I have a calibrated QHD Eizo monitor for desktop and I found that white and grey balance progressively improved in earlier windows versions from 1709 with 1803 showing a marked improvement. However, with 1809 there is a marked deterioration in white balance/gamma. Thus, white looks dirty white in 1809 as opposed to clean white in 1803. Also, there seems to be a lot of uneven grey with black smudging. Overall a marked decline from 1803 to 1809 so much so that for the time being, I am sticking to 1803. As to dark file explorer, does that enhance productivity. I do not think so. Some other generic problems with all windows versions: 1, Looks good on smaller, low resolution monitors but as one goes to 1080, 1440, 2160p; it gets progressively worse. 100% scaling gives a smaller, unreadable font; and 125%+ scaling gives torn up fonts. It is just like low quality downloads looking good on small phones but horrible on bigger displays. 2. I wonder when will Microsoft give us a font style and pitch that will cause us to abandon Mactype patch. That is the only thing that makes fonts look better and cleaner on high resolution displays. However, try use mactype on segoe 125% and on a calibrated monitor and you will see black smudging all over. Tahoma looks much better and neater.
Check if your icc profile is still associated with the display. - You have a colorimeter/spectrophotometer right? Otherwise white balance is pretty subjective when eye balled... - Recalibrate your screen - colour temperature / white balance tends to shift anyway in 2-3 months. - Windows has trouble loading the gamma curves from the profile to the GPU LUT, use the Profile Loader from DisplayCal to load your ICC. - Maybe display drivers needs an update? Text rendering is awful when scaling the display - set the scaling to 100% and adjust text rendering with cleartype tuner (cttune.exe) to your liking. - you can also try setting custom scaling between 110%-115% (don't remember which was "best" on my 25' qhd monitor).
My monitor was calibrated on 24.9.2018 so it does not matter. Display drivers are updated. Just that the white balance on 1809 looks off to me compared with 1803. If I look at it everyday, maybe I will get used to it. But as of now, 1803 looks better to me. I have an EIZO CS2730 but not a calibration instrument. I use the monitor for non-professional uses simply because it gives great colour uniformity. Do get it calibrated every 1000 hrs or 4-5 months and last calibration was 10 days back and maybe 50 hrs. Since I d not have a CG2730 with built in calibrator, I cannot load the ICC profiles for recent calibration.
The OS stage at which calibration was done is gone, reformated. Anyway the main point remains. Like for like on the same monitor, 1803 looks better.