I don't think you ever really used windows 10.
Nor have you ever really used windows XP.
Sneeze too hard and Windows XP will corrupt its registry.
I question if you were even an adult in the age of Windows XP... If you lived in the era of XP, and went through each service pack (SP1,SP2,SP3) along with queuing up windows updates via the Update Website with Internet Explorer. As XP didn't have a built in update selector, just autoupdate manager. It was not rainbows that you think it was.
Also I think you are confusing Windows 8 and 10. 10 doesn't really have a title interface and really only a part of the start menu has the option to show the old classic tiles. Which is actually pretty handy as quick launches. And I don't know of anything that ever required anyone to install something from the MS Store XD.
I grew up in the 60s/70s. I worked in the US Navy for 20 years on electronics and then learned PCs and had to deal with the beginnings of networks on ships and shore stations. I started working with Window 3.11. I used to have to edit Autoexec.bat to load drivers, and the machines had something like a 640K limitation, and if I remember correctly you had to load a driver even to get past 512K
So, I grew up before the PC because a thing.
It was nice that Win95 got you away from all of this and plug and play became a thing. I've used Win95, Win98, WinME, WinXP, Win7, Win8.1 and Win10.
I'm sorry I just never had issues with XP like many had. The fact that you had bad experiences with it is based on what you were doing with your system(s) doesn't change the fact that many if not most people didn't. But, I would reload the OS every couple years, mainly because I was running a lot of different software, and changed my system quite a bit during those years.
Once XP was a couple years past EOL I updated to Win7, which has multiple issues which is why a developer created the Windows Classic Shell. Well, really he put it out for XP, but I never felt the need to use it until Win7 because the file explorer functionality was screwy. With XP it mainly added some tweaks, but with Win7 it had to fix different behavior.
My wife's machine has Win8.1. I don't use it personally but I configure it. Win8.1 has a toggle button instead of a start button, but there's also a get around for it. If you right click on that button it takes you to pretty much any configuration you need to do. You can do something else, and I'd have to look it up again and don't care to just for you, where you get an up arrow on your taskbar that gets you to your programs, so between right-clicking on the toggle and that up-arrow, it gives you almost the same functionality of a typical start button.
With Win10, you click one way and you get the same tiled interface that came out in Win8. You click another way and you get more like a typical start menu. Right now that machine is down, and yes you're correct I don't use Win10, except as a gaming machine. In which case, it's set to run everything by a single click from the taskbar, and that is ALL I do with Win10, so once I configure it, I don't mess with it ever again so no I can't tell you the fine details of using Win10.
Yes, with XP you went to IE to run updates. That was the least intuitive thing about it.
People are going to find using different OSs easier than others. So your opinion is not FACT. It's your opinion. I liked XP better than anything that's come since, regardless of having to know to go to IE to run updates. And from watching LTT talk about Win11 along with a couple of other reviewers, they're not very fond of various settings you have to deal with, which take one single setting and turns it into many, I believe with the option of what files to open with what browser. If you wonder how much tastes can vary over a DE along with accessibility to loading programs, settings, etc..., go to a Linux forum.
I find Ubuntu MATE FAR superior to anything Microsoft has put out, but I don't like the Caja browser that much, so I add in another browser, Thunar. It also has shortcomings with tiling open programs, but you add X-tile to it and it gives you amazing control on single clicks to tile in many different ways, and you can add custom configs. Once I configure MATE, I'm at most 2 clicks away from anything I want to do. For their version of a quick launch bar, you can add menu icons, so imagine one click to open something like a control panel, and then one more click to open up a group of settings.
You're wrong, I do use Win10 on a gaming machine that once I configure the only thing I'm doing with it is running games. Win10 is spyware, so I just don't mess with it. It why I use Ubuntu MATE now for many applications.
And as far as Win10 tiling, what do you call this? This is tiling. You said Win10 doesn't tile. I won't go as far as to call you a child the way you did to me, but I'll leave this with, get you're second brain cell engaged. You need it.
Many things have changed with the Start menu from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
www.howtogeek.com
