Exactly. Lets not go back to that. Last thing we want is a webkit monoculture.

If the main complaint people have about the new version of Windows is that the icons don't look very nice it must mean this is a pretty good version.
After all, it's not like you can't just change the icons to whatever you want them to be. I'm sure by the time it ships there will be more than a dozen "Classic Icon" themes available for download. I may spend 45 seconds finding one I like and then never think of it again.

It will soon be running the same win 10 that my laptop and phone use. I had better be able to make my own games for it.

I've always wanted Apple to invent automobiles.

I probably just don't know enough to appreciate how bad my sound quality is.

Not really. MS views Windows as an open platform and invites 3rd parties to create the apps that run on top of it. This has always been it's strength but as a result mspaint etc. have always been limited.

I used paint.net for years to play around with game art and it's great. But when I bought a wacom it came with PhotoShop elements which does a lot more. It's not that expensive on its own and you don't need to buy into a subscription. There are plenty of more expensive hobbies. If you're doing these things for a living though I think it's always best to get the best tools. If I made my living in digital art I would probably have an adobe subscription.

"I'm a Linux user ... I don't use Windows so why should I *or anyone else* care?"

Anyone else?
Christ, did you read what you just wrote? Most people, by far, are not Linux users. You don't care, fine, it's not for you.
Many, many people use office and would also like to use it on their iPad and Android tablets. For them this is good news.

I kind of understand the hate for advertisers. On the other hand ads pay for a great many of the free services I enjoy so I except that they're not going away. The ads that bug me the most are the ones that don't pertain to me. It's better when the ads do a good job showing me something I care about. Unfortunately it's worst of all when they think they know me but are way off base like Audible that keeps showing me ads for books they know I've listened to. I'd rather they make good suggestions.

Remember "Information Super Highway"?

Still makes me twitch a little.

You bet market power is being exercised. The OEMs all started rolling out low cost devices with free chrome OS which forced MS to cut the price of its low end sku to $0.00. And it's not a secret. They laid out in plain English what the specs were for a device to qualify.
So not only are they now responding to market pressure, they are doing so in a very transparent way. This is no longer the MS you love to hate.

Nah, MS is off the hook for that. The OEMs can fight back now by refusing to go along (WinRT) or threaten to ship more chrombooks. That's enough competition to keep the feds happy, plus tablets really are computers so it's not the same situation at all. And the EU seems to have its sights on Google lately anyway.

Point is, Win10 is going to be solid. It may take a while to overtake Win7 since that was such a good OS but it will take off better than Win8 for sure and that didn't really do that bad compared to non-MS OSs.

It is receiving significant rewrites.

Yes, but that's just a dodge. There are 1.5B people running Windows. Tablets are great (I like mine) but it now seems clear that they aren't going to replace PCs on a grand scale any time soon. So PCs are still relevant, including yours. Since that's a fact it follows that the most popular PC OS would also be relevant.

People scoff at Win8 and call it a failure but that's only compared to Win7 and WinXP. It's been more successful than either OSX or Linux as far as PC OSs go.
And Win10 looks pretty nice already with about a year of dev time to go. Anyone who says it doesn't mater is just whistling past the graveyard.

A year or so ago I would have been shocked if you told me MS would release Office on Android. Now that they've gone that far and seem to realize that they're a Software company first, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they made Spartan builds for ios/android/chrome etc.