Not parent poster, but the interface works as a plaster that obfuscates the stuff I need. Add to it the many mobile imports pushed onto the user (don't care about cloud? Well, W10 cares, and it will push it at every turn) and you get a product that's built to push how Microsoft thinks you should use your computer.
My aging father has used Microsoft OSes since dos, and W10 is the first product he's having real trouble moving to. The reason for that is that he's always been a pc user, and W10 is pushing mobile ux, with a very hard opt-out.
Neither of the parents' posters, but my gripes with Windows 10 come down to these:
- Unreliability of UI elements (mixed responsiveness, difficult to see what are buttons and what are labels)
- Too much wasted space in their current design language, and related to that
- Too much distraction by visual eye candy (background images behind buttons in the email client, for example)
- Somehow, despite having every advantage in manufacturer driver support, still laggy animations
- After years, search is still bad and unpredictable, to the point I have to type "updat" to go to Windows Update because "update" will take me to Bing to tell me about how to update my PC.
- Inconsistencies. Many of those are because of the decades of backwards compatibility, which I can forgive, but even the modern Windows 10 apps have inconsistent designs[1]. Icons from four Windows versions that can all be seen on the same screen if you navigate deep enough through the seconds, even though Windows uses a unified resource loading mechanism for most system resources.
None of the alternatives are perfect, of course, but some are just _less worse_ in my opinion. Compared to the W10 shell, Gnome feels much snappier to me. Also, after finally fixing the bug that made the Windows 10 start menu break, a new start menu bug has been introduced to my system that makes it impossible to use the search bar in the start menu when it's opened start button on my left screen, breaking "winkey > program name > enter" _again_.
On Linux, audio sometimes breaks, or external monitors only work after an update. When nothing breaks, the system works great.
On Windows, everything always kind of works, but not completely. Whatever I'm trying to do, something is broken in a way that's not bad enough to invest time into fixing, but still annoys me to no end.
On macOS, you need to buy the expensive Apple hardware or it won't work at all. I have no need for expertly-graded colour-accurate screens sporting extreme resolutions, but you don't get any other options if you want to experience the macOS UI. I can't say much about the most recent macOS UI because I can't even run it, which makes it impossible to compare.
Of these three, I've settled with Linux, especially Gnome, as the "least broken" UI.
In the mid to late years of Windows 7, the Windows UI greatly outperformed most alternatives. With Windows 8, the system got very usable after the 8.1 update came out. After Windows 10, with the introduction of "operating system as a service", the UI seems to be in a perpetual state of "nearly finished, just needs a few more updates" because of the constant addition of more features and integrations.
Not the parent poster, but Windows 10 is turning into a managed consumer cloud endpoint, rather than remain a power user/prosumer-friendly personal computing platform with privacy in mind.
