I have installed Windows 10 on three of my computers and so far all my software still works. I don't play solitaire on the computer, though, only on my iPad. This is a pretty innocuous upgrade. I am not sure why it would drive anyone to apple.
Mainly because the potential for catastrophic events as a result of upgrades is much higher on Windows, because MS doesn't control the hardware nor most of the software on the systems. Some systems may upgrade seamlessly, others will become unusable, and many in the middle will upgrade "successfully" except for some program the user absolutely must have working.
For someone who uses their computer as a tool, rather than a toy, a day or a week lost because a forced upgrade or update that they never asked for in the first place hosed their system in some way may be enough to push them over to Mac, for whom these sort of events, though not unheard of, are less common because of the tighter control that they exercise over both hardware and software.
Windows has never even tried to exercise that degree of control over individual systems, which makes their decision to force-install updates a very unwise one. When someone gets to work and tries to use their computer and finds that some forced update bricked it, without even giving them notice so they could back up the existing system first; and it costs them hundreds or thousands of dollars in tech fees and however many hours of productivity to fix it, any alternative starts looking good.
I don't especially care for the Mac user interface, but I could live with it. The real reason I dislike Macs is that I don't like Apple's overbearing, paternalistic stewardship of the machines. I want to control the machine, I want to choose the software, I want to tell it when to update (or not to update at all), I don't want it suggesting "apps" to me, I don't want to have any forced ongoing relationship with the OS manufacturer, and I certainly don't want my machine phoning home to share information about how I use it. I want to own and control the machine, period.
Until now, MS has made that pretty easy to do. Even the creepier aspects of Win 8 could be easily switched off, and many of them never initialized in the first place unless the user was silly enough to configure the machine to use an MS account rather than a local account for login. Windows 10 seeks to make avoiding the creepiness impossible to do. MS wants to exert the same (or possibly even more) control over Windows computers as Apple does over Macs.
The problem is that even once you get past the ideological and creepiness objections to that sort of control over your local machine, the practical truth is that MS sucks at it. The many horror stories of Win10 update catastrophes bear witness to that. If you're going to have no choice but to share control over your computer with an overlord in the ether, then it may as well be an overlord that doesn't suck at it.
And then there are the privacy concerns, of course. Microsoft seems to want to engage in a battle with Google to see which company can be the bigger data-mining dirtbags. Apple still pretends, at least, to honor users' privacy.
And once you get past all the above concerns, what does Win10 give you? The hope that once installed, all your software will still work? I have a one hundred percent chance of that by refusing the update altogether.
What I probably will do is wait about six months to learn from others' experiences, as well as to give the hackers enough time to figure out how to switch off MS's datamining, then buy or build a new computer with Win10, install the software I need on it, and taking it on a thorough shakedown cruise before switching over to it for production work.
But I may just switch to a Mac. The software I need will run on either. Which system I choose depends a lot on whether MS backs off on such things as forced updates. If MS insist on going down that road, I'll probably switch to Mac. Apple may be even more controlling, but at least they don't suck at it. But if MS backs off and lets me continue to own my own computers, then I'll probably stay with Windows.
Rich
