Evaluating a user interface in a few minutes makes sense for things which will be used for a few minutes...and for journalists in need of sensational headlines under deadlines. An operating system is complex and used over a long period of time. Using Windows 8 meant I had to learn something. It took a day or two to become effective. A few months to become more effective than I had been under Windows 7, and a while before I really started to get it.

That effort made learning xmonad a breeze because I accepted the idea that I would have to spend time paying the dumb tax. It turned out to be only a morning.

Emacs on the other hand....

I don't need more than a few seconds to find that the contextual menu at the bottom of the screen was absurd. Being frustrated with it means I would try to avoid using it, go around that problem. The solution Microsoft advocated for desktop: use keyboard shortcuts!

I do not dispute that keyboard shortcuts are faster than any mouse based UI. And I am sure that you became more proficient having to go around the Win 8 hassles using the keyboard. However if the UI can only be practical if a user learns by heart all sorts of commands and shortcuts, then it is a massive failure, it defeats the very purpose of a UI, particularly a UI targeted at consumers.

Consumers are not the primary target for Windows. Never has been. Microsoft is primarily a B2B company. That's why they have long support cycles. That's why they make Excel. That's why they make Visual Studio...and languages and frameworks and SQL Server and Windows Server and Exchange etc etc.

Picking tools based on first impressions, is in my opinion, a suboptimal strategy. YMMV.

They are getting cornered into a corporate environment. But they used to dominate the consumer market, and windows 8 was precisely designed to reconquer this lost market share.

> It took a day or two to become effective. A few months to become more effective than I had been under Windows 7, and a while before I really started to get it.

I've been using Win8 for about 1 hour/day for the last few months. The flips between Metro and Desktop still drive me crazy. You might have learned to accept that, or to avoid those flips, but this schizoid mode of operation comes with unneeded cognitive overload for desktop work, even if you did master it.

The thing is, Win8 was optimized for Microsoft's benefit, not yours. Win8.1 gave up some of those things, because (a) it didn't provide the benefit it was optimized for -- windows phone acceptance, and (b) it did alienate a significant portion of the userbase that clang hard to their Win7.

"Using 8 meant you had to learn something", yes. But for what purpose?

My wife and I share a laptop that runs Windows 8.1 Pro. In order to help her use it I had to install a program called Classic Start Menu that brought back the Start Menu. She could not figure out the Modern UI screen.

There used to be a book on Windows Annoyances that told how to deal with them. The most annoying thing about Windows 8/8.1 is the Windows Update and having to restart the OS in order to update and not knowing how long it is going to take and watching the "Updating 12 of 64" with the dots in a circle loop and not being able to do anything with your computer while that happens. If only Windows Update could run in the background and not need to restart the computer or if it does restart the computer it can estimate how much time is remaining of the updates.