Why exactly do you need a redesign every 6 months?

Hours of fun ahead!

Suddenly you are jarred out of the routine. You know where to click save your files! You will embark on a great adventure. Eventually you will find it, but before you do you would have discovered all the "New! and Exciting!!" features you never knew you had including the features you might never ever use.

You would go, "ok, is how you add phone numbers to the tear-away tabs for all those Free to Good Home notices. Well too bad no one uses printed notices on cork board anymore" "What? mail merge? This is how you do mail merge?" "Oh, here is how you right justify recto page footers and left justify obverse page footers, but what are recto and obverse?"

Eventually you might find what you are looking for, or you might google for it.

Ironic considering the sales pitch that made Microsoft such a behemoth was telling senior managers, "You train your work force once, then you dont have to retrain ever again, all applications work seamlessly the same way for ever, Linux! you need to teach them a whole new way of clicking on different location, different menu items !"

These posts about Windows 10 always provoke a lot of diatribe about how awful it is. I tried to keep my XP main machine chugging along, but ultimately it could not keep up with the creep of features and capacity in other software, media, and hardware standards. I switched over in 2016 with a new well powered machine, and guess what, Win 10 is just fine. Sure, it has some things that suck, but other things that MS got right. A good OS should just run the machine, allow you to launch apps, and handle the interchange of data and files without getting in your way. While out-of-the-box Win10 is overly intrusive and at times stupid and overbearing, you can shut down almost all of the annoyances and problems. Outside the kernel, most of the codebase seems to be the same as in XP and Win 7, so with the right registry tweaks, XP and 7 are largely back. Furthermore, rather than fighting Win 10, if instead you keep an open mind to what is new and learn to use it, there are some benefits and advantages.

Simply put, my machine looks and runs like it did under the old OS'es, but better and with some improvements. I NEVER get nagged about OS updates, never, because they can be turned off. I have not rebooted my machine, heavily used every day, since June. Crap like tiles and the barfarocious start menu are dismissed. I installed Classic Shell, but I have it mostly turned off because getting back to classic looks is possible right within Win 10. The main thing that is terrible about Win 10 is the shell itself, Windows Explorer. It is slow and buggy and full of a lot of stupid that is degraded from XP and 7. But, when misbehaving, that can be corrected by closing it then restarting it from the Task Manager. I "live" out of the file explorer, but in Win 10, they have turned Windows Explorer into a useless piece of trash, but by using third party apps like Explorer++ and XYplorer, it is back to the glory days of XP. It is no surprise MS mostly ignores those things that are the direct interface with the user.

Nonetheless, the majority of comments to this thread are on the money about stupid changes for no rational or user oriented reason. The post #59514490 by arglebargle_xiv (2212710) is a nice summary of MS and Windows since Vista. I have no idea why (at the current time) he was modded troll. Maybe someone else will mod him up. But, I will take exception to his first statement, " As soon as you've got used to something, a bunch of latte-sipping Birkenstock-wearing hipsters rushes in to change it, purely for the sake of change." The actual artists and designers who do the work might be latte-stockers, but they are just grunts who most likely are talented and earnest and proud of the work they do. But, they are just doing the jobs assigned to them, and it is the bosses who are assigning the change-for-change's-sake jobs.

When MS was a young company under Gates, or Apple under Jobs, or many other startups, they did / do many things well but also many things naive, foolish, errant, incorrect, and sometimes even evil. But even with the mistakes, the consistent thing about those young companies under their founders was that they all seemed to be motivated to "get it right". They tried to build and fiddle and tweak until the new technologies and user paradigms they were inventing were working well and to the satisfaction or even admiration of the greater segment of users. You cannot please everyone, and each company took its wrong turns (Bob and Lisa come to mind), but overall, they built the foundational systems that today everyone wishes we could get back to. Now, under a newer generation of businessmen who are tasked solely with maintaining profitability and share price, and who are motivated primarily by their stock options, there is little twisting and tweaking or fundamental advancements of the core systems or paradigms. Instead, they assign make-work tasks that glorify form over substance, or else they make big changes for no purpose other than "that's old, let's crap up something new". Som