Win8 was really damn annoying to use without a touchscreen
So many people say that but I actually liked the menu. It opened very fast and you could far more quickly find and hit the right tile than that stupid nested programs tree that was the norm in the start menus of earlier Windows versions.
I’d say considering that telemetry started to creep in primarily with Win 10, 8 was indeed better (meaning less bad).
Personally, I felt like Win8 was an over correction in favor of touch screens vs Win7. Win8.1 was kind of the sweet spot for getting touch screen functionality into Windows while maintaining a consistent UI between tablets, laptops, and desktops. So much so that I would consider it to be separate point on the chart between 8 and 10.
Win10 did improve the UI a bit over that, but was so much of a step backwards in basically every other regard that I do consider that the point at which Windows started trending consistently downwards. As in, Win10 should be lower then Win7 on that curve, with Win11 lower than that, and no real hope that any future updates or versions will ever improve anything.
