And if you look at the marketshare of Windows 7 vs. Windows 8/8.1, you see a pretty big difference.
StatCounter (includes mobile): 20.36% vs. 5.64%
netmarketshare.com: 48.27% vs. 9.61%
Steam Hardware Survey: 36.38% vs. 10,78%
Now, you might respond with Windows 7 simply having more adoption, because it has been around longer, which is a valid point. I can only really refute that with the anecdotal evidence, that Windows 7 is currently seeing more growth off of the people moving away from XP and Windows 10, than Windows 8 is seeing.
Personally, I still think the lack of a start menu is very disruptive - and since Microsoft re-introduced it in Windows 10 makes me think I was not alone in thinking so.
Come 8.1 and this was partially reversed, with Metro apps being possible to manage much like Win32 programs (showing up on taskbar, could be closed or minimized via icons top right).
And i must say i kinda like using the start page concept for launching programs once i have things set so i go right to the "list" rather than dealing with the live tiles.
I have been contemplating getting a smaller Windows based tablet as an alternative to my existing Android one.
Hah. The first time I played a music file in Win8, the application took over my screen, and I had 50 Cent glaring at me (almost larger than life) while my song was playing. I guess he though my music was inadequate, and thought I should buy his stuff instead.
Also, just going to the program tiles screen was just a wall of visual noise. All these tiles were animated, it was hard to focus on what was there with all that going on. You can (and I did) turn off animations for them (or just delete them from the shortcut list), which helped a lot. So yeah, that was not a great first experience.
I'm totally fine with Windows 10 these days, at least as far as UI goes.
True! OTOH, I have never seen one of our users use a Metro App intentionally. At most they would run into the builtin PDF viewer if no other viewer was installed or registered to open PDFs.
One of my coworkers has a Windows phone, and he tells me on the phone the interface is very nice. But I still cannot imagine what the people at Microsoft must have been thinking...
On the other hand, I don't think they will ever get completely rid of that thanks to the huge, huge body of existing third-party apps.
How about a citation?
I personally used it the whole time it was available. Despite the fact that it was unfinished, it was still vastly superior in many ways to other desktop systems. So, I'm quite certain that I don't know what you mean at all when you say "UX disaster".