.
Like any large corporation, MS is not a single cohesive entity and I suspect the Win10 group pushing metrics and Cortana is not the same folks writing nifty quic implementations.
While not quite the same, they're releasing an Excel feature/template called "Money in Excel" soon[1], that uses a Plaid integration to pull live financial data into Excel to work with.
Weird, I must have some different edition of Windows. Totally inconsistent settings/control panel interfaces, updates taking ages, updates failing when you look at it wrong (and then stuck in update-revert loop every boot), driver setup taking minutes, and I constantly discover some new disk-hogging background process.
You're forgetting about the comparison to a linux desktop though.
I personally would really love to switch to Ubuntu full time, but I'm not going to forgive it soon for bricking my machine after a software update.
Unfortunately for Linux, the automated recovery tools just aren't there like on Windows - if a Windows update breaks the system, it will be able to recover itself 90% of the time.
Yeah, the UI is shitty and inconsistent and there's lots of nonsense in the background, but ultimately those don't matter as much as baseline reliability. No one hunts for WiFi drivers on Windows, at least not since Vista.
Compared to the last Linux GUI distros I used Windows 10 is a massive step up. Compared to Windows 7 it's a massive step down. Can't speak to Linux distros bricking my or my Customers' machines. Windows 10 update-induced issues have caused me a lot more headaches than Windows 7 ever did, though.
I'm just waiting for the sine curve to come down again. Companies who can change from that to this in 10 years because FLOSS became hip and popular, can change the other way around if it increases their profits.
Maybe, maybe not. CEOs are replaceable as well. But if the society is dependent on Microsoft, we will remain dependent even after Satya. Look, I'm not trying to preach anything. I love this MS as much as the next guy. It's just useful to think that companies can change both ways because ultimately what a company wants is to maximize profits, it's naive to think MSFT is trying to accomplish anything other than this. It's useful to think this for the long-term picture.
I really like this version of Microsoft.