jamyskis: So, my conclusion after a month of use is that it is a fucking mess.
The start menu is fundamentally broken - nothing new can be added once 512
entries (not programs or apps) are present, which fills up pretty quickly.
I ran into this problem as well, absolutely frustrating after the upgrade that not all my apps are on the Start Menu and apparently no updates have done anything to correct it. I have to look for those I didn't already have on my desktop and pin them.
jamyskis: It breaks backwards compatibility a lot more than previously surmised - around 15% of games that worked on Windows 7 now do not work with Windows 10 - mostly related to DirectDraw issues.
Fortunately, out of the games I have installed, I have not run into these issues. I wonder if it's only due to games that use DirectDraw, but that should be something not too difficult to ascertain.
jamyskis: There's the aforementioned privacy issues.
Wait chain handling is fundamentally broken. It's not uncommon for hang-ups in Explorer or Skype to prevent certain 32-bit apps from running entirely. With InstallShield installer in particular, you frequently have to open up task manager, analyse the wait chain for the setup.exe app and terminate Skype or Explorer because you can launch the installer. WTF?
The privacy issues can be circumvented, one just has to be less than nonchalant when performing an installation and make sure you flip the right "switches". As far as the lock-ups are concerned, I've seen a similar problem in Windows 8.1. I was working with a new hire who was trying to install Borland C++ Builder 5.0 (yes, it is a legacy development environment), and every attempt to install it ended up in the installer just "disappearing".
Funny enough, it turned out he had accidentally opened up the "Windows Store" application before switching back to the desktop, once we "Alt+Tab" to it, all of the sudden, every installation we tried to run popped up at once, all but the first throwing an error. Not sure what Windows 8.1 was doing specifically with Marketplace applications over legacy windows applications, but it was pretty odd behavior on a multi-processor desktop.
jamyskis: The forced updates have already been proven to be a fundamentally bad idea.
The mail app is simply horrid. I've not even bothered with Microsoft Edge - I've stuck with Chrome.
At least we know now why it's free. I certainly wouldn't have paid for this shit.
I'm not a big fan of the forced updates either... you can delay them (and hope the patches get patched), but it's going to move forward whether you want to or not eventually.
I've used the Edge browser, and while it is quite a speedy contender, I went to the HTML 5 support Web page to see how compliant it is with the latest standards compared to Chrome. Chrome beat it hands down and I'm sure if you take all the burden of add-ins off of Chrome, it would end up being the better browser. I am not as stoked on speed of the browser in a desktop environment compared to the HTML 5 support it offers.
All in all, I was at Windows 7 and I certainly wasn't going to pay for 8.1, which, in my opinion, was a bigger steaming pile than 10. The only issue I had with Windows 10 was with the installed Cisco VPN client, but I was able to work around that. I can still play all the games I already had installed from GOG and I like the user interface much better than I do for Windows 8/8.1. Under the covers of the shell user interface, it has some features that are worth the upgrade from 7, but it does have its share of upgrade bugs. In my opinion, it's worth the upgrade while it is still free.