Counter-point: my upgrade was "smooth" in that it worked and there were no surprises. That said, there were definitely issues. Firstly, I couldn't find the upd

Counter-point: my upgrade was "smooth" in that it worked and there were no surprises. That said, there were definitely issues. Firstly, I couldn't find the update. It wasn't showing up in the store. Turns out I had to run Windows Update first then go to the store. Fair enough, but would it have killed Microsoft to put a banner in the store saying "Want to upgrade to 8.1? First click here to make sure your computer is up to date." Secondly, it restarted several times (why so many?), often with completely unhelpful messages about what it's actually doing (my favourite was a message something like "now just doing a few more things..." – yeah, thanks). And progress meters that would stall at e.g. 13% for minutes before suddenly finishing. As for 8.1 itself, it's definitely a step up for me. Just having a start button back and being able to set the start menu background to be the same as your desktop background makes the whole experience far less claustrophobic. The settings to change that were quite deeply hidden away though; I'm surprised I found them. Also, it sets the mouse-over highlight animation on the start button to be the same colour as the start menu, even if that isn't the colour of the taskbar, which made it clash weirdly in my case. But that's a relatively minor complaint on the scale of things. Edit: Also, thanks to Hacker News, I knew to expect the "dark pattern" of not giving you an option not to login with a Microsoft account unless you try logging in first with an incorrect password and then it gives you the option. If it weren't for that, I think I'd be very irritated – but then, Apple are guilty of something similar when setting up OS X (I think it's the "Do you want to register your computer?" screen, which you can escape by pressing Apple+Q and it gives the option to quit, but how anyone is meant to guess that is beyond me.)