I'm probably just projecting from my own experience, but I think Microsoft pissed away a lot of accumulated goodwill with this severe pivot back to the dark-side.

I'm still amenable to Windows -- I play a lot of games -- but at this point there's no way I'll willingly upgrade to Win10 without some important changes, ex:

1. Upgrading to Win10 needs to be on my schedule, not yours. I'll do it when I buy new hardware, so if you really want me to switch, give me some kind of key I can use at a time of my choosing.

2. Fix the schizophrenic UI where various Windows settings are missing or sometimes hidden away.

3. Stop lying about updates and hiding trojan code in them.

4. No sneaking ads onto MY computer.

5. Allow power-users to reliably disable telemetry and "helpful" web-integration. I want to search my hard drive, not the internet. If I wanted to do that, I'd actually open a web-browser.

6. Allow power-users firm control over when patching occurs, because data-loss is not acceptable.

Several months ago I still used a multi-site licensed Windows 7 Ultimate and relied on the "Services for Unix" NFS support. My servers are Unix based. Went outside for a while and when I came back my Windows 7 Ultimate had been replaced by Windows 10 Pro. I really do not know how this happened because I always disable auto install.

My system is dual-boot Windows / Linux using Grub and somehow it did not break (showing that MS knows how to not break dual-boot). So I used Windows 10 Pro for a while only to discover that they removed "Services for Unix" NFS support which is now only available for Windows 10 Enterprise.

I've been using Linux for 20 years and am finally looking into not using Windows anymore at all. People may call it childish (my experience 20y advocating for Linux / BSD etc.), but I just do not trust them anymore. I also did not forget how they compared open-source with cancer and communism, something I think a professional company should never do.

Shouldn't this be a feast for class action lawsuit lawyers? Pretty sure someone who bought win7 or 8 didn't agree to this, even if it's somewhere hidden in the terms of use (at least in most European countries hiding anything significant there is not binding in court, not sure about the US).

This is exactly why I'm now looking for a good Linux laptop. Patch Tuesday has become a crapshoot of whether I have to manually remove the Windows Updates that want to install Windows 10. Of course, I've already uninstalled and hidden them before. I've also disabled the option "Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". But, they keep coming back.

The question I would ask someone from Microsoft is if there is any simple way I can guarantee that Windows 10 will not be installed, but I will still keep getting the rest of the upgrades.

Scary