On the UX thing, I'd argue it's even worse than that -- by design. The main problem I have with it is that they seemed to want to make it more "user friendly" a

On the UX thing, I'd argue it's even worse than that -- by design. The main problem I have with it is that they seemed to want to make it more "user friendly" and ended up constructing a nightmare because of it. The rationale goes like this: If you confront users with error messages, they get confused. The more technical the message, the worse the confusion. Now what Windows does is to hide everything, ignoring that to be able to do that, your systems must never ever have any errors, lest you throw away useful information. I've got a Windows 8 installation I can't upgrade to 8.1 because all the update system does is not install the updates. There's no telling why -- the next time it still sits there telling you "by the way: there are updates you should install". Contrast this with "user unfriendly" linux updates: They tell you loud and clear that things didn't work and give you a message you can google, if nothing else. OTOH, the Windows side of things involves reading tea leaves, clearing obscure chaches, wondering if mercury is in retrograde, deleting or adding random registry keys and in the end doing a totally new installation anyway.