Im going to bat for Microsoft here, coming from someone who uses both for work+home.
How many tech enthusiast/pcgamers are paying customers of Microsoft? I'd bet that most of us are using grey market OEM keys or reusing a license we've had upgraded from a previous install.
Communities like ours love to harpe on about how 95% of people are not bothered by the invasiveness of the telemetry and advertising, yet those are the very same people that are likely subscribing to Office365, not changing their default browser from Edge, and not installing an adblocker.
These are, in a sense, the "paying customer" to whom any profit driven company would be trying to improve experience of. Setting up cloud backup, signing in to your PC with your phone, using an online account are all good things from a general user perspective. I'd bet they have the telemetry to back this up.
I wish MS would release a SKU which was targeted towards the tech enthusiast, but how would they make that profitable? Not to mention I think a lot of us have a few fundamental misunderstandings on the current situation, some examples;
- Telemetry is essential to modern software development, people don't submit enough bug reports and nor should they be expected to for things like device drivers.
- The store/store apps is a better delivery model for software than going to a website to grab the setup.exe. It enforces standardisation, simplifies the process for devs to push updates and isolates user applications from the underlying operating system.
- Even these days you can configure Windows to not include a lot of the stuff people complain about if you're ok with Powershell. At one point in time, being a power user in Windows for both home and work was just about knowing where the GUI buttons are. Now it is about being comfortable in a command line.
I need to purge myself after all that corporate shilling.