"Windows is my favorite desktop OS ... I really enjoy the ease of use that I get with Windows where everything that I need to do just works."

I was in 100% agreement with this up until maybe a year or two ago, having flirted between Windows and Ubuntu for at least a decade. But now, I find Ubuntu 16.04 (MATE being my variant of choice) to work better out of the box than Windows, even with third party peripherals.

As one anecdotal example, I've a basic EPSON printer / scanner combo on my network. It's always been a fiddle to make work with Windows - you need to go to their website and download their driver and proprietary application so that Windows can find it and produce scans, and it's not all that reliable. The other day, I needed to scan something, and typed "scan" into my MATE menu fully expecting there to be a problem to solve. I opened up the Simple Scan application and not only was the scanner detected and online, but it just worked immediately with no quibbles. I get these sorts of pleasant surprises all the time now, to the point that I can honestly say it's easier to use than Windows.

All of the Applications I use have native Linux support (Firefox, Thunderbird, Spotify, Steam, Unity with VS Code, etc) and work as well as their Windows counterparts. Lots of things I find are easier to set up compared to Windows such as Python programming with virtualenvs, CUDA support for TensorFlow and so on.

Plus - no UWP, no forced updates, no dodgy telemetry, no obnoxious adverts for OneDrive and Office popping up in Explorer... add all that up and it's a done deal. No Windows in this house.

Personally I'd really love to move off of Windows, but I've never had this supposedly "good" experience with linux that people talk about. Everything is overly complicated and inflexible unless you want to strip it down to the kernel and start over, which is probably why there's a thousand distros out there.

I'm always fascinated by statements like these. Do you honestly thing that when it comes out, people won't be updating the applications that currently exist to make Windows 10 look and feel like a "classic" windows?

I run windows 10 with Classic Shell and 7 Taskbar Tweaker. The only time you know it's windows 10 is if you need to be in "PC Settings". For all other purposes it looks and feels identical to Windows 7.

I'm pretty sure when that new version rolls around, it'll take a well counted several days for cosmetic applications to show up to make the OS look less offensive to you, and as long as they get the virtualization right, on your 2019 computer you won't even notice that win32 apps (as in, non-uwp apps, not "32 bit applications") are running virtualized.

UWP apps are signed, and do not allow code injection, you effectively cannot modify their apperance, or anything else about them.

Some UWP apps offer mod extensibility (Edge extensions are the most prominent, but a couple UWP games have community mods and more are supposed to happen down the road), and Microsoft has shown interest in supporting general UWP application modding/patching, but haven't yet solved how they want to support that (and still try for security/reliability concerns; not just let it be a new malware vector).

If you think its about malware vectors and not about them having greater control and say over apps and app distribution on windows, I have a bridge to sell you.

You seem to think it's an either/or situation. It's definitely both. It's most correctly that the two concerns are directly related: app distribution is the primary source of malware. The "classic" app distribution platforms for Windows, EXE installers and MSI are terrible for preventing malware. After decades of people complaining that Windows is the most malware-ridden platform, can you blame Microsoft for wanting to make app distribution better?

I can blame them for wanting to take control of the market, yes.

Sure, you can, just don't mind me rolling my eyes at you. For more than a year now it's been as easy, if not easier, to sideload an APPX on Windows 10 as it is to sideload an APK on Android. (The same ease from a user perspective as using an EXE installer or an MSI file: double click, navigate the security prompts.)

You could always patch the os to disable signature enforcement. That might open you up to malware though.

Project Centennial is not the same as UWP.