Recently a friend gave me a notebook PC that had been treated badly and had a bad stick of RAM in it. Replaced that, and then it would boot=> but the kid who had it before had allowed it to be infested by '10' !!! If that sick, sad parody of an OS does not have folks RUNNING to get Linux - nothing ever will. Forget that it is so much like ransomware (gwx - or else !!) - that it is altogether creepy - that it is visually repulsive - even forget for a minute that it is fully lobotomized - that is not the worst of it: It infests your hardware with stuff that simply will not go away !!! I wanted to use this thing as a test box for different distros and nothing would boot despite having turned off the absurd 'secure boot' in BIOS. Finally found a 2nd setting that needed adjustment to allow it to boot though, and got past that. For anyone stuck like this, either with '10' or 'ache' (8.x) - if you have any data on the drive you want to save, I found how to get rid of that nasty GPT stuff non-destructively=> PartedMagic has Gdisk in it, and that works. Finally I was able to delete all the ridiculous partitions (how many rescue partitions should any OS need anyhow ?!?) and convert the drive back to MBR, saving the single data partition that I needed. Moral of this story: This thing that pretends to be an OS is SOOOOOO very bad that it can fool someone like me into thinking there is defective h/w in a system - preventing booting and/or drive editing. It was painful to have to look at it too - but I'm glad I had to as it makes me 1000 times more glad to be a Linux user !!! I think some talented coder should make an app for folks to help them 'recover' quickly from any infestation of these things which pretend to be OSes - maybe even help them download & install a REAL one to replace any of them. XP was the END, really; nothing after that OS has been worth bothering with from what this user has seen.
I'll say that I agree with almost everything you said, except that IMHO Windows 7 is also a great operating system. Or was, until M$ decided to deliberately sabotage their own OS (and this is an OS, not a "service" as it's makers like to refer to W10) by infesting it with ransomware known as GWX... On the other hand, had they not done that, I would have never discovered how wonderful, truly wonderful Linux is! So, if anyone employed by M$ is reading this, thank you so much for ruining W7 and good riddance!
I tried 7 - really - and to me it was just ME-II (vista) with another paint job. The worst of it was just trying to get a non-cartoony setup for it minus all those nasty 'ribbons' and other things they did to lobotomize it - like the THING they replaced good 'ol explorer with. I helped a friend stop that GWX krap on 7 - and have yet to finish with helping to clean up that system because that OS is so prone to just giving me a headache !! I remain open to suggestions - but for now I'd rather stick with using a VM of XP under Linux; At least it is kinder to my old eyes & brain than 7 was.