Vista sucked. Windows 8 sucked. The hate was largely MS's fault. Now some of that hatred was over the top, but still, I'd say most of the hatred was deserved.
Windows 7 was a huge improvement over Vista. Similarly Windows 10 is a huge improvement over 8.0.
Overall, I quite like Win 10.
The thing I hate most about Windows 10 (besides the niggling bugs in this early release version) is the fact that the invasive privacy features are on by default. They should be off by default.
As for the updates, I am sort of used to it since on Windows I usually update everything anyway, and on OS X, the updates get packaged together as point releases so something like 10.7 would have 5 "service packs" over the year, not thousands of individual updates like on Windows.
So, weighing the plusses and minuses, I'd say for Win 10 the plusses outweigh the minuses for me for home (not enterprise) use, whereas for something like Windows Vista, the minuses far outweighed the plusses.
What? People who say 7 was hugely different let alone the ones claiming it to be massively better than Vista don't even know what they're talking about. There were improvements but most of them were made to Vista before 7's release as well. By the time 7 came out Vista was very polished and solid (not perfect by any means) and there really was not that big of a difference between them. The biggest issue with Vista were companies not taking Microsoft's changes seriously which led to them releasing shitty drivers and things, which wasn't really Microsoft's fault as they had been telling the companies for like 2 years before it even came out.
Likewise 10 is largely due to 8. Win 8.1 was quite good and Win 10 isn't that different, let alone a huge improvement like it is claimed to be (and for some it might actually be worse than 8.1, see the tablet users in this thread).
There absolutely were flaws and 7 was more polished than Vista, and 10 seems to have improvments over 8, but it is nowhere close to being the huge disparity people claim it is. I see comments like that from a lot of people that basically never really used Vista or 8, just parrot what others say. Or they tried it for 5 minutes on a store demo machine when it first came out or some bullshit.
I almost laugh at people lauding 10 so much while trashing 8, when 10 is in just as much of a half-ass finished state, actually I'd say even moreso, than 8 was (Edge needs a lot of work and we're waiting on DirectX 12). I guess Microsoft managed to get the point that Win 10 is going to be in a constant evolutionary state better or something, I don't know. Or maybe people just pulled their heads out of their asses and have come to realize that the changes Win 8 started really weren't that big of a deal. Not likely, but then people seem easily appeased (NO START MENU WHAT THE FUCK!!!! Oh there's a start menu back, AWESOME!!!!! Win10 is so fucking amazing!).
There seems to be a lot of bandwagoning of praise for Windows 10. I doubt these people are truly being objective, or even care to be. I find there to be a lot of uncomfortable faults with Windows 10. It's hard to believe that real enthusiasts agree with the forced update, protection, and nanny rules with this OS. Perhaps turning off the brain and forgetting about what goes on behind the scenes fills that appeasement. The superficial gleam doesn't work for me.
I would agree, but I think that has been equally true in the opposite direction. People largely haven't been for anything.
Yeah, but remember how many people are using iOS and Android that are every bit as bad if not worse about all of that.
Give it time for people to figure everything out and likely offer fixes/mods. For a lot of stuff I expect Microsoft will change certain things themselves (possibly might have to, like the default programs stuff seeing as how that got them sued by the US and Europe).