But on the other hand, the list of things that a typical power user or privacy-conscious user needs to tweak continues to grow, and some of them can only be disabled on editions that aren't available to consumers.
Where's the one big switch you claim covers everything of potential concern?
the only real problem I had with setup was sound: emulated sound had buffering issues, as did USB
I would suggest buying a cheap soundcard, giving it to the VM and running a cable between its output and line-in on your host (which hopefully has hardware support, so the sound doesn't have to be touched by the CPU by the host system)
be careful though, the hardware selection relies on trial and error quite a bit, devices have to support things like MSI interrupts, the board has to have proper ACS support, bios support has to be there, and so on
even picking things like graphics cards is a problem, some AMD cards support hot-plugging properly, others of the same generation don't
(and just because it's on the datasheet doesn't mean it works in practice :/)
With regards to usability and customizability, IMHO Unity seems to get worse with each release, so eg. now it no longer supports screenlets, and even the "Unity Tweak tool" no longer seems to work for several useful "tweaks".
But, I just don't get why do people assume it's either "plain" Unity or back to Windows. Have you ever tried Kubuntu? Or MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce flavours? I personally find KDE Plasma 5 the best DE ever, period - that is, once you invest those few minutes customizing it / fixing its few oddities here and there. Why don't you try it out?
For me, my biggest beef with Unity was a death from a thousand papercuts. EG: i wanted to open a file in a program and had to navigate to the location, and couldn't just copy the folder path as I did on Windows. Or when I wanted to Alt-Tab between two windows of the same program, I couldn't do it with Alt-Tab. To remove it, the forums told me to launch a program which then for some reason didn't open when I double clicked on it. And then I realized that Sublime Text was not longer called Sublime Text but Ubuntu somehow renamed it to the last file opened as admin, which was aparently a well known bug with Unity.
Then I read that the next version of Unity is a rewrite from scratch, with usually means many new fun bugs, and just said 'forget it'.
Now, is any of these DE simple to use and with well-thought defaults? I can try out a few ones (after all I will do a clean wipe of my desktop) but sadly don't have the time to test more than a few DEs.
Pro does show adds (like app suggestions in the start menu or add on the lock screen). Enterprise is the one that doesn't (if you configure it properly).
You have windows 8 to thank for that, they figure this out designing their "hot corners" feature. There's a 5px angle at each corner to catch the mouse. This idea is users learn to hit the top and slide across to get the corner, rather than try to nail the corner perfectly all the time.
near the bottom: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2012/05/21/enhancing-win...
Edit: I do have Windows 10 Pro, which other users mention does not show ads.
W10 has multi-desktop support, which is great when you're doing distinctly different things with an overwhelming number of programs open. It also has better use of windowing if you use those features (snap works by quadrant, etc). So by pressing Win+Ctrl+D it creates a whole new desktop (empty taskbar), and you can switch between them with Win+Tab. I don't use this often but it was amazing the few times I reached for it.
Another small thing which bothered me but I've learned to rely on in W10 is if you have two monitors and are moving your cursor from the left monitor onto the right monitor near the top of the screen, it will be "blocked" at the rightmost edge of the left monitor, preventing your cursor from changing from the left monitor to the right monitor. This is useful for quickly minimizing or closing applications on the left monitor without mistakenly moving the cursor onto the right monitor.
I have not yet found anything which I've "lost control" over except item-level customization of the left-hand side of the start menu, which is where pinned programs would sometimes end up. Having the entire right-hand side of the start menu plus the task bar is really sufficient though so this isn't a big deal.
There are some other welcome improvements like the process list and/or performance monitor are improved, I can't remember specifically what wasn't available before though.