> Windows has become essentially malware for most of it's users
That's a major exaggeration. The home suite's ads are more like tooltips than actual ads and they only appear once on a new install; every paid OS has similar things. Chrome OS, OSX and Windows. Ubuntu has sponsored search. Most people I know like Windows 10, it's largely a small group of people that are in love with Windows 7, are die hard Apple fans or Linux diehards that refuse to adopt 10 and most of them are scared of telemetry data being collected (which as a privacy "concern" has largely been disproven by Thurrott and others.) That being said, I hope Microsoft changes course and gets rid of most of these items. I actually find the one time reminder to use Edge and the plug OneDrive vastly less annoying (and more inline with their competition) and intrusive than having to disable "promoted apps." Anyhow, calling it "malware" is utter nonsense.
Maybe you forgot the tracking part? Or the inability of the user to customize the update behavior?
This is malware. And you're paying for it, which is mind-boggling.
Edit: you might think I'm a zealot about this, but I actually started my dev career on Windows 9x back in the day, with Visual Studio no less. When windows introduced online activation, and Visual Studio (2005?) followed suit, I started to look around.
That's a major exaggeration. The home suite's ads are more like tooltips than actual ads and they only appear once on a new install; every paid OS has similar things. Chrome OS, OSX and Windows. Ubuntu has sponsored search. Most people I know like Windows 10, it's largely a small group of people that are in love with Windows 7, are die hard Apple fans or Linux diehards that refuse to adopt 10 and most of them are scared of telemetry data being collected (which as a privacy "concern" has largely been disproven by Thurrott and others.) That being said, I hope Microsoft changes course and gets rid of most of these items. I actually find the one time reminder to use Edge and the plug OneDrive vastly less annoying (and more inline with their competition) and intrusive than having to disable "promoted apps." Anyhow, calling it "malware" is utter nonsense.