The MS conspiracy theories are... sorry, they're nonsense. There is no hint of such a thing, and even if they wanted to do it, at least in some big markets (e.g. Europe) they wouldn't get away with it legally. Look at what the EU did to them with regard to browsers--and in that case, frankly, it is beyond a stretch to call what they had a monopoly; it's absurd. To put it bluntly: they wouldn't even dare to try what is being suggested in this thread.

My old apps work fine on Win 8. Even my ancient Lotus Word Pro (2002).

Certainly, there's things I dislike. I'm aggravated by the whole administrator privileges thing in Win8--but keep in mind that I migrated directly from XP Pro, so most other folks have already experienced most of those growing pains. And I don't like the interface, or the fact that I have to click something in order to get to the desktop. And I hate the native apps; I'm too old school to want to use an app that I can't even close.

But as far as the tiles... they're okay, I guess. There's a myth going around that they're limited to what MS chooses, or what comes from the store (name your story). Not true. I have the apps of my choosing displaying wherever I want them on the tile screen, and have hidden or outright uninstalled ones I don't want.

I could have got Win7, but my understanding is that with Win8 Pro, I can virtualize Win7 without an extra license, anyway, and as a web dev, I may make use of the built-in virtualization capabilities for other things. Plus, it's slightly faster/more robust, so that pushed me over.

Stability: pretty good for a new OS, I'd say. I don't think I've crashed the OS itself yet. I'm not sure though if all the apps are as stable as I would have expected, given how powerful my system is.

I suspect this will be like every version of Windows I've had. Hate it at times, but work with it.

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Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3