To me it always had a bit of a home depot DIY shop showing off its tile collection that someone vandalized with little skill and lots of spray paint.

Careful what you wish for, a domestic cold war is pretty much what we're heading for. It's likely that it's going to be asymmetric too.

Luckily this time WE will be the ones with the few resources.

What?

Damn those Chinese. Ain't it enough to copy our technology, do they have to copy our boogeymen now, too?

A state spying on it's own citizens... shameful. I'd be outraged, unless of course they said it was part of the war on terror, or whatever China's current favorite boogeyman is.

I meant that there are very few countries in Europe where immigrants not only represent a sizable portion of the population but also the leading culture. The cultures of the US and Europe are not too different. Well, duh, the leading culture of the US is carried by people whose forefathers came from Europe. It's fairly easy to integrate into a culture that is essentially already your own.

I see a huge third party app market for getting rid of crapware.

Ummmmm... if I have to tinker and toy to get a system running sensibly (and, bluntly, replacing the shell is a pretty deep modification), that doesn't qualify as "needing a fix"?

Those are not the real problems. The real problems is the users that don't like the new versions and hence stay with the unpatched, insecure old ones.

Yes they did, problem is only that this is where they landed, catapulted from 1995.

They also had no experience in fucking up Windows 8 before it came into existence, and look what a fine job they did!

If memory serves me right, so is MS. IE being "an integral part of the system" ringing a bell?

Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets (emphasis mine).

Or, in short, NO.

Well, once upon a time I might have made many of the same arguments. But now, RAM is cheap. I don't mind having the applications lurking around in the background. Not that I even use OSX, but last time I did (for a job) it was not a big deal, because the system had lots of RAM. And it was only 8GB, but it was plenty at the time and for the stuff I was doing, hint, not video.

Since the code is complicated, people can make all kinds of outlandish claims, how many of them are you going to test? That gets expensive.

Perfect is the enemy of good, but that's no reason not to go for good.